The neverending knight, the black fog intro chapter.

The Neverending Knight

Fog of discord

“Well met my son.”

“It has...been a long time father.”

“Have you finally come to join me in remaking this world? Can it be that...after these long years in hiding and in contemplation...you’ve...finally seen it my way? Can….can I assume that my prodigal son has finally come to his senses?”

“…..”

“Son…..your mother would have wanted this you know...she would have wanted this revenge as much as I do now.”

“…...how many father? How many have you killed these long one hundred years?”

“At least six billion…..i’m saving the last billion and drawing their deaths out in order to ensure they never, ever forget what they did to me. i’m ruling over them, ensuring that they, and their children, and their children’s children suffer over the next twelve hundred years!!”

“Have you….no heart whatsoever? Can you see that these are not the same people who took mother from us?”

“it does not matter. They were spawned by them and they are beholden to the same evils. They cannot help it. Thus, I am punishing them.”

“Then no...father…..i have not come to join you. When I heard you were ruling mankind I had hoped...against every bit of hope that it was you who had finally changed..that you had chosen to…...forgive them...despite what they did.”

“Forgive them? HA! That was a fine joke my boy! No son...i can never..ever forgive them for what they stole from me….for what they did to your mother. But enough of this….if you’ve not come to join me then you can leave. Return to me when you’ve finally seen it my way and….what are you doing?”

“I’m putting an end to this...father. D----la! In th----- of m----- mot----- I will defeat you a----- ---- the humans from your evil!!”

“Evil? What------------ you are nothing but a sp---- child w------ a h---- for ----de----n! but enough talk! h----- a- -ou!”

[Audio Recording Ended Due To Corrupted Data]

Chapter 1

The Night, Eternal.

11/18/1103 BD

On the matter of the black calamity, urgent request for assistance.

My name is jonas harkon, formerly of val britannia, a nation that lasted for nearly fifty years...before the black fog came.

The black fog was...even as I pen this...a monstrously devious force…

Where to even begin?

At least a year ago, our alchemists, chief researchers of the world at the time, sought to explore the mystery of a phenomenon known as the “black fog” there are ruins far to the west of the city of ghol bhandor, and these ruins are of a curious castle. Only the foundation remained of course, but that didn’t stop the alchemists and choniclers from discerning that it was a fascinating and massive keep. One that doubtless towered over the world and spread as far as the grandest mountain range. They found..pieces of it buried deep in the ground for miles..hundreds of miles you see..and at night, a curious black fog would seep from the stones and shroud the region the castle was settled on in a deep, thick, icy curtain of the stuff...the fog was blacker than pitch, and nothing that went in came out.

Of course monsters would..sometimes very rarely venture forth from it.

The alchemists, thinking the cloud a potential work of alchemy, elected to investigate the monsters, they had sir chevaut and his knights twelve capture one of these things, and upon studying the ravenous, slobbering...almost doglike monstrosity, they discovered that it was in fact...a rabbit.

A rabbit that had been warped and mutated beyond all recognition. Apparently a study of its blood led to the revelation that its blood was almost identical to a rabbit’s. Supposedly, the alchemist’s claim that blood contains a sort of…..well this sounds strange, but it contains a blueprint or ladder….something that dictates how the body is formed.

According to them this “ladder” or “blueprint” was a rabbit’s...save that specific parts had been altered. I know naught of alchemy and less of this thing called “genetics” but many people put stock into the claim and thus I am inclined to trust their findings.

Well, upon dissecting the monster they discovered that many of its organs had been enlarged but were still functionally a rabbit’s. Comparing them side by side the shape was virtually identical, and the creature even had the sharp looking fore-teeth, but the ears were closer to a canine’s and it had antlers and was a muscular thing with fiendishly long, curved fangs like a carnivore’s.

In their excitement they decided to investigate the prospects of utilizing the black fog as an enhancement alchemy, thinking that, under the right circumstances...they could wield it given enough time.

So the fools brought a few stones from the ruins into the city of ghol bhandor.

The effects were….slight at first. They sealed the stone in the deepest part of the lab and began experimenting on it.

A few days later…..one of the scientists began muttering something before stabbing himself through the eye socket.

Many of us began to have...terrible dreams….dreams of demonic women who would hold us fast to a bed with crimson silk before ravishing us, yet the act of ravishing us would then drain the very life from our bones.

The women began having nightmares of being devoured by great muscular goblinoids, and the children….gods the children…..i can still hear the screams each night as the nightmares wracked them. One of them woke in such a fit of terror that she tore her own eyes out….she was only eight years old…

suffice it to say it didn’t take long for us to determine that the stone slab was cursed, or the mist was the cause, thus we had the alchemists move it out…

but by then the fog had its hold over the city.

Each night the darkness grew darker, each day the people within the city found their own paranoia increasing as the continued presence of the nightmares began eating away at our sanity.

The nightmares became an enemy we actively tried to escape, but when night fell it was as though we were forced to sleep.

Something was antagonizing us, of that I am certain, something wanted us dead or wanted us to suffer for all eternity. It hated us, reviled us and thought of us as truly terrible. We deserved this, it felt like that’s what the presence behind the fog was saying.

Then...one day...the black fog erupted from the stonework and shrouded the city….

And then it grew blacker as the weeks wore on, daylight ceased to exist, and the children had all found ways to kill themselves or maim themselves beyond repair..leaving many families so distraught that suicides only seemed to……

gods just writing about this is...awful….i can’t bring myself to write on the matter for much longer...but you must understand...whatever was in that fog...it was truly evil.

That some of us were relieved that the screams of children had ceased each night only made us feel worse, it was as if we were being confronted with the most basic flaws of our personalities...we stopped wanting to hear them suffer and thus took relief in their deaths..it’s dreadful I know but the mindset of our society began to change.

Weeks later, we formed mobs and lynched the alchemists who brought this upon us, they pleaded, begged us to let them fix the problem...i stood there and watched from a distance as the distraught families let their rage play out.

It was like a carnival of madness had taken hold, as if mankind’s twisted, dark side had deigned to show itself, almost in celebration of the inky black fog that slowly choked the very spirit of the town.

But weeks later..the mutations began…

a hulking..brutish monster wearing tom hiddleston’s clothes came out of an alleyway and tore a woman cleanly in half while she was still screaming at the...ape-like beast...another, far less generous death came about when a pack of..what appeared to be skeletal gremlins ate a man’s face off.

News from the gravekeeper later confirmed that a number of the children’s corpses had vanished from their coffins….and the reports of the curious gremlins only further confirmed our suspicions that the children had become undead ghouls…

a few days after the gremlin incident, monster reports became all too common, and the dreams we shared now included another figure, a tall...cold looking man with skin paler than moonlight, whose eyes were burning crimson pinpricks of light in the darkness.

He said nothing at first, he simply watched me, chained to the bed in the nightmare while the fiendish women had their way with me.

Only after they had finished and I lay there, once more drained of life and skeletal to the point of death, did he speak.

His voice was like a cold length of steel being fed into my heart, a deep, judgmental thing that sang out with all the colors of night and barely had he uttered a word, yet I found myself recoiling, for I could hear the voice in my very ears! As if he was right there, whispering to me.

He said “You deserve much...much worse human.” and then with a snap of his fingers the she-devils began tearing me apart limb from limb, laughing as they did so!

Many others experienced the same...dark..ominous figure in their nightmares...the women claimed he watched them being devoured and laughed coldly as the goblinoid finished them. The other men had the same dream occur to them, right down to the way their limbs were torn off..tendons ripping and all else.

We called this figure “the will behind the fog” and we confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that this...specter in black robes...absolutely hated us.

What have we done?” I would ask in the next nightmare, facing him down.

He said nothing, he merely watched as I was violated and then torn apart.

Every nightmare I had, I made it a point to question him, every time I did, I was met with ruthless silence and that same...hate-filled glare.

Then one day I called the specter out...i told him that he deserved this torment far more than I, for he had caused the deaths of so many already….how many had died by this fiend’s hand? How many children?”

he personally tore me apart in the dream, and when I awoke...my arm was halfway across the bedroom...and a bleeding stump had already soaked the bed in crimson.

My wife, bless her, had the presence of mind to cauterize the wound, and I lay in bed, recovering from the injury, all the while I silently endured the torture in my never-ending nightmare.

But I endured. I let the fiendish devil women have their way with me, and I glared at him, not with hate...for I do not believe in hate..but pity.

What sort of being was this? What wrongs had he endured to afford him such hatred?

What had we done to him?

This became a twisted contest between us, he would match my glare and the two of us would stare one another down, through it all he found the game perfectly amusing.

Others in the city killed themselves as the dreams proceeded to wear down their sanity, but I became angrier, more determined.

I would face this devil down, I would endure the pain and misery he inflicted on me...and I would die a victor...every...single...time.

Each nightmare became like a contest, and I could sense the figure’s growing frustration, even as he glared in stoic silence at me, I could feel him seething.

But I didn’t taunt him, I didn’t allow my pride to get in the way.

This devil wanted proof of my wickedness, yielding to wicked desires such as pride would only get in the way.

I awoke chained to my bed that night, one of my arms gone, i’d been out for a few weeks...and surrounding the bed were a group of winged women...one of which I recognized as my wife.

And a cold realization hit me...the dream had become something of a prophecy.

The women had been transformed by the black fog in the same way that the fog had transformed mere rabbits into hulking, canid abominations.

I struggled to break my bonds, but the devil women had secured them well, and so each one of them took their turn with me, leaving a bite mark on my good arm once they were finished.

My wife simply watched coldly, the same way that the man had, all the while half the town’s women took their time, making it just as pleasant as it was painful.

All the while she simply watched, not pleased but not exactly unhappy, a glare fixed upon me that spoke murderous thoughts more loudly than her voice ever could.

Why was this happening? There wasn’t a truly logical reason for it….it was simply the fulfillment of the twisted dream.

So then, as before, I stared the presence down, my glare falling on my wife, now turned into a she-devil with wings and horns and watching, arms folded beneath her breasts as the firelight in the room played off her eyes.

Once they were done, I had grown quite thin, and she gave a sigh and approached, gently stroking my chin with a talon, for her hands now sported knife-like claws.

“A pity...” she said. “I had hoped to have you after you were done being unfaithful to me.”

Most men would have backed down then and there, their emotions getting the better of them, but I simply stared angrily, letting her know that I was keenly aware of who and what she was.

She wasn’t my wife...she was a proxy for this….thing!

She left the room, and the she-devils all gathered round, their fangs elongating and their wings shuddering in anticipation.

Truly my situation was hopeless, but at that moment, a great green fist crashed through the walls of the house and a number of them were grabbed up.

Many began screaming hysterically as a towering goblinoid creature….one of many in the distant fog, grabbed them and held them before its gaze.

The sheer horror of their cries revealed to me the truth of the situation.

they’d been driven mad by the antagonism from the dreams, all who succumbed or died were then transformed into whatever the opposite gendered dreamer suffered from.

For the men who succumbed it was the towering goblinoids, for the women, they transformed into devilish succubi intent on dominating whatever men they found before ripping them apart as a sort of cruel vengeance for being similarly dominated and murdered in the nightmare.

Through it all I could hear the fog laughing through my terror, and I could almost hear the stranger’s voice as he said “look!! look!! is this not the true form of man? Is this not glorious in its evil? They became the very things their lovers had nightmares about, to visit their wickedness upon one another as vengeance aahahahahaaa!!”

no such voice was there of course.

The drain on my body had caused the manacles to slip free, and so I crawled out of the building even as devil women and towering goblin-like giants murdered each other in the streets, while packs of skeletal gremlin children hunted down those too weak to be worthy of note.

I crawled through alleys and slowly made my way out of town, but in one of the alleys a pack of the undead children found me and would have slain me, had a devil woman not shown up, almost immediately the fiends gave a shriek and fled, terror apparent on their visage, but if the woman had any interest in killing me, she didn’t show it, she simply made her way for the gremlins, bloodlust apparent.

This….macabre situation lasted the whole night, and I managed to clear the fog after 8 hours of crawling, escaping well beyond the city limits and finding my way to a nearby copse of trees.

I was weak, starving, and surely would have died, but a strange fellow suddenly appeared before me, materializing as if from shadows, I tried to fight back against him, thinking this was another devil seeking to unmake me the way my wife and the towering man in the black cloak had, but the stranger, his hair a pale silver and falling around his shoulders like a curtain of molten metal, his skin like moonlight, was far gentler and kinder.

He forced a potion down my throat, which seemed to restore my vitality after the initial panic fell off and i realized i felt much better, then he calmly asked “tell me what happened...where is the fog?”

he wore a tricorne and his hair, though unbound, was like a woman’s. Indeed the man was quite feminine, only his deep, yet calming voice clued me in.

he spoke very little as I managed to explain the situation through my tears, and he nodded and seemed to think about something as he listened.

Finally, he picked me up, as if I weighed less than paper! And then said “I am taking you somewhere safe. The potion I gave you will heal your flesh, but your mind needs a different concoction to rid you of the black fog.”

he brewed another potion at his camp, practically demanding I not sleep until I drank the draught. Once I downed it, a foul….darkness seeped from my body, he seemed quite perturbed as he watched it vacate my flesh through my pores, and once it was done he fed me tonic after tonic of restoratives...and...to my surprise and horror..this caused my arm to grow back!

It was small at first..like a child’s...but as the weeks passed it finally became...whole again...more mature...it felt quite different from my old arm.

Though I asked about the miracle...he would tell me “it’s from ancient times...the knowledge is dangerous and I use the potion only to restore your body….do not seek it..it is no miracle cure...merely a forbidden recipe that comes with risks.”

he then told me the risks of overuse, including addiction which would cause horrific transformations.

I declined to inquire further...i thought the man an alchemist but he called himself an “ancient” and would say no more on the matter, claiming to be four thousand times my own age before ceasing to speak altogether.

Finally, restored to full health, I had the courage to ask for his name.

He did not reveal it, claiming that I only call him “pale one” or “pale knight”

I decided to instead call him solus, for if the specter of nightmares was the moon, surely this gentle being was like to the sun.

the most curious thing about the fellow is how he would vanish the moment sunlight so much as touched him, in my sentimental haze I merely assumed that he was the sun, and that he would vanish because he was returning to the heavenly body to resume his duties. He laughed at this and explained that he simply could not exist in sunlight, he existed exclusively in the night and thus whenever the sun would come up, the rays of sunlight would dismiss him to the shadows nearby where he would sleep, as if he was a devil to be summoned from hell only to be returned when the summoner tired of him.

My ordeal finally ended, I thought of my wife, under the control of that...monster in the fog. Solus told me she was lost, and that I should give up on her. I was not turned because I did not submit to my despair...he claimed...that the despair..the fear...was exactly what led to the transformation.

I didn’t fully comprehend it but I took to naming the specter in the fog “morpheus” after the god of dreams. I asked solus about him, but solus wouldn’t say anything other than “he was an old friend...once...”

he told me to write a report and told me that by the time it was sent the city would be cleansed of the fog, but that none left in the city save myself would survive. And apparently I only survived thanks to my good fortune.

Leaving me in the neighboring city of khal dhathis, I elected to do precisely that.

Though it is difficult to believe, this black fog is indeed a threat to the great empire. I beseech you, lord brannigan! You must bring together the great alchemists of this world and have them determine how to deal with the threat of the black fog that comes from the castle ruins at bal dhammur!! our city is gone! My wife is gone! I have nothing left now...for a mercy, my dreams have returned to normal, but now all I see are visions of my wife, torn apart by monsters...rarely are my dreams pleasant.

Whoever solus is...he is an expert on the matter! I ask that you find him, though know you cannot find him during the daytime...for he cannot exist in the sunlight...i understand this tale sounds bizarre, but go to what’s left of our city..and you will see for yourself the nightmare inflicted upon us! A nightmare made reality by the man in the fog of nightmares!!!