May Yours be Long

[Swgrclan 2682]

13th of The Amber Cold, 1584.

 

“... I will find the way. I promise you,” Abdiel murmured as he held his hand out. Set in the palm of his gauntlet sat a large black gem which bore a core that swirled with the life of another. It was an offering -- he was giving it to the one before him, Redshroud Raziel.

 

The old soldier had given pause in reaction to this. His soul was right before him… reprieve was but a reach away. But the words the Ashkeeper spoke held conviction, and he could not doubt such a final, prominent promise from him of all people, his last commander. A fleshless hand reached out to take the ensnared soul away from Abdiel, so Raziel may hold it close to his hollow chest. His helmet bowed. “I cannot wait long. You’ve known what I wanted all this time, for when this day came.”

 

“But you cannot bend so quickly. This was not what I taught you - all of you, long before. If you were willing to fight for the sake of this world as those which it hates by nature, you have the strength to wait and ignore this freedom you crave. I tell you now like I did before, Raziel. It will be worth it in the end, and when I return to you, you will know either life again, or a final death.”

 

Raziel held his phylactery in a vicegrip, so firmly that it seemed that the soul would shatter in his very hands. So many more years to endure… for a promise? To what end? But to feel the warmth of life again…

 

“I cannot,” He heaved quietly, looking up to Abdiel. And then he froze, realizing what his own denial could bring about. The weary undead could read it upon Abdiel’s tired expression.

 

“You will.”

 

The dark forest clearing which they booth stood in was disturbed by a sudden, horrified cry of fury and angst. The will of his commander had already set upon him, and no matter how hard he tried, Raziel could not smash the phylactery in his hands. Abdiel commanded him to live on, and denied him the right to die. He ripped his helmet off and threw it astray, jaw unhinging as he exuded frustrated, suffered bellows. Every moment he served, it all led to this - this betrayal, this refusal of an end. His lord, whom Raziel came to know as the last one he was to follow, damned him.

 

In his mad rave, Raziel only saw the Ashkeeper turn his back to him, abandoning him in his time of need, before the old undead fell into the lunacy of the Dark.

 

…

 

Date Unknown

 

The waves of a raging tide crashed against the cliffside with no relent. Only one presence dwelt here, this place which has lasted ages,  settled near its hazardous edge; suffering an affliction much like the unbreaking nature of the cliffside stones. This forlorn undead, whose flesh has long since submitted to the ash of decay… he held onto the key to retribution. It was clasped within his very hands, yet the will to shatter it could not be gathered. Decades ago, this sullen soul cradled freedom in his hands, only for it to be snatched away from him for the sake of a lost promise. Raziel did not forget; he did not forget the treachery of his Ashkeeper, even in flourishing, unbound madness.

But these recent days, there was a faltering in the spell which bound him to forever hold the soul he could not release. The cliffside was so close -- he forced himself against the system which oppressed him, drove himself to this point so close to a final end. He would not take this away from him, Raziel thought. The Ashkeeper would not deny him the right to die.

 

But no matter how hard he urged himself toward the edge… he could not do it. Fears of fate beyond corporeal end did not bind Raziel; fear of retribution delivered by the tyrants of the heavens did not cross his mind once. But the spell would not allow him, would not let him die, no matter its fluctuations and weakening. Collapsing to his knees at the edge of the cliffside, the broken Darkstalker heaved in pains beyond the flesh and an insufferable pressure upon his being derived from the magic that made him what he was; undeath.

 

“Good.”

 

Lifting his bared skull to the familiar, yet gravel-toned voice, Raziel peered over his shoulder to catch sight of this interloper.

 

“No need for you to go just yet.”

 

Grizzled and grayed, not by age, but by afflictions that were not known, Raziel’s old Ashkeeper stood a distance away from him. Without his old, ceremonial armor set upon his frame, he seemed as frail as a human with his gray hairs would have been. Yet, Abdiel stood tall, and displayed no sign of decrepitude.

 

 

“Ashkeeper…?” Raziel groaned quietly, slowly staggering to his feet with phylactery still in-hand. From his side, he slowly pulled his old arming sword from its scabbard; preparing, even before the thought came to him, for vengeance.

 

“It’s been too long, Raziel. Especially for you.”

 

Their sudden reconnection became a standoff as soon as Raziel noticed the weathered Dark Elf carried a golden dagger in his hand. Abdiel approached him with lethargic pace; dirk-shaped blade slowly raising forward as his old Redshroud rose his weapon in response. Their tense nearing seemed as if it took hours, let alone seconds; and as Abdiel got within Raziel’s range of striking, the meagre bane of beasts slipped from his hands, and clattered to the ground. Raziel’s cranium tilted with this; eyeless sight dazedly distracted by the unusually deliberate discard of the aurum dagger, before this was taken advantage of, and his old commander rushed forward, and took hold of the hand that held the arming sword at the wrist. With the twist of his wrist, and a hard thud of the old Ashkpeer’s palm against the opposite-ended shoulder of Raziel, the undead’s arming fleshless arming hand was left broken at the joints between the hand and the forearm.

 

With his iron sword clattering to the ground, Raziel all at once regained focus, but all too late. Haphazardly close to the edge of the cliffside, he was not thrown into the abyss of the raging sea, but pulled forth -- pulled into a limp embrace by his last, traitorous character. The shock of surprise and the will to act upon the notion of bloodshed within the deranged undead seemed to fade away… now that they were together again, without the means to fight as Men do, there was nothing left to do but stand together and listen to the storm.

 

“My Redshroud… my soldier. Or should I call you… brother?

… It is time to set the madness aside, and forget lost promises… and embrace the end.”

 

Stepping back and releasing Raziel, who stood and watched Abdiel wordlessly, the Ashkeeper bent down and took hold of the ancient steel armament; only to cast it off and into the depthless waters far below.

 

“This mission - our mission - it’s all faded away. The notion to fight against what we were fighting… be it Gods or the Old Dark… it’s all folly now. It all started with a bunch of old dead men, trying to be better than the living ones… but the plan has dwindled like the life of a flame. Only ashes remain, cast to the earth.”

 

He pointed toward Raziel’s phylactery and shook his head. “You’re the last of the Redshrouds that I could find.”

 

Lifting the ensnared soul in his hand, Raziel briefly glared into its weakly-glowing light within. He returned his gaze to Abdiel, words venomous and bitter; as if he could be warm to the man he knew as his leader one second, and traitor the next. “How could you do this? To finally say I may die now… when it was due so long ago. Just now you hunt down the last of us? Where is the cure you promised, Ashkeeper?”

 

It was a rarity, what Raziel saw next; apprehension. Fear, almost, in Abdiel’s gaze, of telling him what was true. “The cure never came.”

 

“It’s all… just a dream. I inherited it, and you shared it too. You should know by now… the means to turn the undead back to what they were, to become whole again, it will never come. It doesn’t matter what we do.

 

We can cull all the mindless, teeming darknesses we can find; we can murder all the puppets of the Gods; we can sacrifice the living, and use our fellow undead as flock, one and the same, for the same oblation. But it doesn’t matter what we do; all that fighting, it didn’t do this world any good. We should have known since the beginning, once we laid eyes upon that timeless chasm carved into the Old World. Fighting carved that Abyss. Fighting won’t solve it.

 

And that was our business; fighting. We brought ourselves up, earned by our daily hunting. We gave ourselves purpose and believed-- wished it would keep us from the darkness our kind know.  How happy we would have been, if our efforts truly returned the humanity we lost with death… we could have burned the whole world down so it could start over again, and it still wouldn’t make us whole. Us, or any of the undying. But our wishes and dreams do not come true. We just cling to the idea of being whole again; we cling to phantoms. Memories of the once-was.”

 

Stepping forward once again, his one amber eye settled upon the phylactery Raziel held in such a vice-like grip.

 

“Those who herald this very world, the Gods - the whole lot of them and the system they created was against us from the very beginning. Not only did they usher in the undead their with Fallen One, but they set upon the ones that kept their minds with a label - a meme, dooming us to remain pitted against the world. Our plot was a deviation, Raziel. It went against the agenda of the Aenguls which sought to wipe out the mistake their awry Daemonic brother made, believing all undead could be removed by the designs- the magic- of what they afflict them with. But they did not understand what the undead were; they still do not. They perpetuate a fate for the undead, phantoms who wish to be whole again, by giving mortal Men the belief they can be quashed like others of flesh and blood. But the Aenguls have not experienced what existence upon this earth is like. They have not known life, and then withering of that life, and then death; and then waking up again in the hell that we have known for countless ages.

 

They believed we could die, and they sought to implement a method that was paradoxical in nature and mistaken at its core. It was like this since the very beginning… it is why Xionism has come to rise time and time again. A God had created the undead with his existential meddling, and then his kindred came to correct something that, by nature, could not be corrected. They believe the mortal plane is like the falsehoods they can fabricate - they believe it can be bent in their hands, whether by their own will or through the directives of those who serve their machine-like lords. But it will, as it always has been… remain a paradox. It will not end, and our efforts to break the meme which the Gods had formulated - the effort to become whole again, as Men are, by regaining our humanity, and saving the world from itself - has all been for naught. Those deific machines against our kind, they blanket us with one identity. There are no exceptions. They have incited a fight which will not conclude...”

 

A sort of old, worn-out fury dwelt his singularized gaze; briefly painting his expression with a disdain he has long since failed to let go.

 

“In this evolved paradoxical conflict, there are no mortal directives, no mortal ideologies, no mortal influence; not even what we value the most - individuality. Only the propagation of Aenguls and their norms, set upon misguided followers who thought the will of incorporeal entities was law in a place they did not belong.”

 

Another step forward was made. Abdiel slowly reached up toward Raziel’s soul-gripping hand as the worn soldier watched him. He did not speak a word - he only listened.

 

“I told you what we were, Raziel. I told you… ‘we suffer for Men, so Men need not suffer as we do’. It’s the same thing that our predecessors had done, Raziel; it is why we chanted, ‘Hail Horus’ - so we could remember the ones who had tried to do the same thing we tried, reclaiming humanity and individual will, and to remember they failed. Our history follows the same path as godlessness and Xionism. It builds up within undead until they tire of fate this Aengulic system placed upon them, and rise up to become something different. As Horus and his humane undead had fallen in ages past, we will; and forward in time, more undead will rise again to perpetuate the same vision. They will show undead, ‘we are Men’, and they will tell the Gods, ‘you are wrong’. This fighting we do… it means nothing. It’s the ideas we concrete. Blood being shed only leads to rot; winning battles only earns you a page in a history book. But the idea of what we are… it is timeless. It will inspire. It will make change.

Men may die, but ideas never perish.”

 

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TtAYfDe3BU ]

 

With a firm grip, Abdiel took hold of the skeletal hand which held the phylactery. So close to his sword brother’s soul, he felt and saw what Raziel had been enduring all these years… all at once yet only for a moment, he saw spectres which lined up along the cliffside in countless abundance, all old comrades and friends and loved ones the soldier experienced in both his lifetime and his undeath. And then the memories came; together, they took witness to scenes of the once-was, flashing before them…

 

The horrors of the Dukes’ War, which pitted Raziel against his brethren…

 

The recollections of his sword brothers, lost to the tides of mortal warfare…

 

The savagery of Men, and the cataclysmic results of battles partaken…

 

The madness of undeath, and the darkness which it showed him…

 

… yet, the camaraderie he found amidst it, all the way to the end…

 

… and thoughts of better days, when war had its merits and purpose.

 

Reaching up with his other hand to clasp Raziel on the shoulder, his grim, weathered features softened as they held the imprisoned soul together. “Your service will not be forgotten; and in the ages to come, when more of our kind come to rise for the sake of their humanity, they will not utter ‘Hail Horus’... but ‘Hail Raziel’. Your rest… is earned…”

 

The sheer weight of the moment caused the old Redshroud to loose his balance; falling to his knees as his Ashkeeper did with him. The end was so near.

 

“... and it is time… to return to the grave.”

 

Their connected gaze did not shatter; there was no flinch as the phylactery they held, as one, was broken in their hands like fragile glass. The darkness that converged upon Raziel - it was not cold like the cliff he sought to leap from, it was not lonely; it was warm, and the man who promised him deliverance was there with him to witness his final death. Speaking no words but exuding a peaceful, ragged sigh, his skull tipped back, and his sullen form went limp against Abdiel’s thin person.

 

“No Man can escape his sleep,” the Ashkeeper heaved, his voice broken with unbound emotion as he held the empty skeleton close to himself upon that cold, desolate stormy cliffside. “They may only delay it, my brother.”

 

“May yours be long.”

[GDPR 014 48]

Meditation by a fire, an ashen wanderer indulged it. He was free, yet felt a connection to his old master. He could think no longer of the glories of his previous life, only the suffering the shrouds did. 

 

The former Wraithheir of the Redshrouds stirred, breaking his trance as he lifted his close helm to the blanketed sky. 

 

He looked to his side, glancing at a meditating Drauch, another of the old shrouds... yet they were no longer, they were mere wanderers, cursed by undeath and meant to struggle for their eternities. 

 

"I wonder where the others are." The wanderer muttered to himself, interrupting his companion. 

 

"We set off, brother." Lifting himself, the two move on with their wandering, their struggling.

 

[Norman Osborn 247]

Richard the Unkindled would be perched near a bonfire of bones in the Sunless Sanctum, the graven's new home, his own coiled sword thrust into the bones, all in tribute of the Nameless Lord. Upon hearing rather late news of this, Richard pulled out the coiled sword.

 

He thrusted it into the ashen ground, leaning against it as he prays the Old Lords for the Ashkeeper to live long and prosper.

 

Spoiler

 

[Wendigo 786]

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