Tales of the WildScar: Witch of the Wastes

Deep Wilderness - WildScar Frontier - Beginnings & Deals

                                                               -o0o-

His head rings fiercely as awareness returns, a mallet banging against the interior of his skull...

Stagnant air fills aching lungs, musty, enclosed. With it comes bitter memories of a cellar, one long gone now but never quite forgotten. The rats scurrying ever so close, chittering and scratching...then he allows himself to breathe deeper, banishing old traumas. New air, wrought thick with the variegated scents of loamy blood-soaked earth, pungent corpse-stench, and something sweet a man doesn't recognize. 

Hardly a comforting state of affairs at the best of times. Not a cause entirely for panic in itself, not like the cellar, though certainly concern namely over one very pressing question.

...'Where in the bloody hells am I?...'

He shifts, a hard surface digging into his back. Not a bedroll, not even the usual dusty mound of silt, and foliage that had become so ingrained in physical memory. A slab of sorts, a smooth stone yet pulsing like a beating heart...?

Brion opens his eyes, alert if still yet somewhat languid. Orbs of blooded crimson, a monster's eyes, for some odd reason find difficulty in parsing the lambent fugue of the low-ceiling cavern in which he now found himself.

One in which he certainly couldn't remember entering, not consciously at any rate and certainly never willingly...a conundrum that. His last true memories are those of failing sunlight draped along a desolate weather-worn path lined on both sides by black volcanic glass and curved protrusions that spilled wild from canyon walls, or otherwise erupted from the dusty earth, winding upwards like roots.

Hardly seeming at all a natural occurrence or so his brother had postulated, but one could never rely on imagined certainties. Not here.

Such simply being the unbalanced nature of the southern expanse so aptly known far and wide as the 'WildScar Frontier'..or the 'Scar' to some. A chaotic region where the leylines of spell-power ran plentiful as rivers, such mainly why the Aerillon Empire of the North and their pet hedge-wizards with the Arcane key in such a vapid hurry to try taming it for themselves.

Trying and failing miserably so far, due in no small part to the potency of such abundance magics acting a fertile balm to the surrounding environs. Be they flora, fauna, or simple folk making their way, few things were spared the changes of wild sorcery. Oftentimes in manners magnificent as they were so horrific, and not all of them wholly obvious as both her and his brother had since come to learn so readily in the desperate months since first arriving in the region...

...Wait his brother?

'...Cyric!?'

A moment's unease catches him off guard, subsiding with the familiar musky odor lingering in the air beside him. The sweat-reek born of hard travel, a lingering mineral-tang of river slick from a last attempt to scrub himself clean of old vitae, and beneath it all the familiar spoor not unlike his own. His brother is nearby, yet even with this motivation to spur him on it feels an age before the man finds the strength enough to twitch a finger.

This weight some unseen presence, inexorable and malign, tugging at his limbs and seemingly his very self in the bargain. An odd sensation, but a burden to be fought nonetheless, and so he does so with all that he can muster.

Brion had always held a knack for fighting, a trait realized late and gratefully indulged ever since with gusto. And he'd always fought all the harder for his twin...whether against or at his side. Such had always been the way since Escher. Since a cold winter night painted red...a night he'd not thought of in...in how long now?