The Heart is a Void: Ashes to Ashes

Chapter 99: Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

Crucis showed the bookmark to Sharak, who quickly leafed through the book by Climacus. It turned out that every page of the book was filled with repetition of the word 'river.'

"What a peculiar novel to keep a bookmark in!" Sharak said. "Fahiz, why did you do this?"

"I must have got tired after reading the first 100 pages, and so I left the bookmark there before I dozed off," Fahiz replied facetiously.

"Well, enough about his mischief. That poem? I remember it, monsieur. A poem of most excellent fancy. The automaton must have been reading Hamlet, and when we asked it to write a poem it came out with this strange paean to a bat. It is like if a man ate raw pork for supper, and thus dreamed oddly that Sir Francis Varney were a vampire. Though that were quite unconscionable."

"Varney?" Crucis asked.

"From the novel 'Varney the Vampire.'"

"Ah. Yes, yes. Even if he is a vampire, I hold it not honest to say so."

Crucis began to read the poem.

Ode to a Bat

O, dark leper, flying amid trees and gloam!

Rat-faced monstrosity, born in a witch's cauldron

From ill-conceived stew of bird and rat. When

The night falls, and all birds are ensconced,

You rap your wings raucously against the night air,

As if to celebrate your forgery of birds. Beating

Your wings from a rugged cave, where men fear to tread,

You rise, suspended upon the gloom, and men question

If it is truly you, or if the night has grown wings.

How came you to have such fondness for desolation, for

The cave and the dark, foggy air of night? Is

There prospect for one such as me, cast out from the light

Of the court, the gazes and smiles of men - aye,

And women too, if you should ask - and banished

From the riches which courtiers gaze on as if blinded?

What blood have you found, which newel is the fountain -

Is evil thy Providence? - of the counterfeit life which you pursue,

Without balustrades, in the dark, free passages of night?

"What a peculiar, yet splendid, ode," Crucis said. "It reminds me of the inhabitants of the mines nearby."

"Ah, so you visited the mines? Very good. Perhaps you have heard the rumours, that the god of death sometimes wanders the area nearby?"

"I can't say I've heard that," DicingDevil said. "However, I believe that the mines are associated with the god of death, known to some as Dravaistaya."

He knew that the mine's inhabitants were slightly secretive, so he refrained from going into any detail about the shrine which John Hazlitt had described.

"It is a common belief among the settlement nearby that the deity wanders near," Sharak replied. "If you talk with them enough, it will surely come up. They call the god Darva. During several famines and plagues, even some faraway cities have reported encountering a mine identical to this one in all respects, and sometimes a roaming, Reaper-like figure is close by. One is almost inclined to speculate wildly like a superstitious villager. Though it seems like a mine, and seems too to be moored in this vicinity, perhaps it is a gaping grave that wantonly seeks a harvest of the dead — even if it must wander abroad. That frame outlives a thousand tenants."

"How come you feel comfortable living near it, then?" DicingDevil said.

"Ah, because of my particular discipline of magic."

Sharak knelt down, and drew out a large, python-like snake skeleton from the lowest drawer beside the fireplace. As he cast [Irvian Animation], a blinding, white light lit up in the skeleton's eyes, and it began to slither slowly across his arm. Its mouth occasionally opened as it glanced at the visitors, revealing long fangs which now dripped with a semi-transparent venom.

It coiled slowly across his arm, and its head slithered past his shoulders and across his other arm. It was mightily rearing its enormous skeleton from the low shelf, and clearly had enough strength to suffocate him easily, but due to his control of it he felt no danger.

"Of course, a necromancer. And very powerful, it looks like. So I guess that Dravaistaya is actually a boon for you," DicingDevil said sagely.

Sharak pet the snake's head gently, then dispelled the animative magic. The snake's heavy skeleton was once more still, and the players helped him to lower it back into the shelf, where he carefully arranged it into a coil shape.

"That snake was one of a rare breed, the [Mad Ascai Python] of the Western forests."

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