They call their home the Patchwork.
Long before the first of them awoke underneath the boughs of the White Tree, the once-proud humanity fell and was consumed by their own hatred and madness. In the final days of their downfall, those with the vision crafted the Tree, and a guardian to watch over it from a castle that could not be destroyed.
That guardian became the Last King.
The calamity that was the Fading changed the fabric of the cosmos, altering reality in ways no mind could have conceived. The realm that once spanned star systems became broken, shattered like old glass, and the Children of Men were tasked with rebuilding civilization from the shards.
But the wounds ran too deep in this dying broken land, and now dangerous creatures from another time and space roam the wastes as survivors huddle within the shadows of crumbling structures. Noble Valiants, former servants of the King, patrol ancient sentry posts, attacking anyone who approaches…be they friend or foe. Cold stars burn in the eternal twilight sky above it all, unchanging and uncaring.
And on his throne beneath the Tree, the King sleeps forever.
Part 1 of a one-shot
Once upon a time, a rook sat down to palaver with a dead man.
The cold southeastern wind moaned and wailed like a grieving woman over the dead city as the rook sat down to begin the ritual, fishing out an item from the ragged satchel at his side. The skull he produced was small for a human, with narrower features and a slight glass-like sheen on its surface. He settled the skull on his lap as if it were a crystal ball, keeping both hands clamped to the sides of the object. Several tendrils of exotic metal slowly extruded from the gaps between his fingers and proceeded to drill themselves into the cranial region with small ratcheting noises. The rook remained patient as he quietly initiated the proxy communication protocols with a flick of a mental switch, ignoring the cries of some dying creature in the distance. The bulb-shaped lantern he had scavenged from the ruins a fortnight ago threw stark, mile-high shadows on the walls of his current enclosure.
When the connection was established, he shut down his external sensory feed and closed his eyes, only to open them a minute later.
“Hello Demalion,” said the dead man sitting on the other side of the lantern at his feet.
Tatterdemalion tipped his head by the slightest of degrees. “Macaan.”
Macaan favoured him with one of his once-familiar lipless smiles. “To what do I owe this visit? You rarely stop by anymore.”
Guilt stabbed at the rook like a hot knife. “I need your help.”
“Of course,” Macaan said.
Between them, the lantern suddenly disintegrated in a flare of light and quickly began to reform into something else. Before long, a glowing holographic map of the dead city had shaped itself into existence, with a pillar of yellow light marking the abandoned structure they had taken refuge in for the night. Sections of the map were broken up, floating at different heights above each other in real time with only wispy tendril-like structures to link the majority of them.
“These past few days I have been trying to work my way up to the Crow’s Nest,” Tatterdemalion said, and tiny scaled models of himself appeared on the map as he spoke, illustrating his actions. A giant blinking red sphere on a floating section of the city near its northernmost end marked his destination. “I’ve found my way blocked many times…mostly by rubble. Yesterday, I discovered a pathway to a transport hub through the city warrens, but there was a problem.”
Macaan frowned at the map, rubbing a hand under his chin while he thought. “Voiders, I take it?”
Tatterdemalion nodded. “They’ve blocked up most of the tunnels, and there are no accurate schematics of the warren layouts on any of the terminals I’ve checked.”
“I see.” Macaan harrumphed to himself, closing his eyes for a brief moment as he tried to think. “I have no idea if it still exists but…back in my time, a friend of mine found an access tunnel leading straight to the other end of the city.” He touched the map with a finger, drawing the path with a green trail of light. “Here. The entrance point lies within the Garden…that’s what we called it back when we were kids.”
Tatterdemalion studied the map, committing it to deep-memory. “It…seems simple enough.”
“True, true.” The dead old man held up a finger, looking solemn. “But we were forced to stop using it when another friend of ours…Jaan, I think was his name…was attacked by a lone Voider. It may have taken up residence in the Garden and spawned a few more. I have no further information beyond that, so…do your best to take care.”
“I will,” Tatterdemalion said as the map flickered and died, dissolving in a swarm of firefly dots. “Thank you.”
“Bah,” Macaan waved him off. He smiled with his eyes again, then grew somber. “It’s alright. Just be careful around that Voider. It killed a good number of our men before we decided to leave it alone.”
Tatterdemalion tipped his head again, the guilty feeling cropping again but laced with tinges of sadness. “I’ll be back soon, old man,” he promised as he exited the simulation.
In the waking world, the rook stirred after exactly two minutes and forty-eight seconds of inactivity. The link-cables retracted into their sheaths as he released the skull from his grip, and carefully replaced it back inside the satchel. Sighing, he rearranged his legs beneath him, looking up at the sky. There were no clouds there, only a large pale moon shining between the myriad branches of the Tree.
It was a long time before Tatterdemalion was finally able to sleep.
The Garden had been beautiful once, perhaps in the time before the Fading.
Even as Tatterdemalion strode through the deserted botanical facility, he could make out lingering vestiges of the former beauty. A stray growth of a flower here, a mesh of bioluminescent vines there, and a tangle of iridescent red-and-gold plants interspersed between. At one point he even stopped to examine a rose-like flower that appeared to change shape and color every five minutes, entranced by the exotic lifeform.
Still, it was hard to ignore the corruption of the Void that stained the place, like blood on the flowers.
Tatterdemalion squeezed his way through a doorway that had been partially jammed up with fleshy rust-red coils of alien flesh. The Voidborne infection trembled like a thing alive at his touch, retracting into itself to make room for his bulk to pass. While he had no face to show it, Tatterdemalion scowled inwardly with distaste at the encounter. The northwestern side of the Garden had been completely overrun by the Void, save for a patch of ghostly white flowers in the middle of the room surrounding and covering a suspicious lump. The rook walked over to the patch, actively avoiding the urge to look in the corner of the room ahead where the stringy ropes of alien flesh coalesced into a pillar the height and size of two men standing atop each other. As he approached, the strange mound would squirm and wiggle, like a slumbering beast. Tatterdemalion paid it no mind however as he knelt over the flower patch, and gently began to nudge the flowers back from the object of their concealment.
“You don’t have to hide,” he said softly over his shoulder.
In the dimly lit doorway behind him, a small figure popped its head out of cover for a moment, then ducked back again.
Tatterdemalion sighed, resting back on his haunches. He found himself staring at the skeletal remains of a nameless individual. From his telemetric scans, he deduced that she had been female; possibly on the verge of old age. The slender, elegant antlers that sprouted from her forehead was a dead giveaway of her dolomi breed. Her aura had decayed by 82.39% – which was unusual in and of itself – but he had been able to pull a name from the scans; Taola, daughter of Imakon from the squatter settlement of Mion.
“Requiescat in pace,” he mumbled as he placed a hand over where the heart used to be. Then to the little girl behind him, he added. “I’m sorry about your mother.”
He could see her with the only two functional of the four rearview cameras at the back of his head; a frightened looking child about six winters old or so. Her clothes were little more than blood-soaked rags, her body marked with bruises and dirt of many a winter spent alone, and her long dark hair had lost its sheen long ago. Still, there was some humanity left in her forest-green eyes, and with the high-res cameras, he could make out the tears glimmering in them.
The Void thing in the room squirmed, emitting a low rumble.
Tatterdemalion did his best to cover up the body, and stood up, raising a finger to nonexistent lips while facing the dolomi child. The little girl blinked but kept her mouth shut, backing away a little from the rook. Tatterdemalion quickly scanned her aura while she appeared to remain indecisive; her name was Aurin, and she was in fact seven winters old. Her father had died a month before she was born, and poor Taola hadn’t made it past her fourth birthday.
Aurin kept walking backward, glancing apprehensively from the rook to the Voidspawn present in the room and back again. Before Tatterdemalion could warn her of the danger, she tripped and fell over a tendril, rupturing another with her overgrown fingernails as she flailed with a startled yelp.
With a piercing shriek and a sound like wet paper being shredded, the Voider awoke.
Tatterdemalion reacted without conscious thought; spinning on a heel, he reached up and back to whip out the blade at his back. In a fluid succession of the move, he drew an arc diagonally to intercept the creature that had ripped its way out of the mound. The blade cut through nothing but air as the Voider impossibly changed vector at the last moment, accelerating only to bounce off the floor and springboard off the wall to Tatterdemalion’s left. In response, the rook sped up his internal clockcycle by a factor of 1.5, and loaded up half a dozen knight training combat modules. The world seemed to slow to a crawl, losing a touch of color and vibrancy. He saw the Voider in full for the first time; a vaguely humanoid thing that was all claws and gnarled spines as if someone had taken a basic DNA strand and stretched and twisted it into the shape of a man. He saw Aurin in the first stages of panic, trying to scramble back away from the beast that was glacially flying at her with claws stretching.
Simulating a guttural roar of his own, Tatterdemalion unleashed a fury that had been building inside him.
Aurin found the breath to scream, closing her eyes for a couple of heartbeats. Something large and heavy crashed through the wall behind her, taking out part of the doorway in a shower of plascrete dust. She opened her eyes, her waifish body trembling, and saw only the rook standing before her, his crimson-and-silver form sheathed in a thin layer of stickly purplish gunk and a broken sword in one hand.
“Are you alright, little Aurin?” He said, extending an inviting hand to her.
Vignette 2
Gryphon's Nest 2.0 