Vraxious- The Forsaken Lands
The descent from madness to darkness was brief, a two-stride fall down into a thick carpet of glowing blue mushrooms that had conquered every surface in the large stone room. Whatever was once here had been claimed by nature, leaving only the stalwart tan brickwork. Torvald was standing in a fighting stance, legs spread wide, hammer held up, staring down something that was plodding its way up the staircase in the corner of the room.
Vrax trusted Torvald had that in hand and looked around more; the spiders had a large bubble-like nest in the upper right corner. Eventually he also spotted another trail of tracing veins leading to a crack in the wall's stonework. When he stared for too long, it struck—a small black snake, except it had been twisted by its new master. Its jaws opened like a blooming flower petal, each part of the mouth filled with thousands of hollow, needle-like teeth, and wings formed from its own veins flung it through the air in a mist of blood. Vrax ducked as it sailed over him and whirled after it, slashing high while it wheeled around in the air to strike again. Smite sizzled on the tip of his spear, forming a halberd's blade, and the miasma washed through the snake, rotting it into two dripping halves that fell on either side of Vrax.
“It’s a fucking Blood Marionette! Sever the veins after you kill them!” Vrax followed his own advice, stomping on the rotting halves as they started oozing veins from one half to the other, and used another small smite to rot away the web of veins leading off down the stairs.
Torvald hit a humanoid figure as it came up the stairs with a well-squared full-body swing to the head. The figure's head exploded, and the helmet it had been wearing shot back down the stairs violently. Torvald yanked the headless corpse towards himself, grabbing the bushel of vein trailing from its spine, then he kicked it back down the stairs with such force the veins stayed in his hand as the body thudded downwards.
“Bah, why were you so worried, Vrax? What is this, some weird undead? That wasn’t even a scuffle.” He looked a bit proud of himself and wiped his hands clean of blood on the mushroom-covered floor.
“Torvald...that was a dead adventurer and one snake...both obviously newly added to its...domain...the longer it has them, the stronger they get. Can you imagine fighting that Urgoth if it could heal forever until you found the puppet master, potentially a league away, hidden in some forsaken corner surrounded by its thralls?”
“When you put it that way…” Torvald tightened his grip on his hammer and pulled out a glowstone, channeling a bit of mana into it and clipping it to his belt.
Vrax stepped ahead to go first quietly, the Dreadfeast practically apparating beside him. “Stay behind me and only intervene if it goes from a quick scuffle to a real fight. We want to find the next waystation without this escalating to where it thinks we are a threat.” Vrax crept down the shadowed stairs just as the maddening golden light outside started peeking its way through the hole in the roof. Torvald rushed after him.
The stairs led all the way through the ancient building to a massive circular room surrounded by tunnels with grated edges long filled with sediment and packed with dense vegetation, trailing off in each of the cardinal directions. Vrax took the eastmost one, heading towards the grove of Vurune; if he was really lucky, this tunnel would lead straight to that ancient city he had sheltered on the edges of.
The tunnel teemed with all manner of creatures that flourished within the cool, moist shelter the ancient aqueducts provided. Large green lizards with crested heads skittered up and down small shrublike trees that nearly blocked their way. The dreadfeast was gathering the lizards by the handful; as they continued on, he had three wriggling handfuls on him that he occasionally snacked from. The translucent spiders were still everywhere here, snatching snails nearly as large as they were, and they carefully edged around more than one of the Fool's Hounds as they continued on. A sudden snuffling noise brought them to a cautious stop.
Vrax had to stop himself from immediately jumping forward when a Logart cautiously peeked out from a nearby bush, eyeing Torvald's magic items hungrily. Torvald readied his hammer and faced the low-slung, long canine, obviously not knowing what it was.
“Wait, wait! It’s a Logart; they are friendly-ish...but just don’t let it steal your magic items.” Vrax stepped between them, coaxing it out with a nearly expended sparkstone that it grabbed onto greedily with its fuzzy little paws, then paddled away into the nearby bushes in fear as the Dreadfeast loomed from an overhead branch, seemingly appraising the newcomer.
“Fuck, okay, this is a stupid myth…but we should follow it…it…might lead to treasure.” Vrax said hesitantly, waiting for Torvald to ask him if he was stupid.
“Treasure? Hell yeah, lead the way. We’ve been walking for nearly half an hour now without a fight. These tunnels actually seem pretty tame.” Torvald gave a big thumbs up and showed Vrax an entire handful of empty coin purses he had ready to go if they found any good loot. Ha, and this is why we are friends.
The logart continued shuffling down the same tunnel the way they were already going before coming to the first branch in the tunnel they had seen. a simple Y-shaped split, and took the rightmost path, waddling through the shrubbery with purpose, pausing momentarily as a lizard with a trail of veins protruding from it lunged at it. The logart darted back and practically vaporized the small reptile with a blistering blue bolt of arcane force before snorting angrily and continuing on.
They followed it for nearly half a league before it scrambled up a tunnel wall and through a large crack at about head height in the wall. They would have never noticed it; it was draped over with a curtain of messy crimson flowers so dark they were nearly black, utterly obscuring the passageway behind. Torvold shoved himself up without hesitating and began arduously stuffing himself through the crack in the wall. There was a scary moment where Vrax had to shove on his feet to help him get through, but he made it, landing with a thud on the other side.
“Holy fuck, Vrax, get in here!” Torvald said excitedly.
Vrax clambered up into the passageway, dismissing his armor briefly to make his passage seamless as he weaseled through the uncomfortably moist pathway. He was blinded for a moment by the twenty-stride-long cavern they had come into. It was edged by tall mushrooms that scraped the high ceilings; white and red spots covered their tan surfaces, and they glowed as bright as any torch. The Logart shuffled into the hollowed-out bottom of one of them, nestling in with another few of its littermates, peering cautiously at the interlopers in their home.
The center of the room was a fantastically carved stone square untouched by the ravages of time, literally humming slightly with power as mana thrummed through the intertwining symbols across its face. The back wall held a tall bronzed door carved with the symbol of a man, sword upraised, facing a floating gem that had a spectral figure emanating from it with a sick smile. Vrax felt the familiar magical pressure he had first noticed in the Whispering Grotto.
Vrax stammered for a moment. “Is that a teleport anchor!? And…that's a fucking dungeon door, Torvald! We found a dungeon!!!”
Torvald was concerningly silent; Vrax turned to him but nearly jumped out of his skin as a shin-high humanoid mushroom wobbled from somewhere near the door, eyes practically burning blue with poorly restrained power.
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A voice thick with the power and wisdom of ages tore free from the myconid, literally melting part of it with every word: “Welcome, brave travelers, to the dungeon of Malaketh... Wait, it's you two? Goddammit, no, you are supposed to beat my first couple floors firs….” The myconid exploded in a puff of blue fire and smoldering plant matter.
“Uhhhh…” Vrax stammered, not sure if he should be getting ready to fight or not.
Another myconid wobbled from the shadows near the door. “Bah! These feeble shells can barely last long enough for me to get a damn word out, but as I was saying!” The myconid detonated, spattering both of them with uncomfortably hot mushroom pieces.
“What the fuck is happening?” Torvald whispered as another myconid wobbled out, this time noticeably bigger, coming up to their waists. Vrax shrugged.
“Gah! Fuck, don’t go in yet. You will get murdered! Suddenly and without mercy, level up first so you can bring me more wonderful monsters!” The myconid stood proudly smoking for a second before also exploding.
“How the shit is the Whispering Grotto here? That's it, right?” Torvald asked, wiping plant matter off his face.
“Certainly seems deranged enough… and I can’t think of any other dungeon that yoinked my designs,” Vrax whispered back and addressed the newest approaching Myconid. “Hey there…Malaketh?” Uhh…can you work this teleporter? We are trying to get to the ruined city next to The Grove of Vurune,” Vrax asked, unsure if this was wise.
“Hmm...yes... There is an intact one near there by my ninth floor. But what would I get out of this... exchange? It's a lot of essence to teleport people. Oh, how about a new beastie for me to play with? The daisies are the most fun I’ve had in nearly a century, and they aren’t even high tier; they are just damned mean!” The deep voice bartered back before the poor myconid died ingloriously with a blue flash and pop.
Vrax nervously looked towards the dreadfeast and then shook his head, realizing that was a spectacularly bad idea. “Uhh...well, what were you thinking?”
The next myconid was even bigger, nearly as tall as Torvald. “Well, describe how the daisy came about to me. What’s your process, young man?” The dungeon questioned with obvious genuine fascination.
“Well, it started as a joke. Torvald asked if I could kill a man with a daisy, and it spiraled from there…” Vrax cautiously expounded.
“Like a literal normal daisy? Just existing in a field somewhere?” The dungeon said, sounding terrifyingly excited.
“Well, yeah...I found it beside the kings road…” Vrax started.
“Ho HO! I have such a fun idea. Rest here for a bit. I'm going to bring you something, and you are going to turn it into a horror the likes of which the world has Never seen before. In exchange, I'll teleport you three times. Take a nap and spend some essence; nothing will get to you in here, and this is going to take me a bit...and a few hundred souls worth of essence….” It grumbled to itself the last bit before the myconid fell still, the dungeon's presence having left them.
Torvad slowly and judiciously turned his head towards Vrax without saying anything. “Hey, I haven’t done it yet! And having a fucking dungeon on our side is some life-changing shit!” Vrax defensively spouted
“You’re sure about to do some life-changing shit for some poor fucking dungeon delvers, all right…” Torvald grumbled but didn’t argue the point, settling against a mushroom and closing his eyes, hands behind his head.
Vrax took a relaxed pose, leaning against the dungeon door itself, and took the dungeon's advice, delving into his sanctuary to spend some essence.
He descended into the calm breeze of his sanctuary, the light of twilight above casting playful shadows around the menagerie of creatures flitting around him. It was all much the same as before, but Vrax gazed out over his almost full essence lake at the boundary. It looked to him like it had receded back quite a bit; instead of a line of willows along the edge, it was now like the edges of the forsaken lands themselves, thick stands of trees draping veils down nearly to the ground, and they had that starspeckled green shimmer to their veiling branches that he had added to the willows on the very edges of the Forsaken Lands a day or so ago.
He stepped up to [Adapt Life] and the lake behind him rose to his will. Let's see if this works...if it does, my only real limiting factor will become mana and creativity...and well, hopefully common sense. Vrax sent the essence around himself and his statue in twirling, hungry streamers that occasionally lashed out at anything foolish enough to come near the conflux of power Vrax was wielding. He began lancing the erratic streams of potential into the statue with a vivid purpose. The potential disappeared into the statue at an astonishing pace; cracks began forming across its surface.
Vrax buckled down, slowing the stream of power and holding together the statue's cracked edges with his bare hands as the entirety of the lake behind him streamed into [Adapt Life]. When he was done, the crumbling edges flaked away to reveal a new sight.
Vrax’s statue now depicted him fully armored, Sunshine ahead of him tearing a man held high in half, and the Dreadfeast was arched around his legs, tongues reaching towards the dying man in Sunshine’s grasp.
It worked… I can now craft skills and talents.
[Adapt Life] (lvl 9)
Change living beings to better suit your needs. Entities changed with this skill will be less hostile towards the paladin, and towards those who wear an adapted mark of the cycle upon themselves You may view and adapt the [Talents] and [Skills] of adapted entities. Faster changes or changes farther from the base functions of an entity will use exponentially more mana. The more powerful an entity, the more mana required.
[Mana Cost Massively Variable] [Increased Efficiency]
[Duration Permanent]
Vrax brought up his full status for a moment to review how much progress he had made in such a short time.
[Vraxious Tier-1] (lvl 15) (Unique) [Paladin Of The Cycle]
You will safeguard the cycle of life and death. Wield the powers of growth, of change, and of decay to set the world free from those who would hold it stagnant. Stand tall with weapon held high and strike down those who would fetter you. You will adapt the life of the world around you to serve your will; life leads to change, change leads to death, death leads to rot, rot leads to life, and thus the cycle continues.
[Skills]
[Decomposing Smite](lvl2)
Infuse your blows with entropy, corroding your foes and using their essence to heal your wounds. You may shape the path of the entropic energy with your will.
[Mana Cost Variable]
[Adapt Life] (lvl 9)
Change living beings to better suit your needs. Entities changed with this skill will be less hostile towards the paladin, and towards those who wear an adapted mark of the cycle upon themselves. You may view and adapt the [Talents] and [Skills] of adapted entities. Faster changes or changes farther from the base functions of an entity will use exponentially more mana. The more powerful an entity, the more mana required.
[Mana Cost Massively Variable] [Increased Efficiency]
[Duration Permanent]
[Stigmata Wrath Of The Grove](lvl 6)
Woe befall those that would cause harm to those under the sacred canopy of our protection. Life is a struggle. Life is pain. Life is hunger. Life is fear. Let those who threaten our beloved feel naught but the wrath of the grove until they are returned to the cycle.
[Stigmata Garden, twelve slots available]
Entities in the stigmata garden will make copies of themselves. The life drain of the stigmata garden will now affect a larger area and affect essence-bound entities that oppose Vurune’s chosen.
[Talents]
[Forest Strider]
The forest around you will subtly aid your movement based on intent, be that speed or stealth.
[Passive]
[Identify]
Reveal a living being’s name, tier and level if it is an essence infused entity.
[Mana cost insignificant]
[Hunter's Ear]
Your hearing is as sharp as the predators of the deep wood, more easily discern slight sounds.
[Passive]
Improved Attributes
Mental Defenses: 1.6
Physical Strength: 1.2
Mana Capacity: 1.4
Physical Defense: 1.1
Total Mana: 143/143
He brought himself from his sanctuary and back to the cavern. Torvald was still leaning up against a mushroom, eyes closed, probably in his own sanctuary.
The room flashed with light, and suddenly a familiar figure wrapped in garish silks with a foppish hat was wheeling around, sword at the ready, in the center of the room. Red stood there looking confused and ready to fight, holding a small fuzzy creature protectively in one hand, his eyes locked onto Vrax, and his defensive posture softened.
“Of fucking course it’s you two goddamn pains in the ass. Wanna tell me why the fuck I just got the weirdest dungeon quest ever? Like, what even is the point of this stupid little thing?” He held out his tiny cargo for Vrax to examine.