The Brotherhood of Necros [Soulblight painting, lore + fiction]

[The Brotherhood of Necros]

To paraphrase the Count himself, "Welcome to my thread. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!"

(I'd make a 'Nosferatu' quip but Orlok's not too big on dialogue...)

As a new year breaks over Shyish, the Ancient One stirs in his tomb. For decades, his spirit has walked the Realm of Death's many underworlds, his physical remains sustained by a diet of dark magic. Unfettered from his cadaver, he has travelled far in his hunger for knowledge and secrets. Most souls are all too eager to share their stories. Others are doomed to repeat their final moments or strongest memories; the Ancient One need only watch. Even the dead want to be heard.

Now his tower stirs again. Fell bats flock to the upmost turrets, crawling like lizards to rest in the rafters. Those humans and the other base creatures held in the laboratories huddle deeper in the shadows. Deep beneath even the duardins' old tunnels, rows of iron maidens rattle once more with madness and the crunch of mandibles. Acolytes long sequestered in their private quarters feel the Winds shift and look up with red eyes and trembling hands, helpless against their Master's will.

While his carcass has withered in its casket, that will has grown fat on the words of the dead. Eyes glittering with the patience of one who cannot die, he has walked from the trackless forests of Necros to the howling deserts of Nulahmia seeking answers and learned much about the Mortal Realms in the process. Back in possession of his remains, he pushes aside the lid of his sarcophagus and emerges to record that knowledge, the secrets of the dead captured in crimson that he might reread them, refer back to them, draw pleasure from them all over again in his quest to understand them. For only in understanding them does he make them his own.

And they will be his.

The Ancient One is still waking, but as he does so, I'll share pictures of (and stories about) the finished things that crawl through the tower and make those tunnels their home. If you're interested in WIP stuff, you can find that in the Laboratory, in the Painting and Modelling forum. For things like inspiration and book reviews, I've also started a blog. Finally, if you're into Instagram, you can follow me at @brotherhoodofnecros.

I hope this has captured your interest — I can't get enough of this crazy community. Thanks for following!

Edited January 5, 2020 by The Brotherhood of Necros

[Ferrus65]

Excellent start, I will follow your progress!

Edited January 5, 2020 by Ferrus65

[The Brotherhood of Necros]

 

'The Withering'

They are watching us. From the moment we crossed over into this fecund place in search of it, I knew eyes on me, felt its attention shift, infinitesimal speck by speck, a vast consciousness like the hive mind of a colony of wardroth grubs turning its antlered head our way. Even now, it tracks us through the tumbling vales, and what it sees, it wishes to destroy. It dreams of ending us, of trampling us, of impaling us on those magnificent horns, of returning us to the soil and the wind. The mortal coil!

Is this what it feels like, to be studied, to be read? Is this what my subjects experience, when I look for the secrets in their skin? We came for a book, but already I have gained something far greater: wisdom with which to fill a tome of my own! Of course, such a text will warrant the finest materials. A bolt of buckskin shall do nicely. Or, failing that, a ream of aelfhide. I shall weave a placeholder from their hair!

Her song holds no sway in these old trees. They stir with a different sound. Stop running, child, and you may just hear it: the wind in the boughs, like the billowing of vast wings; its keening shriek, like that of a beast in pain. You may yet hear it, if you just stop running. You may yet sing with them. Yes, little princeling. Catch your breath and raise your voice and sing with the children of the night, even as they catch you. A choir of screams, in harmony!

"Awake, O dead! Crawl from your mountain tombs. Once more, the dispossessed have cause to march upon the forests of the aelves: my cause! No root nor branch nor witch-forged blade will spill your blood this time..."

*

I hear it then: a tapping, the patter of fleshless fingertips between the stalactites. Overhead, blackness, impenetrable except for that sound and something else, almost inaudible, a keening pitch. Scree scatters before my boots, the darkness a precipice over which I dangle, every step my last. One more.

Up ahead, a glimmer of light. One more.

The entrance is in sight. One more.

They are waiting for me, outside, unpacking the camp by torchlight and the glare of the zephyr spites. One more —

Wait.

Silence has descended over me like a fresh darkness. What of the tapping? Nothing, just that whine, needling into my ears, growing higher, cutting sharper. The dead wolf’s bite didn’t wound so deep. My groan echoes around me. The blackness swallows it utterly, then spits it back in a scrabble of scratches and the flutter of wing beats. I imagine a mainsail filling over and over with competing winds, impossibly vast in the shadows. Run run run —

My every footfall kicks pebbles and stones, glottal pops marking my flight. One more step.

A smell washes over me, a rotting tide. One more step.

The entrance looms before me, my exit now, and I make out the silhouettes of my comrades, moving about camp. Is that their laughter I hear, or have I gone mad? One more step —

*

See how quickly they die, how easily they rise again? Necromancy, a written art, its secrets consecrated in blood, His Word made flesh. For the longest time, that was all I saw; runes and languages that sought to confound me even as I learned them. Never did I stop to study that on which they were written.

Their medium: human skin, gut for binding, and flesh of a different kind, sprouted from the sodden earth, grown into great forests before being hewn and pulped. That flesh is silent now, but in fair Ghyran, it still sings, the very wind whispering with untold secrets, a shiver down my spine. So I walk that land, and beneath those trees I read again, my fingers teasing stories from the throats of sylphs and the aelves that dance with them, my tongue the sorrow that defines their tales.

What more could the undying ask for than that: Nature, a book that never ends! Such a shame that they won’t stop screaming. How is one supposed to read, surrounded by such a racket?

Edited April 7, 2020 by The Brotherhood of Necros

[The Brotherhood of Necros]

 

'The Withering’ (Pt. 2)

She emerged from between the trees and her light was like the coming of spring on a cold winter’s morning. Far below, the forest was a patchwork of withered glades and walking dead, but she had only eyes for the abomination sailing towards her on ragged wings and the entourage of monsters flapping in its wake. 

Here was the architect of the forest’s plight, the one for whom the puppets swarming below staggered and danced. Its unnatural presence rolled across her, a shadow over her soul, and then it crashed into the Green Finger. Rock crumbled. The mountainside shook. The delicate weave of life magic in which she hung rippled, sending shivers down her arms, and for one dizzying moment she felt the nature of the creature and its blasphemous mount like a poison through her veins. The once noble wyrm swung its head to regard her through eyes like amethystine marbles. Staring into them, she saw nothing. 

Then she was amongst it, the winds become pale flames under her touch, a prayer to the Goddess on her lips as she cast back the fell bats and turned her hands on the soulless monster in the saddle. Once more, the winds lurched. Though she couldn’t hear the creature over the gale, she could see its lips moving, and where her pale fire leapt, bolts of amethyst sprang forth to meet it. The monster’s gaze burned into her, until she could not resist it. 

Her ears filled with the screams of the dying, her hair with the wordless roar of the wind. And the unblinking eyes that stared back at her from that long-dead face did so with the detached curiosity of a mortal about to pin and dissect a butterfly.

Edited April 7, 2020 by The Brotherhood of Necros

[The Brotherhood of Necros]

 

'What We Are'

They emerge with the shadows from beneath the pale branches, unable to resist my summons. My, how prolific my sons have been. They  travel fast, silent but for the knocking of hooves and the rattle of old bones and a sigh, as empty as their heads. Their steeds bear down on the Bloodbound horde before us, and though their gift is weak and their thoughts base, their hunger is my own. When was the last time I let them feed? Even before they crash headlong into my foes, I realise I am smiling. How bats flock to the smell of blood. Is there anything a starving rat won’t eat?

*

Do you know what it’s like to have a secret and not be able to tell anyone? I see it every night, in my brothers’ eyes, in the catacombs where we sleep, in the long silences that fill the Tower, suffocating. If only! You see, I am two people. One part of me would raze the realms to live again. I would drown in this silence for one more breath, to remember what it is to fill my lungs even as the air is choked away from me. But I cannot. Why? Because the other part of me is ravenous. For knowledge, for Dhar, for the blood of the living and their secrets. That person would hold my head beneath the water, just to watch me flail. So you see, I have a secret, and for all I would scream it from the parapets, I am held ransom by it, forced instead to crawl through the Tower and the surrounding foothills, a dead thing given life, trapped in this halfway place, a puppet made to sing. Sing with me, won’t you? And when our song is ended, show me your last breath. Share that release with me, as we have shared it a thousand times before. Breathe for me, while your lungs still hold, before the rot sets in. I can smell it already. Look at us, sharing secrets! You will promise not to tell anyone, won’t you?

 

Edited April 7, 2020 by The Brotherhood of Necros