[IC] Icy Enmity: Battle in Oerelle's Halls - Alucroas vs Longinus

[Alucroas]

A faint blue light crackled and streaked across the frozen sky, appearing to shine ever brighter as its draconic source flew closer and closer to the strange architecture. Sensing his destination was near, lightning built at the back of his folding wings, and was compressed into a tight space that was infused with a soft, red underglow as the beast tilted into a vicious nosedive, all of the accumulated energy blasting out behind him in a purplish explosion of heat.

Moving at close to sub-sonic speeds, Zucroas blazed a burning trail through the forest, melting the snow off branches, vaporizing the ice along the ground, and leaving a linear steam plume behind as he zipped toward the thing that had aroused his spirit. The cold air was no hindrance to his sharply pointed snout – as a creature that was not of the natural world, as a dragon whose breath was made of the second strongest force in the universe, he could smell spiritual foulness like a hound sniffing the bloodtrail of a corpse that had been dragged into the woods, and the critters flowing through his blood ensured he felt the threat pulse through every cell in his body.

Such was the gift his new brother had given him.

Round eyes as deep as the ocean dilated wide to take in the palace, big, black pupils a stark contrast to his nearly pure white skin, with scales too smooth and flat to be seen without raising them. Twenty-foot wings folded downward like an umbrella to catch the wind, and a flexible tail, the latter swinging forward and the former opening up to slow him down just enough so that his momentum would land him on the vines. His long muscular arms reached out, the jagged crimson scar on his left, and the sapphire one on his right showing briefly as he used his claws to slice through the thorns in a violent, fast-paced ascent to the entrance, nostrils still flaring as the scent of danger intensified with each pull.

Growing ever more anxious, Zucroas wings flapped furiously, turning his scaling into aggressive leaps, viciously gouging plant flesh as he eagerly, violently rushed up to a massive horizontal split in the cliff-face. The ceiling was spaced a generous fifty feet from the floor, though narrowing considerably at the staircase leading up to the entrance. Zucroas threw himself over the edge, claws raking, and heels cracking the brittle ledge, his attention focused solely on the entrance that he instantly ran toward and up, even going so far as to grab the steps with his claws, and bounding his way into the atrium.

Upon finally making it in, the drake felt his spine tingle, muscles tense, like there was an entity trying its absolute best to fill him with dread and despair for having had the gall to step right into its jaws. What was Zucroas’ reaction to this? His claws on hands and feet alike clenched, neck craned and head swung, tail raised, and altogether at once, made all his joints crack, slammed his tail back down hard enough to break the ground he stood on. As his head finished its swing, Zucroas lurched forward, opened his mouth to a deadly width, and hissed a deep, nasty, meaty hiss, fangs and molars glistening with spilling drool, greeting the supernatural threat with vicious, primal savagery.

[L0nginus]

Zucroas broke into the court, utterly and completely feral by all accounts. The brutality of the monster rang true throughout the labyrinthine palace, his madness flashing across glacial glades. By aĺl accounts, the ruckus he had stirred up broadcast his presence to anything lurking within— to any foolish enough to try and kill him. Or, to another monster. The frozen embrace of the interior welcomed him, echoing with the grating candor of Zucroas' snarl, though that too eventually degenerated into a chorus of hushed whispers. Alien from their originator.

The ethereal, baby blue light was everywhere; yet, from somewhere off in that vast corridors of this place did a fuzzy absence seem to cloy at one of its many corners, which bestowed base upon the haunted cries. A faint umbral haze from which the first clatter of dainty steps sing in dissonant harmony with Zu's violence. Not quite a walk of peace, but it was easy to conflate the sultry serenity of the emergent Grecian woman with a sort of pacifying lull. Narcotic in the ease of which even her breathing seemed to lull even the most wrathful of titans. She came into this place, clad in a transparent chiton and himaton which hugged her slight build and fairer features, tinted scarlet with shimmering black patterns that raced through it with the grace of smoke curls. Orbiting the woman's head was a diadem of crossed, golden blades, which a waterfall of warm auburn hair threaded through with lilac flowed past. The darkness which regurgitated her stretched in her wake— joining with the abyssal embrace of her own shade with the diabolic yawn of a Hellmouth. The whispers grew in substance, as though Zucroas' frenzy had given voice to the voiceless, and the woman's presence here only served to bridge that stygian gap. From 20 feet away, the woman extended a delicate hand out for him to take wordlessly— her image splayed out across each crystaline face of the room where 'Croas found his absent. Her loveliness was not diminished, not even as she smiled.

Not even as she wore the smile of one who brought only woe.

[Alucroas]

A permeable curtain of darkness appeared before him, and as something wholly unexpected walked through its veil, his hissing sharpened, aggression tempering into a cold stare of savage malice. Her deceitful appearance did nothing to calm his nerves, and in fact worsened his agitation, eyes filling with crackling blue light as the atmosphere shifted from palpable tension, and evolved into blatant, snarling hostility. By time she was thirty feet away, the scars on his arms had become aglow with primal spirit-energy, claws surging with a thickening film of blue and red light as he readied himself for the impending calamity that was about to befall this temple.

In the moments between her final steps toward the looming dragon, in the depths of crystalline mirrors, something besides the woman's many vile reflections slithered and flew as horned serpents made of lightning so often do. Matter-vibrations from the infinity of neighboring universes connected to this palace flowed along a network of maroon lines, synthesizing a ghostly membrane with which to grant significance and substantiality, and ultimately authenticity of form to the alluring visages. If the provocative woman was as perceptive as she was dangerous, she would see the colored lines fading into transparency, whilst feeling their existential threads sewing her skein to the ones in the mirrors.

Alas, when she arrived at her position before Zucroas, and the fiend raised her hand to what the beast read as a facade of benevolence, electricity accumulated at the back of his throat, chest filling as his hissing was replaced with loud buzzing. Within his mind’s eye, and possibly the woman’s own, he saw the serpent’s converge on the parallel entities, maws wide, and bodies moving in a murderous lunge that sunk fangs into throats. Whether she’d live through their massacre was anyone’s guess – not that she had time to make a prediction, for a densely packed beam of lightning the size of her own body was being streamed from the dragon’s mouth with an intent that was all too real.

[L0nginus]

Pray.

Zucroas sutured tight the gaping wound of causality, weaving Creation itself upon the needlepoint of his tooth and claw. There was little mercy in the act, save for the swiftness of his execution of that loose woman. But, there was something.. strange. Not just in the ease of which he managed to intercede into her being and that of countless others, but in the fact that the connection was already preexisting? Come to think of it, from the moment she entered the frozen forum, the gaze of her reflections seemed to focus on him. It was a ubiquitous kind of attention, the kind of uncanny ease with which an old painting's eyes seem to follow you everywhere. They each adopted her saunter and sway, almost with intent. But that would be silly, right? They're her reflections. They didn't have to try. It is just what they do.

Unfortunately, the Draconite spat in the face of the wench's mercy. Her lovely smile was soon bathed in the radiance of countless volts of electricity and x-rays, flashing the squirming sight of her skeleton in a black-bodied silhouette that danse macabre'd in the wicked frenzy of her "pain". She fell to the floor in a heap, crackling with astral thunder that arced throughout the environment in branches of electric fury. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of the exchange were two things, however, were two-fold. Well, technically three. Firstly, her hand was fully outstretched whilst she collapsed into a smoking wreck upon the floor— her hand curled into what Zucroas perceived to be faux acceptance. Secondly, though her images were all molested with the unbridled fury of the serpents ripping into their throats, they were all.. bloodless. The electricity that the astral predators emitted did conduct into them too, but the charge was consumed by the yawning vortex of something lurking within the now-real reflections, something which mirrored her too-long shadow. Their smiles widened.

Thirdly? From the drooling chasm of her throat spews viscera. Frothing, bubbling scarlet, like sea foam. And much like the sea, there was quite the volume of it too. An unreasonably large amount for someone of her small stature. It seethed in its sluggish trek, spilling out and tainting her smooth, delicate skin with that sticky red. The tide advanced, racing to engulf his shins in her gore. In the same fashion that her doppelgangers seemed to have happen to them, Zucroas' breath rolled over the woman, but passed through the boundary of something unseen. That roiling abyss which persisted in spite of the light of his cataclysm. A brief whine— a shriek— called out from the other side into the material as his lightning seemed to twist as though it got passed through an event horizon, before being yanked down into the endless gullet of her shadow, which blossomed with a bouquet of countless bloodshot eyes.

Wait. There was yet one reflection accounted for. The reflection of her in his eyes, though a reflection it did not remain for long, likely to his chagrin. It blossomed into psy-flame from within the corridors of his gaze. This was no scalpel, nor was it a hammer to batter down the battlements of his mind. It was a jackhammer. Left unattended, from the moment it proliferated itself into being, it sought to consume his skull, though this.. thing.. bore no heat, no severity of the elements. No, it brought a far more destructive gift. Ego death. Its caress made to boil away his psyche, all the way down to his instincts, leaving the creature a hollow, empty existence. A perfect thing to be remade as she saw fit.

[Alucroas]

An umbral abyss opened its lightless maw, its hungry, swirling shadow pulling the elemental serpents into its dark gullet. Strangely, and quite unexpectedly, the drakes did not resist, for along the sides of their crackling, undulating forms, rifts in the forms of jagged scars traced an opening to a much deeper layer of the astral world. Within that layer, chaos reigned as the dominant spiritual force, and it was from such a disorderly place that a surge of shimmering red and blue substances poured out. It had a thick, gelatinous texture that was highly viscous, sticking to whatever it touched, and functioned as a digestive sponge to foreign energies by overwhelming them with the essence of its origin, reducing them to pure potential that was void of form and purpose. This ethereal plasmic membrane rapidly enveloped and conformed to the serpent's bodies, providing a pre-emptive defensive shield that would safeguard them against being destroyed within the vortex, and consequently gave them an uncannily invasive quality, as seen by many bloodshot eyes, whose realm they drained into.

Fully armed with the familial gift of protection, a vicious assault began as the serpents dove straight at the staring orbs, horn-tips spewing crimson clouds of nanoscopic dust in their wake, which itself emitted the very same maroon light used in sewing the many reflections together. In no time at all, they would make short, vicious work of their sight, just as they had done to the many throats of the women foolish enough to just let themselves be maimed.

The eyes…windows to the mind– the ones leading to Zucroas’ had been filled with scorching lightning, blinding in its luminance and hazardous to any entities attempting to pass through the electric inferno. If setting fire to his psyche is what she wanted to do, then she’d find her own burnt to a crisp as the same maroon energy used to bind and make clones of her reflections manifested as counter-offensive outlines around the drake’s eyes, strengthening the psychic connection to the point of it feeling like there was a giant, clawed hand wrapped around her throat, the sturdiness of strong, thick bones, and powerful muscle forming the bridge that forced stable passage. Here she would bear witness, and experience first-hand the wrath of the dragon, whose sacred space she sought burn down:

A purple ocean rose and fell beneath a fresh yellow sky, its waves whipped into a violent storm. Above it, a crackling cloud of smoke and ash rolled forward, dead remnants of the psy-flame blown into motion by tremendously flapping wings of the purest white, their length reaching both ends of the horizon. Behind the cloud, long, muscular arms hung, each bearing the jagged red and blue marks that symbolized the scars of the dead, both pouring waterfalls of red and blue gel into the astral ocean, giving it its unique color. Mounted atop the wings was a draconic face roaring endless, unrestrained fury, horns aflame and eyes seething static electricity, for the full brunt of its rage had been wrought forth by the woman's maleficent threat against his mind. Absent the restrictions of time and space, the apocalyptic stormcloud bloomed larger, vicious maws swelling, stretching, and collapsing in on themselves, only to lunge out with terrifying instantaneity, followed by an internal explosion that expanded the supercell outward, sending a wave of suffocating psychic energy that would choke her spirit’s voice like volcanic ash filling airways, raze her thoughts like pyroclastic flows shredding the land beneath a blotted out sun, and engulf her soul under the immense weight of a monster who vindictively wanted to crush, immolate, and bury her like lava smothering a person.

Back on the physical plane, Zucroas saw the vomit of unnatural blood and instinctively leaped, flapping hard and throwing himself into a backflip, his still firing beam gouging the upper wall and ceiling. The maroon lines siphoned a surplus of energy from the extra-versal gates, swelling with power as they gorged on extraversal nourishment, channeling it all into the beast as he hit the floor on all fours. Riding the momentum of his maneuver, Zucroas swung his head up, lightning beam thickening, widening, blossoming with intensified might and resilience as it made contact with the sanguine flood, vaporizing a trail through to the woman.

Before the path he made could seal itself shut, Zucroas turned off the beam and broke into a mad charge, the film that had initially coated only his claws now covering his whole body, much the same way the serpents had protected themselves. Bowing his head, the dragon’s horns aimed ahead of him, tips covered in a sandy crimson dust, as were his claws, talons, and tail, sparing no precaution as he aimed to skewer her upon his three foot weapons of war.

[L0nginus]

Pray II

Zucroas leapt back from her sanguine elixir, moving with such force, such aggression, that the countless reflections of the tangible woman before him couldn’t help but swoon in unison.. though, she made no such gestures. How could she, bleeding out as she was, right before his eyes? His breath's radiance bleached the room in a stark, bone white— juxtaposing against the ever deepening abyss of Oblivion's maw, leaving it to be cast across the forum like the bleak, open wound upon the borders of life and death that it truly was. An umbral scar upon the corridors of this palace. The woman twitched, but for as inrealistic as it were, that was somehow enough for her to build sufficient momentum to send herself tumbling to her right; narrowly avoiding the cosmically-charged electron beam, as its fury discharged into the pool of blood around her— leaving both a harrowing red mist and the mirror like viscera pond yo race with bands of his power. However, he rushed in soon after, led in with his sheer bloodlust. The lightning, however, would never reach her. Not before he did, at least, though it was trapped in a closed-circuit loop around her; the ionized gore storing far more energy than feasibly possible, with impossibly complex matrices of covalent bonds that wove his fury into tangible, material form. Stagnant, isolated. Usable. Lending to itself more mass This led them to the crux of the oncoming storm of violence. He charged at her, through the gap. He fell headlong through the crimson fog, bringing all he had to bear, before the river of scarlet dried up like the Euphrates. Converted into theoretical, potential value— a veritable slew of horror that converged upon the energy quotient of the blood mist the instant it occurred, which was upon contact. Zucroas' death knell sang with the rupturing of countless fermions into a counterfeiture of celestial light. The distended vomit of Creation— otherwise known as reality cancer, and threatened to baptize him in the collapsing of countless possibilities into a single inevitability.

"How unfortunate," the chorus sang, coming from every direction save for her own lips. No, they hung agape, drooling in debased ecstasy, her eyes emptily taking in the sight of Zucroas' silhouette through the implosion. Her joints crunched and snapped wetly as she disobeyed the conventions anatomy demands; hoisting herself to a half-stand as her knees rotated in the opposite direction to pivot upright. The false halo hovering above the woman's head had since ceased being an addition to her garment, and unfurled into a collection of 6 golden blades of various western ethnic style. The Swords of Hekate. Those blades, fashioned of a metal with the density of neutron star matter with a quarter the weight, they thrusted forward upon their own initiative to bury themselves into his skull, save for 2 which made to run through his traps to dismember Zucroas adjacent to the shoulders all the way down through the ribs. The woman leapt back, evidently unbothered by the incorrectness of her legs, like the vectors of her motion were moving in Kintar's stead. In that same illogical way, the curvature of spacetime conformed around her weapons, for their sheer mass and density were enough to grant them their own orbital fields. Nevermind how much force they had to generate to move themselves at subsonic speeds, their mere presence was enough to disorder the geometry of the dragon's flesh and yank him into their flight path with his inertia compounding into it.

Zucroas' serpents surged into the abyss, the realm of death. An afterlife known as Hell. A realm of aught terrible, where the damned torment each other in absence of God. There was no light in this stinking pit of black-burning fire and brimstone, and their luminous into it shone upon those 'eyes', revealing their true nature. They were all an endless swarm of ashen skinned men and women, ferally clawing over and onto each other amidst the stink of their own feces and urine. Various wounds adorned their flesh like the paintings of a sadistic child, leaving them to reach for the serpents which acted with pure malice. The red dust spilled amongst the masses as that astral plasma rendered them into entropic slime, ripping and tearing through the still-moving carcasses of deadmen. But, as was the natural order of things, Hell is paradoxically a place of imbalance and contradiction. The Karma of this place stunk of Kintar's deceitful dominion, and imbued onto the formless ones a purpose, and if not a purpose, a form, for one begot the other and with neither there was only the opportunity for renewal. Their inherent uselessness was fed to the other accursed like pig-slop, strengthening them; bolstering them with infernal might. With each evisceration, with each man or woman turned to goo, the masses grew more potent in their workings as they sought to crush the serpents beneath the clutching and ripping tide of their misery.

Meanwhile, in the mental realm.

Zucroas outputted enough psychic might to pop the brains of countless psions into grey sludge, but it was all for naught. This was no meeting of minds, but a flame that devoured his psyche. His mental energy. What he did was tantamount to pouring gasoline into a fire, which he may as well of done, for that was the literal outcome here. The psy-flame was emboldened by this outcome, if not held at bay briefly, before flowing back into the corridors of his wrathful mind to render his sacred mind palace to a rundown hovel. Though, two other things were of note here. Firstly, his mind registered the attack, but imprinted the response onto a caricature of the woman which his mind conjured up in that exchange. This created effigy soon blossomed into an instance of the real thing, to his detriment. Much like the Kintar in front of him, it glutted itself upon his Wrath, and used his inherent sin as a gaping hole in his supernatural defenses to exploit for the sheer presence of it. The creature swam within pyroclastic flows, and danced upon slipstreams, finding nourishment upon his anger; infesting his mind with his malignant touch, until eventually it proliferated enough to try and cut-off his mind-body connection, infiltrating into his nervous system to shut down his motor controls.

"Mmm, KiKi likes you very much." It whispered, its sultry voice like a finger trailing down Zucroas' spine, and a breathy moan into his neck.