Erdawn: an end to boredom!

[Wyborn]

OoC: Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you a new character who I am not doing justice. -OoC

Webs ran from tree to tree, gossamer strands like invisible tripwires that filled up the whole world. His webs, his trips, his window to knowledge no man should have. Deer strode, not even noticing the too-thin fibers that they stepped through. Ants moved up and down them, slipped and fell, unable to latch on to strands so much thinner than their own feet. The wind blew. Squirrels looked out from their nests, furtively glancing about as if aware that something was wrong. A raccoon lay and rotted, and flies buzzing about it flickered and hummed. The only things missing, the only things that did not move in those woods, were spiders.

Vibrations ran from everywhere, carrying information about everything. The Spider King felt it, and knew.

He hung in a sunless vale, shaded under trees and spider webs so thick that the sky between the leaves was rendered greyer than storm clouds. It may be inappropriate to say that he hung - rather he was suspended, sitting upon a harness of silk, strands running from his fingertips and the hairs on his arms and legs, out from between the thin lips of his mouth.

His skin was the color of ebony, his short-cut nails the color of blood. His body was shaped as if he had been chiseled by Michaelangelo, in perfect repose as he hung suspended; every muscle and cord was a tightly coiled spring quivering with restrained power, each of his limbs as lithe as a cat's but as solid as a tree's. His head was shaven clean, covered in tattoos in the shape of creatures that suggested insectoid forms, and crowned with a headdress that was horrible to look directly at: all chitinous scales and black hair, twisted leg-shapes rising up into the air on both sides. Aside from the headdress he was naked; aside from the motion of the vibrating web he did not move. No breath issued from his nostrils.

But he knew, did the Spider King - he felt as a deer took flight at an imagined sound, heard the hundreds of flies swarming over the form of the dead raccoon, saw the movement of a creature that had never been in his woods before.

Who wandered there? Even better, what? He would know. He would kill it.

He opened his hand, relaxed his muscles, and dropped. The webbing snapped and flailed back through the air, tracing weaves that could not have been natural results of their simply snapping. He landed without a sound.

He knew where the intruder was, knew the direction in which it had been moving when the strands broke. That would be enough.

His eyes opened, and they were blacker than his skin and perfectly reflected his surroundings. He smiled, and his teeth were fangs as black as his eyes, too long to be human and dripping with saliva, dots of venom dancing on the tips as his jaw creaked.

He rose up, naked save for his headdress, and when he moved into the trees it was without sound. The Spider King came from a people older than the spider itself - and long had they hunted in these woods.

The forest became hushed, and the intruder might have noticed an all-pervading silence.

Edit: If anybody wants to play spectator I'm sure it would be fine, but try to be discreet.

[Erdawn Il Deus]

The footsteps made no sound - muted impressions of movement against dark grass. Where they fell, the earth erupted with minute exaggerations of life - vegetation swelled in size and beauty, flowers and weeds erupted in force, youngling fruit took the preliminary stages of shape. But just as soon, just as quickly, they fell to rot - wilting and then blackening and finally crumbling away like ash. In their wake they left ashen nimbuses of dust like the sand of a graveyard, lifting upwards from his path and settling behind him with the grace of ghosts. At first, his features were indistinguishable from the obscurity of the forest shade - he seemed in fact to uproot the shadows which he passed and draw them about his corporality like fine veils of gossamer darkness. His passage not only disrupted the interweaving tapestries of silk laid bare to him by his enemy and natural nemesis but snapped them like plucked harpstrings, letting them fall away as loosly as silk in water back to the brush.

He came upon the King then, dark royalty unto himself, a human figure whose flesh seemed perpetually glazed with the moltenness of candlelight. At first glance, it was madness, no more a man than a dragon or a dragon than a god, he seemed half of all three and beautiful in all aspects. Where he was a man he was an Aresian sculpture of carven, immense musclature kept pristine within smooth walls of flesh the colour of brass and sheened with a perpetual sweat. His abdominals shredded into themselves downwards to his nakeness and to his legs, which seemed poised with an very wicked curve, like those of a satyr, and his ankles stretched to feet which ended the humanity at toes shaped more in the likeness of talons or the claws of a preying owl than those of a man. His arms were roped over his chest like lashed cables of bronze, and from his hips and where his shoulders boiled outwards from the width of his neck his body stretched outwards - into a Cyclopean pair of membranous wings, fleshy like a bat's but more sinister, holding a biblical impression of the reptilian like something out of a William Blake painting. They teetered like cities of flesh and scale above his head, holding a human quality as repugnant as they were majestic, like this being was a perversion of the human image in itself, and at the same time superior.

He craned his immense neck and peered forward, shifting above the brow of his skull a gnarled nest of antlered, paganistic horns of all sorts, ending in an odd number both disfiguring and mesmerising curling about his ears. His face was beautiful, but twisted by a kind of amused perversity and sheltered, wrathful disdain contemptuously kept in check by tenuous anger. When he spoke, his lips outlined each word with practiced sophistication and his voice was deep and melodious like the harp of a titan.

"I impress upon you my most unwelcome visitation, O lord of that which crawls on the earth." As he spoke, his right thigh twitched - his spine flowed sinuously down from his back into a long, whip tail which coiled itself languidly around his ankle and heel. His voice left footprints of smoke on the air like burned incense. "Then again you have been here long before there was earth for them to crawl on, have you not?"

If the Spider King could have replied in english speech, he chose not to, instead, his mouth opened in a peculiar way, through the silk, and he hissed, and the flesh around his lips bulged rapidly and grotesquely as he did and there was a kind of choking staccato through the foam of noise before he fell silent, still relaxed in his web.

"Ah yes, I have been their prince before even they could stand upright." His eyes, which were red within red and perfect like almonds in the womb of his skull, seethed with heat. His lips pulled apart, revealing teeth sharp and scythed inside the canine construct of his jaws, and then he was smiling a scimitar of teeth towards the arachnid lord and its joviality was haunting. "I assure you, I am much darker than the shadows they fear in their waking hours - their terror is really just their own aversion at looking inwards. I am all that represents."

With a dancer's grace he bowed forward, and the entire biology of him followed suit with disturbing naturality. His fingers coiled upwards like spines - rigid, each digit again ending in sharp, curled talons, and he beckoned with a threat as he would a kiss. The air around his hands seemed to distort, a Nevada horizon above his palm.

OoC: Hope you don't mind the liberties but you went snoring.

[Wyborn]

What the dragon man spoke to was not the Spider King, though he did not know it. The Spider King knew, though, as did the thing itself, but the dragon man was comfortable in his arrogant ignorance, dancing on the edge of a pit of knives.

"I am all that represents."

The Spider King sneered in the darkness, a nearly silent intake of breath that the dragon man would have taen for the fall of a leaf even if he had heard it. He was hidden well, hidden better than all the living spiders in the world, the darkness clinging to him like a cloak and the forest acting as his shadow, but through his wide black eyes he was watching. The devil bowed deep, bowed low, his entire form coiling sensuously as he beckoned with one upturned hand. Fire waited to be born in that hand, the Spider King knew, but it did not matter.

The dragon man smiled up at the hideous illusion suspended in the web, teeth like interlocked fingers framed in lips curled into a gibbous moon. All the malice in man's heart was there, framed beneath eyes that emitted nothing as they did cruelty and hate, the racist's heart as he spurned his fellow man. If men truly had a devil as the white men told in their stories, it must have stood there in the woods.

The thing in the web (it did so look like the Spider King, a thing to be proud of) leaned forward and hissed its false hiss, strands trailing from places they should not have, its eyelashes and nostrils and even its mouth. The dragon man gestured again. That was all it took.

The devil answered the lunge of the lie in the web by leaping at it, and thus was already moving to attack as it disintegrated, its parts dissolving into writhing black shapes that pushed themselves apart from each other and flew nimbly past him, trailing gossamer strands that hummed and sang. He turned to look at them as they flew past but they were on him, then, hairy black horrors with bodies as large as his fists and legs longer than his fingers. They were quick past reckoning, leaping off of him as soon as they were noticed, anchoring him to the ground and skittering off into the shadows of the trees with a speed that would have defied the human eye.

They were the grandfather spiders, the greatest of the Spider King's children, the perfect form to which all other spiders aspired, and only that forest in all the world held them perfect and unchanged as when they had been created. The grandfathers moved through the darkness away from the battle, silent and unnoticed by any creature no matter how alert, exuding a sense of evil so sublime and perfect that it formed the background of the universe there, so those sensitive would have gone mad without knowing the things that drove them to madness. They preyed on everything, feared nothing, and as they moved through the woods the wildlife felt their return and a grisly pallor fell across the world.

The dragon man moved, or tried to, but the cords that wound about his flesh would have restrained the largest herd of elephants to ever roam Africa, and held tight against the twitching of his flesh. This it did for only a moment - but a moment was all that was necessary.

The shadows reached out, moved like a physical thing, and the Spider King bounded out of them, upon the dragon man before his prey even saw him. There was a flash of movement, the briefest glimpse of black fangs, a stab of radiant pain, and the Spider King was dancing back, beyond the reach of his enemy and grinning with teeth that one could never have pretended were human. His teeth dripped with blood of his enemy as much as his own venom, which was running down the ragged wound in the devil's shoulder.

The dragon man winced, face contorting from an image of subtle horror to one of pure grotesqueness, as white fire ran up and down his veins, eating at blood and flesh, liquefying what tissue it could come in contact with. There was no way to stop it, once it was in, and the Spider King rejoiced in the momentary acknowledgement of the power of his poison.

"They are your people," the Spider King said, and his voice brought to mind sex with a stranger in the dark, "but I have been with them longer, and I will be with them last. I am the cold that waits for them when they leave the womb; the hunger away from mother's nipple; the darkness before covered eyes; the stillness of lying down for the last time." He smiled through his thin lips, and perhaps the devil saw that he had no real humanity in his countenance, but perhaps he didn't. "From beginning to end I am with them, I am everywhere, fear of the unknown and paranoia at what might be; tell me, what do they know of fear that is not of me? If you are the embodiment of that which is not of me, then what wisp of smoke have I caught?"

The devil dragon did not speak in his man's voice, but he inhaled and within his chest there soundedd a deep rolling rumble that built itself, a roar in the distance, echoes from a cavern that twisted down into the depths of Hell.

"They are your people, but they belong to me." He was still smiling through black teeth, laughing with black eyes.

Then the dragon man moved, not with a wrenching motion but with the grace of a dancer rising to perform, and the strands did not impede him but snapped like twine with audible metallic notes.

The laughter died on the Spider King's face, his mouth falling open and twisting downwards, in disbelief and then in a sneer.

The devil lunged, serpent's movement bound in human flesh, and the Spider King's body twisted itself out of the way of his reaching claws. The Spider King spit and the dragon man turned his face, venom splashing against his head and sizzling but not burning enough to matter, and when he looked back the Spider King was nearly gone.

That form, black as jet, was a fluid, noiseless thing as it disappeared into the darkness. The darkness grew deeper as he entered it, somehow blacker than black, and there was a moment...

The dragon man stood looking into it for only a moment, a juxtaposition of otherworldly form against unworldly nothingness, color and shape silhouetted by darkness. Perhaps he knew what he committed himself to by following the Spider King into the shadows. Perhaps he did not care.

He followed, bent at the waist and lent balance by his tail, his body moving like no human had ever seen except in fevered nightmares of things that had once been. At a run he disappeared into the darkness.

The forest was silent.

OoC: And with that, Erdawn, I give the reins to you, and state my purpose with this:

Let us, you and I, show to all who watch what this is about. I am not in this to win: I ask that you are not in it for that reason either. Throw aside all preoccupations with the victory of your character, the tiresome business of throwing "attacks" back and forth until it is little more than a tennis match for the foolish. We both are writing one thing - the battle between the devil and the Spider King. Let us see who shows the more interesting side of it, and how it will come to its blood-soaked finish.

Adieu. -OoC

[Erdawn Il Deus]

Again the silence was a baffling testimony to the grace of his movement. Life was injected into the earth with the bending of a knee, decay dealt out with the flexing of his calf, so that great and wondrous and unimaginable things grew in that dark prehistoric forest reigned over by his adversary and his adversary’s black spawn, and became dying and dead and terrible shapes amidst the trees.

He moved with unwholesome fluidity despite his size – nothing that could ever be captured by cinema or even literature, so unseemly and alien a sight the motions of his musculature were to the naked eye – so complex and beautiful and sinuous and powerful beneath their coil of flesh. His eyes burned, red within red, the only light allowed continued existence in the dark realm in which the dragon found himself, but darkness was as saccharin a womb to him as that madness which had given him birth – was his element in different ways than it was the Spider King’s, but his element none the less.

”The practicality of your belief speaks itself with verve and forte,” He muttered, not heaving or out of breath or dismayed by the poison which had ravaged his face and worked its way inside him. And despite his flight, the Spider King heard him, securing the brief vibrations from the webs which networked the highways and bi-ways of his route through the trees, minutely picking out the harmonics of his enemy’s voice and creating for himself the sentences from the evidence provided. ”But it is naïve, Spider King.”

The dragon man sneered or grinned – the disfigurement of his beauty lending a perplexing hand to the features of his expression. He leapt upwards on muscular calves and as he did his wings spread open and carried him upwards on heated air, almost glowing with pulsing, living heat, his circulatory system visible in the dark. He lifted upwards with hadean ease, graceful as a moth, a bat chasing a spider, breaking through branches and snapping cobwebs in a terrifying spectacle or morbid power.

”O Highness, but for all they fear you my people has always belonged to me and always will. You belong to me and do not yet know it. They fear you only because they can imagine you, and that, your dark majesty, is why they are mine.” His jaws opened and his teeth opened to the darkness and his voice left glowing footprints through the air.

”Who architected the foundations of Hell? Was it God? Was it not man, so pregnant with fear, giving birth at last in the throes of a dark nativity to a child creation of purest horror – so that the Makers of life weep to think upon it, weep for their children, shackled, and unable to lend them aid.”

The Spider-King looked back, trying to gain distance and set up and ambush or strike to bring down his pursuer, and almost frozen by the eyes – red eyes which hung above the earth like blazing half-moons, giving the barest illusion of luminescence to their owner’s body as it glided towards him. And for the first time, the Spider-King realized he was being hunted by a predator great as or more terrible than himself. More terrible. Time would tell.

”Unable because they have no power in the face of Mankind, no real power, power that I am the ultimate representation, power of which I am the peak and apex and ultimate result of.” Suddenly, monstrously, his figure intook air – wings and body so dimly illuminated they made half-shapes in the shadows like turning coals – and the noise was far too loud and long, a great vacuuming that tore foliage naked from the branches and closed space around the void in a thunderclap of sound.

He hung high above, broken through the canopy, lifted above the darkness like the nightmare incarnation of a pterodactyl conjured from the prehistoric fears of Neanderthal man. The air in his lungs heated, and as it did, his chest cavity began to glow through the flesh, the imprint of his lungs against his ribcage a fiery silhouette. He hung there, a falcon in mid-dive, and struck, falling like a twisted arrow back down into the dark forest.

The Spider-King saw his hellish shape through the trees, now illuminated fully, taken wing like some monstrous bat of fire, coming at him with the speed of a predator. The air rung with his passage. He had no name, none that could be spoken, and would take on the monicker Cauchemare, because to Man it was as fitting a title as any. It was all he represented in a single word.

He exhaled.

With hurricane force his breath funneled between his lips, turned molten in the vats of his biology, a golden stream of fire which incinerated everything in his path. There was a heavy whoosh, and the mortar crumpling as air superheated and clapped and was pushed aside by the pressure of it, a napalm stream angled downwards towards the Spider-King even as Cauchemare plummeted still.

Trees went up like so much kerosene-soaked driftwood, turning to matches in the heat, great torches which burned brighter than the sun. Things were illuminated with lethal quickness, quicker still to shy away from the light, denizens of the arachnid lord’s domain, quicker still to die in obscurity.

The Spider-King shrieked, pained in whatever ancient language his vocal organs could produce, throwing himself away from the blinding light, the heat which scalded the coarse, short hair of his body and blistered his dark flesh, but even he could not outrun in unscathed. Whole boughs melted and came tumbling down, curtains of gold and crimson, gobs of liquid matter spattered in droplets to black soil. The part of the forest became and inferno, and in the midst of it carnage was wrought as Cauchemare plummeted towards his vicious prey. Gale-force wind sucked oxygene from the flames and killed them dead, and trees were shattered cleanly in half, and he came upon his enemy in that wood.

The King reared forwards, his mouth opening in ways that made clear the absence of humanity behind his deceptive silhouette – poison a thick mist smoking of the glistening curve of his fangs. Cauchemare slammed into him at something like Mach-****, uprooting underbrush and gashing the earth open in hissing, charred trenches. The King bit and bit and bit, striking without reason or calculation, opening small, mortal wounds across his enemy’s flesh, drawing open lines of blood which turned the air to fire and hummed like ichors from the wombs of their veins. The dragon lunged forward as they crashed, spinning and thundering through the forest, killing everything and sparring nothing, his forehead coming down into the King’s face with a thunderclap of knocking bone, rearing his head from side to side so that his horns made indistinguishable any identifying features. Most of the face came away in frayed strips of flesh, the rest caved in, blood showered in their wake.

Both bodies hit paydirt. The earth was blasted upwards around them and rained back down in a mist. Cauchemare’s palm had caged his enemy’s face and used the head around it as a cushion, slamming it foreward into the ground. He brought it away and back down with a snap like a broken guitar string, fist and fingers crashing into an already disfigured face, blood a haze about both, talons sinking into one of the king’s socket with a plop inaudible over the breaking of bone and moist sundering of flesh. It came away at an angled, caked with gore. His tail surged back and forth, the barb seeking warm, yielding meat. The Spider King opened his mouth, venom lifting upwards with his scream, pinned beneath this morbid, reptilian man-god. His free arm lashed upwards, sinking into the meat of his enemy’s gut, retreating and snapping back again, moving like the keys of a typewriter until the flesh spilled forth and the boiling steam of his enemy’s guts was laid bare. The blood burned his body but he relished in it.

The man-dragon opened the hallways of his throat and roared – but this time, the humanity in it was questionable, echoing to the skies, an alien anthem of wrath and pain, gibbous and shuddering. He lunged again, bringing his face downwards, but this time opening his canines and sinking his upper jaw into the King’s skull, fangs actually puncturing the bubble of bone around the monster’s brain. The struggled moved earth around both of them, tearing roots wetly from the ground, shaking bark from the trees. At some point Cauchemare was thrown off, thrashing, his wings and muscular tail clearing the area around him of everything while the Spider King lifted away upwards on strands of web.

”You are prehistoric,” The dragon hissed. “But not as prehistoric as fear. I am beyond instinct, because that instinct, terror, is only and always a root in dark earth. I am the shadow from which fear bubbles, saccharin like tar.” He lifted his arms up above the crown of his head, and perhaps the King understood what he was, perhaps there was enough Man in him to realize it – or perhaps enough animal to sense it. Even as the sharp, coldness of the dragon’s venom sank into his body. ”You will drink deep from my well, this night.”

And his eyes burned, and his guts left scalding afterimages of light on the air with their heat, and his blood burst from him, and he lifted slowly into the air, out-stretched, but did not laugh. There would be no waiting this time.

[Erdawn Il Deus]

Bump, you cheese eatin surrender monkey.