Waters Wild and Wicked – Part 1

Falk, immersed in a swirl of boot heels and unsheathed knives, drifted unseen towards the table. A beefy, cast from unimaginably large shoulders, pulled the owner of a seat in front of him away into the throng.

“Is this seat taken” asked Falk.

Sitting there, across from him he beheld a retinue of feather plumed tricorns. Bright gold buttons sat on waist coats stitched delicately with the finest indigo and violent dyes. The wafting air of the cabin hold filled his nostrils with nautical dreams. Falk was peculiar even among his colleagues at the Grey College. He had learned through a life lived watching afar how to read the many sensations of people. His smell, taste and touch could instill in him images, forms, and understandings. He could gaze into eyes filled with cataracts and wander the pastures of youth they once observed.

These things, images of lives not lived but well may have been lived, he could wear like many pieces of fine jewelry and charm the weariest eye. And so there, as candles flung from their stand casting eerie shadows upon the floor, Falk began to fade into a cloud of sea brine and adventure. His pale eyes became filled with ghoulish spoil. About his feet grew black belted boots. His shoulders formed threaded epaulettes and his body grew into the shape of a warrior of the waves. He sat there, with his face gleaming with the personality of another’s, mantled in all the guile and bravura of an honored soldier.

“Pardon my interruption, I saw you gentlemen here and wanted to add my mind to this charming company. I hope you are all a cut more reasonable than that doorman, fine man…er …thing that he is. Tell me, I sense here an air of quality lacking in all the parlors of the world. Being a man of standing, I don’t partake in indulgences weaker stomachs and minds soothe their miserable woes with. Yet here I as so verily impressed by this gallery of finery, I would ask that you join me in a game of chance.”

Suddenly from up Falk’s blue sleeve shot a deck of long playing cards, each draped with the terrible countenance of many a daemon and magus. He passed the cards between his hands with dizzying pace and shuffled his entire hand in the time it takes a fly’s wing to beat. From beneath the table, a unseen satchel of heavy coins clanged with innumerable chimes.

“I promise you,” said Falk as his eyes gleamed with sapphire sheen “it will be worth you while”.

He then placed his glowing coin oh his thigh, awaiting the response of the table.

TO FALK:

The room was still slowly recovering from the shock of the eldritch gunshot which had nearly rent one of the denizens in half at the shoulder. When Falk approached the table arrayed with devilish cutthroats, some distance away from where the commotion had occurred, the men there glanced at him as though he had a miniature elm tree for a head. Slowly, regaining his composure, one of their group sneered at the wizard, peeling back his dry, cracked lips to reveal black gums and rotten teeth.

“Seat don't look taken, do it? Unless someone come'n take if from ya, Flotsam,” the pirate spat.

The other occupants of the table exchanged suspicious glances. This newcomer was strangely calm for one who had just witnessed the carnage of that assassination mere moments ago. Yet even now, rattled as they were, there was a strangely soothing composition to his words. Some of the pirates had already forgotten the entire affair and were returning to their musky, hemp-bound bottles of rum. But some, like the sneering gentleman suffering from very poor dental hygiene were not so easily disarmed.

He glowered at Falk's airy demeanor, the smack of breezy confidence in his lyrical voice; every uncanny quality which served to disarm the others only served to incense him further and deepen his growing contempt for the stranger.

“Think ya can pass one over on me, bilge drinker? I ain't never seen a deck o' cards with no such frills and baubles on 'em. This deck be rigged, or I've got a mansion in Lustria.”

“I'd love to see it one day, then,” intruded the silky rumble of Captain Sangrio's elegant voice as he took a seat at the far end of the table, opposite to Falk, immediately making eye contact with him. There was a strange twinkle in the captain's eye that suggested that, like Falk, there may be more to him than a cursory glance would reveal. Peering into his dark eyes revealed no tales of his youth, laid bare none of his plans, provided the wizard with nothing but an uncanny spark, not unlike his own. “For indeed I have seen this deck before. Hand-drawn by the great Raphael de Fucca, no? Only three sets in existence. I have one myself. So, my friend, what sort of game did you have in mind, exactly?” The captain reclined leisurely in his chair, resting one leg comfortably upon the other. "And," he added, "What might the stakes be?"

All heads at the table turned slowly to stare at Falk, awaiting his response.

A far off distance away, as the light pattering of rain began to fall, the glowing barrel of a long-nosed firearm protruded gently from the broken window of some nondescript shack opposite the tavern. Eldritch, black-green fumes continued to waft from the weapon's cold, iron maw. Upon the first signs of commotion from across the street, it quickly retreated back into the shack that had been simultaneously pilfered and disposed of its residents. The barrel deftly and noiselessly receded back through a murder hole that was punctured through a boarded window on the second floor of the dwelling. The barely perceptible steps of clawed-toes scurried across rotting wood and out an adjacent hole in the rear wall. Feeling its presence known, an instinct honed from many years living within a hive of nonsensical backstabbery,the hunched figure darted across the rooftops of Sartosa.


If a passerby were to glance upward, turning their eyes towards the gentle drizzle that glistened against the city lights, they would see nothing. If one were observant, they might hear the soft scrapping of claws against ceramic shingles. If one were unlucky enough to catch a mere glimpse of a dark shadow racing through the night, they would see little in their last moments of life. The unclear outline of a hunched silhouette with indiscernible features. A ragged cloak flowing barely an inch off the figure's back with some long armed handgun clutched between ten digits. All this comes to an end as two orbs of baleful red light turn to face the onlooker before a deafening crack shatters the silence of the Sartosan night, a screaming trail of gunpowder and black emerald energy tearing the stranger asunder. All that remains is a broken body, undone by hidden techniques of artifice and mad magic. 


It was late now. The evening sun had sunk below the overcast horizon, wreathing the port city in a shroud of gloom. The emerald hue of Morrslieb, though obscured by cloud cover, gazed ominously over all who still walked the streets. The rain began to pick up. The light sounds of droplets on wood intensified into a steady symphony of water gracing cobblestone. Distant thunder rolled through the streets and caressed the rooftops. The figure hurried its pace as it silently leapt from balconies and shingled overhangs until it was within view of the alleyways. It swiftly disassembled its artifice into three interchangeable parts and stashed them beneath its rags. With one clawed hand it dangled itself over a low hanging balcony and dropped to the streets, silent as a shadow in the dark. Red eyes darted up and down the alleyway with unnatural perception as it spotted the means to which it had entered this neighborhood of the city: a single manhole cover. The figure slinked towards the sewer grate in movements that were stilted and erratic yet did nothing to impede the subtlety of its posture. In one quick movement, it lifted the grate roughly a foot above the precipice and glided underneath. An observant passerby would only see five clawed fingers gently descend into the dark as the manhole cover was adjusted, appearing to have never been disturbed.


After quickly making its way down the nonexistent infrastructure of a pirate city, several curious devices are left in its wake... Disk like in appearance and laid carefully in various choke points and sharp turns. Upon activation the subtlest spark of movement would mean explosive death to any who would tread upon them. Other obstacles were more advanced, a tripwire connected to pipes that spewed undousable flames, trap doors into chambers that drowned the victim in caustic sewage and waste. Some were simpler such as doors that crashed down onto those who stood beneath them, grinding the unfortunate who stood below into paste and trapping any of his cohorts who survived. One was merely a large metal blade fashioned from failed experiments and was hoisted into a hidden compartment in the ceiling. But by far the most effective means of preventing any ignorant sea cur from wandering into this deadly sanctum were the rumors of chaotic energies suddenly mutating any who walked near. Corpses displayed in grotesque forms of misshapen agony as they were prodded and tormented by cruel scalpels and drills until they were sent screaming into the warp. By far what frightened most were the endless legions of flesh eating rats that infested this section of the sewers, stripping a man down to bone in less than a minute and devouring the bleached skeleton soon after.


At the heart of this sanctum was a single, large door. It was heavy and iron bound. It could not be opened from the outer side and had to be accessed remotely via a hidden switch in the wall, through a hole laced with mutating warpstone...