NOVEL NEXT Our Lady of Perpetual Darkness
6/12 noon
Demetria nodded judiciously as she checked the mind of another one of her soldiers. The oracle knew that something was foul in the city of Tyr’s Hand; how could she not? Her senses, opened to the myriad possibilities of the future, spoke of treachery and domination among the ranks. Lord Valdemar, now infused with the same spirit of wisdom and grace that had once guided Lord Dathrohan, warned her of the nature of the threat shortly after she became the leader of the Scarlet Crusade. Someone, likely among the Scourge if not one of their dupes, had discovered a method by which to warp the minds of even the most faithful of her crusaders without any visual cues to accompany it.
She, along with Dathrohan’s other disciples who knew and embraced the secrets of shadow, were all the more important now than ever before. It was enough that she had started acting entirely off of her impulses, taking inspiration from her visions without any additional inspection just to accelerate her movements. Sending Rohan along with a delegation for Light’s Hope on this very day would supposedly eliminate a major threat; she didn’t have the time or energy to question it.
She realized what might be causing this now, and how Rohan was involved, when she studied a series of mostly female crusaders and found clear signs of tampering. These dozen young women and three men had been noted as acting out of character, shirking their duties, acting provocatively, and humming strange songs while on vigil or patrolling. When her disciples scoured their minds they found a strange preoccupation with a single subject: Disco music. Rohan had somehow infected their minds with his frivolous obsession, and in the process made them remarkably taken with him.
Even forbidding all discussions or acts of Disco on pain of torture seemed like a half measure. No, Disco had already proven to be an insidious form of brain rot, resistant to removal by shadow priests, and needed to be purged. To that end, the unfortunate souls who had already succumbed to its dark allure were currently being subjected to rehabilitative torture while listening to disco music. The minstrels and inquisitors involved were, of course, routinely tested to ensure that no seed of darkness, no joy in this foul music, could take root. It wasn’t yet working consistently. Half the time the result was the victims coming to associate pain with pleasure, instead of disco with pain. The Inquisitors would need to refine their technique, lest disco become a death sentence.
Their strange music boxes were somehow key to all this. Valdemar had insisted on taking one for study, but the rest were destroyed posthaste. Demetria was about to go and check on the captives again when a man in black armor appeared in her office. He had the audacity to leer appreciatively at her.
“Guards!” She barked, following it up with “Pain” directed at the intruder. She-
She fell to the floor, her body simply refusing to support itself. A loop of cold metal was around her wrist, tingling, and the intruder suddenly had a pair of giggling young women hanging on each arm wearing a disgustingly sexualized parody of Crusader’s garb.
“Alright,” he said when he saw her fall, “let’s get going.” He picked her up in a bridal carry, and she felt something in her mind forcing her to take note of how impressive his casual show of strength was. She crushed the thought, as it was unbefitting of her station. His scent and voice also seemed laced with a supernatural appeal, so she manually filled herself with disdain to counteract the foreign influence. Her sex drive had been pruned years ago, so seeing it resurface had been a clear red flag.
He walked through a portal he’d conjured, which she made herself feel unimpressed by, into a snowy field in front of a dwarven style stronghold. He strolled right in, then looked at the two harlots dressed like crusaders. “Alright. Which of you two knows this woman better?”
“Me! I’ve been her bodyguard for years!” The chestnut haired woman on the left chirped, as if Demetria had ever seen her before in her life.
“Alright.” The man popped a collar onto the floozy, and squinted at Demetria. The woman’s body seemed to melt and reshape itself as he looked back and forth between the two of them. Within a few minutes Demetria was looking at a nearly perfect copy of herself. “Ok, take her clothes, then go back through the portal and pretend to be her. Call for backup if you need it, but try to keep your head down and hide your amulet.”
“Of course, my lord.” The doppelgänger replied in a close approximation of Demetria’s voice and mannerisms, “it shall be as you say.”
“Alright,” the man continued, turning to the other strumpet, “I need you to take this amulet and look up the ritual titled ‘brute force silver.’ Memorize the incantation, you’ll find it a lot easier than you might expect. I’m gonna make the circle and put her into it, then you’re going to do the ritual, alright?”
“Yes sir, if you say so.” She seemed uncertain, but obedient, and stared into the distance as the man inscribed a circle on the ground.
“I’m impressed, by the way.” He spoke conversationally as he carved a circle into the ground, “Tier six, and I’ve never heard of you? Plus you resisted my polymorph. So, congratulations on being our first test case for rapid ritual capture. If it works, you’ll be back to Tyr’s Hand in an hour.”
Demetria slowly realized she was going to be changed, mind and body, by this man. She couldn’t even struggle as she was placed into a small ball at the center of a meter wide circle. It began to glow and flash as the woman that she slowly realized must be a transformed and enslaved crusader began chanting rapidly in a strange tongue. “Vi undrar are ni redo att vara med Armarna upp nu ska ni f se Kom igen Vem som helst kan vara med.”
She held fast. She would not give in. She would not become another floozy hopelessly enthralled by disco!
••••••••••
I came back an hour later to find Demetria right where I left her, with Roger still chanting. She’d been in fantastic shape to start with, so when the one hour mark ended she didn’t change much physically. She was in her underwear too, so I would have noticed if she did; mostly she just lost a few scars and wrinkles. She was captured, according to my amulet, so I took off her bracelet and commanded her to stand. She did so with an unfocused, dreamy expression.
“Hey. Welcome to the retinue. We are glad to have you. How are you feeling?” I asked; I hadn’t experimented with this new form of capture yet, so a few boilerplate questions seemed in order.
“I feel welcomed to the retinue.” She said in a slurred monotone.
“Anything else?”
“I’d like to listen to some disco music. I think I didn’t give it enough of a chance.”
Alright. So an echo of what I told her and a random non sequitur; her mind was not on right now. “You are happy to be a member of the retinue, and look forward to serving me faithfully.” She stared at me, not saying anything. After all, she hadn’t been asked a question. “Uh. You’ll wake up when I say wake up?” I didn’t bother giving her a sleep trigger. It would be a minor security risk if someone pretended to be me, and mind runes could do anything a hypnotic trance could. “Now, awake.”
She smiled slightly when she came to, which was quite the departure from the grumpy lady that used a shadow word on me the moment she processed my presence. “Hello, what can I do for you?” She flirted. What did this woman think I wanted from her when I put her in that circle?
I smiled at her and waved her into the house. “We can figure that out. If I’m in the mood later, then we might have a bit of fun, but for the moment I need to know what you can do in a more practical sense. Run me by your personal abilities, and let me know whether you think you can get the majority of Tyr’s Hand to go through the process you did.
“Since the death of Saidan Dathrohan, I am the supreme leader of the Scarlet Crusade. None would ever dare to defy a direct order from me.” I somewhat doubted that it was that straightforward, but it was probably close enough to true that I could work with it. “Personally, I have been trained in both the light and shadow and can resurrect those whose faith is strong..” Given how the light works, I suspected that actually meant that she could resurrect people that she thought deserved to live, but even if she actually could only resurrect religious fanatics she managed to bring my list of resurrectors up to six. Sally, Tony, Anduin, Uther, Katherine, and now Demetria; several more if you count my rapidly increasing number of Val’kyr.
“I’m also capable of listening to the shadows to gain insight into the world around me and potential futures.” Another Eva too? Nice. I had Eva out on a special assignment in Outland; the ability to draw the answers to difficult questions out of one’s ass with nothing to work off of is uniquely useful even to someone with as many resources as me.
“Hell yeah.” I spoke into my amulet, “alright team. We have Demetria. Take out anyone else who is compromised by Nefarian, then pull out. Demetria here is going to be handling the cleanup.” I looked back at her. “I can lend you around fifty body doubles if you need them. We haven’t quite made a proper taskforce for ritual capture yet, but if you send someone along we should be able to take care of them.”
“Excellent, my lord. I’m sure I’ll be able to clear everything up in no time.”
••••••••••
Ten identical black haired women floated towards the Scourge stronghold of Deatholm. They drifted through the skies as living masses of shadow. They had picked up wands from the supply depot, as mindless undead tended to be rather irritating to harm with shadow magic, but those were only a precaution. Even weakened severely, even divided into fragments, Xal’atath was a being of pure void and the one she was here to face was an upstart mortal with delusions of grandeur.
The defenders of Deathholm were beset by half remembered nightmares, tentacled beasts of flesh and teeth plucked from the horrified vestiges of their once mortal minds. As the shadowbeasts distracted the zombies and skeletons, the ten women floated inexorably towards their target in his temple, following the tracker in the lead overlord’s amulet. The ghosts that flew up to meet them were in equal parts disrupted by wand blasts and ripped from the Lich King’s clutches to turn on their allies. The spirits had no real antipathy towards Xal’atath’s puppets, so it took hardly any effort at all to make them turn on the Scourge.
“Come, come and serve me.” The ten women said in perfect unison. “I shall grant you-“ each mouth spoke a different word laced with shadow, a different promise with which to entice, “vengeance,” “freedom,” “peace,” “new life,” “redemption,” “power,” “oblivion,” “knowledge,” “purpose,” “hope.” The Lich King wasn’t weak by any stretch, but so far from his seat of power in Northrend it was possible to pry these sentient beings away from him, with the right knowledge and their cooperation. Red strings trailed away from those of them on the edge of gaining freedom, strings that Xal’atath took hold of and pulled.
As such, when they reached Dar’khan’s sanctum, Xal’atath had a small army at her disposal, and a field strewn with ectoplasm from those too weak to embrace her offer. Dar’Khan was a dandy, dressed in black and silver robes that had no doubt been quite fashionable once. He was accompanied by a small team of necromancers, his students and functionaries, which Xal’atath’s puppets split off to duel one at a time so as to not slow their advance. Not wanting to be wasteful, she made sure to render them each brain dead instead of actually dead, then encouraged her recently recruited spirits to possess them. It was a supremely enjoyable experience for the ghosts, so long deprived of physical sensation, and the majority continued to follow their dark savior to the conclusion of the assault.
Dar’Khan was not a fool, when he saw the women bathed in shadow magic he didn’t respond in kind despite that being his specialty. He fell back on fire and arcane magic, and his first flamestrike incinerated one of the overlords completely. His next flamestrike never came, as in seconds his magical protections were stripped from him, his tongue became lead in his mouth, his arms became too heavy to lift, his mana was burnt away to nothing, and his sense of self was assaulted by shadowy talons. His contingent spells, meant to teleport him away from any true danger, were useless when his body was not the thing under attack. The slippery undead archmage could handle almost anything, but he’d been caught off guard by the appearance of a goddess. Fragmented, weakened, forgotten, and shamefully pathetic by her own standards… but still more than enough to tear apart a jumped up little elf if she saw fit.