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by Lobos on Wed Jul 31, 2013 3:35 am
A long dead city burned.
Towers of stone, crumbling from age, alight with wytchfires. Twisted, tortured overgrowth yielded only grudginly, seemingly resilient to the fortress's bane raging around them. Gales of winds twisted through dusty halls and windows, the harmonics generating a noise akin to thousands of voices as one.
Screaming.
Warrens, tunnels, lost libraries, foundries, row upon row of dwellings and monuments to greatness were nothing more than fading reminders of mortal glory. Yet evidence of the superb craftsmanship remained, for these ruins had stood for millenia against the test of time, the powers of etherial energies and the life of its forgotten people suffusing the bricks, the mortar. If one cared to dig deep enough, they would find the bones of its makers the foundations on which it settled, yet thus far none dared. For it was a haunted place, filled with pain and anguish, demanding remembrance that it would never receive. Debris lined the streets, the bones of animals and the signs of their leavings and nested scattered about. The beasts themselves were nightmarish, twisted by the penumbra they dwelt in until barely recognizable as creatures at all, but monsters incarnate.
The earth to the north creaked, a vast weight settling upon it as something immense in power settled down, the coronas in the heavens that of those to the far north. It was with a heavy report of bedrock snapping asunder that bared feet touched the earth, a powerful stance over the narrow fissure. The apparitions appearance was unearthly, that of an immense, powerfully built man. Worn leggings of leather were the only clothing worn, his muscled chest and arms bared to the air, covered in tattoos of arcane, tribal writing. Within the woads were letters of a dead language, their glyphs ever changing, glowing mutely with the power within them. About his wrists were manacles of dull, tarnished metal, shattered chains hanging from them. Clattering quietly in the gusts that tossed the mane of gleaming, white hair that rolled down his back, the figure studied the place for a long few minutes, inhuman yellow eyes taking in the sight with an expressionless mask.
Names held power. Lobos understood that, and his own was lost to time. Better that way, he told himself. Walking slowly for the ruins, the god breathed the brimstone laden air, sighing with a deep, rumbling growl not at all like any sound that came from mortal lips. Something was wrong, a sense of perversion in the winds. And one of enough power to warrant direct attention. That its nature directly opposed his own simply made it...
Personal.
A mammoth hand touched the pendant at his throat, the round wheel of burnished bronze and stone glowing with runes and glyphs in such concentration that its surface swarmed. From it radiated power to chill titans, quake other gods. It was alive in a sense, yet so far removed from time as to never perceive the transience of matters of mortality or lack thereof. Even after the dust of his passing had long since blown to the corners of the heavens, the obelisk would remain. And so it had, until he had come into its care.
"Let us be rid of this, then." With a voice of quiet thunder, Lobos, Lord of War, Wolf of Winter, and God of the Blizzard Storm, strode onwards to the shattered peaks and ever lit flames, ignoring the howls of the wind and the tainted presence of a murdered people still clinging with hellbound determination to this, a relic of a lost age. The denizens fled his approach as would beasts of the forest spread apart to allow the hunter to pass unchallenged, ghosts flinching back with fright at the nearness of his wild glory.
Serenade the moon, and let loose your howl.
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