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.”
“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!!!
