Dark Gifts

Ciara's awakening was felt for miles around. Residents of Memnon going about their morning routines were killed where they stood as the great storm raged around the city, souls absorbed into the howling sands. As Ciara stood with Darruk's re-animated help, removing the beam from her chest cavity, all that had been slain began to dry and desiccate in the desert's hot air. Ciara sloughed dead moss and burnt skin from her arms and raised them to the howling sky, all of the corpses stood with her.

Skin charred and blackened by the fire she and Darruk had set, it gleamed wetly in the late afternoon light. Darruk shambled slowly off to her left side, taking a knee and bowed his massive head quietly. Ciara reached down and grasped a fistful of grey and decayed moss in her hands, watching as it dried and flaked into dust. She laughed then, a raspy and terrifying sound, as lungs which no longer worked wheezed ineffectively in her chest.

She closed her eyes and focused on the memory of the fight and upon the visage of her terrible God. She understood so much more now. Annatar had bonded her with the strand of fate that he'd severed from the Tapestry so long ago, just as the other half had bonded with the devilkin. She looked down as she remembered the stab wound delivered by that young woman, her eyes finding a delicate tri-edged poinard half-buried in the sand and wreckage around her. Delicately, Ciara picked it up and stared at its deadly blade still crimson with her own blood. She smiled grimly as she murmured an arcane phrase that would grant her magical sight and nodded slightly in satisfaction. The resonance was clear to her even through the howling storm and she began to stalk towards the docks with purpose.

As she moved, the radius of her deadly presence moved with her, raising as defiling more corpses as she went. Interestingly, those that she moved too far from, instantly collapsed into husks of nothingness, blown to dust within seconds. She took some note of this, filing the information away as useful but not of critical importance as she approached a docked ship.

The guards at the gangplank, along with her crew, were already dead from her pesitlant presence long before she and Darruk boarded the vessel. As they did, the crew rose to a janky and slow resemblance of former duties, preparing the ship for a voyage. Ciara was quiet as she noted all of this, watched as several schools of fish in the harbor floated dead to the surface around the ship, and she laughed that awful, wheezing laugh again, amazed at the power she'd been granted.

Darruk stood impassively beside her as always, the onyx that had replaced his eye sat cracked by the impact that had killed him. A gruesome indent in his huge skull was also a visible reminder that he was no longer a living creature. Ciara decided to test the limits of her gifts a little as the ship released her lines and raised anchor, preparing to chase after the trail Ciara could follow back to Isobel. She turned to Darruk and spoke softly, her voice a raspy whisper, "Do you know who you are?"

A low growl escaped Darruks lips as his dead and dying synapses magically twitched slightly. "Am Darruk." A large fist thumped his chest. He turned his massive head towards Ciara and pointed. "You Shee-ara. I protect. I obey." His great head bowed in servitude to her as he proclaimed this proudly. Ciara's eyes widened as she marveled at this near-perfect recreation of her companion's knowledge. Such things were far beyond any abilities she'd once had; She could raise a corpse as a minion, but they were mindless and incapable of complex speech. This was amazing!

"Correct, Darruk, very good. Tell me, do you remember what happened back in Memnon?"

His good eye was glossy and blank, but behind it great gears began to move and grind. "Fought pretty bird man." His mind continued to shake cobwebs free as it worked slowly, "Bad lady stabbed you, Shee-ara. Birdman blinded Darruk." He growled softly to himself as if willing himself to remember.

"Go on, Darruk. What happened then?" At this point Ciara was morbidly curious to see how his mind had interpreted what happened.

"Dunno, couldn't see." He muttered softly, sadly. "Felt like I was flying maybe? Bird man used magic to throw Darruk? Hit wall and soft person very hard." He scratched at his head wound and scowled annoyed at his own hand. "Couldn't move. Fire. Then nothing. Then Darruk heard you call to him, Shee-ara. Woke up. Now here." Fresh blood began to weep down from his scalp and Darruk pawed at it as if annoyed by its presence.

Ciara stood in thought a long while, was it *her* power that had brought Darruk back, or that of the Other, as she'd begun to refer to it? It rather felt like a second presence in her mind that was suffusing her with power and life, though it never spoke to or acknowledged her in the least. The same sense of rage and hatred she'd felt when the High Preistess had 'blessed' her back in Memnon was still present, as if it was a part of that Other sentience.

Once she concentrated upon it, she could see that it was the part of Annatar's story that concerned him becoming the dark God he was destined to be. She saw moments of him as a mortal leading a great army, of a half elven woman with auburn hair and kind eyes. Frustratingly, the second that Ciara began to delve into that, wanting more of the tale, it seemed to disappear from her mind almost as if it didn't wish to be examined. All she felt in place of it was a driving hunger to find its other half alongside vivid memories of death and destruction as the great King led his army against the humans of the Old Vaelian Empire. Swaths of dead soldiers cut down by magical lightning and more images of a great court filled with dead and dying Archfey were all she could see in her mind for several moments every time she attempted to delved further.

"Darruk, go below decks and prepare the former Captain's cabin for me." He obligingly shambled away from her as she looked back towards Memnon seeing a trail of dead and bloated fish and other sea life left in the wake of her boat's passage. She focused inwardly with her will, began to test if she could control the range and strength of this new unconscious power. Many hours passed, first up on the deck where she's stood and then in the cabin that Darruk had prepared for her, one hand absently scribbling notes in a journal as she worked.

With a great deal of testing and effort, she learned that she could in fact tightly control the radius of that gift she'd begun to call her 'death field'. But, the tighter she controlled it, the more power it seemed to consume, and it appeared that it fed on life itself, forever hungering and destroying everything around it. Interestingly, she found she could also use that range to control any minions raised by it, but to her chagrin Darruk seemed to be the only one who had retained any semblance of his former self. More testing was to be required then, Ciara mused, as she continued racing after the trail of magic resonance like a shark after a freshly wounded victim.