Hearing Ixqueya's threat, he went to the weapons box at the door ready to grab his Power Axe and render the Allfather's Judgement on the newcomer, but Mathiys's request stayed his hand and he simply asked for a mug of Mjod.
Fumizuki wrote:
Fumizuki brings Drael an energy drink so he can restore his strength.
"Thank you, sweet face." He smiled at Fumizuki
Mathius Kothinto wrote:
Ixqueya Jorgenskull wrote:
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. Roasted meat. These scents 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 mocked 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 tropical plumage or 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 held fast to her pelvis. Its dye a shade that devoured the lantern light. 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 the garment fell strings of beads. Vertebrae. 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 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 bounded by hair fine crescents of cinnabar 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. 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 moving from deep teal into ember red into an absorptive darkness that swallowed the lantern glow. Between these plates Necro Ice 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 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 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 verdict rather than compromise. Her lips 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. A profile suited to palace reliefs carved three stories high. 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. Transforming the 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. These 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 the sense of ledgers behind them already balanced.
Above. The headdress rose like a frozen litany. A circlet of engraved gold clasped her brow. Crowded with tesserae of turquoise. Obsidian. 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. 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 with veins of cobalt that broke the dim light. Snow powder dotted the upper layers. Those flakes refused to dissolve. They persisted as hexagonal glyphs embedded in the sable cascade. Winter annotating her.
The tavern received her with the reluctant stillness of a congregation caught in sacrilege.
Gamblers froze with cards half fanned. A hireling 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 resumed only in whispers. Each voice sounded 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 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 unaware of its impending consecration.
Bodies parted. Sometimes with deliberate deference. More often through instinct excavated from older hungers. Those too drunk to stand steadily still moved aside as vertebrae remembered older predators. Those who attempted to stare her down found their gazes skidding away. The way eyes retreat from a reliquary that has not granted permission. A handful watched unabashed. Measuring her with greed or curiosity. Her audit took note of them.
The arachnid limbs behind her angled outward. Edges tilting infinitesimally. Defining the volume she claimed. Frost rosettes continued to flower beneath each step. Ephemeral snow mandalas blooming and effacing in rapid succession. The tavern floor served as temporary scripture.
The proprietor waited behind his battered plank. A portly man whose 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 leached from his cheeks. His eyes climbed her height in reluctant pilgrimage. Pausing at harness. At extra limbs. At headdress. Finally 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 rested upon the wood. Rime radiated outward from the points of contact. Colonizing grooves left by decades of knife play. The lantern above her faltered. Its flame shrinking until it resembled a trapped spark. For a breath the entire room felt sealed beneath a bell jar of crystalline air.
Within her chest the Tlāzōtlalpan gave a measured convulsion.
The organ drank greedily from the accumulated heat of bodies. Lamps. Steaming dishes. Translating stolen energy into the ordered cold that haloed her. Necro Ice buds along her armor responded. Brightening a shade. An auroral flutter passing through their translucent flesh. She sensed the instinctive recoil of the living around her. Their blood thickening. Their joints tightening. Their hearts stuttering toward flight.
This bawdy grotto had never been inscribed upon her sovereign’s map of shrines.
Nevertheless. Under her scrutiny it began to warp into annexation. Lanterns mutated into unwilling votives. The bar counter into a parody altar rail. Patrons arranged themselves into ragged aisles. The stink of spirits and sweat thickened into a parody of incense. Where moments ago there had been commerce. Now yawned the suggestion of judgment.
When she spoke her voice did not rise.
“Wine.”
The syllable carried 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.
He poured. The liquid left the neck in a reluctant stream. Thickening as it met the gelid air. Frost feathered the cup in elaborate dendrites that resembled ossified prayers. By the time he slid the vessel toward her a thin film of ice trembled across the surface. Quivering like a nervous conscience.
She allowed the cup to rest upon the little frozen plinth. Her attention remained on the patrons. Gaze moved from face to face. From hunched priest hiding in his hood to scarred mercenary with medals tucked into his shirt. From painted courtesan assembling a new smile to young bravo with a hand too near his knife. Each received a fragment of her regard. Each fragment lodged like a splinter of ice.
This was not a visit. It was inspection.
The tavern had built its liturgy upon intoxication. Transaction. Oblivion. Tonight another sacrament arrived. Winter in the person of Ixqueya Jorgenskull stepped into the nave of vice. Carrying a colder catechism. The den might continue pouring envy. Lust. Despair. She had come to count them. To determine which hearts would leave with their sins sitting lightly upon their shoulders. And which would leave embalmed in Necro Ice. Names entered forever in a ledger that did not forgive. And never forgot.
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. Roasted meat. These scents 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 mocked 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 tropical plumage or 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 held fast to her pelvis. Its dye a shade that devoured the lantern light. 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 the garment fell strings of beads. Vertebrae. 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 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 bounded by hair fine crescents of cinnabar 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. 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 moving from deep teal into ember red into an absorptive darkness that swallowed the lantern glow. Between these plates Necro Ice 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 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 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 verdict rather than compromise. Her lips 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. A profile suited to palace reliefs carved three stories high. 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. Transforming the 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. These 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 the sense of ledgers behind them already balanced.
Above. The headdress rose like a frozen litany. A circlet of engraved gold clasped her brow. Crowded with tesserae of turquoise. Obsidian. 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. 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 with veins of cobalt that broke the dim light. Snow powder dotted the upper layers. Those flakes refused to dissolve. They persisted as hexagonal glyphs embedded in the sable cascade. Winter annotating her.
The tavern received her with the reluctant stillness of a congregation caught in sacrilege.
Gamblers froze with cards half fanned. A hireling 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 resumed only in whispers. Each voice sounded 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 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 unaware of its impending consecration.
Bodies parted. Sometimes with deliberate deference. More often through instinct excavated from older hungers. Those too drunk to stand steadily still moved aside as vertebrae remembered older predators. Those who attempted to stare her down found their gazes skidding away. The way eyes retreat from a reliquary that has not granted permission. A handful watched unabashed. Measuring her with greed or curiosity. Her audit took note of them.
The arachnid limbs behind her angled outward. Edges tilting infinitesimally. Defining the volume she claimed. Frost rosettes continued to flower beneath each step. Ephemeral snow mandalas blooming and effacing in rapid succession. The tavern floor served as temporary scripture.
The proprietor waited behind his battered plank. A portly man whose 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 leached from his cheeks. His eyes climbed her height in reluctant pilgrimage. Pausing at harness. At extra limbs. At headdress. Finally 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 rested upon the wood. Rime radiated outward from the points of contact. Colonizing grooves left by decades of knife play. The lantern above her faltered. Its flame shrinking until it resembled a trapped spark. For a breath the entire room felt sealed beneath a bell jar of crystalline air.
Within her chest the Tlāzōtlalpan gave a measured convulsion.
The organ drank greedily from the accumulated heat of bodies. Lamps. Steaming dishes. Translating stolen energy into the ordered cold that haloed her. Necro Ice buds along her armor responded. Brightening a shade. An auroral flutter passing through their translucent flesh. She sensed the instinctive recoil of the living around her. Their blood thickening. Their joints tightening. Their hearts stuttering toward flight.
This bawdy grotto had never been inscribed upon her sovereign’s map of shrines.
Nevertheless. Under her scrutiny it began to warp into annexation. Lanterns mutated into unwilling votives. The bar counter into a parody altar rail. Patrons arranged themselves into ragged aisles. The stink of spirits and sweat thickened into a parody of incense. Where moments ago there had been commerce. Now yawned the suggestion of judgment.
When she spoke her voice did not rise.
“Wine.”
The syllable carried 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.
He poured. The liquid left the neck in a reluctant stream. Thickening as it met the gelid air. Frost feathered the cup in elaborate dendrites that resembled ossified prayers. By the time he slid the vessel toward her a thin film of ice trembled across the surface. Quivering like a nervous conscience.
She allowed the cup to rest upon the little frozen plinth. Her attention remained on the patrons. Gaze moved from face to face. From hunched priest hiding in his hood to scarred mercenary with medals tucked into his shirt. From painted courtesan assembling a new smile to young bravo with a hand too near his knife. Each received a fragment of her regard. Each fragment lodged like a splinter of ice.
This was not a visit. It was inspection.
The tavern had built its liturgy upon intoxication. Transaction. Oblivion. Tonight another sacrament arrived. Winter in the person of Ixqueya Jorgenskull stepped into the nave of vice. Carrying a colder catechism. The den might continue pouring envy. Lust. Despair. She had come to count them. To determine which hearts would leave with their sins sitting lightly upon their shoulders. And which would leave embalmed in Necro Ice. Names entered forever in a ledger that did not forgive. And never forgot.
He smirked and went behind the bar and produced a glass and uncooked an unlabeled bottle and poured it. "Welcome to Trixie's"
Ixqueya received the glass as though accepting a minor eulegy. Frost blossomed beneath her touch in lambent filigree. The wine quivered, unsure whether to flee or submit. Her gaze rose to him with an austere tenderness, a kind of glacial reverence that did not thaw so much as illuminate.
“Your gesture is not lost upon me,” she murmured, a velvet tremor beneath the winter in her chest. “There is a peculiar grace in an unnamed bottle poured by a steady hand. A quiet courtship between host and stranger. I acknowledge the offering. And I am… pleased.”
She allowed the word to linger like incense unraveling in a forgotten antechamber. Her eyes traveled the tavern’s dim interior. The air held its decadent ruin. Its fugitive warmth. Its congregation of vice. All of it seemed to fold inward around her presence.
“This place bears a worn sanctity,” she continued. “A sepulchral charm. Debris of older rites clinging to its ribs. One finds a rare species of intimacy in such decay. Thank you for granting me its first taste.”
She noted the subtle shift of his shoulders.The almost gravitational pull toward the other patron awaiting him. A competing claim on his attention.
Her lips curved by an imperceptible degree. Not amusement. Recognition.
“Go to the one who tugs upon you. Tend to the orbit that calls you. I would not trespass upon another’s gravity. Nor do I require escort. Winter abides. I can savor a drink in contemplative solitude.”
She lifted the glass.The frost on its rim chimed like a tiny frozen censer.
"Concerns about the Lord General being fit to command: noted for future reference."
I am at work for a bit longer. My replies may be delayed. I also have no clue if the child with the injury was referring to Ixqueya or another. So I am going to ignore for now till I am certain.)
"I inherited ownership of this place. It is a multiuniversal converge nexus. Anyone can access this place"
He grinned and he went over to Jadzia and took her hands into his and kissed them.
He grinned and he went over to Jadzia and took her hands into his and kissed them.
"That is actual insanity, a bad trait for leaders of any kind..."
" Alright, alright, I've heard you, there shall be no chainswording for the the forseeable future
Annoyed grumble, as he handed off the chainsword to his subordinate.
" But someone stitch her up, she's spilling ichor onto the flooring... believe me Mathius, it will cost you a fortune to remove those stains, I speak from experience "
The general added, sauntering off to his usual corner.
Mark my words however, at some point however, you will regret not trading your corpse in for a suit of nigh-invincible armor. Bah, conquerors a-plenty and powerful beings, and the mere SUGGESTION of a beheading is all it took to ruffle your feathers.
Annoyed grumble, as he handed off the chainsword to his subordinate.
" But someone stitch her up, she's spilling ichor onto the flooring... believe me Mathius, it will cost you a fortune to remove those stains, I speak from experience "
The general added, sauntering off to his usual corner.
Mark my words however, at some point however, you will regret not trading your corpse in for a suit of nigh-invincible armor. Bah, conquerors a-plenty and powerful beings, and the mere SUGGESTION of a beheading is all it took to ruffle your feathers.
"A cleaning servitor will take care of removing the unwanted biological fluids, at no charge."
Siege wrote:
"That is actual insanity, a bad trait for leaders of any kind..."
Perhaps you are better concerned with your own leadership
"Drael has already seen to her healing, and I've cleaned blood before."
He set the tumbler full of single malt Scotch before Aleksandr.
He set the tumbler full of single malt Scotch before Aleksandr.
Siege wrote:
"That is actual insanity, a bad trait for leaders of any kind..."
"Mind your tongue when speaking to a part of the Emperor's light"
Mathius Kothinto wrote:
"Drael has already seen to her healing, and I've cleaned blood before."
He set the tumbler full of single malt Scotch before Aleksandr.
He set the tumbler full of single malt Scotch before Aleksandr.
Much obliged Mathius, this is the good stuff I hear.
Aleksandr Von Drakenfell wrote:
Siege wrote:
"That is actual insanity, a bad trait for leaders of any kind..."
Perhaps you are better concerned with your own leadership
"Concerns have been noted and shared. Of course, should you be willing to assist me further, I can keep these concerns from reaching the ears of those who would act on them."
Magos Dominus Harkoth-937 wrote:
Aleksandr Von Drakenfell wrote:
Siege wrote:
"That is actual insanity, a bad trait for leaders of any kind..."
Perhaps you are better concerned with your own leadership
"Concerns have been noted and shared. Of course, should you be willing to assist me further, I can keep these concerns from reaching the ears of those who would act on them."
Concern.
" Come now Lord Harkoth, would you really call the Inquisition upon me for such a trivial matter... ahah.. I was... ahem... I was merely attempting to extend the Emperor's light to another denizen of this fine establishment, there's no need for that, come now, ehrm... look... I have already... er... sourced a relic from the dark age of technology for you. "
Aleksandr plucked a toaster from the wall and presented it to Harkoth.
"Indexing vocabulary for appropriate response. Response found: Bruh."
Aleksandr Von Drakenfell wrote:
" Alright, alright, I've heard you, there shall be no chainswording for the the forseeable future
Annoyed grumble, as he handed off the chainsword to his subordinate.
" But someone stitch her up, she's spilling ichor onto the flooring... believe me Mathius, it will cost you a fortune to remove those stains, I speak from experience "
The general added, sauntering off to his usual corner.
Mark my words however, at some point however, you will regret not trading your corpse in for a suit of nigh-invincible armor. Bah, conquerors a-plenty and powerful beings, and the mere SUGGESTION of a beheading is all it took to ruffle your feathers.
Annoyed grumble, as he handed off the chainsword to his subordinate.
" But someone stitch her up, she's spilling ichor onto the flooring... believe me Mathius, it will cost you a fortune to remove those stains, I speak from experience "
The general added, sauntering off to his usual corner.
Mark my words however, at some point however, you will regret not trading your corpse in for a suit of nigh-invincible armor. Bah, conquerors a-plenty and powerful beings, and the mere SUGGESTION of a beheading is all it took to ruffle your feathers.
Ixqueya watched the chainsword depart his grasp and felt her estimation of him contract further. Like a pupil collapsing in sudden glare. Once he had been merely inconsequential. Now he resolved into something more contemptible. A homuncular pageant of bluster. A simulacrum of authority lacquered over an exiguous core. His florid orations about relic armor and quasi invincibility revealed themselves as logorrheic compensation. Fustian varnish laid upon a hollow armature. He trafficked in beheading as idle spectacle. Then retreated the moment genuine consequence brushed his ankle. Such a creature belonged not among conquerors. But among discarded footnotes.
His prattle about stains and ichor. About the purported expense of purifying the flooring. Completed the portrait. Here stood a being for whom blood signified chiefly an inconvenience to upholstery. Not covenant. Not sacrament. A petty custodian of surfaces masquerading as strategist. He adorned his cowardice with sardonic quips and imagined this passed for wit. It was otiose ornamentation. A palimpsest of borrowed bravado scrawled upon mercantile anxiety.
She turned her attention back to the wine with deliberate finality. The cup rimed in fragile filigree possessed more gravitas than the entire exchange he had engineered. The surface trembled beneath her cold. Then stilled. Accepting its fate with greater dignity than the man who had poured it. In that stillness he diminished to the scale of a drifting mote suspended in tavern light. Epiphenomenal. Momentary. A speck revealed only when pinioned upon a stray beam before dissolving back into obscurity. An ephemeral amusement. Nothing more.
She raised the glass. The wine unfurled its muted complexities across her tongue. Tannin. Sepulchral fruit. Ghosts of vineyards that had outlived their celebrants. These nuances merited contemplation. The general did not. In the quiet tribunal of her mind he became a negligible datum in an overcrowded ledger. A transient irritant. An itinerant fleck of animated dust whose intersection with her orbit warranted no further notation.
"It sounds like everyone just needs Saluzzo wine." She popped the cork right off a bottle, dated from before whatever Terran year before Lappland was ever born, and just chugged it all. "Ahahaha~ Mio padre wouldn't like this at all, but I don't care. So many expensive bottles to just...pluck. All because they're mine~"
" Give me a break Harkoth, it's been a night. I've earned the enmity of a Voluminous Aeldari on top of an ill-construed stratagem to source a weapon.
By the Emperor, what a poetic rage, you would think if the Aeldari's penchant for prose matched their capacity for combat then they would not be on the verge of extinction, I suppose the prevailing assumption is that I am impressionable to well construed and verbose mockery and that it whittles the morale of the imperial guard. "
By the Emperor, what a poetic rage, you would think if the Aeldari's penchant for prose matched their capacity for combat then they would not be on the verge of extinction, I suppose the prevailing assumption is that I am impressionable to well construed and verbose mockery and that it whittles the morale of the imperial guard. "
Lappland Saluzzo wrote:
"It sounds like everyone just needs Saluzzo wine." She popped the cork right off a bottle, dated from before whatever Terran year before Lappland was ever born, and just chugged it all. "Ahahaha~ Mio padre wouldn't like this at all, but I don't care. So many expensive bottles to just...pluck. All because they're mine~"
"As good as it sounds, I'm gonna have to respectfully decline. I've had some issues with alcohol in the past, so I avoid it."
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