Walking the enemy's streets(Ulric)

[Antar]

Summer, 11, 512av. Nothing compared in the hollow downtrodden world then having a purpose for being somewhere. A purpose allowed one to concentrate, to begin to identify the details one would be accustomed to plan things. Certain nefarious, chaotic things, for the city of Chaos. Shai had come here for a child. Antar had come her for a bit of revenge for a child. A half-sister really, taken, brutalized and killed before his eyes before he was tossed into the river to drown so long ago. There was so many details left unknown, but there were signs, all of them lurking within the tangled webs of the past. However, both the two were linked by one key component. Somewhere, in the midst of things, the parents of his sister's killer, or the kidnapping of Shai's child; the same link had kept reappearing. There was always a connection to the ebonstryfe. Faint as it was, that connection had been there. And that was something worthy of starting a cool fire burning in the pit of Antar's soul. If the stryfe were involved in any such things, then it would be rather difficult to take any form of vengeance upon them. The stryfe were a dangerous adversary, dangerous to investigate, twice as dangerous to skirmish with, and twenty times as dangerous to pursue. To Ravok, and Rhysol's followers they were the forceful arm of their religion, and the hammer of their fury. The defiler of others, seeking only to mix and match trials they heaped upon others to make themselves, and Rhysol stronger. The people of Ravok loved them for it. On the outside, Antar couldn't really blame them for that. The city was a lot cleaner then most. Peaceful, if you ignored the slaughter and trickeries which occurred off the streets. It was as if life in the entire city was a painted facade to hide the festering boils beneath. Poor deluded fools... to think he had once been one of them. With heavy thoughts in mind, after he had secured a room for himself and Shai, Antar decided it was time to call in a favor from one who had mentioned he would also be coming this way for his own personal debts. A man who had said to contact him long before Noth and Shai had left Alvadas. A man who told him to check the forests outside of Ravok as soon as he arrived. Who was this man he was to seek? Why, that would be none other then Ulric. A man with his own burdens, and his own hatred for the ebonstryfe. A man who said he possessed plans for coming here mid spring and potentially stay until mid summer. Whatever it took for his own revenge to be completed. If Ulric was still around, Antar would find him and he knew where to start. Gazing back, across the waters towards the city, Antar looked forward into the treelines of the woods. He took a few deep breaths before setting his shoulders straight and his eyes forwards before willing his booted feet to traverse the gravel path before disappearing into the trees. Noth may have started in the forest today with a bit of hunting, but he wasn't hoping to stay here all day. Not if he could find the man he'd come here to find.

[Ulric]

Nothing, from clay to teak, and even pumice, quite rivaled the silky concavity of skulls. They made perfect bowls, really. Hollowed, they’d imperfections that he’d scuff with his awl, making sleek basins. He’d a knack for this, he thought. He’d plenty of time for loafing, too.

Maybe he’d just given up brooding.

Ulric puffed into his fire, the fickle, yellowy tongues lapping at sticks. Scritch-scratch, replied the awl, gripped in his palm. The tip grazed over ossified bulges, flaking off tiny slivers. Inevitably, I’m always left with bones, he grunted, ruminating over the frosty peaks.

Bad jaunt, that.

Everybody perishes.

Further on, his saggy awning cowered under a murmuring pine, looking over musty bedding. The grove jutted wildly near the pebbly strand, fringed by spiny larches and tapering birches. Trunks caked by resin. There was a stink. The sickly-sweet redolence of decaying cherries mixing with putrefying meat. Fungi dappled the grove in knobs by splay of roots, or clung to the trunks. Ferns raking from a muddy carpet, mussed by needles. They tufted over javelins. Rusty swords pitted by neglect, flanges of dented plate.Everywhere, there were traces of his squalid grotesquerie. Tubes of bone tied by twine dangled from lower branches, incessantly clacking. Caked by flies, a denuded cadaver drifted in the zephyrs, strung up by his ankles. Everything bloated in a blotchy black, tinged by purple and green. Distended, the head was pulpy, conjuring up the imagery of a great, swollen pomegranate.

Boiling was out of the question, though. There was a sooty kettle, steam lifting from its rim, but no cauldron. There wasn’t any vinegar, either. 

Ulric’s chin lifted, with an inky glare despite the twitch of his lips. The dipping of his elbows was glacial, furling over plated chest with a creak of gauntlets. The cloak swelled around him, clasped by an inlay of silver. There was more, though. Thongs looped over metal, affixing gristly fetishes of bone like fruit. The jut from his gorget was, unmistakably, a necklace of yellow phalanges strung by wire.

This was his charnel, his reliquary.

Idly regarding the rogue, he made his awl scuff at the skull, curling off shavings. Utterly macabre. There’d been a time, in his trudging, when he’d been dulled by this brutality. That was before he’d realized that he enjoying killing. Now, he reached for a bowl. Noisily slurped its broth.

Stood, extending his wrist.

“Antar,” Ulric yawned, hardly shaken by the unlikely twists of augury that’d reunited them. “It’s good to find you well, though maybe not as skinny. It’s of no matter, though. I figured you’d stand beside me in battle, even had visions of it during my trek.” he remarked, a grin crawling over his lips. “They were… long displaced from this moment.”

“If you’re in for the killing, then don’t fuss over it,” he shrugged. “I’ve left you plenty.”

[Antar]

The trip to Ulric's camp had been a difficult one, twice he had to backtrack upon game trails made from beasts that wandered through the woodlands, but he was comfortable in the woods. Ever watchful for anything that might pose a danger, as his eyes scanned for any random landspawn or sign of the person he was looking for. And after a bell and of a half of searching, crossing and criss crossing the area, Antar had found the way to man's secluded camp. A place well hidden from the world. His approach was open, for he did not wish to startle his friend into attacking him out of instinct. So he merely waited as Ulric began his conversation, waiting for the man to have his say first. Ulric had more then earned that courtesy, and respect. Antar was usually a man of verbose words. A man who hid his true agenda under the guise of flowery language, and long winded speeches that were posessed of rather little purpose. But not with this man. This man had earned a lot better in his mind, so Antar was straight and to the point, well as straight as he could be while expressing his divided reasons and rationales behind what he wanted to do. Still though, he tried to compress his thoughts to respond in kind to the man. Though he wouldn't know whether the other man would recognize it or not. "Killing? I'm all in for the killing, and I'll take some small joy in the thought that you didn't kill them all either. But this isn't just about killing. It's about a fight. A fight not to fail, nor to fall. Or we'll end up like the others who've ever tried to do hard harm against the Stryfe. And more importantly we have to get away with whatever actions we take. To do that we should plan things out. We can't win a prolonged fight, nor even a skirmish so the goal would be go beyond the simple actions we might take. To kill and distract, distract and kill. To destroy their resource bases and fade back into the emptiness of the city's denizens. Then to infiltrate, weaken, and destroy while I find the secon reason I'm here for. It seems a mutual acquaintaince or ours had a family member captured by the ebonstryfe." Antar stood back and leaned against a nearby tree, taking in the man's teacup for the first time. "I must say since it's your home territory you might help us figure out where to start looking. Where the pieces of the trail are, where to raid and get such a child back." Taking out his kukri he reversed it hilt forwards to the man, he spoke with the voice of a carver's experience. "If you want a smoother shape then an awl will get you, a kukri's inner curve is good for shaving the outer layer off without cracking. I could show you a few tips if you want while we talk. That teacup is too suiting to you for me to let it go unfinished. May I ask if you have another skull I could make into a teacup as well? Or will we have to go get one from some poor sap connected to the ebonstryfe later?"

[Ulric]

Ulric grinned, reached for the kukri with an incline of his chin. “My gratitude, friend,” he grunted, flipping the curved knife over in his palms. It was heavy and comforting, and when he chafed it over bone it did, indeed, peel off larger flakes. “This must jog your memory,” he ruminated. “That time we plumbed the depths of chimera, I’d taken a liking to mugs. That madness has passed, though. The lips and cambers of bowls are vastly more intriguing.”

Restlessly, he shifted on his ersatz throne of a cedar stump. Holding the skull and kukri in his left hand, he knelt to doff the tarpaulin by his side, divulging a shallow pit he’d hacked in  root-knotted soil. Filled with fragments of bone, mostly skulls that’d been flayed, abraded, and cracked by clumsiness, a noisome stench lofted from its bowels. There was also a head, puffy and purple. Plucking it by the ear, he lobbed it to the rogue. Maggots writhed from oozing sockets, slimily peeked from the lips. “There was a pair of them,” he clarified, with a wag of his hand. “They came by boat, maybe to scout. That didn’t turn out so well for them.” Turning back to the skull, he scuffed it, dredging out a long fillet. “That one’ll take a bit of skinning.”

The fire popped.

Ulric jerked his chin through the larches, where he glimpsed the lake’s grayly intruding tundra. “They’ll be missing the others. That they’ve not dispatched any dravlaks to sweep these forests speaks their unruliness, but its ending. The great temple is nearly restored, legions ready to quench my raiding, your sabotage. The perils swell, as do the stakes.” 

Sighing, he puffed into the skull, ridding it of bone-meal. “I’ve never believed I could win this, y’see. It’s only for spite. I’m so weary of doing nothing, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I tried hiring spears for a raiding party, but fighters I thought sufficiently boiled only laughed at my audacity, more quivery flesh than metal in their hides. I implored the knights to give me a squad, give me anything, but they refused. There are no more good in men.” 

Glav Navik betrays us all.

Ulric scowled at the recollection, surveying Antar. “If you’re with me, then there’s two men, at least, that don’t tremble at a scrap. I like killing, but I know you’re right. It’ll take far, I think. If you’d bring those cunts to their knees, then I’ll show you where to strike. I must depart in time, but I’ll do it.”

“If you’d regain a child, maybe that will make up for the futility. I think I will come back, but only with the men to finish this task, once and for all.”

[Antar]

Antar reached down and picked up the severed head of the man who was to become his next work on a bowl. The head and the dead's visage didn't bother him. Not really. He was introduced before to the idea that things could be made using the bones of the dead a while ago by Darian. 'Malediction' the man had called it. Shame that they had never gotten together for a good hunt. Ulric would have liked Darian, a third like minded individual that wouldn't shy away from a good fight, so long as their was a purpose to it all. Taking out his second cold iron kukri, Antar began carving the side of the severed heads skin, using his gauntlets in tandem with the stilletos to forcefully cut and peel back the skin as he listened attentively to the man. He waited, nodding in agreement at times to Ulric's words. He was being polite enough to wait to speak for all topics save when the name of the Dravlak's were brought into play, "What type of creature is a dravlak? What could I expect if I was to face one?" Perhaps he had voiced the most important thing first? Who knew? Only time would tell. He let himself drift back into silence until the other man had his full say. When he finally did speak, it was to convey his purpose. "I do not plan to take them to their knees , Ulric. I fear that will be impossible for just one or two men. No, but I intend to bloody them still. Attacks such as I could pull off would only, in the end, become nuisances for them. There would be no momentum garnered to hit them harder without more resources at my disposal. No lasting toll of physical damage, but..." He paused a moment, trying to form his words to convey his thoughts, to connect with his ideas to begin making some shape of a plan. "But the infallible reputation of the stryfe might take a hit outside this city, though I see no real way to undo the years and years of tormented brainwashing this city's denizens hold towards the Ebonstryfe. To combat that I would need to work a press, and somehow inject a schism between the group and their master rhysol. At least in the eyes of the public, the public would have to view the ebonstryfe as conflicting the master of the city's goals. As if the stryfe were betrayers, not just of themselves but the very things they were formed for. I don't know how to go about that though. I can only ask if you have any considerations in that regards. Otherwise, I may only gauge their reaction times, plan out distractions, though those may be costly to the lives of their ranks, find the child, plot an egress and get out of the city intact." Antar sighed, using the flat of his blade in long strokes to begin curling the flesh as he scalped the corpsehead, and cleaned out the eyes. He only stopped to throw the eyeballs into the heat of the small fire, contentedly hearing a small pop and a momentary hiss of steam as it consumed itself in nothingness. "I imagine you have several such avenues of escape already considered. That way... as you say... you have the chance to finish the job later on. But no, I don't mind a scrap with these devils. I don't mind a scrap at all. So that leaves one question , where do you think we should begin?"

[Ulric]

Ulric rubbed pearls of slickness, conveying the kukri to his other palm as he worried and fretted the skull, chunks plunging like mica over the leaves. The plink of ossified beads falling was tranquil. They nearly allowed him to disregard the proximity of putrefying flesh and the buzzing of flies. “Dravlak are devils of lurid nightmare, infrequently unfettered” he explained. “Twisted things, whose raking talons, scaled hides, and snapping fangs only reflect a hysterical frenzy. They aren’t seen, but they shriek through the bars of their jail, piped through rocky, chaotic bowels to the slurry of canals and cantons. Mindless flayers, the lot of them. Miasmic in their devilry, disordered impulses switching bone for jelly long before jaws close over your gullet.”

“They’re… unpleasant.”

Thinking on it, he hadn’t any inclination to wrestle with the demons. They’d require sorcery or divinity to dispel, and he hadn’t either. Steel only goes so far, he reflected glumly.

Brainwashing, though?

“Antar,” Ulric replied firmly, handing back the kukri. “Grinding them to grist and purging the dregs will fail, but so too will rupturing, injecting qualms, and swindling insurrection. There’s something you should know before we carry on. That our benefactor is good to us.” There’d be no mistaking the implication. Rhysol, for all Ulric’s parricidal yearnings, was part of him yet.

“Rhysol’s not that bad, as far as deities go,” he admitted, with a curt shrug. “Doesn’t he offer us beauty as part of his toll? Doesn’t he keep my kind from harm, and salvage us when all the others won’t? Believe me, for I’ve walked beside a god, made a goddess turn tail, lived as the incarnate of a god, for a time. Rhysol looked after me. Glav discarded me to shackles and injury in that volcano, is likely why so many souls perished in the djed squalls.”

Ulric fixed his glare on the ruddy coals. “If I’ve learned anything, it’s that gods only care for power. I’ll stand with whoever’ll stand for me, as will the entirety of my city. If I fight, it’s to display my capacity to subjugate. I will bring empire,” he growled.

“Xhyvas is my witness.”

Reaching for the rim of shield, he looped its thongs over his elbow, tucked the necklace of bones under his gorget. They shrieked over the black, pocked metal. “We’ll kill, and we’ll liberate the squalling kid, but that’s all we’ve got.” Ulric clanked from his roost, adjusting the drape of scaled skirts, flanges of ringmail. Jerked his jaw, signaling they’d a long slog before them.

“We’ll depart by ferry, scrutinize the quarters for deformity, uncover the mongers of innuendo. I figure we might lay inquiry with my mother, but she’d likely turn a blind eye to any mischief, nothing further. It’s pointless asking acolytes to assist you in killing acolytes, unless they’ve anything to gain. I doubt she’d look kindly on you as a fitting partner for me, either.”

“Shall we be off?”