Ephemeral - Chapter 9 - Laerelia

Chapter 9 - Laerelia

(Continued from Pale Master)

"Why won't this work? All the motes are right," murmured a slim elven mage with purplish-silver hair, hair that shone brilliantly under the light of the full moon, Shonil. Laerelia Eludrar, formerly of house Aumoran, pored over a thick, rune-inscribed tome in a largely forgotten cemetery under the bright light of a cantrip. She was attempting to determine where her necromantic spell had gone wrong.

The slim and shapely necromancer had moved much earth to reach a particular skeleton buried there a century or more before, and she was determined to learn the secrets of its life. She wanted particularly to know how it, a half-ogre known as Detrats, the Dark, had led to the destruction of her family's long-respected house before meeting his own grisly end and ended up buried in this run-down burial yard.

She was but a child when her family's house had fallen into disgrace and was beset upon by angry mobs, eager to take revenge upon the house they felt had left their city in tatters after the Moyan Guild Wars, wars that had supposedly been fomented by certain members of noble House Aumoran and unspecified and unnameable dark forces that wished to destroy the holy city of Moya altogether in their jealousy of its splendors.

Moya had survived the wars, but House Aumoran had not. All of its inhabitants had been killed save for Laerelia, who had been hiding in a cellar when the angry mob had started lobbing torches at the roof. Its ruins, still untouched after a hundred or so years, still sat as a crumbling black mark on a citythat  many, mostly its own inhabitants, considered to be the fairest city in all of Naturna. Its columns stood still, as well as its walls, yet the upper floors and windows were stained black by the heat of the massive conflagration that had consumed it. It bore no roof and anyone with the nerve to enter the cursed place would have found anything non-flammable still in its original place, untouched by time.

Laerelia shook her head to clear her thoughts of the past, unable to suppress a shiver as the chill of the night air seeped in through the open folds of her black velvet robes. She pulled its hood over her head, shadows enveloping the fair features of her thin face. She concentrated again on the spell, reading the arcane words aloud to the lonely and still air around her. Power welled and she felt the ecstasy of magic course through her. She bent her will to channel the energy into a form that would imbue the skeleton in the open grave before her with animated life, binding its soul to the thing's empty skull.

With puissant glee, she felt the spell's subtle sigils coalesce and the blue-white streams of energy flow through her fingertips, a familiar rush of lust flowing outward from her body and down into the grave. The energy became flames as it enshrouded the skeletal remains. The bones began to orient themselves as they would have existed in life as the flame flowed around them. Then, suddenly, the flames disappeared, sucked into the skull as a stream of water into a drain.

Then, all was dark. Nothing moved. The skeletal remains sat still, the animation seeming to fail. Laerelia growled in frustration at yet another failure to reanimate this heap of rotten bones. She turned around and placed her tome on a flat stone near her. She was exhausted. The multiple failures had nearly depleted her energy stores and she was near to collapsing.

A coldness deeper than that of the night air, approaching from behind her brought her to immediate attention, fear gripping her heart.

A deep, raspy voice spoke menacingly. "What Eludrar has ripped my soul from that disembodied torture of Purgatory and placed it in this shambling parody of life?"

Laerelia turned quickly, just in time to see the formerly inanimate skeleton very near to her face, its bones surrounded by the glowing outline of its former living self, a dark-haired, dark-eyed and hideous half-ogre, its human features giving it no measure of grace.

Seemingly out of nowhere its hand encircled her throat and shoved her back and down onto the rocks where her spell tome lay. The pale orb, Shonil, hovered in the sky behind the monster hovering over her, outlining its face in darkness. The once-living creature was easily twice her size and she fought against its crushing force.

"Answer me, witch," it growled angrily as its grip around her throat tightened. She struggled in the mighty grip of the thing, unable to form words with a throat whose supply of air was being cut off slowly. Her lips began to tingle and she tore at the animated horror's wrists desperately.

"My, you're a pretty one aren't you," it taunted. "Been many the age since I tasted an elf maiden, it has."

It, no, he, she noticed with growing terror as it unlaced its glowing outline of trousers with its free hand and let a massive and warty ogre organ tumble out, its own weight pulling it groundward despite its erect state. Its ghostly member, nearly the size of one of her arms, was now freed of the constraining spectral breeches. It used the same free hand to tear open her robes and tunic, continuing on to yank off her deerskin trousers while she struggled to remain conscious.

It stared at her bared body in obvious wanton hunger, her pale skin illuminated in the light of Shonil. It ran its gaze over her soft breasts, touching them roughly with a pallid and almost transparent hand. She felt the tip of its oversized erection press against her smooth vulva as she finally, mercifully succumbed to the lack of air and her world went black.
 

Ariana ascended the stairs leading from her caverns to a crypt that led to the outside world. The steps were many and dark, and water trickled over them, dripping from various sources in the ceiling where water worked its way through the ground above. She worked the gears in a complex locking mechanism and soon the imposing stone door at the top of the stairs swung outward into the crypt itself.

Along both sides of the mausoleum beyond the ancient earthen passageway were stone shelves containing sarcophagi whose contents Ariana had removed many eons prior. Those corpses had been some of Ariana's earliest experiments in magically-animated necrophilia. They were now long dust on the floor of her cavern below. Her soft footfalls made small prints in the dust of the floor as she strode out through the stone chamber, her black robes flowing behind her.

Lost in thought, she opened the steel portcullis guarding the crypt entrance, its many magical locks giving way to her touch instantly. It squealed loudly as it opened and cool, dry night air greeted Ariana's face as she left the confines of the crypt.

Almost immediately,her sharp elven ears picked up the sounds of a grunting male. Ariana quickly cast a darkvision spell on herself and moved silently in the shadows toward where the sound had emanated. Rounding a tall obelisk, she made out a ghostly, hulking skeletal form bent over what appeared to be a female of some sort, judging by the smooth curves of the pale legs on either side of the spectral form's hips.

It seemed to be fumbling with something and wasn't aware of Ariana moving silently to a position directly behind it. She placed a hand upon its side and murmured a single word. "Dominate."

As she uttered the word, the creature stiffened in place and didn't move.

"Go, stand by the obelisk, right there," she said and pointed to the obelisk that had hidden her approach. The beast, a half-ogre by its looks, struggled to go to the obelisk, powerless to resist her undead domination, and constrained by the breeches around its ankles. She focused her will on commanding the creature while her gaze lingered for a moment on its ogre-sized cock. She bound it magically to the obelisk while she studied the half-naked form lying on the rocks.

The ogre didn't appear to have harmed the beautiful, purple-haired elf, Ariana learned after some close inspection. She leaned in close to Laerelia's face, the pale master's silver hair falling over and around the unconscious mage, and breathed a word into her ear. Laerelia's eyelids fluttered open and she gasped, her hands going to her throat, expecting to find the sinister undead ogre's hands there. Seeing Ariana's lovely but haunted face leaning over her instead, she caught her breath and drew her robes around her, struggling to sit up and pull her trousers up. Ariana laid a cool hand on the surprised necromancer's naked breastbone and gently stayed her.

"Wh...who are you," she asked.

Ariana smiled and backed away, slightly folding her pale hands in her robes. "I am Ariana Blueheart, Pale Master of the Moyan mountain crypts," Ariana said, bowing her head slightly.

The magically bound half-ogre spat. "A Pale Master, of course. You fucking witch, release me, and my dark lord will make your death quick."

Ariana smirked and made a gesture with her hand. Detrats, the Dark's glowing face twisted in pain and he howled.

Laerelia eyed Ariana, then the half-ogre, in awe at the power emanating from the silver-haired elf's simple gesture. The ghoul she'd struggled to raise, then failed to control, once raised, was powerless under the influence of this mysterious and divinely exquisite woman standing before her.

Laerelia quickly finished lacing up her pants. She decided to cast aside her torn blouse, replacing it with just her robes and drawing them in close around her and tying them with a black cord.

"Ariana, I beg of you. This creature holds information I seek. Information as to why and how my family's house fell after the Moyan Guild wars. Indeed, I raised him solely for that purpose, but was unable to control him after he had been animated."

Ariana raised an eyebrow at the young necromancer. "You raised this thing," she asked in an almost approving fashion. "I'm perplexed as to how you managed to imbue it with the ghostly essence of its former self. Normally, they are merely rattling boneboxes with a voice."

"I will share with you the spell I used if only you'd grant me the boon of questioning this creature for a time," Laerelia said, supplicatingly, recognizing the sheer amount of power within the wizardess who so effortlessly held the wraithlike ogre in thrall.

"Yes," Ariana said silkily, "you will share the spell with me, whether you like it or not." She reached out to Laerelia with a skeletal hand and placed decayed fingers on the white skin of her bare neck. Ariana spoke a word softly and from those skeletal fingers came a numbing sensation as Laerelia's body was overcome with paralysis. Fear coursed through her as the elven pale master ordered the ghastly half-ogre to pick the paralyzed elf and her spell tome up and follow as the arcane mistress returned to the depths of her cavern abode, a night walk cut short by a fortuitous meeting under the bright, pale light of Shonil.

The enthralled half-ogre obeyed and shadows obscured the three as they entered the crypt. Ariana enspelled the opening with wards against entry behind them and she willed the half-ogre ahead through the open door to the caverns beyond, locking the second door with a series of geared movements, sealing the way out.

Laerelia fought vainly against the paralysis as she was carried down a set of wet stone stairs that seemed to sprawl out endlessly before them.

"Well, this is it," she thought, mirthlessly. "The end of my journey. Damn the gods and their capricious ways."

(Next: Insatiable)