Netherbane: Returns, Part V
This morning we bring you Part V of Netherbane: Returns. This one brings Vasedra, formerly known as Sedrai, back to Azeroth after time off-world.
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Gearing Up
"These?"
Ary looks at the full, heavy boots and wrinkles her nose. "Isn't there something... lighter?"
"Ary, if you buy sandals, you may as well just go barefoot, again. Boots." Sedra sighs.
"They make my feet hot and my toes feel constricted." She reluctantly takes one boot from Sedra's grasp looking at it. "What about a normal shoe or slipper?"
Now it's Sedra's turn to wrinkle her nose, the expression a little more hidden under her cowl. Making an exasperated sound in the back of her throat, she looks around the shop's wares once more and wanders a few steps away to look at a shelf of shoes.
"No slippers. Useless things, those fabric footwraps..." She sighs and picks up a pair of sturdy shoes, really low ankle boots in a light leather save hardened and shined toes. Though she gives them a bit of a dirty look, she holds them up to Ary. "These might still save your fleshy bits."
Home and Hearth
Far to the west of Blackrook Hold, hidden in the dark and fog, the little island that has been all but swallowed by a large, truncated section of the wreckage of a Legion warship hunkers atop the churning ocean, helpless victim of yet another demon invasion. Once a teardrop of near-barren rock nearly half a league long and wide, now it is only a little hill of Azerothian stone left strewn with Argussian rubble, dirt and rock and plants, and the massive bulk of the wrecked Soul Cleaver from mid-bow to near-aft. The last quarter of the vessel falls off with the land and submerges, shimmering with fel-green light just under the water's edge and evoking the thought of a beached, dying Leviathan. Here and there around its perimeter, shadow power still wafts free of the perfect, void-stained cuts through its bulkheads and through bits and pieces of the foreign rubble that snuggles against it, wisps of dark that whisper and writhe.
Revenant Bound - Chapter 4: Arrangements
About an hour later, Vasedra stands just inside the door of the simple quarters, watching as Ary wanders the room, inspecting the organic bed with a mattress of some sort of spongy, liquid-rich membrane and the storage shelves of bone and sinew and the chair and desk arrayed against the wall.
"You'd be near enough to mine to reach me easily, here. Also, it takes a little bit of time, but the room furnishings can be rearranged to your tastes."
Revenant Bound - Chapter 3: Consequences and Conspiracies
That very moment, a deck below and half-a-ship to the aft, Cazas cocks a saucy hip to the side, watching the brig's seamless door stretch open. The room beyond is oddly truncated with the cell closed, a six-paces-wide control strip all that's left of the 20-paces-wide space. She saunters in, tilting her head to the side and snapping her tail back and forth as she examines the draenei prisoner with sharp, calculating interest.
Her voice is light as a cloud, at odds with the malice behind her smile as she says, "How fortunate are you, lovely blue thing! Here I am with your dinner, compliments of my darling captain. It's still luke-warm."
Revenant Bound - Chapter 2: Introductions
The transport pad solidifies around them, the world of the vessel slowly resolving out of a field of light and fel-glowing green.
As dark as the Revenant's exterior is, the interior is equally bright. The walls are made of some substance the color of ivory that is inlaid with a bright silver metal at joints and high up near the ceiling, forming traceries along the surface like veins or circuitry. The room is bulbous, shy of rectangular and devoid of right angles, organic, with a high archway over the open door and two floor-to-ceiling ribs along two extremes of the space that look as much like sinew as structure.
Off to their right, a control panel sprouts from the floor, equally white and formed as if by stretching taffy and molding a flat, crescent-curved surface into its top. A conduit of clear fibers lit within by fel-green energy runs along its pedestal from floor to panel, the bundle alive with pulses, crackles and sparks all safely contained within. A colorful assortment of gems of all shapes and sizes populate the panel at its terminus, their vibrant tones a distinct contrast to the muted colors of the six-armed shivarra demoness who mans them.
Revenant Bound - Chapter 1: Rendezvous
Sedra sits in the lee of a rock, watching the quiet surf of the lazy night ocean slide in and out over the sand, washing away the cloven hoofprints left behind by her earlier pacing. The grooves fill with water on each surge and soften with each recession. Fill and blur. Fill and blur. Fill and blur...
It reminds her of something vague, something thrumming from her heart, and as the sound of the ocean against the rock fills her ears, her gaze grows unfocused and her head lolls back against the curve of the boulder, the false-lit blue of her eyes beneath her cowl slipping up to the star-filled sky, unseeing.
Revenant Bound - Prologue: Keeping Promises
In that area, the halls of the Soul Cleaver were as silent and still as the grave. Appropriate, since these particular ones were a grave in truth, still home to a few drying carcasses of the Atrium's former denizens: the ones that had been too weak or too injured in the crash to escape their damaged cells.
Vasedra had known their names. From her Belmun self, she had crafted together a habitat for them, for all of the collection, and ... adored them in her own way. Sentient, intelligent pets. Children, half-loved at best.
The void knight could still remember the feel of the mucus that had drenched her human hands when the vozaksian had first hatched. Disgusting. Fascinating. The corpse in the cell at her back had been the last of her kind, and Sedra's Belmun self had been the last creature in all of existence to experience one's hatching.
A memory, now. Rot and entropy. Decay, like the King in the mad shrine to Raeisley's slug.
Invader
The workshop smelled of spilled chemicals and ozone wards, of dried blood and rotting tissue. It was broken and stained and crooked, with three sets of shelves bent at the middle and two more ripped in half, the bright, blue-white metal supports sheared near shoulder height and the tops tumbled down amongst the refuse of their former contents. The workbench, solid and unflappable, was strewn with bits of broken glass, odd crystals, tools ripped from their wall slots, and the offal left from the ruins of Belmun’s once-extensive collection of preserved organic… samples.
Read MoreBiding Time
Vasedra stood in the open iris of what was formerly her workshop along the outer hull of the Legion warship, the Soul Cleaver, staring in at the spacious room. The blueish tint of the lights turned the bright metal of the walls and workbenches - not felsteel, but an alloy of cobalt and ghost iron and an ore that she harvested on a far distant world - more purple than rose, glinting like sunlight off the ocean from the surfaces of tools and crystals, liquids and even decorations, what few survived intact when the Cleaver was grounded, smashing itself into the shelf of the Mac’Aree landmass. Keepsakes. Resources. Half-finished creations. Salvage.
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