Fittingly for a master tactician and his avid student of history, the Princes of Biding and Sacrifices have chosen a well-defended lair for their plotting--and their vast collection of sacrificed followers. It is an under-hill cave in the Shroudwood, once a shrine to Death--She of Endings, that old Thief--and now a haven for those who have escaped Her.
The stench is horrific even at the mouth of the cave. Its entrance has been carved in a danse macabre, with dead of all four species holding hands as their frozen sport leads entrants deeper into the cave; the carvings are defiled with blood and filth. The first corpses--elves and shrikes, long-decayed, plumage plucked and scattered--are no more than ten yards inside. The corpses appear inanimate, but they have enough motion left in their hands and arms to grab and pin anything that comes into their reach. Yet they are not so thick on the ground they can't be avoided or kicked away on the journey to the central chamber, another hundred yards down the hall.
A needed breath of air comes as one arrives in that chamber, a vast dome that stretches fifty or sixty feet toward a natural skylight. Trees and flowers grow right beneath that open stretch of sky... or did grow, until two Princes came to rest here. Now the plants are all dead and torn down, except thick thorn-hedges that constrain approach to the vast obscenity at the center of the once-grove: A pile of a hundred (a thousand? More?) corpses stacked atop each other in a gruesome platform.
The two Princes stand waist-deep in the clutching corpse-arms of their followers, twenty feet off the ground; the pile nearly obscures how the contents of their opened bellies are grown together like grafted branches. Biding is pale and shining still even in the gore, his silver hair perfect and talons so fine light can be seen through them. Sacrifices is Biding’s his golden echo, though crimson blood drips constantly from the plumes of his arms and chest.
They murmur mouth-to-mouth, or stare deeply in each other's eyes, uninterested in anyone who enters the chamber until they come in range of the pile. Then they erupt into violence, Sacrifices' unerring bow backing Biding's impossible swordwork and uncanny ability to appear everywhere at once.
Frontal assault is possible, but unwise. Perhaps something can be found in Biding's ancient home, standing only a mile away in a thick patch of transplanted forest.
3.1 The Princes of Biding and Sacrifices (cw: corpses, mass death, gore)
The stench is horrific even at the mouth of the cave. Its entrance has been carved in a danse macabre, with dead of all four species holding hands as their frozen sport leads entrants deeper into the cave; the carvings are defiled with blood and filth. The first corpses--elves and shrikes, long-decayed, plumage plucked and scattered--are no more than ten yards inside. The corpses appear inanimate, but they have enough motion left in their hands and arms to grab and pin anything that comes into their reach. Yet they are not so thick on the ground they can't be avoided or kicked away on the journey to the central chamber, another hundred yards down the hall.
A needed breath of air comes as one arrives in that chamber, a vast dome that stretches fifty or sixty feet toward a natural skylight. Trees and flowers grow right beneath that open stretch of sky... or did grow, until two Princes came to rest here. Now the plants are all dead and torn down, except thick thorn-hedges that constrain approach to the vast obscenity at the center of the once-grove: A pile of a hundred (a thousand? More?) corpses stacked atop each other in a gruesome platform.
The two Princes stand waist-deep in the clutching corpse-arms of their followers, twenty feet off the ground; the pile nearly obscures how the contents of their opened bellies are grown together like grafted branches. Biding is pale and shining still even in the gore, his silver hair perfect and talons so fine light can be seen through them. Sacrifices is Biding’s his golden echo, though crimson blood drips constantly from the plumes of his arms and chest.
They murmur mouth-to-mouth, or stare deeply in each other's eyes, uninterested in anyone who enters the chamber until they come in range of the pile. Then they erupt into violence, Sacrifices' unerring bow backing Biding's impossible swordwork and uncanny ability to appear everywhere at once.
Frontal assault is possible, but unwise. Perhaps something can be found in Biding's ancient home, standing only a mile away in a thick patch of transplanted forest.