Sir Valik Caprinadin, the Heretic Paladin

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• "The Heretic Paladin"

also yes i'm the reason iaste armor exists, lol

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Valik's Past

Valik's Beginnings

The Pilgrimage Itself

Valik's pilgrimage, like the rest of the Darkblood, began in Thunderforge, progressing south-east through Doomwood and lower Greenguard until reaching the area just above the Etherstorm Wastes, where the events of Book of Monsters: Reshaper take place.After the events of the pilgrimage, he returned with his people but only until the point of passing Lightguard Keep for the second time, after which point he begins a detour.

Keeping Shape: The Pilgrimage

As the Darkblood caravans traversed the undead-eaten countryside of Doomwood, between them and their destination, Valik was curious to find that he had caught the apparent attention of a curious, flickering glimmer of light.

---

This curious glitter of light, this strange little firefly, is carried on the wind gently at his side as they progress towards the rift. He regards it with a strange, causeless fondness. He feels an incommunicable love radiate from it, as if it were screaming out to him in a pitch he's mute to hear, but he could still feel its vibrations.

---

Valik struggled with the decision of loyalty to Eremon and Kolyaban, or Primarch Madra and her rebels.When the Hive was destroyed and Madra asked the people, "Is this what you want to become? How you want to live?" Valik felt an appeal to something profound in himself, something he became determined not to lose, nor to lose touch with. He couldn't name that light inside himself, he knew it only by its value.

"We have come face to face with our legends. How disappointing they are."
-Madra addressing the Darkblood

Valik's Own Pilgrimage

Following the Darkblood civil war, Valik felt that--while the majority of his people had found disturbing answers to their existential questions--he hadn't. A fundamental aspect of his nature still felt unknown to him, and the presence of the apparently magical "firefly" gave him more questions than he ever asked earnestly before his pilgrimage.

---

Having passed Lightguard Keep on his pilgrimage to find the answers of Kolyaban, he decides to visit the keep instead of viewing it from afar, doing so without the tentative fear and reproachful memories of Archlord Lionfang which his brothers and sisters in travel made no effort to hide.

---

His entrance to the keep is initially greeted with skepticism. They easily see Valik's latent necromantic abilities, but the "firefly" (which he had met sometime shortly after passing Lightguard Keep on his way TO the Rift) lends him an audience from the paladins.The paladins explain to Valik what a spirit orb is, and they work together to quickly discover that not only was he born was a latent proficiency in light magic, and more specifically, that he's attuned to spirit orbs.After this revelation, Valik takes his last name (which Darkblood didn't customarily do), choosing Caprinadin after craning his neck up at the immaculate, stony visages of aspiration for which he had been searching.

---

Valik was an apt pupil, and eager in the ways of the light. The paladins trained him and permitted him access to their facilities, until such time as he completes their training to the point that a recruit would be initiated to the rank of paladin.

---

Sadly, he couldn't become a real paladin.
Their reasoning was that he, as a Darkblood, didn't know how to wear, tie or untie shoelaces.

---

He was referred to the Shadowslayers of Darkovia Forest in the goal of furthering his knowledge of slaying, and of the monsters of Lore. Bets were taken among senior Shadowslayers for long he would survive.He proved wrong every single bet placed on him by surviving until the day when he would be formally welcomed as a Shadowslayer. The Shadowslayers don't often count their own ranks--lone wolves, independent agents that live or die and the difference could never be visible, only felt.
It was only scarcely noted that he vanished on the night of his initiation.

"Destiny is anywhere,
anyone,
I choose to be."
Kimberly Freeman - Destiny

After vanishing from the Shadowslayers, Valik turns north-east and travels until the crystal spires at the heart of Mythsong refract chartreuse, cyan and magenta streaks across the
dawn-lit sky.

---

In Mythsong Valley, an encounter with the reformed 6th Lord of Chaos, as well as the exposure to human culture now broken completely free of outside interference, brings Valik to understand the value which he had felt but lacked any ability to recognize.He felt a burning-hot individualism, a love for life, and above all else, a desire to hold onto humanity that he may have never have had. A desire never to compromise his being, his mind or his body to the standards or dictations of any being, be they the 11th Chaos Lord, the Champion of Chaos, the Queen of Monsters or even his race's demiurge.To never allow the "self" which he found on his pilgrimage to be reshaped.

He also brought some merch back to Falguard to commemorate the occassion.

Valik In The Present

Following Valik's enlightened return to Thunderforge, he commissioned a special set of armor to be crafted for him personally by Saluk.

---

His new armor is forged from an alloy of minerals found exclusively in Thunderforge, in parts pulled from the depths of the Death Pits. His specifications see it crafted in the style of a traditional paladin's plate armor set, down even to the gilded trim, but laden with rich skull iconography in recognition of both his roots and his abilities. Light and death--bleak in appearance, to reflect the grim act of hunting, but with golden trim to remind him of the souls he liberates with his every effort.

---

Though no longer an active member of the Dreadwatch, he is an ongoing participant in Falguard's defense. After his pilgrimage, he hasn't swayed from the isolationist, independent stance most Darkblood feel toward the world outside their walls.In his meditations, performed sitting atop the gates of the city and scrutinizing every entrant with a meticulous eye, the spirit orb has continued to drift ever around him. It had continued to be his companion ever since leaving Doomwood, suggesting a relationship which he yet doesn't understand.Despite his advocacy for Falguard's isolationism, he has retained a quiet love for humanity and continues to strive toward his image of a perfect paladin, although this doesn't take the same form for him as it does for most.He would lay ruin to the rest of Lore himself before he would let Falguard fall.

Valik's Dreadwatch Trainees

While Valik was living in Falguard, prior to the Darkblood pilgrimage and subsequent civil war, he had trained many young, male Darkblood in the style of combat their people have been passing down, and subtly improving upon, since their days as disparaging neighbor tribes.While it was most often true that his instruction was short-lived, primarily teaching how to use specific necromantic calling spells or weapons, he had several prodigious trainees whom he maintained a relationship with. The most notable of these students were Kelin and Maharn.Memories of these students haunt him. He had seen many come and go, many Darkblood falling in battle with their own kind or succumbing to Chaos, and he isn't in the habit of mourning the dead beyond the length of time it takes to kill them, but these influences directly served to mold the person he would come.

Kelin, the Twisted

Kelin was born to a Darkblood armorsmith --not that one-- and was trained to fight shortly before Chaos Lord Lionfang's attack. He and Valik fought to repel the Chaonslaught together, along with Maharn.
Kelin was loud, hard-headed and a merciless juggernaut on the battlefield. His passion and anger was only matched by Valik's, who encouraged his ruthless and chaotic style.
After the invasion had been repelled, Kelin followed Valik's influence and left Falguard to explore the world beyond.He was outside the city's doors when Drakath's allies attacked during the Chaos War. He was captured by Chaos not far north of Arcangrove and taken to Crownsreach to be Chaorrupted.After his young, reckless and brutal mind had been warped, it was a simple plan to release him and allow him to cause Chaos, which he did with a reveler's enthusiasm.Valik's last encounter with Kelin occurred not long after he left the Shadowslayers. He happened upon his pupil, his mind dismantled by the whispers of Chaos, jibbering madly as he raised hell upon a quiet countryside.Valik kills his pupil without a word spoken, and only speaks to beg his forgiveness as he cannibalizes him as a way of honoring him.

(Prior)
Hair: N/A
Eyes: #990000
Skin: #49363B(Chaorrupted)
Hair: N/A
Eyes: #990066
Skin: #B199CB

Maharn, the Reshapen

Maharn joined the Dreadwatch's training at an older age than most. While most Darkblood are eager to fight, kill and defend their home all once, enlisting as soon as they come old enough to carry a mace, Maharn was born very deeply anaemic, with blood that failed to coagulate properly. He spent his earliest years pouring through tomes of healing magic, angered that holy magic never came to his call.
When he met Valik, he recognized his pension for Spirit magic over Soul magic and sought to encourage Valik to learn more holy magic.
Valik heeded his influence, learning how to focus his inner light in order to heal his ailing kinsman who wanted deeply to fight, but couldn't.Valik's influence helps to make Maharn less neurotic, and to improve his health. By the time Maharn's pale, stricken body was nearly-but-not-quite well enough to fight, the Darkblood had begun their pilgrimage to meet their Goddess, Kolyaban.
Maharn had no intention to leave, citing his hermetic fear of the outside world, the wavering state of his health and the possible dangers of the outside world.While both Valik and Maharn were initially loyalists to Eremon's faction, Valik took a sharp turn when the Hive was uncovered. Maharn, however, thought that Kolyaban could be the answer to his every fear and his every sickness.Valik confronted him and chastised his short-sightenedness, sparking a spiteful defiance from Maharn. He sought out Kolyaban, giving her his desperate petition and the story of his woes, and was given the two things he wanted more than anything: a new mind, free of fear, and a new body, free of weakness or need.Valik learned, indirectly, of what he had done, and sought to hunt him down. Valik wore his hood over his head to disguise his tears as he fought the being that had once been Maharn to death.

Hair: N/A
Eyes: #84FFE0
Skin: #5B5348

"How disappointing our legends were...
We have no choice but to live new legends."
-Valik

Steal Valik's Look!

Hair: #121212
Skin: #3F3030
Eyes: #1CAC88Items featured:
Helmet: Male Darkblood Helm
Armor: Darkblood Peasant
Cape: Harvester's Long Coat
Weapon: Fancy Naval LighterBase: #1A1A1A
Trim: #666666

"Do I even have any humanity to lose..? Who--what am I? Why can't I let myself lose touch with something I've never had..?"

• Back

Wind lashes the high, off-purple stone walls of Falguard like breaking waves. Thunder peals like the distant detonations of dynamite and rain falls so violently that it feels like stone debris coming down after an explosion. This had been no obstacle to the construction of the city at the throat of a mountain, and it was no obstacle to the Darkblood people who continue on with their daily lives even as the storm lashes for hours without a sign of halting. All that this means to the Darkblood is that they ought to not wear fur, for it becomes too heavy when it’s wet, and to bring their stock from the tables on the sidewalks in front of their stores inside. Some Darkblood switch from carrying torches to light the night to lamps, or magical lights. The ones who have access to neither traverse the city with only their low-light vision to guide them.
The storm has no adverse effect on the city. Darkblood architecture has weatherproofing and flood immunity as a subconscious constant. The city is largely vertical: a labyrinth of stairs, of bridges suspended hundreds of feet above solid ground, of ladders and blind alleys. Storm drains are built nearly invisibly into the bottom of any place that the near-perpetual tempest could soak. Seeing as most Darkblood never leave their isolated obsidian metropolis, they gather their supply of potable water directly with rain collectors. The mountain provides them nothing but stone and filthy snow. There are no underground reservoirs for them to tap.Valik sits atop the hundred-foot-high wooden gate which serves as Falguard’s only entrance. The Dreadwatch never addresses it as such. They call it simply “the chokepoint”, reflecting their attitudes and expectations regarding the people who might come knocking.
His axe is embedded diagonally into a roof tile beside him as he watches the downpour batter the winding dirt path up the mountain’s face. He had sat this unelected watch nearly every day after returning to Falguard, following the Darkblood pilgrimage to the Rift. He swings his hooven legs up to recline them across the drenched wooden panels, laying his head back and allowing the rain to soak his face directly. He only straightens out his incredibly casual position, sitting precariously atop wet roof tiles that slope down to an apparently unsurvivable drop, when a flash of lightning and the whipcrack of a thunderbolt call his attention to a cloaked figure struggling up the path against the forces of the elements which conspire to send them tumbling violently to the foot of the mountain given just a moment of poor footing. Valik doesn’t judge them. Wearing a cloak in this weather makes perfectly decent sense. The next time a flash illuminates them, he can see that their hooded robe is an especially rich shade of emerald green, made pine green by the saturation of rainwater. As he impartially waits and watches them approach, Valik hums to himself atop his perch. He doesn’t intend to sing, but humming the rhythm takes the words out of his lips without him even intending to.“There’s a place where I am the heroooo~”

As the stranger approaches the gate Valik can see numerous pale cotton ribbons trailing from their lapels and beltline, as well as an hourglass the size of a log strapped to their hip with leather. He can’t make out fine details, but the hourglass appears to be incredibly ornate, made from high-karat gold and full of blue sand which neither increases or decreases in the amount of light it reflects, despite the constant flickering of lightning.“There’s a world in my fantasyyyy~”The stranger is close enough for him to confidently assert from the manner of their gait that they aren’t a Darkblood. The movement beneath the verdant robe is too fluid and involves too much moving of the hips, the dead giveaway that the stranger didn’t belong to the city.“I can take you if you want to goooo,”The stranger stops in front of the city’s gates, clutching their robes and struggling to hold them closed against the lashing of the wind and rain.
“Follow meeee,” Valik holds the lyric with a tender fondness as he pulls his axe from the roof above the gate where he has it perched, and leaps down to the muddy dirt road beneath. Despite the bulk of his armor, its many assorted points, the axe he’s clutching the size of his torso and all logic speaking to the contrary, he isn’t simply killed instantly when he lands. As he lands on the outside of the closed gate, among the splash of dirt and mud he sends out are spraying jets of golden light and billows of divine fog.“Who are you? You haven’t come this far out of your way for shelter from the weather, so what do you want here?” Valik curtly demands.
“Relax, relax! I’m a friend of Madra’s, I don’t mean Falguard any harm. Can I come in?”
“Really? A human friend of Madra’s?”
“I’m not human. Not…exactly.”
“You aren’t Darkblood,” Valik quite bluntly states.
“No.”
Valik, satisfied at least that he didn’t have any probable cause to harass the entrant, turns to the enormous gates. He approaches them, places his hand on the handle and grips it until a surge of holy golden light surges from the rune engraved on the back of his gauntlet. With a grunt of strain, he forces one of the doors to the city to begin to swing open, creaking with the menace of a monster’s jaw, ready to snap closed and trap its prey inside.

“Aren’t you going to ask what I am?” The stranger asks.
“It doesn’t matter. You aren’t Darkblood. You can come in, but watch yourself, the eyes of the Dreadwatch can see in the dark,” he says in the low and cutting tone of a deliberately spoken warning.
“Oh, scary. Cryptic! Actually, if you aren’t doing anything else, would you mind walking with me? You look like the kind of guy who knows exactly where to find a weapon store.”
“A friend of Madra’s, but you don’t know the way around town?” Valik snorts.
“Do you really have anything more important to be doing? The entire time I was climbing up here, I’m pretty sure you were just sat above the gate.”
“Keeping watch, being vigilant. Chaos might once again rear its hideous head, and we’ll drive it back into submission if it shows up at our door. I’ll be ready when it does.”
“I’m sure Chaos won’t turn up in the ten minutes that it takes to walk there,” the stranger says with a snicker, “and if it does, one single person sitting above the gate won’t make a world of a difference. Besides, I think I’d like to talk to you.”Valik’s eyes dart around and he raises a hand to his chin. “I suppose nobody asked me to…alright, I have time for you, fine. Let’s go, outsider. I’ll take you to Ralstis’s shop, Falguard Weapons. It’s where I got this fine piece made,” he says, slinging his axe’s weight onto the narrow valley of exposed, hardened skin between the thick stump of his neck and the weight of his pauldron.His beautifully ornate double-bladed axe is made from a unique composite material of obsidian bonded with trace amounts of Rotstone, a sickening and maddening gem-like substance which is pulled from the depths of the Death Pits. It features prominent, pyramid-shaped spikes along its two rounded blades. The haft and the inside area of the head, everything except the blade’s edge and the rod of the handle, is gilded with the purest form of gold. A single rune glints with otherworldly incandescence at the center of the immaculate, waxed haft.“It looks…familiar,” the cloaked stranger says ponderously.
“Does it now? That would make sense if you were human, but you aren’t,” Valik responds.His burdensome armor clatters quite loudly with every hoofstep against the rain-slicked stone slab streets. The outsider walks so lightly that Valik can’t even hear them over his own noise.

“Is that a spirit orb following you?” They ask. Having grown so accustomed to its presence that it had faded into the background, Valik makes a sound of mild surprise when its brought to the forefront of his thoughts.
“Oh, that? I suppose it is. If I’m honest, it took to following me quite a long time ago. I have no idea why, but it seems like it’s always by my side now. I don’t question it too much any more, I’ve figured out that there isn’t an easy explanation for it. I don’t know who it was, or even when it came with me.”Thunder cracks in the distance. As the reverberations settle, several flashes of bright light flare across the dark stone city. The rain feels cool and crisp against the exposed skin of Valik’s chest. Despite the weight of his pauldrons, greaves and gauntlets, he couldn’t break from the Darkblood tradition of questionably practical torso armor. His abs and pectorals are exposed, although his sides, shoulders and back are all properly protected. The stranger appears to take the downpour with a less revelrous attitude, shrinking in posture and pulling the cloak closed tighter.Guided by Valik, the pair stride through the gates and up the stairs beyond, upward into a plateau common area. They’re directly opposite an imposing, multi-story manor which, in a time now gone, had once housed the Primarch of the city. Its windows are dark and chains wrap the door handles, holding them firmly closed with a padlock the size of a human helmet.
They ascend a set of stairs to the right of the Primarch’s domain with the width to accommodate a dozen Darkblood shoulder to shoulder. They walk in relative silence with Valik in the lead, only rarely having to shoulder through a crowd of people.
He savors the feeling of walking in full regalia, of feeling the absurd heft of his noble weapon borne on his broad, almost ox-like shoulders. The irrepressible rippling of metallic layers with his every step is a thing of a pride to him. To the living, to the Darkblood, to the ones who recognize it, it’s a clarion signalling security. To the undead and to unwelcome intruders in the city, it’s a harrowing and violently intense deathknell.

As they pass the stairway and wrought iron street sign signalling the path higher up the mountain, to the Storm Temple at its summit, Valik turns to the cloaked non-human and asks rather brusquely and suddenly:
“You said you’re a friend of Madra. I won’t fight you on that front, but I do want to know what you’re doing here. You never said why you actually came to the city.”
“I’m here to collect and pay for an order from the weapons shop.”
“Do you know Ralstis?”
“Only a cursory amount. I met him while I was helping fight the Chaonslaught out of the city,” the stranger explains in an off-the-cuff and casual tone.
“You were here for that?! How can that be?” Valik asks with a gasp, “you aren’t Darkblood and you aren’t human--or at least, you said you aren’t. Were you one of Lionfang’s boys, did you turn turncoat when he went Chaotic?”
“No. I was hot on his heels when the Onslaught stormed the city. I chased him here and helped the Dreadwatch force him out.”
“Well I’ll be! I’m glad I didn’t turn you away at the gate, then.”
“Do you have the authority to do that?”
“My axe is my authority,” Valik says with an amusedly derisive snort.
“So you don’t, then?”
“I keep the city safe. They don’t ask the how’s or why’s. I do a good job, and the people are happy with it.”
“What about you? Do you know Ralstis?”Valik nods, shifting the way his axe is resting on his collarbone, calling attention to both the horned skull pauldrons on his shoulders and the elaborate design of the obsidian double-headed war axe.“He forged my gear for me when I came back from the Rift. It was a custom commission. I was exceptionally demanding.”
The stranger pricks a fingertip on the needle-sharp tip of one of the horns, leaving a small circle of red on it.
“Ouch! Wow, I was expecting it to be a lot more square than that.”
“I would’ve warned you if you asked,” Valik says with a snort, “every part of my armor is just as much of a weapon as my axe is.”
“Just don’t do a running tackle into me and we’ll be fine,” the cloaked stranger laughs back.
“Probably won’t have to. Don’t make me want to,” Valik only half-way jokes.They round a corner, passing a house where a Darkblood can be seen working out in a heavy-looking set of shoulder armor on the second floor balcony, apparently unbothered by the rain, and finally ascend a set of steps. At the top, they find themselves standing on a flat bridge without railings on either side. The Falguard library stands to their left, the only building on its particular plateau. A wooden shop sign is clattering violently in the wind, a glowing white symbol of an open tome clearly demarcating its purpose. When the cloaked stranger lingers to stare at it for a moment too long, Valik’s curiosity is attracted.

“That’s the city library. It’s a skeleton of what it used to be. We had to--” Valik begins to explain.
“Burn your history to keep Chaos Lord Lionfang from discovering the Tears of the Mother,” the stranger finishes.
“How do you know about that? That’s far from common knowledge,” Valik says, shocked.
“I was there. If it’s so far from common knowledge, does that mean you were there too?”
“No. During the attack, I was with the Dreadwatch on the ramparts. I noticed that about half of the contents of the library were destroyed when I came back to it after the attack. Some of it, I was only part way through reading.”
“Hah. Sorry.”
“It had to be done,” Valik says with a shrug, causing his pauldrons and layers of armor to rattle. “I’m hardly the one who suffered the most from it.”The two carry on to the right, away from the library and up another set of stairs. The hooded stranger doubles over and stops walking halfway up it, squeezing their knees and taking long, deep breaths in.“Sheesh, slow down for a second…you Darkblood are insane with your stairs. How often do you guys slip down these when it rains?” The stranger squeezes out between huffs and puffs.
“Less often than you’d think, but more than never,” Valik chuckles, “we always get a good laugh watching human visitors starfish down the stairs with all of the grace of a falling armor display.”
“So much climbing with air so thin…”
“Darkblood have strong hearts, you’ll come to find,” Valik says with a rakish grin.A passing Darkblood couple join in some joint laughter at the stranger’s expense, remarking something to themselves about humans and the fragility of mages. Valik keeps his arm crossed and watches them pass, expressionless. He neither encourages nor discourages them, and when the stranger starts to move again, he finally speaks.
“You’ve committed an act of incredible strength just by climbing this mountain,” he says in the impartial, impersonal tone of a judge repeating back a fact stated to him. “Nobody expects you to climb a mountain, feeling nothing. They want a chance to talk, so they’ll talk, and they might talk until their tongues rot halfway up the mountain. You won’t hear them at the peak anymore.”
The stranger huffs and puffs a bit more, but Valik’s speech seems to have delivered an injection of needed energy into their bloodstream.As they ascend past the last plateau and up the final stairway to reach Ralstis’s weapon shop, Valik starts to fiddle with his loose, indignantly rain-soaked dreadlocks. He tosses them around, as if shaking off like a dog will do any good while he’s still being actively rained on. He tries to wring them out onto the sidewalk as they approach, then to pull them all into a smoothed-out ponytail. As they approach the door, he produces a small cloth to wipe the dirt from his face with.
“Oh, you’re coming in too?” The stranger slowly and tentatively asks.
“Oh, yeah, I was thinking I would, just since I know the man--I mean, the guy, the…I know the person who runs this place. We fought together in the liberation against the Chaonslaught. You don’t mind me coming in, though, do you?”
“Well, no,” the stranger continues to drag their speech, “I just wasn’t expecting you to be coming in behind me. It’s just a bit odd, that’s all.”
“Oh, I understand, should I--?” Valik to starts to ask.
“Nevermind. Let’s not do this, just come in,” the cloaked person says with a small chuckle. “I don’t care that much.”

As the two step inside, Valik is suddenly possessed by the spirit of a lock-step marching soldier, or at least his abruptly at-attention posture gives the impression that he was. He slips two gold piercing rings into nearly-invisible holes near the tip of his right horn, which he hadn’t been wearing while watching the gate or walking.
An iron bell hung above the door drones with all of the force of a church bell as they enter, causing the stranger to recoil in slight surprise. Valik manages to keep a more stoic face about it.Ralstis, the shop’s owner, stands opposite the door, slouched over and hammering at a blazing orange-and-white heated metal chunk on his anvil. He grumbles dismissively when the pair enter, but when he looks up he’s struck instantly with an expression of shock.
“I’ll be with you in a--oh, damn! Well I’ll be!”Valik opens his mouth to speak, but only a series of stammering, unrelated syllables fall out. “Ralsty--Ral! Crap, Ralstis! Hey’lo--hello! You met? Have you?”Valik points back and forth between the store owner and the green-garbed stranger. Though he can’t see the stranger’s face, he can see Ralstis’s, and it would be most charitably described as “perplexed”, at worst, “cringing.” Without seeing it, he’s sure the stranger looks the same beneath the hood’s shadows.
“Right. Okay, anyway,” Ralstis says with a harsh clear of his throat and a tone of second-hand embarrassment, “I have your commission complete.”
“Amazing. Thank you again for doing this for me.”
“Hah! It was light work. The amount you’re paying me to do this, I could probably afford to shut shop and retire in Lolosia.”
“But--but you won’t, right?” Valik blurts out. “Err--who would fix my armor, if not you?”
“I dunno,” Ralstis shrugs indifferently, “the next chump to open a smithy here. But that said, no, I won’t. I’m spending this money at the tavern and on finishing my tattoos.”Valik’s eyes shoot open wide when the stranger reveals a messenger bag carried beneath their disguise. Opening it, they start to produce bundles and bundles of paper, banded together.
“Five-hundred thousand, one million, one point five million, two million, two point five,” the stranger counts as they toss rectangular pieces of paper onto Ralstis’s counter. Valik doesn’t have to look closely, or think very hard, to deduce that they’re gold vouchers. Gold vouchers were a convenient and customary way to handle transactions involving millions of gold, and millions this sale did involve. The stranger discards seven and a half million gold worth of paper with the easy flick of the wrist with which a person discards refuse.

Valik hadn’t even realized his jaw was slacking open until the stranger started to laugh.“Oh, Ralstis, with this much money, you could get a gold cap for that cute broken horn like I kept telling you to!”
“For that what..?”
“For that broken horn, like I kept telling you.”A momentary silence hangs over the room.It agonizes Valik, but it seems to drag ever on and on.He prays that someone will say something, but the stranger and Ralstis are both just staring at him. He feels a manic fluttering in his stomach from having the enormous Darkblood man’s ghost-eye eyes staring into him like a mining drill.He fights to maintain his poker face.He feels his face becoming red, or perhaps draining of all color and becoming totally pale. He can’t tell which, but he’s certain that it’s happening.The silence continues. The eyes on his face only make it worse. They know. He knows they know. The three were all sharing the same, exact thoughts, though probably in different words.Unable to bear the stillness in the room any longer, Valik decides that, against all logic, reason and intuition, that continuing to speak is his only option now.“So, Ralstis, what were you working on before we came in?”
“Are you really asking, or do you just want to change the topic?”
“Oh, come--come on! Nonsense!” Valik blurts back in perhaps the least convincing tone of fake offence ever attempted.
“Uh-huh. Well, since you really want to know, the Dreadwatch wanted another batch of axes. Turns out their old head-choppers are starting to degrade and break at the haft, rather than the blade. Seeing good use, I say.”
“Yeesh. Dark,” the stranger winces.
“We’ve been dealing with tribalists trying to break up the city,” Ralstis spits on the floor, as though he were spitting on the people he was talking about, “they want to dissolve Falguard, see it sectioned and quartered up to the tribes that formed it. They want control over the death pits and to see us eternally at war with ourselves. They sprang up after some human heroes chased Chaos Lord Lionfang out of the city. Some Darkblood were offended we accepted human help, to fight humanity. They claim we sold our soul to the…”unshapen”. At best, they could be described as savages. At worst, as Kolyaban’s last living acolytes. Their language is shameless.”
Valik is silent, because this doesn’t come as any surprise to him, but the stranger seems to be taken momentarily aback by this.
“Really? How hadn’t I heard about this?” The stranger asks.
Ralstis guffaws boisterously in reply. “Don’t you see the irony in that question? We don’t need you. We’ve been burying their skulls en masse. Begging an outsider to help would only prove to them that they’re right--and they aren’t. The city is stronger and more organized than the people who’d try to pull it apart.”

Valik lets out a dreamy sigh, cupping his cheek in the hand not holding his axe. He makes an effort to hide his swooning, but it fails spectacularly. Discretion is the better part of valor, but it is not the better part of Valik.“Well, I can’t say I’ve ever seen someone react that way to talk about burying skulls,” the stranger deadpans.
Ralstis approaches the counter, carrying the half-shapen blazing metal rod in a pair of tongs. He gathers the unfathomable wealth in the form of vouchers, stuffing them into some sort of pocket or pouch among the many, many layers of his leg armor.
“You’re actually here to pay a bit earlier than I thought you’d be. Madra and Stormking Boros have it up at the Storm Temple for the very last touches. I’m sure they’ll bring it down at any time, but if you want it tonight, you’ll have to climb to the very summit.”
“Thank you, Ralstis. I appreciate this all. Have a good night,” the stranger says, tipping their cowl as though it were a hat.
They walk past Valik and open the door, causing the ominously deep bell to sound again.
Valik raises a hand to wave a goofy, grinning goodbye to Ralstis, displaying his axe quite prominently on his shoulder. Too prominently, in fact, as it strikes the doorframe on the way out. Valik tumbles backwards gracelessly and the metal continues to comedically vibrate. He lays on the ground in front of the weapon shop’s doorway like a starfish until the door swings closed and smacks him on the top of the head.
“Well, I’m going to be thinking of that conversation randomly when I’m trying to sleep for years,” he grumbles.The stranger extends a hand down to him. He can’t feel anything through his gauntlets, but even still, the feeling isn’t quite right for metal on skin contact. Nevertheless, they help him to his fee--hooves.
“Don’t suppose that you could show me the way to the top of the mountain, could you?”
“Up,” Valik snorts back curtly.
“Not as help as you think,” they protest, “besides, I was hoping we could keep talking. There are some things about you that I’m curious about.”
“Alright, well, I'll relent. I have to admit, I’m curious about you too. I’ve never seen a visitor quite like you. Well, not since--“ Valik stops himself, clears his throat and continues, “not in quite a few years.”
“My friends kept me busy,” the stranger says with a laugh that suggests a joke only they understand, before they jolt to attention again. “Wait! Isn’t the path to the mountain top just off of the city center?”
“You’re right,” Valik notes with a nod as he leads them deeper into the city, away from the entrance and the Primarch’s former residence, “but I’ll show you a way to get further up without backtracking.”

As they reach the plateau where the armory and tavern are established, opposite a row of homes, the stranger raises their voice in confusion.
“Why are we over here? This street is a dead end, we can’t get any higher from here.”
“So says you,” Valik says with a shark’s toothy grin, approaching a length of fence connecting the walls of the two businesses.From a distance, the fence appears to be surrounding a dead drop and a few feet back, three windows overlooking the gap from the inn’s wall contribute to that impression. Valik has a leg up on the railing, just about to hop over it into the presumed chasm behind when the stranger yells for him to stop.
“Wait! Wait, we can’t go that way!”
“Why not?”
“There’s no gold arrow,” the stranger says, pointing to the ground.
“I’m sorry…what?” Valik asks, incredulously lifting an eyebrow.
“Well, I can only go somewhere if there’s a gold arrow on the ground indicating I can! I can’t just go climbing over fences, taking shortcuts and--”
“Stop! Wait, rewind, what was that about gold arrows?!” Valik gasps.
“I said I can’t go that way! There has to be a gold arrow there.”He and the stranger stand in an awkward, stunned silence, with his heavily armored leg half-way over the railing. Eventually, Valik takes a deep breath and pulls his leg back to a proper standing position. Not without a grunt of incredible labor and the loud clatter of metal, stone and chain.“How many more of those enormous vouchers do you have on you, exactly? It looked like you barely even dented the amount you were carrying.”
“I have 285 more.”
“YOU HAVE WHAT?!” Valik gasps. “That’s--”
“Fourteen million, two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand gold. Well, that’s not counting the other vouchers, or the actual gold gold I’m carrying.”

Valik gapes at the stranger, staggered. “So, what are you, some sort of counterfeiter?”
“You can’t counterfeit gold,” the stranger snickers back.
“Then you have to have a philosopher’s stone tucked away somewhere! Out with it, then, what’s the secret?”
“I’ll leave it at this: you wouldn’t even believe me if I told you.”
Valik shakes his head. “Fine, I won’t pry. Give me just a single one of those vouchers.”
“What for?”
“Does it even matter?” Valik snorts derisively.
The stranger shrugs. “Not really. Here. It’s only one.”Valik takes the voucher and sprints away into the armor shop, running the fastest that the stranger had even seen a tank with hooves run.Time passes and the stranger grows bored, tapping their foot and humming to themselves while they wait for him to return.
An unspecified amount of time later and a wipe transition later, Valik returns with his axe strapped to his back, carrying an enormous and quite apparently heavy package, covered in a pale leather sack.
“What is that? That’s some odd miscellaneous item.”
“I got your damn gold arrow,” Valik curses as he approaches the fence again, “I converted one of your vouchers to gold, then had Saluk mold it into a spearhead and reshape it just a bit. In fact, I owe you about four-hundred-and-ninety-nine thousand, two-hundred-and-twenty-one gold in change, but I left that with Saluk because even I’m not strong enough to carry that amount of raw mass at once.”Valik whips the bag off in a fast, sharp gesture, then drops the enormous, solid-gold arrow onto the stone, attracting the curious and shocked attention of passing Darkblood pedestrians. Some of them mutter unrepeatable words.
With the arrow on the ground, Valik vaults the fence as though he was jumping over cover into a warzone. When he lands, the weight of his armor, his axe and his body create a small, circular crater in the stonework.
“No excuses! Get down here!” He cries up behind himself.
The stranger lands next to him, limp like a thrown doll.Turning around, Valik looks at the wooden ladder on the wall behind the two of them.
“You know, you didn’t have to jump, there’s a ladder.”
“You could’ve told me that before you jumped yourself,” the stranger grunts as they come to their feet, dusting themself off, “I thought that was the only way down.”
“I literally weigh more than most anvils do,” Valik laughs, “that ladder is made of wood. You’re just wearing cloth. If I tried to climb it, I would’ve crumbled it like a sapling.”
“Well--it doesn’t matter now, my back is already probably injured, just show me where you’re taking us.”Valik laughs as the pair start to walk again. The groove that they had jumped, instead of climbed, down into was actually another road which runs perpendicular to, and underneath, the one they came from. A short walk through an underpass tunnel lit with torchlight leads them out into an open surface of mountain road. They can see the entire way to the peak of the mountain, although the path to reach it requires travelling back and forth between the various plateaus. While most of it is packed, smooth dirt, there are some precariously rocky natural stairs they’ll have to climb to reach the true summit.
The stranger lets out a pitiful whine as they see how far away the peak is. Valik finds some amusement in their dismay.

“Are you kidding me?!”
“Are you kidding me? You spend not just a king’s ransom but a kingdom’s treasury quicker than you would climb a mile?”
“Another MILE?!”Valik and the stranger share some laughter as they step to the side of the walkway. The stranger sits on the edge of the mountain path to rest their legs and gather their strength. As Valik drops into a squat beside him, balancing a part of his weight on his axe, the stranger regards the spirit orb drifting behind him.“Well, just from the armor alone I wouldn’t have guessed you to be much of a holy sort, but between the gold trimming, the spirit orb, the symbol on your gauntlet and the haft of your axe, and well--the rest of your axe, too, I need to ask: are you a paladin?”
Valik shrugs, a soft half-smile cracking his features. “Formally, no. I’ve always had a glitter of gold to my magic, even my curses seem to sparkle with spirit orbs, but I’m no paladin.”
“Then I need to know more than anything: why does your axe look just like Artix’s? It looks just like the Blinding Light of Destiny. I never would’ve expected to see a weapon like that in the hands of a Darkblood. Don’t you all prefer storms, ice and dark magic to light and destiny?”
Valik laughs. “Do we? Hah. Funny, that!”
“Well, why do you have a replica of Artix’s axe?”
“Well, if you really are asking, I’d be happy to tell you. I’ll start just as soon as you start walking again,” he says with a pointy-toothed grin.
“You malicious caprine jerk!” The stranger chastises him. He laughs uproariously in return.
“Well, let’s get going, right? I don’t want to keep you in suspense.”The stranger grunts and groans, but comes to their feet and starts to walk again.“I call it the Brutal Light of the Darkblood,” Valik says with a proud smirk. “I commissioned it and I specially designed it so that it would always remind me of what matters to me. I served some time in Lightguard Keep, and I trained with the young human knights. The sad fact of the matter was that they wouldn’t accept me as one of them. I was allowed to reach the finish line, but not to break the proverbial tape. Still, I can’t be mad. It’s for that reason that I didn’t settle, that I kept moving. I wasn’t allowed to get comfortable until my journey took me where it had to. In that way, I suppose I thank the paladin order. They kept me from getting complacent.”
The stranger thinks for a moment before speaking. “You know, I’ve never seen a Darkblood quite like you. You have the armored, righteous way of a paladin, but those skulls on your shoulders send a different message. You’re not quite holy, but not quite evil. You seem to exist in the liminal space somewhere in between, like a twilight.”
Valik snorts proudly in reply. “I’ve gone beyond your good and evil. I’ve defined my own.”
“You’re a strange one, Valik. What does that mean?”
“That you think I’m not a righteous and holy paladin, only tells me that you and I have different ideas of righteousness and holiness.”As the two start to round a bend, Valik reaches out a cupped hand. His accompanying spirit orb drifts into it, where it perches and rests like a trained bird.

“To other paladins, this is the source of their power. Other spirits, other tenets, other doctrines, other light. My power is different,” Valik says, releasing the spirit orb from his hand and guiding it to the stranger’s shoulder. With a gentle but firm grasp, he turns them to look behind, at the city of Falguard behind and beneath them.It rises before them like a forest of stone-brick trees, bearing a canopy of Burgundy and Matterhorn roofs. The oblivion-black silhouettes of bridges connect the isolated skyscrapers like horizontal branches.
“This, is the real source of my power.” He explains with a sweeping gesture of his arm. “My light has always been different. I could always channel the ‘holy’ light without ever having whispered a prayer in my life. When I was young, I used to wonder why everyone else struggled with the dark. They carried candles, oil lamps and magical lights, and I didn’t understand why. I could see so clearly in the dark, and I could snap my fingers to flood a room with light. I thought everyone else could.”
Valik snorts in some apparent self-mockery.
“Looking at them now, I understand. Look closer, stranger.”Doing as Valik instructs, the stranger clutches their hood and leans a bit further forward, straining to see the city. When he does, he sees tiny pinpricks of light in the distance: light peeking through open windows, silhouettes crossing the suspended bridges while clutching covered candles, and the intermittently placed streetlamp which gives off a radial glow not too different from the spirit orb.“I realized while I was out there, wandering Lore, what I thought was pursuing myself—they’re the source of my light, and my hope. It’s the spirit of Falguard that I draw my strength from. It isn’t borrowed power, it’s mine by right. Every one of their lights, clutched, cradled and concealed to protect its fire from the storm that never ends. We carry open flames through rainstorms so casually. That is what’s holy to me. I would go so far as to say, it’s the lights of the city’s skyline that I draw my powers from, not spirit orbs.”The stranger is silent, but a peculiar trilling chime emanates from the golden spirit orb.“I’ve always wondered whose spirit that is. I’ve used that same orb for so many different spells, but unlike every other spirit orb, it sticks around after.” Valik pauses thoughtfully. “In fact, where do any of them go? Are they consumed by my magic? If so, then why not this one?”Thunder cracks. Flares of lightning shower the sky in sparks. They are nearing the mountain’s summit. With the peak drawing nearer in view, the stranger seems to strike a second wind, because their posture straightens and breathing becomes much less labored.
The summit doesn’t feature a plateau of any kind. There are no structures or constructs to adorn it. From this position, all of Lore and even the clouds themselves were below them. Above them, the night sky is a deep and rich Lapis Lazuli, streaked with the thin bands of white clouds that could manage to hold themselves above even this peak. The air is thin and a gale howls like a malevolent monkey as it attempts to push them by force from the heights. Neither the stranger nor Valik are budged. Valik knows that he isn’t moved because of the sheer weight of his armor and weapon. What he’s less certain of is how the stranger, dressed only in travelling clothes and a robe, is so resistant to these extreme environmental conditions. While the Darkblood had adapted, evolved and selectively bred for the traits which would enable them to survive this even since their inception, the not-quite-human stranger was curiously unflappable. Humans almost never withstood reaching the true peak of Thunderforge without nearly fainting.

Madra stands at the peak like a flagpole erected by much stronger climbers than either of them. As they ascend toward her, she turns to see them.
“You’re here! Thank fate!” She cries, as she might’ve once cried “thank the Mother!”
“Hello, Madra,” the stranger coos warmly.
“It’s good to see you again. I’m surprised to see that someone joined you,” she says, turning her cold purple stare to Valik. He smiles back at her. “Valik. Ordinarily I’d ask you whether you were badgering this guest of ours, but right now I’m glad to see you, actually.”
“What do you mean actually!?” Valik cries out.
“Stormking Boros was attempting to create a relic for this outsider, with my supervision, when we were set on by some of those freak-maker wizards,” she curses so harshly that she spits slightly. “They must’ve just made some sort of new horrorshow on two pairs of bat wings. They kidnapped Boros, and he had the storm bolt with him!”The stranger rolls their eyes beneath their cowl, throws their shoulders back and lets out a begrudged groan that lasts for an entire twelve seconds. Considering the thinness of the air up here, Valik laughs until he snorts out of pure awe. It’s then that the stranger turns to look at him.“I’ll go get it back, but I want Valik to come with me.”
“Valik?” Madra repeats.
“I don’t appreciate what you’re implying there, Madra!” Valik objects.
“Quiet, you,” she cuts back curtly.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, ducking his head and shrinking in posture like a scolded housepet.
“Now, if you’re going to get them back, there’s something I need to discuss with you first,” Madra returns to addressing the stranger. “Considering they stole a relic that was meant to be yours, I won’t object to you fighting to get it back, but I want to ask something of you: I only want you to do whatever is necessary to get the storm bolt back. I don’t want you to do anything else, just get it and leave the city as quickly as you possibly can. Can you do that for me?”
“I can, but who did you say did this?” The stranger asks.
“Valik, can you go with them and help them get around the city? While you’re walking, you can explain what’s been going on in the city. My guest here hasn’t seen Falguard since Lionfang fell. I have to amass the Dreadwatch to prepare to descend into the undercity. Rest assured, we will recover that storm bolt.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Valik obediently whimpers back at Madra, earning a laugh from the hooded stranger.
“I’m certain that there’s another timeline out there where I waited three hours to come back and just bought it in a totally standard transaction,” the stranger groans, “why did I get stuck in this one?”
Valik laughs at them this time, “come on, then. We have to start climbing down.”

* *The three descend toward the city, with Madra quickly diverging from the path that Valik leads the stranger down, taking a path around the mountain that leads downward into a much further part of the city.“So, were those people that Madra was talking about the same ones that Ralstis told me about?” The hooded stranger asks.
“Yeah, it would seem so. They like to menace the city but the coordination of the Dreadwatch means they only really get away with it by blending in, something that must be getting increasingly harder for them. They must not be able to drag people off the street anymore if they’re sending some…” Valik pauses, stammering as he attempts to find the right word, “some sort of freak dive bomber to kidnap Stormking Boros.”
“What do you think they want with him?”
“If I had to guess, they just want to use him as a magical battery, or maybe to hamstring our leadership. Either way, doing it in front of Madra’s face was probably the worst mistake they could’ve made.”
“Why did Madra ask that favor of me?” The stranger asks.
“I think that what she means is, don’t get involved with fighting the tribalists. It’s our city, our civil war, our home and our people. They believe that Falguard is weak, that us even tolerating the existence of humanity is a spineless betrayal of who we are. They confuse who we were, with who we are. The Mother is dead. Lionfang is dead. Kolyaban is dead. The Alliance has left our city. They can’t let go, so we’ll break their fingers. If we use outside intervention to defeat them, it would ultimately prove them right.”
“But what’s so wrong with that? You should welcome the outside world, be part of it again.”
Valik shakes his head. “What’s wrong with it is they aren’t right. The Darkblood have existed in unendurable conditions since our inception, and we outnumber the secessionists three to one. They have their anger, their disorder, their bone spears, hides and pelts. We have structure. We are coordinated. They underestimate us because we refused to fight a losing battle. They consider that the hallmark of weakness, not the ultimate demonstration of strength.”
“Well, let’s get that relic back quick, before they try to do something with it.”
“Actually, stranger, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. What could you have possibly commissioned that would’ve required Stormking Boros to come to the summit with Madra? You were commissioning something from Ralstis for a price like Falguard’s entire treasury, so at first I assumed it was an enormous shipment of Darkblood weapons you were after.”
“Actually, no. Nothing of the sort. Ralstis forged a vessel for me out of Rotstone, so I had to pay out the nose just to get him to handle the stuff. To give you just a little background, I’m not sure exactly how much you know, but during Lionfang’s occupation of the city he—“
“Erected a temple at the peak. I saw it.”
“Oh, that makes this easier then. He blended chaos magic into the clouds and used that to puppeteer them into form. After his Chaos magic faded, there was still the power of the denatured mana lingering inside the clouds like glue residue. Stormking Boros was supposed to condense the energy of the storm temple into a holdable format for me.”
“What do you want with an enormous battery of denatured mana?” Valik asks almost indifferently.
“I need it to save the humans and the elves of—“
“Then I don’t care.”
“What?!” The stranger gasps.
“I don’t care what you want it for. I couldn’t give one less damn about why you’re doing it, then.”
“Wait, what? Will you still help me get it back?”
“Of course,” Valik snorts derisively, “you got stolen from and one of our spiritual leaders got robbed, not just in broad daylight, but at the peak of our mountain. What you do with that relic doesn’t matter to me anymore, what matters is that we take a swing back at the tribalistic freaks.”
“Well, I wasn’t planning to spend long in the city. We should hurry. Besides, even a pretty awful mage could figure out how to use a relic like that for destructive ends.”
“Got it. Let’s double-time it down the mountain and I’ll show you the quickest way to the part of the city they blasted.”
“Blasted?”
“You’ll see.”

* *Valik and the stranger eventually make it back down the mountain’s path, much quicker than they made it up. Neither of them need even a short break the entire walk back down, although they share one once they’re finally back on Falguard’s stone brick streets. After a moment to ease their muscles, but not long enough to get comfortable and thereby let the strain set in. The armored Darkblood guides the cloaked something-or-other, who has taken to following him autonomously.“There’s no way to ask this that doesn’t sound bad, but what do you actually think about humans? Are you just going to chuff and say, ‘hurr, I don’t think about humans’? Because if so, not very original. With an axe like yours, I have a lot of questions.”
“Hah! Good one, but no, I wasn’t going to say that. If you want the honest truth, I’ve met too many good humans to keep a tab of the ones I didn’t like. Lionfang was the first human that a majority of us had ever seen. Grudges were made, pain was latched onto. Even after Lionfang, the Darkblood were never treated especially sympathetically by humanity. With that being said, I remember fighting alongside human volunteers from the Alliance, all trying to push the Chaonslaught out. There was a sort of unity there, one that I hope doesn’t have to be lost because we aren’t in mortal danger anymore. There was one, I believe his name was Guthan--I can still remember his face, although I can’t even remember how I met him. There were others, too. Even I of all people have my idols among the humans.”Valik smiles warmly. A fond memory comes to him, and then another, and another. He thinks of the way humanity rushed to their defense--their defense, from humanity. While Valik would never praise a person for curing an ailment they caused, he didn’t fault the whole of humanity for Lionfang’s existence. He didn’t represent the majority, as was so aptly demonstrated to him by the champions of humanity. After that, his mind swims to the human singer whose voice raptured him and cloaked him in cool clouds, who he had met in a valley of music, of honey and of exquisite gemstones.“Does that explain the tattoo on your pec?” the stranger asks,
“Hah. Yes, it does. I’m surprised you could recognize it.”A tattoo is prominently visible on his right pec, a heart with an eye at its center and a set of feathery wings flaring from it. From the cleft of the heart, between the wings, a wispy trail of fire leads up and away. The bottom of the heart continues into a stylized curled tail, like the loop of a lowercase g.“What is that in tribute to, specifically?”
“The woman who taught me that destiny is anywhere, and anyone I choose to be. After having been rejected by Lightguard, and not finding a place for myself in Darkovia, she told me what I needed to hear most of all. She taught me that I’m a beautiful freak.”
“I think that I understand who you mean.”
“You do? Well, I’m frankly impressed!” Valik blurts out, making no effort to conceal his genuine shock.
“Eye was there, too.”

Valik stops walking, slamming to a halt and causing the stranger to thoughtlessly stumble into his back.“Wait, really?!”
“She once pulled me up on stage because I helped her get a song out of her head,” the hooded stranger laughs as though at their own wordplay.
“That’s—that’s incredible! That’s amazing! Oh, once this adventure is over, you and I absolutely have to trade stories! I won’t let you leave Falguard until you do.”
“…kidnapping?” The stranger quite reasonably labels it.
“Yep!” Valik boisterously agrees, “you can’t just drop a tidbit like that and expect to get away with it, you criminal! I’ll arrest you and interrogate you until you confess if I have to!”He starts walking again, the stranger in tow. They share in some reverent, joyous laughter. They pass through a street densely packed on both sides with thick-walled Khrushchevkas with the same, faint twinges of purple and orange in its dark, gothic architecture. This quarter of the city is one that the stranger looked quite uncomfortable with. They had likely never seen it before, and the density combined with the smoggy air had a tendency to make outsiders claustrophobic. The covered candles used to light the lower levels give it a suffocating twilight haze, regardless of the time of day.
Clothes hang on clotheslines across the gap of the street, which wave in a wind they feel much more violently than the passersby below feel. Their shadows are wailing, thrashing ghosts in the storm.
The pair descend deeper and deeper into the intestinal tract of the city, past more hooked fences and the shadows of balconies above. Voices echo down from above like discarded refuse falling into a canyon, adding an unsettling, omnipresent whisper to their walk. Valik takes the whispers, the twilight haze and the cramped spaces in stride, walking with a bold and unabashed jauntiness. The stranger, on the other hand, starts to step closer to him with a shifty look in the electric-blue eyes visible beneath their hood’s shadow.“We’re almost there,” Valik says, “one more street and we’ll reach the only stairway down to the valley. Before we go any further, I need to reaffirm, one more time: from here on out, I don’t want you to fight, alright? I don’t know what you are, or what you’re capable, but while you’re with me, you leave the fighting to me, okay? No matter what happens.”
“I will,” the stranger nods, “I promise.”The two walk on in silence. The back streets of the residential quarter reveal both the cleverly dense construction the Darkblood had managed, but also the harsh limitations on space imposed by living near a mountain’s peak. They can only build upward, building outward isn’t an option without descending the mountain.
When Valik guides the stranger down a corner staircase, the two pause, staggered by the sight before them.Valik had seen the blast site once or twice before. Half-way along this road, the loyalist secessionists had dynamited the bridges and foundation connecting a tower to the edge of the city. The perpetual rain had still not taken away most of the debris at the edge, with the ground blackened and sprayed with enormous segments of exploded brickwork. Metal drainage pipes and water systems are still in ruin, with most of the rainwater from this area of the city simply running down the mountainside into the dark valley beneath.
Only the single tower stands in the valley, now tilted at a dramatic angle. An enormous skid mark trails from the city edge down toward it, clearly telegraphing its descent. The silhouettes of banners can be seen flapping from it, but not viewed clearly at this distance. While the lowest level of Falguard’s multi-level architecture is lit with covered candles, not a single light is visible below. The shadows stir at the tower’s base, but no details betray what’s moving.“You said there would be a stairway down,” the stranger notes, pointing at the skidmark.
“It sounded nicer that way, rather than saying we’re going to slide down into the darkness.”
“Oh joy,” the stranger sighs, “because I haven’t fallen down enough mountains in my day.”
“Down you go!” Valik says with a cackle, shoving them from behind and causing them to tumble down the mountainside in a starfish position, bouncing off of every rock and ledge along the slope down. Valik follows immediately after, although he’s able to walk down with remarkable dexterity given his bulk.

* *Arriving at the bottom of the mountain at roughly the same time, Valik finds the stranger rubbing their head and trying to bat away the birds flying in circles around their hood.“Hey, you lived! You really aren’t human!” Valik cheers.
“When--when I stop seeing star-birds…then I’ll yell at you!”Valik cups the spirit orb following him in his palm, then guides it toward the stranger. With a flare of gentle golden light and holy energy, the stranger’s head recovers from the likely concussion.
The spirit orb appears to be the only source of light, until Valik hums an incantation and causes the symbol on the haft of his axe to glow quite brightly. He holds the Brutal Light of the Darkblood as his light source, walking into the darkness which demarcates the loyalist’s camp.The camp, wrapped in the mountain’s shadow, has the tower as its only evidence, but Valik and the stranger find an entire rudimentary camp constructed around it. Leather tents and wooden shanties, all scrawled with geometric-looking runes in dripping red paint--that’s paint, right?
The scent of death permeates the cold and bitter air, but worse yet is the smell of undeath. The air is unnaturally metallic, foul and coppery. Valik has to suppress a gag at the smell of the encampment.“Where do you think they’re keeping the bolt?” The stranger asks, their voice at a low whisper.
“I really hope that it isn’t inside the tower. We would never be able to get it back without the Dreadwatch. Stormking Boros should be easy to find, though. He’ll know where it is.”
“How will we find Boros?”
“We should wait. This entire place is dark,” Valik explains, “when we see a flash of lightning, we’ll know where he is.”
Valik and the stranger turn to each other.
“Isn’t it strange that there’s nobody here?” The hooded stranger asks.A sudden flash of blue-tinged light flares out from a window at the top of the sunken tower, illuminating the entire camp and causing all of the leather tents to billow.
Valik and the stranger exchange a look.
“It’s inside the tower,” they both groan.Despite the flare of light, neither of them realized that the camp wasn’t really empty. A red-eyed Darkblood who had been keeping to the shadows only feet from the entrance came sprinting in a frenzy toward the one carrying the light source.
The stranger heard the unmistakable clarion of armor falling into a heap as they deliver a single blow to the back of Valik’s head. As he loses consciousness, the light in his axe’s haft goes dark again.
“Wait, I’m just following him, don’t knock me out too!” The stranger yells.

* *When Valik comes to, he does so with a startling caprine scream. Part bleat, part gasp for air, he tosses his head in every direction. He finds himself to be tied back-to-back with the stranger against a stone brick wall. Looking around, he can’t immediately locate where his axe went, having been separated from it presumably before being taken wherever they are.
Luckily, his scream doesn’t attract any attention from the Darkblood passing through the room in patched, ragged brown robes. The lack of lighting in the room suggests that they’re keeping it dark and relying on their innate darkvision deliberately. This gave them a keen advantage over Valik, whose eyes didn’t acclimate well to a darkness this thick. With some effort, he’s able to eventually make out shapes. He’s surprised to find that they weren’t being held in a prison cell of any kind, although this tower didn’t appear to be the sort that would have one.
Acolytes hurry around the room, weaving in and out of sight amongst the shadowy silhouettes of piles of clutter, such as boxes, barrels and crates haphazardly piled with what appears in the darkness to be clothing and unlit candlesticks. Valik’s awakening must have sturred them to move ever faster and faster, and the sight of them is not unlike stagehands hurrying to prepare the set as the curtain threatens to rise. Even with the world barely visible in hazy shades of blue and gray, he doesn’t have to strain himself to recognize when Stormking Boros is brought through by a procession of twitchy acolytes in patchjob robes carrying gnarled wood staves. Valik can’t determine exactly how many as they circle around and weave amongst the shadows, but he estimates between eight and ten, each baring their own chain. Boros’s horns radiate a dim blue light that illuminates the room as he’s dragged through. He had been stripped of his enormous pauldrons, which double as foci for electrical magic, as well as his clawed gauntlets. His hands still arc with coils of sparks, eager to strike something dry and spark a balefire. He still wears heavy plate greaves which rattle like Valik’s own when he walks, as well as a rich blue cloth skirt over top.“Our mother is dead!” A feminine voice echoes over the chamber. The acolytes stop their scurrying, heeding the sound of her commanding bellow.
“Our grandmother is dead, too! Long live their daughters!” She continues. Boros begins audibly thrashing against his restraints. He attempts to conduct electricity through the chain back to his captors, but it fails to have the intended effect, and succeeded only at giving the acolytes cause to wail against the physically enormous Darkblood.
“Don’t despair, we are the scions of a proud house! We continue in a rich tradition, never forgetting the soil in which we grew our roots!”
“Praise mother, praise daughter!” The chorus of acolytes chant in response. “Praise the family, praise the oneness!”
“Stormking,” the woman continues, no longer in the tone of proselytizing to a church congregation, “don’t you see what a large legacy was left to us? Don’t you see, this was always our destiny?”

The Stormking doesn’t give any sign of an answer, not even a thrashing of chains.“You won’t resist forever. Take him back downstairs, drag an answer out of him. I refuse to let an opportunity this valuable go to waste!”
“Praise the family! For our future,” the acolytes chant. Valik is shocked to hear a chorus of much raspier voice join in the chant from above them. Looking up, he sees the shadowed outlines of a swarm of Darkblood, airborne, their arms replaced with the wings of werepyres. Valik is deeply relieved to see the swooping nightmares leave when the acolytes drag Boros away into the darkness. Valik can see the shackled and scarred Stormking for only a brief moment between two stacks of crates, but he’s fairly certain that he sees Boros throw an object into the darkness outside of his handler’s view, where it lands on a robe thrown over a crate, causing it to make no noise.
Seeing this, Valik elbows the hooded stranger behind him.
“I have a plan, get ready to make a break for it.”The voice which commanded the room with a bullhorn’s clarion belongs to Lamash, the self-styled “Daughter of Kolyaban”. This was as true for her as it technically was for any given female Darkblood—an inescapable fact of geneological certainty. She appears to them at first in a black silhouette atop a stack of barrels in the center of the room. Her body is slim, her figure quite beautiful, however the movement of her robes is deeply unsettling.“The Darkblood need a god! They need a faith! They need something to believe in! They need a fair, and beautiful idol!” Lamash monologues. As she speaks, she fans her arms, all twelve unfurling like a Sandsea goddess, or a series of afterimages which linger after they should’ve disappeared.What Lamash felt distinguished her as a divine scion was that she was a prodigy in fleshweaving. As a girl, just as Valik had discovered an innate talent with the manipulation of light, of spirits and of destiny, she discovered she could easily warp a person’s appearance. At first, she used this to bring her friends closer to their idealized self, but the child couldn’t remain innocent forever. Age eventually jaded her, and, made cynical and nihilistic by the death of Kolyaban, Lamash began her campaign actively waged against the beautiful. Her cult preached that Falguard had grown too akin to the cities of Good. In order to avoid this, “the acolytes of the Daughter” had swung too far in the opposite rejection. They didn’t just reject the idea that beauty was an ideal, they preached that beauty’s purpose is to be destroyed. They would spread a message of self-acceptance by the radical means of worshipping mutation. Not growth or evolution, as the purpose of their mutations wasn’t even to make them subjectively appear beautiful, not even through some warped concept of beauty. They worship a cruel and deliberate iconoclasm.The queen of this insidious hive descends toward the two bound captives. Her unfurling limbs and his restrained state evoke the skin-crawling image of a bonespider in Valik’s mind.
“You’re the last person I would’ve expected to be at my doorstep,” Lamash taunts, “have you come to learn just how much more is possible to you?”
“I want to know why you took Stormking Boros. Hitting one of our most powerful, at the throat of our mountain!?”
“Oh.” Lamash seems bluntly unsurprised, but disappointed. “I should’ve known. None of your business, is why. I truly hope you make a better gate watch than junior detective, because you should’ve already figured it out.”
“Err…yeah, I figured out your scheme! I’m here to get back the Magical McGuffin of Ultimate Destiny!"

The hooded stranger turns to Valik and cocks an eyebrow, a curious expression somehow visible even through the overcast shadow.“It’s a magical battery that—“ they start to explain.
“I know what it is!” Valik defensively cries out. “Lamash, you’re no goddess, you’re just some two-bit loonie that went off the deep end! More shameful than your pitiful little cult, is the fact you actually tried to restrain me with ropes but left my armor on.”With a single flexing gesture, Valik rips free of his restraints by annihilating the rope at several junctions in his armor. The stranger stumbles onto the ground, surprised by the directness and extreme recklessness of Valik’s strategy. He dives for the item that Stormking Boros discreetly tossed, then scrambles to sprint for the door to the room. The hooded stranger makes it long before he does, with his armor much better at severing rope than it is at dexterous escapes. Lamash lets out a frenzied scream and leaps down to the stone floor to give chase.
In his attempted running, his staggering at tripping, Valik manages to get the object which he can’t feel through his gauntlets and can’t stop to examine, and he makes it halfway to escaping when Lamash tackles him to the ground. Her many arms drag him down easily.“Valik, Valik,” Lamash coos, “you would be a splendid addition to our family.”He attempts to kick and struggle against her, but her thin frame belies a preternatural strength. She has the physical strength of a bodybuilder concealed in tattered burlap robes, ornamented with a stole woven from moldy rope.“Get off of me, you freak!” He screams as he thrashes. One of her hands dives for the object Valik grabbed but he manages to keep hold of it. She attempts to wrench it away from him, to no avail.
“You don’t understand, yet!” She cries. Her many hands grip his horns, his throat and his jaw. No longer trying to break his grip on the item, she attempts to turn his vision upward by force.
He doesn’t see anything in the shadow of the domed roof, although he didn’t see the hanging werepyric Darkblood, so now he second-guesses that assessment. He fights to contain his reaction as he sees a single, golden spirit orb drift in through a crack in the tower wall like a firefly or a dust mote.“See, now!” Lamash hisses. The candles dispersed throughout the room burst into ignition in sequence, throwing a meagher lambent light over the piles of clutter around the room, but also to what had been above them the entire time.
Strung from the ceiling, in layers of cold steel chains, is a half-formed undead amalgamation. It’s a horrific, gestalt entity, with an upper body and head taken from the rotten remains of an exhumed warlord. Some stale relic from the dark, dark past of the Darkblood. The lower half is a rippling, tank-like entity built out of an indeterminate number of rib cages and limb bones. It was a petty, although disgusting, necromancer’s pale imitation of The Hive.
“You are the most like them, Valik, the most like the deniers.”
“Deniers?!”
“You deny what you are. You deny that you are a monster. You play at being peaceful, you play at being civilized, but that is not what the Darkblood are. You play at being moral, at being heroic and good, you deny what you really are! What we are is rotten, all of us! You deny your true nature, you deny that you’re a monster, you deny all of the worst parts of you! But you can’t deny them!”“Who are you to lecture me about what it means to be a Darkblood?!” Valik swings his head to attempt to headbutt her or gouge her with his horns, but she easily deflects it by pushing his head off at a diagonal with several hands. “I don’t deny the worst parts of myself exist, but I refuse to blindly worship them!”

The thing, bound in chains, lets out a strange gurgling rattle.
“Join the Oneness!” Lamash cries out, “you would be such a beautiful new addition to our family! Think of what strength you’d give to us, to our weakest, to our most downtrodden!”The hands close in on Valik’s throat. His heart races and he struggles against the monstrously strong woman restraining him.
“No! I won’t!” He chokes out, although his voice is hoarse with the strain of effort.
“When we draw upon the residual energy that the Mother’s eleventh champion left in our skies, we will become closer with her! Think of just what you might become when that time comes! Do you see the purity of our dream yet? She is gone, but her power is not!”Valik kicks his legs. Lamash thrashes him side to side, held by his throat, like a cat trying to kill a snake. When she lifts him up, with six hands on either side of his collar, he considers gripping her wrists and trying to use the concentrated, purifying flame of holy energy to burn them off. He dismisses this idea, realizing he doesn’t have the amount of time to repeat this trick 12 times before he runs out of oxygen and presumably dies. In a last bid of resistance, he turns his green-cyan eyes upward, where he sees the glittery spirit orb hovering in wait above him. With a struggled gasp, Valik manages to choke out a shockingly forceful cry.

“You haven’t bled my spirit yet--! SACRED MAGIC: BRIEF CANDLE!”

With this invocation, the suppressed, distant wailing of electric guitars and battering of acoustic drums starts to echo through the room’s shockingly pleasant acoustics, given its use as a necromancer’s ritual room.
The spirit orb draws a heart in the air, which lingers like a neon trail, before descending toward Valik. When it merges into his chest, the drum and guitar start to thrash as if they occupied the contents of every brick in the wall. In time with the music, a set of wings of pure, golden light spray out from his back. They begin to beat with a timing and a feathery batting that sounds like a heart beating. Golden feathers drift through the air and a heartbeat echoes like a resilient declaration of life in the face of sterling and shameless death-worship.“Let the face melting commence! GO!”With a caprine death-metal scream, Valik starts to furiously bat his feathery wings. He breaks Lamash’s grip on him and now hovers a foot above the ground, propelled upward by the furious assailing of his wings. With every flap, he throws another wave of flame forward. With every flap, he bathes Lamash in a wave of burning destiny. With every flap, he assails her with his uncompromising ego. Wave upon wave of sanctified light break upon her, pushing her back and scorching the ground in an obvious, smoldering cone so ruined that it looked like a dragon had breathed a cone of flame. The fanning of his wings had begun to pull spirit orbs from the half-formed Oneness. Though it wasn’t active before, it stirs to life and begin to wail.“No! It isn’t finished, you can’t! I won’t let you!” Lamash cries, but despite this, she can’t even come to her feet (hooves?), because she has to use all of her available arms to meagerly attempt to shield her face from the waves of battering fire.As spirit orbs descend from the ceiling, the waves of flame grow in size and in heat until the final one impacts her with such force that it explodes, scorching everything in the center of the room, causing an explosion of flaming wood and burlap debris, and send Lamash flying until she impacts the opposite wall.“I reject everything you stand for, I spit on everything you are! Are you so afraid to be Good? Are you so afraid to undergo the effort to overcome yourself? I’m not! It’s so easy to sell your soul, Lamash, so easy it would shock you! You’ll find a buyer on every street corner! Do you understand what a great labor you’ll have to undergo to get it back, though? I do!”Given Valik’s prior direction, the stranger seems to have already vacated the room, because when he sprints for the door himself, he doesn’t see them anywhere inside before he slams it. He rips a single plank from the top of a nearby crate and manages to jam it into such a position against the door handle that it would have to be unbarred on this side before it could be opened. He sprints down a set of spiral stairs that were connected to the vault-roofed ritual chamber and finds a set of acolytes curiously examining his axe, the Brutal Light of the Darkblood, with spells to attempt to dissect its enchantment. He grabs each of them by their horns and crushes their face against each other, either knocking out or killing both of them in a moment. He discards them, grabs his axe from the table, and makes for the exit. In doing so, he passes Stormking Boros, still held by a busy group of acolytes. He knows that he can’t fight them all at once, much less with Lamash and The Oneness enraged upstairs, but he also knows that none of them can break formation to give chase after him, or they would risk the Stormking overpowering the remaining ones.After some more running, although much more comfortable now that his axe had been returned to his person, Valik shoulder-barges out the wooden plank front door of the tower. Stumbling outside, he’s not entirely surprised to see a shadow-cloaked mob of tribalists loyal to the Daughter of the First in a semi-circle around the door, although he is surprised to see that the stranger was already standing in the center with his hands raised. It seems that they were part-way through explaining how they weren’t involved with the lightshow going on inside when Valik scoops them up in one arm, swinging the other in a wide arc with his other arm, and forces his way through the center of the crowd like a charging bull. Valik’s headstrong charge gets them both assailed with random thrown objects, but they’re easily blocked by Valik masterfully trying his shoulders or his sides in order to repel what seemed like unavoidable throws towards his exposed, fleshy areas.
Sprinting up a mountain while carrying a regular-sized not-quite-human and while wearing full regalia definitely wasn’t Valik’s favorite idea, but the giddy adrenal surge borne from his stubborn defiance is enough to give him the willpower. As he reaches about half-way back up the path that the tower slid down, Madra’s shadow crests the top, followed by the unrolling silhouettes of hundreds of armed and armored Dreadwatch soldiers.
“Glad you’re safe,” is all she says, clapping a hand on Valik’s shoulder as he passes.She begins to address the Dreadwatch as Valik places the stranger down and starts to stagger forward, his adrenaline rush coming to an abrupt end and causing him to feel the net strain of sprinting up-hill in his ludicrous armor all at once. He can’t even hear what she’s saying, though he assumes it to be rather inspiring and forces himself to feel inspired because of it. Perhaps something about purpose, or clarity. About humanity, goodness, civility or sin. He’s more comforted by the knowledge that he wouldn’t have to face such dread horrors alone, for there’s an entire city in wait, ready to defend itself, and the burden isn’t his alone.Eventually, after some deep, heavy breathing and some recovery time, he opens his eyes and blinks himself back to a more lucid consciousness. He and the stranger are sitting on a bench in the clustered residential quarter.“That was amazing, what you did back there. I have to admit, I wouldn’t have assumed that just running for it would work. For a little bit there, it kind of didn’t--”
“You were complimenting me,” Valik corrects.
“Oh, right. But you recovered! It was amazing how you fought back and saved yourself,” they say with the intonation of a smile, “I really had to fight to restrain myself and not do anything, but you made me promise and I’m no liar.”
“Well, thank you. That was the other thing that I learned from a certain someone in Mythsong Valley.”The stranger snickers, and a calm stillness falls over them both. They sit in contemplation for a moment, before the stranger takes in and lets out a deep breath.“Not to intrude, Valik, but after everything I’ve seen, I think you should tell Ralstis the truth.”
“What!?” Valik gasps. “I just saved us both from a congealed undead skeleton horror cult, and that is what you want to talk about?”
“More than absolutely anything else.”
“Oh come on!” Valik cries.They share a loud laugh before the stranger asks something.
“So, you really don’t need my help here, do you?”
“Well, how do you mean?” Valik asks for clarification.
“Well, I mean that I’m used to something like this happening every week. Every Friday, some new existential threat or new cult pops up and I have to do my best to keep the world from falling apart. On a Saturday if it’s a particularly bad week. I was worried I accidentally stumbled into something that’ll devour the next three months of my life in some grand crusade against blah-de-blah. It’s so relieving to see that this world has heroes like you in it, Valik.”
Valik lowers his head in an uncharacteristic display of humility.
“Well, thank you. I appreciate it, and I appreciate your restraint. Really, though, you don’t need to fear for us. We’ve handled much bigger hardships than this and done it alone.”
“You shouldn’t have to do it alone,” the stranger says with a soft nod, “but I shouldn’t underestimate you. You’re self-reliant little goat hermits.”
“We’re a scrappy, fighty sort,” Valik snickers back.“I have an idea,” he says after a pause as they scoop two loose cobblestones from the ground nearby.
With an unpleasant scratching noise, he engraves a crude version of the symbol on the haft of his axe into each of them. With a soft hum, both start to glow.
“I want you to take one of these.”
“What is it for?” The stranger asks.
“If the Dreadwatch are ever outnumbered, are desperate for help and are losing to the Acolytes of the Daughter, I’ll crush that. Yours will start to glow and pulse unmistakably. You can think of it like the city’s SOS beacon to you. If that happens, it means we’re desperate and we need you. Otherwise, you can kick your feet up and relax.”
The stranger takes it and, with some manipulation, manages to bind it to their waist.
“Oh!” Valik abruptly adds, “and I’m going to try to talk to Ralstis about--oh, you know what! If it goes poorly, I’m crushing the runestone to call you here too, but just so I can personally beat the tar out of you for pushing me to do it.”
The stranger snickers. “It won’t go poorly.”
“You can’t see the future!” Valik curses back.
“Say, did we manage to get the Storm Bolt back?” They ask.Valik gasps, only now remembering that that was more or less the purpose of their intrusion. He produces the object which Boros discreetly discarded, specifically where he could see. Now able to stop and inspect it, he realizes that what he picked up was indeed a length of Rotstone, roughly the size of a human forearm. Small to a Darkblood, but not insignificant. It had lost its original color, now swirling with the cyan and deep blue energies of latent storm magic, contained just beneath the surface of the matte stone. It’s bent, gnarled and twisted as though someone had attempted to make an accurate depiction of a lightning bolt using crystal.“Well, now I’m really impressed!” The stranger shouts. “I thought I’d have to wait for a civil war to go down before I could get my hands on this!”
“Aren’t I a miracle worker today?”
“I’ll tell Ralstis what a good job you did,” the stranger says with a giggle and an elbow. “You know, Valik, there’s one more thing that I need to ask you.”
“After the day we’ve had, anything seems fair at this point. Shoot.”
“That symbol on your axe, and your gauntlets. You took it from the Blinding Light of Destiny and the Order of Lightguard Keep. It means ‘destiny’. What does destiny mean to a Darkblood?”
“Destiny is anyone, and anywhere, I choose to be; and I choose myself, in Falguard.”
The stranger snorts. “I should’ve known that would be your answer. I wonder, did the Unael spirit choose you, or were you destined for it?”
“Unael?”
“It means hero.”* *The stranger left the city that day, with their commissioned Storm Bolt in hand, and a lingering, almost haunting curiosity about Lamash, and the Acolytes of the Daughter. Nevertheless, they respect Madra and Valik’s wishes for independence, for the ability to disprove the acolytes on their own terms. At times, they check the runestone on their hip throughout the course of their day, just to ensure it hasn’t been activated. Days go by, and then weeks, and eventually months, and the runestone that Valik gave them never becomes active. The stranger often checks it, with an incantation prepared on their lips and ready to be spoken:
“Slash, join, Falguard.”
A simple enough teleportation spell for a being of their cosmic scale. A single slash of a draconic claw through space-time would be enough to open a tunnel anywhere they might wish to travel, and with only a three-word incantation.Despite all that occurs after, the runestone never becomes active.

I'd like to give a special thanks to the Hollowborn Paladin, Allvo, for helping with the two-person pictures! Love ya, man!

As a thanks for reading "The Heretic Paladin"--below is a compilation of my own art of Valik!