Metacosmoclypse!

The Apocalypse has arrived! 
Who will stop it?
The Gods?
The Priests and the Mages?
Or an Ex Princess and her family ?
All may be revealed within!


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Preview Chapter:
Chapter One – A Priestly Predicament.

Berythus Naechos closed the door to the Temple of Libraria behind him. It was a stout door, hard dark wood inlaid with great metal bands, lacquered with paint, and many, many, layers of grime.

            It was not the main door, they lay on the other side of the building, and opened onto Quill Street, but the ‘tradesmen’s entrance’, that led onto Leavings Alley.

Apparently it had been named for an old orphanage, now long gone.

            He turned his head, gazing furtively up and down the alley. This was a man afraid. Not a big man, nor especially a short man either, his robes, hood drawn up against the cold dank mists, hid a thin face with a small nose, and a thin scholarly body, used to the indoor life.

            He hunched, a little against the cold, but more to present a smaller target, should trouble appear. Perhaps he even sought to hide behind the wisps of mist and smoke drifting through the night. His lantern, small and hooded, bar for an aperture at the front, its beam shining an orange shaft through the grey mirk.

            He carefully pointed it this way and that, his caution almost painful to behold. He stepped out his nose wrinkling and his free hand rising involuntarily to his face, as if to ward off the ever present stench, of indescribable foulness, that smote his senses. No sea breeze reached these alleys, so tall were the surrounding buildings.

            He took another step as fearfully gazing downwards now at the unnameable, lumps of matter that littered his path. Actually, looking a little too close at one lump in particular, some things were all too nameable, thus was the disadvantage of an education brought home to him.

            He stepped on, gingerly, tentatively, listening now, his ears not spared their measure of fear and anxiety. His lantern light, lit upon graffiti. It too was unspeakable, well, perhaps in fact, more unpronounceable, and as a scholar he felt slightly put out by that fact. He knew a dozen languages. Old, new and arcane, and yet here was a patois he did not understand. Some of the diagrams were a bit more obvious. He reddened, shivered and moved on a little quicker. He knew he couldn’t hang around, but he knew he mustn’t fall foul of the people of night.

            He walked steadily now, his feet picking their way quietly through the night, strange and not so strange noises, sometimes from the buildings either side. Many of these were derelict, their fairly stout outer walls hiding the crumbly flakey ruins within.

            This not to say they were abandoned. The poor, the wild, the mad, and the criminal, were their usual denizens. He hated what Carseport had begun. He remembered what the city had been like before King Xagigg had been crowned. Xagigg had been a man then, now of course rumour was he had become some undead fiend, some sort of Liche.

            People carried on regardless, some people had profited. Death did not stop people from working. Xagigg’s dark magick stopped all but the most wealthy from resting peacefully in their graves. Zombie factories arose, making some few merchant families rich beyond their wildest dreams, for awhile. There was even a little boom, as the countries damaged by the dragon strikes recovered. This did not last long, as the darkness fell in the southlands, cities, gone dark, their people turned into dark eyed horrors, living only to destroy and recruit into their own numbers.

            He shuddered again,  he pulled his hood up around his head again, a needless nervous action, as it settled back, almost immediately to it’s accustomed position. His cloak flapped around him as he moved, as swiftly as he dared down the alley way, the chill misty night air stabbed cold clammy fingers at his face, and the backs of his hands, ran wet. Was it the mist or was it sweat? Perhaps it was both.

            The alley curved, and bent. He slowed. His thoughts presenting him an image from long ago, the marching liveried Bone Legion, rank upon rank of newly raised zombie troops, accoutred with spears and shields, bows and daggers, helms and chainmail. He remembered watching them march onto the ships, bound for the South, the salvation of a place far away, he knew only from maps.

            That was years ago, and the Bone Legion was still there. Trade had all but dried up. People did not like zombie made goods, and despite the Wall, despite the Iron Legion, and later he had learned, the mighty war machines of the Gnomes, Agents of the Nameless Darkness had slipped through.

            Countries, weakened already by the Dragon strikes of old, now fell to internal strife, bandits, warlords and monsters had made the continent a place of misery. Famine and plagues had followed.

            Carseport had declined. He had kept studying, hoping for the best, after all it couldn’t last forever, could it?

            He turned the corner, cautiously his lantern hooded fully. He let the light out gently. No one to be seen. Good, he carried on.

            Yes, he thought his studies. He had read most books and tomes in the Temple. Libraria was a goddess of knowledge after all, and he as her priest, devoted his time to worship, through books. As the years passed he wondered if there might be some help, some solution to the nightmare, recorded in one of the old Tomes. Yes, he thought in the end there is nothing new under heaven.

            Plucking up his courage, he had opened the Forbidden section, works so dangerous to mind and sanity, that none should read them, unless of course they had a will of adamantine and no internal critic. These books, chaotically written by human or inhuman hands or appendages, had never been properly edited. In fact a weak minded individual would risk his or her own mind being edited by the book itself, such was the disturbing, mind wrangling shenanigans invested in the heinous eldritch tomes.

            Eldritch as in very old indeed, certainly thousands of years old in their original, one or two said to have existed before the world began. How that would work he didn’t like to think. Perhaps they came from a different world, an older world, or perhaps it was just out and out lies. Who knew?

            He giggled as he thought of it. He had worked for months. Long, long days and nights he had huddled, just candlelight for company, as he had perused the darkling works.

            He had translated and digested some of the oldest and the worst, of the rather large and horrible collection. Now, as he stepped lightly cautiously almost catlike, if such a cat, was a little drunk, or hampered by an exceptionally ferocious mouse clinging for dear life to a rear leg. Yes, now as he made his way through the nightbound accursed city (some people regarded Carseport as accursed, and some didn’t, it’s a matter of perspective), his mind squirmed and wriggled, beating at the eggshell thin bone of his puny braincase, with it’s urge to scream howling into a void of eternal oblivion.

            But he had done it. He had his scroll, his personal magnum opus. He must deliver it, before beating his brains out joyously upon the cobble stones of Caresport.

He had learnt much. He knew how the Devourer could be re imprisoned. Destroyed or slain, too much to hope for, and the maddening hints of strange unearthly powers, that might just do that, when appeased in ghastly fashion, remained elusive and tormenting.

            He had found out how, and the bare bones, with no unnecessary elaboration, he had written down, clearly so any might read and know the way.

            He knew how and the finding of it had shredded his reason. He had but one last, one final mission, and then peaceful oblivion.

            He hurried through the alleys, by day he knew the ancient tottering city of Carseport, like the back of his hand. He was a native, Carseport, born and bred.

Yes, he remembered Carseport, back when it had Kings and Regents, when the corruption was just the normal corruption of greed , lust, and envy.

            Sloth was only latterly a problem. The workers who had grafted in factories, now discarded in favour of zombies, were reduced to petty crime and panhandling. The Zombiemation of the factories, had created bumper profits, for the already rich mill owners, and despair for their former employees.

            He laughed, then cringed. It had carried through the mists of the night, dully thudding off the night air.

            He walked on, a little slower, ready to hide or flee, if need be. Oh, accursed city! Rightly nick named the Necropolis of Xa, after Xagigg, the Lich King, Master of the realm of Graeffenland, and via his Bone Legions, leader of the ‘free’ world.

            He laughed again, tittering inanely at the thought. 


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