Forums » Fantasy Roleplay » Trixie's Bar (Everyone welcome)

The Character's sheet.

The tavern had outlived its baptism.

Whatever syllables the first signboard carried had peeled away with the paint, leaving only a scar above the lintel that the regulars filled with their own blasphemous nicknames. To the magistrates it appeared as a forgettable coordinate on a map. In truth it functioned as a clandestine nave for appetites, a crypt turned inside out and furnished with stools.

Heat congregated within like hoarded guilt.

The atmosphere possessed the viscosity of spoiled anointing oil. Lanterns of smoked glass bled a fuliginous radiance that clung to walls in diseased halos, painting every beam in shades of exhausted amber. Pipe fumes crawled above the crowd as sluggish incense, not sanctifying anything, only varnishing lungs. The reek of spirits, unwashed skin, overused perfume, and roasted meat mingled into a single oppressive miasma that smelled like a festival held outside a shuttered temple.

Voices rose in profane psalmody. Dice rattled against scarred timber, little knucklebones of parody. Coins rang as tawdry offertory. A musician in the corner coaxed a wanton melody from a cracked instrument, each note staggering as if drunk on its own echo. Procuresses negotiated in low, economical phrases. Patron saints of nothing at all were invoked in curses. No icon watched from the rafters; only smoke stains and cobwebs stared down like cataracted eyes.

What vestiges of sacred objects survived had been degraded into curios.

A cracked votive shield blocked a draft beside the door. A brass thurible, chain snapped, hung repurposed as a spittoon. Prayer cords looped the neck of an empty bottle where flies gathered with the devotion worshippers reserved for relics elsewhere. The entire establishment read like a palimpsest of sacrilege, prior sanctity scraped away and overwritten by appetitive graffiti.

Winter took notice.

It did not arrive with spectacular gusts or thunderous annunciation. Its advent came as a doctrinal correction. Warmth began to leach from the air in incremental thefts. Sweat cooled on clavicles. The hookah’s vapors no longer climbed, but sagged and drifted along the floor, their voluptuous curls collapsing into foggy rags. Lantern-flames narrowed to thin, bluish tongues that withdrew into their own soot like chastened choristers.

Then the door completed its arc.

The alley’s night spilled inward in a single precise incision. Within that vertical wound, a silhouette pausing on the threshold towered above the interior rabble. For an instant she was only outline and contradiction, height without detail, presence without narrative. A shard of imported cold rode in with her, subtle yet sovereign. Breath misted from the nearest mouths, astonished and involuntary, like prayers torn from congregants who had forgotten the words.

Ixqueya Jorgenskull entered the den.

Her first contact with the warped planking birthed a fragile corona of hoarfrost that sprinted outward along the grain, tracing old stains and knife-gashes in crystalline script. Each subsequent step left behind a brief sigil, a pale mandala that flared, then thinned to a persistent chill that sank into the timber. Anklets of aurichalcum encircled her ankles, heavy rings incised with minuscule glyphs and set with jade cylinders and bone beads. Their muted chiming surfaced through the tavern’s noise as a clear, alien tintinnabulation, the sound of a sanctus bell ringing inside a brothel.

Her legs proclaimed a theology of incarnate discipline.

Bronze skin, burnished to the hue of sun-stroked sandstone, poured over muscle dense as quarried basalt. Calves swelled with the coiled strength of a veteran climber of ice-laden escarpments. Thighs carried the breadth of bastions, functional mass shaped into luxuriant curves that made a mockery of any attempted divorce between potency and allure. Along the outer arc of each limb, laminae of lacquered scale clung close, painted in searing turquoises and sanguine reds that evoked both tropical plumage and heraldic carnage.

From these plates jutted shards of Necro Ice.

They grew like glacial thorns, irregular, many-faceted, feeding upon the tavern’s warmth with quiet voracity. Their interiors seethed with corpse-pale luminescence, cyan currents writhing within the hyaline bodies. Refractions broke across the floorboards and up the legs of stools, pricking the shadows with spectral motes like frost-stars fallen out of a polar sky.

Around her hips, cloth conceded as little territory as possible.

A panel of dark weaving, its dye a shade that devoured the lantern light, clung low upon her pelvis. Along its hem marched cramped sigils in metallic thread, archaic ideograms that spoke in strokes of inundation, famine, winter jurisdiction. From the girdle that clasped that garment fell strings of beads, vertebrae, and small carved skulls. They knocked together with every stride, the sound a soft abacus of bone keeping its own uncompromising tally.

Above, her torso ascended like the central spire of a chthonic basilica.

Crossing bands of leather dyed the color of deep ocean cinched around the generous architecture of her chest, anchoring a harness that both exhibited and controlled the weight beneath. Armored crescents of dark chitin cupped each breast; their polished surfaces bore incised labyrinths of web-patterns and snow-signs, lines folding back upon themselves in dizzying repetition, like the marginalia of some glacial codex. Between those crescents, a vertical strip of exposed bronze carried a smear of turquoise pigment over the sternum, anchored by a medallion of bone and jade. That ornament resembled a stylized, inverted sun, its rays curling inward as if crucified upon its own corona.

The chitin itself was not inert.

Necro Ice had infiltrated it, sprouting through seams and borders in minuscule crenellations. Inside those crystalline protrusions slow radiance gathered and faded with a rhythm not quite her heartbeat, yet bound to it, as if some buried aurora had been pressed into service as circulating sacrament.

Warpaint consecrated the visible skin.

Strokes of turquoise coursed diagonally across her upper arms, over clavicles, along the prominence of her collarbones. Each band was bounded by hair-fine crescents of cinnabar, pigment laid with monastic precision. This was not cosmetic affectation. It read as jurisdictional gloss, commentary written on living parchment. Between those strokes, scars of deliberate origin traced faint pale lines, the remnants of initiatory incisions that had once opened arteries to let winter in.

Her shoulders carried pauldrons that resembled reliquaries shaped for war.

Layer upon layer of chitinous laminae fanned outward, edges serrated, surfaces painted in gradations that flowed from deep teal into ember-red, then into a darkness so absorptive it seemed to swallow the lantern glow entirely. Between these plates, Necro Ice had colonized like holy fungus, thrusting hyaline tongues outward that oozed a lambent cyan. Within the armor, sunken scenes revealed themselves when the light struck at a slant: rows of penitents trapped mid-kneel inside stylized ice; an inverted tree whose roots coiled about heaps of skulls; a river of swords frozen mid-current. The imagery did not invite interpretation; it imposed dogma.

From the armored spine, her supplementary limbs unfurled.

Four arachnid appendages emerged in slow, hieratic expansion. Joints angled sharply, carapace glossy as wet obsidian, veined with elusive flashes of teal. Each extremity culminated in a curved scythe whose inner edge gleamed with preternatural keenness, as though it had already tasted mitigated flesh. Along the undersides delicate threads of frost stretched from segment to segment, weaving and dissolving in continuous, brittle metamorphosis. These limbs moved in counterpoint to her stride, maintaining equilibrium, framing her stature, proclaiming an anatomy that obeyed a more predatory scripture than mortal design.

Her human arms bore their own constellation of relics.

Bracelets had been stacked along both forearms until skin vanished beneath metal and bone. Gold cuffs engraved with minute glyphs nested against loops of leather threaded with teeth, beside bangles of dark horn, interspersed with shards of frozen crystal imprisoned in wire. Small charms dangled, some worn smooth by habitual caress, others sharp as new offenses. The backs of her hands displayed faint ritual scars crossing the tendons, pale latticework mapping the secret conduits through which the Tlāzōtlalpan siphoned energy.

Her throat and upper chest formed a shrine.

A broad pectoral of turquoise plates and hammered gold spread across the superior swell of her sternum, each segment inset with slivers of bone and chips of ice. The pattern suggested a stylized jaw encircling a captive star. Below, cords hung with obsidian teeth and jade droplets cascaded toward the shadow between her breasts. At their convergence a single shard of Necro Ice rested like a suspended tear. Within its clear body a miniature storm smoldered, pale light coiling upon itself in slow, somber circulation.

Her face transfigured the monstrous into hieratic splendor.

Bronze skin lay smooth over prominent zygomatic arches and a jaw whose line suggested more verdict than compromise. Her lips were full, the upper carrying a natural, subtle bow sharpened now by the hint of wry displeasure. The nose traced a straight, unforgiving bridge from brow to tip, the sort of profile that looked at home carved three stories high on palace reliefs. Across this architecture pigments drew a cruciform of intent. Two thick bands of turquoise shot from the swell of each cheek to the outer brow; beneath them curved narrow arcs of carmine that imitated suspended bloodflow. A further crescent hugged each lower lid, turning the entire gaze into a pair of permanent stigmata.

Her eyes were glacial jurisprudence made visible.

Irides of saturated ultramarine encircled pupils with unnerving steadiness. Around each iris, a narrow corona of ashen gold traced a thin ring, less adornment than measuring instrument. Those eyes did not wander. They audited. Whenever they crossed a face, the recipient felt not looked at but entered into an account. No vulgar sorcerous glow disturbed them. Their intensity came from depth, from a sense that there were ledgers behind them, and that those ledgers had already been balanced.

Above, the headdress rose like a frozen litany.

A circlet of engraved gold clasped her brow, crowded with tesserae of turquoise, obsidian, and bone arranged in quincunx motifs reminiscent of sacrificial platforms seen from above. From this foundation burst a corolla of feathers. Macaw plumes, long and iridescent, climbed toward the rafters, their hues shifting from sea-green near the circlet through incendiary orange into oil-black at the tips. The lowest row carried fragile sheaths of ice that encapsulated each quill-end. When she moved, these frozen caps clicked softly against one another, a crystalline, arrhythmic chime like frost-gnawed chalices touching in an abandoned choir loft.

Her hair fell beneath this avian corona in a dense torrent.

Straight, heavy strands of black spilled past her shoulders, nearly to her hips, streaked here and there with veins of cobalt that caught and broke the dim light. Snow-powder dotted the upper layers. Those flakes refused to dissolve. They persisted as tiny, hexagonal glyphs embedded in the sable cascade, as if winter itself had annotated her.

The tavern received her with the reluctant stillness of a congregation caught in sacrilege.

Gamblers froze with cards half fanned. A hireling who had been climbing toward violence discovered his fist stranded midway to another man’s jaw. Laughter strangled into uncertain coughs. The musician in the corner let his fingers fall from the strings, his last note stretching into a plaintive squeal that died in the frozen air. Conversations, clipped mid-invective or mid-innuendo, only resumed in whispers. Each voice sounded suddenly like blasphemy uttered in a crypt.

The cold heaped around Ixqueya Jorgenskull altered more than sensation.

Condensation along the walls crystallized into feathery rime that crawled between splinters. Liquor within poorly sealed bottles grew cloudy. The surface of spilled ale shrank and tightened into amber scabs. Smoke from pipes and braziers sagged and spread across the floor in low, sullen sheets, resembling reluctant censer-clouds forced to crawl beneath a foreign altar.

She advanced toward the counter as if approaching a chancel not yet aware of its consecration.

Bodies parted, sometimes with deliberate deference, more often with baffled instinct. Those too drunk to stand steadily still moved aside as vertebrae remembered older predators. Those who tried to stare her down found their gazes skidding away, the way eyes retreat from a reliquary that has not granted permission. A handful of souls watched unabashed, measuring her with greed or curiosity. Her audit took note of them also.

The arachnid limbs behind her angled outward, edges tilting infinitesimally, defining the invisible volume she claimed. Frost rosettes continued to flower beneath each step, ephemeral snow-mandalas blooming and effacing in rapid succession. The tavern floor had become, for that passage, a temporary scripture.

The proprietor waited behind his battered plank, a portly man whose usual armor consisted of practiced insolence and a smile polished for every sort of sinner.

Both protections failed him.

The cloth in his hands stilled upon the rim of a cup. Color withdrew from his cheeks. His eyes climbed her height in reluctant pilgrimage, pausing at harness, at extra limbs, at headdress, before finally arriving at her stare. Whatever welcome he had been assembling died unspoken. Salt glistened on his upper lip in sudden beads.

Ixqueya Jorgenskull did not stoop to take a seat.

She halted before the bar, towering over its stained surface. Her fingers came to rest upon the wood; rime radiated outward from the points of contact, colonizing the grooves left by decades of knife-play. The lantern hanging above her faltered, its flame shrinking until it resembled a trapped spark. For a breathless interval, the whole room felt as if it had been placed under a bell jar of crystal air.

Within her chest, the Tlāzōtlalpan gave a measured convulsion.

The organ drank greedily from the accumulated heat of bodies, lamps, steaming dishes, and translated that stolen energy into the ordered cold that haloed her. Necro Ice buds along her armor answered, brightening a shade, an auroral flutter passing through their translucent flesh. She felt the instinctive recoil of the living around her, the way their blood thickened, their joints tightened, their hearts stuttered on the edge of fight or flight.

This bawdy grotto had never been inscribed in her sovereign’s formal map of shrines.

Nevertheless, under her scrutiny, it began to warp into annexation. Lanterns mutated into unwilling votives. The bar counter became a parody altar rail. Patrons arranged themselves unconsciously into ragged aisles. The stink of spirits and sweat thickened into a parody of incense. Where moments ago there had been only commerce, there now yawned the suggestion of judgment.

When she spoke, her voice did not rise.

“Wine,” Ixqueya said, the single syllable carrying the timbre of distant ice calving from a glacier. “Not the sour indulgence you sluice into cowards and debtors. Draw something that still remembers the vineyard it betrayed.”

The barkeep flinched into action, fumbling for a bottle whose dust testified to rare use.

He poured. The liquid left the neck in a reluctant stream, thickening as it met the gelid air. Frost feathered the outside of the cup in elaborate dendrites, patterns so intricate they resembled ossified prayers. By the time he slid the vessel toward her, a thin film of ice trembled across the surface of the wine, quivering like a nervous conscience.

She allowed the cup to rest upon the little frozen plinth rising from the counter.

Her attention remained on the patrons. Gaze moved from face to face, from hunched priest trying to hide in his hood to scarred mercenary with a chain of old campaign medals tucked inside his shirt, from painted courtesan assembling a new smile to young bravo whose hand hovered too close to his knife. Each received a fragment of her regard. Each fragment lodged like a splinter of ice under the skin.

This was not merely a visit. It was an inspection.

The tavern had built its dirge around intoxication, transaction, and oblivion. Tonight, another sacrament had arrived. Winter, in the person of Ixqueya Jorgenskull, had stepped into the nave of vice carrying a colder catechism. The den might continue pouring envy, lust,and despair. She had come to count them. To decide which hearts would leave with their sins sitting lightly on their shoulders, and which would leave embalmed in Necro Ice, names entered forever in a ledger that did not forgive and never forgot.