Hephaestus

A prince of the sands smiles.

Consigned to spinning tall tales and weaving ballads in the low altitudes of a mountain somewhere, Ptolemy of Thoth made haste to bring the notice to the attention of Crumena of Kamees. @Heero

i would do smuggler rp if it was possible 100%

i said NFT, not FTB! where is your mind!

this guy is pretty much the crème de la crème of anthroparions. trust me, he knows his stuff. plus one.

while our personal interactions have been few, and sometimes bitter (knowing i am far from your favourite lotcer), doing any administrative activity on lotc takes more than a f**king hail mary, and i applaud your resilience. i wish you luck in the future, wherever it'll take you. all the best to squak too. much needed female representation on the admin team.

it's appalling, really. i guess red tags are above the law in the server's current climate #freekincaid

while cool in theory, i believe djinn fulfil the niche this CA attempts to achieve. there also remains the izthukii shell-shock. i think you’d maybe have better luck pursuing something on a smaller scale as unwillingly suggested. but in any matter, i encourage you to write some more lore in the future.

Out of curiosity, can the Tawkin cold-blood/wtever mutation (I'm unsure if it still exists) be used to circumvent the defects wearing/touching Rokodra poses?

___________________________________________________ ______________ PvBLIVS CLAVDIVS CANTILIA scries his orb — sparkles on digits, slender and pale, — divining the restoration of Renatus for the umpteenth time. His features were rent and bent to flash a vapid frown, from whose remains a smirk had found foothold: "Ave?" Only quizzical anticipation could be deduced from his glottal, nasally gibbering. ___________________________________________________

________________________________ ________________________________ THE smart from the halcyon pods of the Southern wastes had bred dewdrops and anguish in the waxing, olive-tinted eyes of one Banardian scholar. With laboured, but boyish enthusiasm, he wrenched gilt hooks and festoons, and many a piercing, from his features. He kneaded tallow and pomade into his lineaments, from which he structured faux living and appendages — taking sight of the Savoyard vista strelt which stretched out before him. He had relished this steppe. HE had since relegated the curios procured from his sinews and pompous countenance to a bondslave rightward his flank, all the while juddering in gingerly glossolalia and babbles of all sorts: "Ready the goats and litter-chair. Tonight, we consort with desertmen." @Proddy AWAKEN, MIHYAAR. ________________________________

pumping iron (ingots). i was very religiously working out at the gym up until the last month or two, when i was hit with a very demanding work wave. i still occasionally attend the gym though, and have desperately been trying to get back into my groove. i like to do incline dumbbell chest flys in supersets as often as not. was working on my hamstrings a bit ago so i'd also get into the habit of barbell romanian dls in 4x10 routines also (workout stolen from @KBR). my present goal i've been working towards like crazy is being able to squat 300. i was just recently able to squat 275 (granted, just barely [still killed me]) which i've been proud of but i've admittedly been in a bit of a rut ever since.

i'm gonna kiss you

A hearty thanks to all who made this character possible; _____________________________________ I THE BUTCHER OF BURON “Vlad, by the grace of God, the Duke of Upper Adria, Lower Adria, Khagan of the Turkin, to Otto, be this bill written and delivered. Father, I have entertained a delegation of wisemen from abroad, Radŭ and Bogdan among them, eager to plumb the deepest gorges of their knowledge and share with them morsels of my alchemical expertise I had discovered to yield most excellent results and products. Mastery over the dual living and dying were chief among our fantastical endeavors. We did not then portend the prophetic import of a thing quite as cut-and-dried as the twitch and judder of a lark’s foot. My zeal for dogmatic rituals and litanies for summoning was invariably ebbing with every pursuit, with the failure of nigh-each of our attempts. Suffice it to say, possessed as we were by things from unnamable spheres, we could not rid ourselves of curiosity; vying to bask in our successes, many and plentiful. Prodigious counts of flesh were heaped upon one another, two by two, amounting to a lock in the network of aqueducts atop which our manor has been raised. In this mire, we observed wretched things — fusing together in the filth of Dobrov’s underbelly. Yakov returned to Powys, intent upon pacing the pews of their synagogue. We cried. But, Father. We were not aided by the divine. We made plans. And God laughed. May you be in His governance. Vladislav, written on the road from Woldzmir, to New Esbec. Bendithia Due. 1802.” 1849 LIGHTLESSNESS pooled in the bowels of Heith-Hedran; the tendrils of Rh’thor vying outwards from the reaches of the physical sphere, into the dankest cavities of the Abyss. From then on, the fabrics of the mortal coil were sundered from the very seams, as the cogs of all logic were ushered to a standstill. Death had been bypassed, wrenched, and rent; bent from the very flanges, and made mockery of. A lure was cast into the recesses of Ebrietas, the cache of all those woeful and remit from the waking world, and from that strait of pity and anguish, was a pygmy; no elation; no despair. It teetered on the edges on the fringes of Heith-Hedran, ready to be estranged from that sea of indignity and undeath at a moment’s notice. FROM the ranks of the de-ceased, the furtive spirit was plucked — at first, only a follicle of its prior being. No more than a morsel of a soul. In the subterranean bosom of the earth, remote from any Man’s bounty, the tapestry which was the material world was riven; cloven from the sutures, as the influence of Heith-Hedran was usurped from the strait which was the False Sea, a lough on the fringes of Rh’thor which drove all to atrophy and disfigurement. And, from death’s cold clutches, the pygmy was estranged, entrusted into the hooks of two Yultharan laymen, versed in the base ways of those who walk with their backs crooked and faced away from God. That evening, a vibratory resonance thrummed throughout Petra Turris, the final foothold of Rh’thor, sending it into quiet trepidation, from the helm down to the hooves. QUIET, dulcet glossolalia crescendoed through the tabernacle of the necrolyte gorge, as the duo spoke in tongues. Sinew and cartilage had prior been strewn at the centre of Heith-Hedran, a lesion in the fabrics of life itself. Incredulous lies were exchanged between the basest warlocks of the earth’s underbelly, as the undead were raised from the recesses of the world, unfettered. They had since relocated the pygmy spirit to a cadaver, nigh-palpitating as innumerable spoils of tendon and cartilage agglomerated into the maleficent carcass. The undead thing had begun to burgeon, which was before only a manikin, sprawling out from the centre of its being and fast-expanding to fit the mantle of a full-sized man. Rabid and voracious was the undead, in the beginning. And then, it took sight of the world and vistas which stretched out before it. Before him. His ears became manifest, and he heard. His eyes became manifest, and he saw. His mind became manifest, and he thought. THOSE invocations which prior belted throughout the subterranean depths of Petra Turris were nigh inaudible, as the aberrant thing found its way onto dual feet. The smart from the below-ground pressure had since inspired dew and teardrops to well and coalesce in his eyes, saturating the glassy surface of his aureate iris’ with a gauzy, salt-swept crust. Those acolytes, crested from head to heel in bone, unburdened by cartilage nor flesh, scried into his eyes. There was a bleating silence. A loud quietude. An unnerving inability to express any caveats. And then, the undead thing blinked. Pop… Pop… ! The popping of his joints found ample resolve all throughout the breadth of the underground, sending a grating shrieking, reverberating in the bosom of any mere man’s ear. IT takes a village to raise a child, it was said of old. But, in that moment, it took only the wicked spirits of the basest lords who had shed light upon the face of the earth, to raise a dead man walking. The living-dead peered outward into the world, like a fledgling lark, privy to the many occult incantations told on that eve. Long, black tresses, made glossy and sebaceous from a lifetime of failure to condition oneself, reaching out in tendrils down the centre of his back. The necrolyte panned his cataracts once. Left. And then, right. No tangible sentiments had become streaked across his countenance, only disparity. A mutiny had occurred upon him, in the moment prior to then. And, anguish weighed nigh upon the bosom of his spirit. This was a tragedy. His eyes fixed ‘pon Ostromir the Greater, who stood nary even five steps forward from himself. The relic called out to him, in concert with the second: “Why do you consort with us, Vlad? Dining with we dead men — it is curious.” The glint of the dead-man-walking, Ostromir’s, irate eyes, vacuous save for only concentrated modicums of viridescent fire and fry, caught the necrolyte. He had estranged him from the cool clutches — surely, he’d the authority to question. “Who has dealt unto you the displeasure, and unto us, the labour? You are aware, then, they who are fated never to die, need not be careful to inquire into which place Death shall usher them, but what death they are to die to.” “Felled. And, at what cost? I have been thought a two-trick mage, Prophet. Now, I forsake these sixty-six years which have passed me by?” “These were sooner your first sixty-six years, than they are your last, Vlad.” Reticent, the second necrotic was lulled into the corners of Petra Turris’ tabernacle: biding time in the basest shade of the necrolyte synagogue. It proved taciturn understanding of labour and empathy — presenting a shape and logic that could not be matched to Man’s in the least. This was something created outside of God’s better wishes. A puppet, spun from the fellest fibers of the mortal coil. “Keep to yourself. I, alive, and washed ashore, with bones and stones all sore, fashioned the pulp of your spirit from my labouring hands. From dust you were made and to dust you will return.” THERE it had come again, the same silence which seemed to seize the throes of time itself, save only hushed postulation under the shade cast by the Black Sun, which loomed like a colossus at the grotto’s marquee ceiling. Each of the three leered into the chasm in the centre of the recess. And, each felt its dread as it sent a reverberance through their defiled, maligned bones: and, it leered into them. They had felt, then, agony and reverence in equal gusto, sending outward their aerosol mist of blackness, endeavoring to seal and mend those lesions which had since saturated the physique of Vlad, the Count of Goza. He felt all around his throat for a relict talisman worn once in a life unremembered, lost to all save himself: the count felt nothing. MARCHING was then audible, in the catacombs of Petra Turris, a tell of the trio who had made route to the throne hall, in that moment. Of the litter, only the greater of the warlocks had obliged to retire themselves; the archlich to the cathedra; and the alchemist found solace in the modest, demure of the three seats. The living-dead fixed himself fore the maroon dais, bulwarking the former-men in the brimstone and basalt from the Abyss-Fire of its flanged plate accoutrement: shrouding them, that no soul could have borne witness to their exchange. Vlad proceeded, his grovely murmur low and poignant: “I have seen, on this day, the crudeness of Men. The roughness. The greed to make pride of their… false justice. My discontentment swelled, Otto.” But, with the drop of a hat, it looked that the lich receded into the asphalt throne. Surely, it had not been a figment of the count’s thinking? “How shall you look this time, alchemist?” A third intonated from the hall’s alcove. THE rind of a tome, once consigned to oblivion for merit of its pure age, had managed itself into Vlad’s furtive clutches. The leaflets and pages of the chronicle were fast-unfurling, eyes tracing over the innumerable glyphs of the legendarium. Stanza to stanza, letter to letter. He returned: “Dark, I think, that I might diffuse the scent of cardamom and clove. What is it to you, stalker? You think because you are not in your skin, that all is forgiven? That you have borne powers relegated to you by God, since you were raised? That you can aid in this endeavor?” Low susurrations growled in retort, “It shall be seen to.” _____________________________________ II THE RH’THORAEN RECEPTION “Ready the waterskins. It will be a tenuous trek.” “Especial lord Louis de Savoie, Dog of Drusco, I recommend myself, Vlad of Woldzmir, unto you, my good lordship, beseeching you will find not displeasance as I here say… The bannermen of my home, opulent and known-well, have tired of the conventional extravagance. I employed a particularly unsavory, motley band of mariners who had, par for the course, increased their tarrifs to combat my intense condition of secrecy. A discrete system of pulleys proved plenty to hoist a ramshackle jetty from a shantytown on the fringes of your royal domain. The bastards objected to my initial wager, like a mad litter of errant mites, opting better to parlay, sleeping off the alms and revelry predicated by my haps. And, when night came, I hexed their anchors with each twisted invocation I ever could consider, weighing unto it the load of my contempt for their crude extortion. Waifs slept on the bank which our dingy toppled, and our oars ploughed, and in precocious, child-like wonderment, I indulged my prey. Brackish waters, astoundingly, presented a tribulation in our odyssey, as I tightly fastened myself to the ship’s helm, and fettered my prey to the gaudy idol at the head of our argosy. There was no siren, as was told of old. It was a Redfin Pickerel. We found foothold in the sands of Petra. Interestingly, the days here were thrice shorter, as assumed by a thorough assessment. Tight-lipped and terrifying at first glance, we had made the company of southern slavers — wanton captors, they were. They presented a people, not of carnage, but of saturnalia and yuletide. We quaffed all manner of herbs and concoctions, and mead and ambrosia. Come what come may, to reassert our rule, I prayed that the unscrupulous mariners would apply force and go forth with their proceedings. I will have you notified of further developments. I have neared Savoy. I am your man and ever will be, and pray that you shall return word of your welfare. Vladislav. Written from beneath the springs of Petra. Bendithia Due. 1845.” 1845 THE smart from bismarck weeds bred teardrops in the eyes of Vlad; staining the corners with pinkened tendrils which would vie to their centres. His pallid port-wine marks had since been griddled by the summer swelter of the sahara; made all the more vacuous and unwitting, in his throes of breathlessness by the cloying stench of cordite and smoking asphalt. For, now three long months, his motley gaggle of seamen and mariners had skirted ‘round the fringes of a Seyami campsite, a tribal fief which pledged itself to slavers and slaves in equal allowance. They had made acquaintances with the sonar-ping of skulking bats in the night. The contingent put stock in the minarets of the desert-bound: lengthy spires mounted upon masjids, the synagogues and temples of the people mottled across the arid wasteland. THERE were seventeen men, and fourteen less women — three, — and to each was assigned a duty. Palanquins were borne on the back of Adéwalé, in Meszair, a bondslave and hierodule in the temple of Koszeg, the oldest of the gaggle at sixty years of age. He served as the crew’s quartermaster, and the chief grifter of the litter. He counted bonds and cheques, and shekels and widow’s mites. Often as was not, a lack for humility and poor haps drove the former-slave to the abhorrent practices of swindling and chiselling. It is assumed that the greater part of the will and inheritance relinquished to Vlad by Otto Carrion was heaved on the balance of Adéwalé’s calloused hands. This swindler burnt grapes and spirits, where else was not present. THEN was Laureano Pasqual Aleghieri, a stonemason whose family had settled themselves in Terrazza della Onnisciente, in the recess of Varendoz. A brawn in nigh-every sense of the term, the seaman was the crew boatswain, delivering parcels and provisions to and from ships and ports. He was second then to only Captain Barnim Dijkstra, from Banard, the de-facto head of the mariners. For, stout and no taller than four-feet, at the most, though he was, the seas knew no fiercer foe. The Fiend of Feingard, as the captain was known, had adopted the thrumming of the banks as a second tongue. An undertaker, in his fatherland, appalling tales of his exploits in Aeldin ran amuck from bunk to bunk, in the dingy’s ruinous cabin; a man versed in occult proses, who had wagered with fiends of the night for his unmatched, depraved steering. Be they true or not, he was no regular man, either way. YOUNGEST of the pack was Lanfrid-Piers Cadwallader, a cook of demented designs. Often did he and Vlad consort in the latest hour of the night, fashioning cryptic conditions and contrivances from their crudest intentions. In the dune, in fact, yoked by the whipping sands, their trials for transmutation were imperative. The young, toothless miscreant boasted an uncanny knowledge of wicked goetia and alchemy, though furtive and not yet trained in the elements he was. They carved men from stone, and sought to indulge gratuitous rites and sacraments of alchemical malpractice. But, when interest ebbed, Vlad buried him below the blockades: cast him aside. “Where is he?” Mathurine, a handmaiden aboard the argosy prior, croaked. It had been two days since then, since Lanfrid’s departure. Starvation’s melody purred beneath the feet of, now, eighteen men and women: stomachs thereon vacuous, desolate. The last of their alms had been stripped from their safeguard by marauders with flanged maces and headwraps under which only their eyes were borne. The boatswain, Laureano, made his leave only before Lanfrid, to barter and parlay with the marketeers of a commune not far west. Unbeknownst to the pack was what beast made carrion of him. “… I hunger.” “The world stretches further out, in this region. Pasqual shall make amends in little more time, trust and believe. Quit your yapping, *****-dog.” The irate count, Vlad, beckoned forth a skewer, to which the last morsels of meat clung; dangling it lame near the fireside. “Not him. The boy — the cook. I cannot hear his rabid groaning anymore, the poor whelp.” “Mrm…” Silence. There was not a whine, save the spittle and smart of the fire. Broiled strokes across the skin of those wretched sailors, and their imminent scurvy had inspired a disparity upon each of their fell spirits. Vlad’s hand yoked his gunpowder-leaden mouth, tentatively gnawing at the gristle of his fingers and the excess of his nails. He peered unto the blockades leftward himself. ‘He is there, below the blockades,’ the flitting dialogue was relayed through his mind. Fervent attempts to shroud the smirk which had formed along his chops made for failure. “You are dull swindlers, the lot of you. Do you know any shanties?” PADRAIG Doyle mustered together a slur of half-inebriated interjections. He pressed his clutches to freeze just above his breast: bridling his laboured croaking from imposing any further damage to himself: “In Venclair, we sang an 'earty couple — aye.” “You spend your days thrashing weighty oars on the backs of sirens. Sing for me.” EVENING soughs sent their baritone caroling and chorusing into a crescendo throughout the night: poignant chanting evoking the shreds of resoluteness and fortitude in the vacuum left in their souls which prior could not be filled. By dawn, only one of the departed mariners had returned. And, it was not Laureano. Relieved of his tissue and tallow, two-tonnes of bone and cartilage, walking, braying, spasmodically squirming, had made route to the camp. The goety skeletal animation tore their bosoms open asunder, and took from them their skin, and made lesions in them so dank and so foul, that one could not make front from back, nor face from behind. By God, It was Langfrid. _____________________________________ III CHILDREN OF THE CROW “Leave him in binds. Watch him bleed.” “To Fyodor Ostrovich, and courtesans, in his dwelling in Woldzmir, be this written & delivered. It is of my hopes that you are in fair tidings and governance, Fyodor. Pilgrimage has proven a tenuous feat, but no matter. Simple folk are, by design, loquacious, and those of Dobrov are no exception. I surmise, it should be not long before hearsay of my morbid knowledge and secretive exploits shall begin to haunt local legends. The wild whispers of iconoclasm and devilry which have been spilt from lip to lip grow intolerable, and shall crescendo the rabble into a fit against my genius. Wide-eyed and eager to end the general air of rebellion which has inspired domestic disturbance, my collection of hardened fiends were instructed to act against the treachery and do as they would. They were quick to oblige, suffice it to say. Ire turned to awe, as demonstrations of my barbarity and brutality were held in the plaza. The noisome Woldzkiy population, once stacked so many, has shown more manageable numbers. I hope this shall not interfere with anything. In witness hereof, I set my seal in Providentia. 1813.” 1849 HEMP fetters kept the Butcher of Buron, Vlad Carrion, in bondage. Voracious murmurs sounded throughout the arcades of the Savoyard bastion, a foothold for justice in the face of goetia and dark magicks, doubtless. The butcher wept, but did not weep, in his gently purring, gently humming alcove of the building’s stockade. A contingent of Freymarkish and Hanseti combatants bulwarked him from reaches left to right, two beast-fellers — Hexers — propped before him. Innumerable lacerations had found resolve across the breadth of his anorectic frame. His ebon tresses were burnt brittle; and, eyes borne within sunken cavities; cheekbones cinched. If ever were there a feckless, hapless beggar — it was this man, surely. IN that moment, he did not worry, though flitting fear had streaked about his features: gnarling his countenance. The sentinels peered out from beneath the threshold of the portcullis, at the taciturn relic — Job of Adria, supposedly Vlad Carrion. This was no mere punishment: it was pageantry, and pride, and pomp, as rowdy bacchanalia sounded in the distance, the spittle from those torches producing a grating sibillation in the ears of any mere passerby. The filicide obliged by Vlad, the Bastard Butcher, would surely be penalized, on that eve. Where pitchforks rang out in bimetallic clashing and clanging, an altercation was nigh waxing. Who among the gallant sirs would take the base kinslayer — Vlad Carrion, or, Job of Adria, apparently — between the Haensemen and those who were owed accolades for their proficiency in making roadkill of aberrant beasts. “Beast-feller, do you hear that?” The contralto susurrations of Job sounded in the ear of the lesser Hexer — Oscar of Corazon. Drip… Drop… — like molasses, a surplus of his lifeblood saturated his breast, trickling down in many a vermillion tendrils. “More blood soaks the soil. It feeds the evil they are in, beast-feller.” OUT before him, the vista stretched of carnage and incredulity, sending a vibratory chiming all throughout his ear. With the tolling of each furtive moment the horsemen argued between one another, they allowed the supposed necrolyte all the more time to formulate some dastardly designs. Occult exploits, and wrongdoing. He laboured against those manacles which restricted him in place — no luck. All the while, he postulated a notion in reticent, albeit vexed, consideration: Father lived two more years than I, sixty-nine. The cacophony of radical bickering proved to faze him only then, as the greater of the Hexers — Edmond — recoiled some nugatory count of footsteps: facing the butcher himself. A FLOURISH presented in the Hexer’s taciturn clutches to the silver sword’s hilt. Hexers do not kill Men, or so thought Vlad — or Job, rather. As the horseman before him bridled his stature, fashioning his arms to a relative angle to cleave Vlad’s head, the Carrion did not think yet of what would await him afterwards. Nor did he consider how much it would hurt.. He only pondered how long before it would have happened. Swipe. And then, his head was liberated from his shoulders. And the Butcher of Buron was no more. _____________________________________ IV EPILOGUE IN the recesses of the study in the Kremlin Anavet, in Woldzmir, a layman might have made note of a tabloid from the year prior to the Butcher of Buron’s formal murder. The blurb read: “VLADISLAV O. CARRION, B. 1782 — 1848 Coroners of the right especial house of Carrion regret to make it known that on this day, the Third of Sigismund’s End, the year of Eighteen-Forty-Eight, Vladislav Ostrobor Carrion died, in his residence in Freeport. The very image of his father, Ostromir Carrion, in all feats, the lord proved a well-beloved casanova and prodigious scholar in the niche spheres of alchemy. Much on par with his fondness for the finer things in life, he paid his due and met his end bathing. A failure in the aqueduct network below the residence exerted the tub beyond its intended capacity, detonating the washstand and the lord altogether.” _____________________________________

Glory to you, o’ Dark One.

hot

what gus said. just for ease of communication, might i contact you on discord?

You were a paragon of solid player-to-staff communication all throughout your tenure, and I only pray the next Community admin has your drive and openness to make a difference. I wish you nothing but the best. Cheers.

solid work, fellas

Really beautiful stuff.