Archive: Dark Moon

[Agrarvyn]

I realised that I have the the four posts I originally wrote as Dark Moon saved on my machine. Without further ado, here they are!


In the depths of the Dazhiarn, an exiled saviour of Sommerlund, lost to darkness, envisions his return to power and glory.

In Yr-Naoga, the lost territory, the spirits of the Darklands wait with glee, haunting a fallen fortress.

In the territory of Galhiak, the last remnants of the Darklords' spawning pits seethe with malignant expectation.

In the frozen wastes of Kalte, a Kai Supreme Master cannot envision what fresh horrors are going to become his responsibility...

[Agrarvyn]

Dark Moon was a tall, handsome, thickset man, with an excellent physique, arrogant good looks and a commanding personality. He was also a renegade Kai Lord, formerly known as Cloud Moon, and after pledging his soul to the Dark God Naar, he had joined the ranks of the Dark Cultists.

Still just as cunning and charming as he had been as a servant of the Light, his Naar-given powers and residual Kai abilities had led to him becoming a leader of men, wealthy, skilled, feared and, most importantly, obeyed without question.

He had kept a close eye on the people he had spurned long ago and, with the emerging Kai Fleet, had sought a way to keep his former allies off-balance while he attempted to plunge Northern Magnamund into eternal darkness.

And so, after many months labour, he had hatched his most brilliant plan yet. Posing as the sanctimonious Kai Lord he had come to despise in himself, he had gained entry to the Brotherhood Guildhall, accompanied by a Cener Druid, suitably disguised as a Herbalish, and a former Brotherhood mage, and had directly struck at the Brotherhood by abducting Guildmaster Banedon when he was at his most vulnerable.

Using dark magics to ensure that the Guildmaster's chambers were exactly as they left them, the Cener and the renegade Kai left the Guildhall with Banedon, leaving their Brotherhood ally to catch up later.

Meeting up with a gang of paid Vassagonian mercenaries, they then split up, the former Brotherhood mage taking his section of the mercenary gang with him and the Cener, Kai and Banedon (still against his will) taking the rest of the mercenaries in a different direction.
Hopefully, the Brotherhood and their allies would either all follow the wrong group or they would split the resources and track both of them. To Dark Moon's thinking, either would be fine. He even relished the thought of discovery if it involved him meeting his old student again...

[Agrarvyn]

He awoke, screaming. The electrical energy that suffused his body was sparking unmercifully, sending sharps spikes of spike throughout his body and causing his head to feel peculiar as his forehead fizzed with invisible static. Every hair on his body was standing on end and his skin felt like it was on fire.

It took him a moment to realise that whatever hellish environment he was in, it was actually quite comfortable and the surface of whatever he was lying on seemed to mould itself to his body. It took another moment for him to realise that his eyes were shut. Forcing his eyelids open, a surge of nausea swept through him and he nearly gagged and snapped his eyes closed again. Whatever had happened to him, he had clearly been on the losing side.

Taking a couple of moments for the unbearable multiple pains to subside slightly, he cautiously cracked open first one eye and, when he didn't immediately feel ill, then the other.

A cold, grey mist confronted him, stretching as far as he could see. To his surprise, it appeared to be semisolid and somewhat buoyant, considering that he was sprawled against a particularly dense clump of mist-stuff. Looking down at himself, he was wearing green travelling clothes, with an empty sword scabbard at his belt.

Another spasm of pain shot through him, particularly concentrated around his heart and, as he gripped his chest in pain, to his surprise he felt a rough surface beneath his shirt. He unlaced his shirt to take a look and found a large crystalline mass, as black as night and glowing with dark energy, embedded in his chest, presumably just over his heart. Then pain overwhelmed him again, this time centred in his head, and memories began to flash back.

A tall man in similar clothing to his, strangely familiar, loomed over him with fury on his face.
A village in flames, its unfortunate inhabitants fleeing in terror.
A black gem, its inherent malice vying with its promise of health and power.
An ancient library, filled with books that even depraved scholars would not dare read.

Of course! He remembered now. He was what others referred to as a fallen Kai Lord, one who had moved away from the teachings of the God of the Sun. He had once been Kai Master Cloud Moon, a talented and respected Kai Lord who had trained many young Kai novices. More memories flooded back unbidden, remorseless in their intensity.

He was Cloud Moon, a victorious Kai Master who had bested a poor Naarite cultist. The cult had been smashed, their monstrous minions had been slain and the cult leader's advisors had been slain or arrested and dragged off. Now that very same cult leader of Naar, supreme God of Evil, lay before him, gasping for his life.

Cloud Moon refused the wretched traitor's pleas and slew him on the stairs to the very altar where hundreds of innocents had also been slain, in homage to the Pentad.

But the cult leader had the last laugh and as the man was reduced to a shredded corpse under Cloud Moon's righteous assault, a black gem of terrible power freed itself from the man's grasp and propelled itself directly at the Kai Lord in a flurry of pain and surprise.

It was a Doomstone and the man who would no longer be Cloud Moon found it had melded with his body and was even now beginning to whisper its poisoned message directly into the Kai Master's mind.

The doomed Kai Lord wandered for many weeks, desperately searching for anything to block out the Doomstone's insidious influence and malignant whispers or to remove it from its body. Eventually he was forced to seek out the company of Pentad cultists as they alone knew even the merest shred of knowledge about the Doomstones.

The proud and wrathful Kai Lord fell... hard. Naming himself Dark Moon, he mastered the basics of the Naarite cults and finally knew some peace. The Doomstone no longer sought to send him howling to Tharrayn, God of Madness, but instead it granted its malevolent powers of celerity and lightning to him and exhorted him to greater and more wretched acts of darkness.

The villages burnt, the commoners flew before his dark might and brutal mercenaries knelt before his power. An obsessive Sage and a corrupt Brotherhood magician joined his army and they abducted a powerful Brotherhood master, holding him for ransom before the Kai Monastery intervened.

With his army shattered, Dark Moon found his most talented and experienced former student in hot pursuit of him. Archmaster Hawkeye eventually tracked him to a Durenese ruin and there they fought, master against student, Kai Lord against fallen Kai, friend against friend.
He had lost: been forced to suffer the indignity of being permanently bested by his former student. He had been stripped of his weapons, his magical equipment and even his Kai Master's cloak. The Doomstone has refused to be removed, even with the combined lore of the Kai Lords and the Brotherhood of the Crystal Star. so he had been thrown through the Toran gate to the Dazhiarn with it still fused to his body.

The memories ceased abruptly and he was furious with himself, with Hawkeye, with Magnamund and with the Gods. How could this happen to him? He sank further into the mist bank and slept.

[Agrarvyn]

Dark Moon awoke to find himself rudely sprawled on a wet cobbled road. For a moment, he lay there, unclear of where he was or why he was here. Then it struck him that he was of course still in the Dazhiarn, the planar prison for criminals from Magnamund. Then why was he in what appeared to be a fairly normal town? He glanced at the sky – a grim, overcast grey sky glared back.

As he got to his feet, rubbing his sore back, a street urchin rushed past him, knocking against him as the boy went. Instinctively, Dark Moon’s hand flew to his belt and realised at once that his pouch was missing. With a cry of rage, he raised his left arm and felt a surge of pain as the Doomstone embedded just above his heart crackled into life. Dark blue lightning lanced along his arm, pooled briefly around his hand (which was pointing at the fleeing urchin)and then leapt through the air, catching the urchin in the back and sending his quickly charred, young body sliding along the slick cobbles.

Glaring at the smoking corpse, Dark Moon watched his money pouch drop out of the urchin’s lifeless grasp and hit the cobbles with a discontented splat! Concentrating briefly on the pouch, Dark Moon used his Kai skill of Mind Over Matter to bring the pouch slowly into the air and then, more quickly, into his outstretched hand. Securing the pouch more tightly on his belt, the fallen Kai Lord turned and surveyed the road with a baleful glare. His sharp eyes picked out a small group of ragged-clothed boys fleeing in horror.

It was just starting to rain when Dark Moon looked up at the various inn and shop signs that decorated the houses along this road. One caught his attention – a cheaply-made, rough wooden sign with peeling paint, grandiosely describing itself as The Jewelled Unicorn. Bringing the hood of his Kai Master’s cloak up around his head, he approached the inn, opened the front door and stepped inside.

The taproom was smoky, poorly-lit and, from what he could tell, was just as shoddy inside as it was out. Then again, the malodorous clientele, a various group of motley ne’er-do-wells and those of little moral fibre, fitted the surroundings perfectly. As he stepped in however and the inn fell silent (as they often do when a stranger arrives), one of the thugs in the taproom noticed the very particular cut of Dark Moon’s cloak.

“It’s a Kai Master!” the thug bellowed. Dark Moon briefly considered asking if he hadn’t just killed a Kai Lord and taken his cloak, but then realised that he wouldn’t believe himself either. He closed the door behind him, cutting off the wan light that had allowed such a swift identification, and flexed his upper body ominously.

“What of it?” he asked quietly, his right hand now beside his empty scabbard and his left arm concealed amidst the shadows of his cloak.

“Only prisoners are sent to the Dazhiarn!” the thug continued. “So you’re either a spy or you’re here to kill us!”

“I’m no spy,” muttered Dark Moon, “but,” he added in a louder tone, “I will kill you if you don’t leave me alone.” Much laughter greeted his threat, though Dark Moon wondered how much of it was as confident as it sounded.

“So you’ll kill us anyway?” asked the thug. Dark Moon quickly reassessed the man’s mental capabilities – he wasn’t quite as stupid as he looked, it seemed. “Get him lads!”

Dark Moon, always quick to act, initiated hostilities by revealing and raising his left arm. A severe pain wracked his chest again and then more blue lightning arced across the room and flung the now smouldering thug’s body six feet from where he had been sitting. The people in the taproom, already half-standing and in various stages of drawing weapons, all paused and some stared stupidly at the dead thug, while others gaped at the Kai Master.

He shrugged and took advantage of the general surprise by focussing on the sword scabbard of a nearby mercenary and calling the man’s sword to his right hand. Unlike nearly everything else in here, the sword was well-made, but obviously well-used. The mercenary’s hand futilely leapt to his empty scabbard and then threw himself at Dark Moon, his hands angrily grabbing for Dark Moon’s throat.

Dark Moon however, had not been a Kai instructor for nothing and had developed the Kai Disciplines of Hunting and Weaponskill almost from his earliest times at the Monastery. Stepping back, he swung the sword in a practised arc and casually decapitated the weaponless mercenary. Swaying to his left to dodge a knife expertly cast at him by the barman on the other side of the room, he then despatched the barman with another bolt of lightning.

The last bar brawl for many months in The Jewelled Unicorn began in earnest…

[Agrarvyn]

Dark Moon stood amidst the smoking ruins of The Jewelled Unicorn. The pitched brawl that had raged in the taproom was now over, with catastrophic effect. The barman and all the patrons were dead in various different ways and the fallen Kai Lord had taken a few minor injuries as well, despite his prodigious abilities. The inn itself had been badly damaged by fire when one decidedly drunken patron had attempted to brain Dark Moon with a flaming torch, missed spectacularly and accidentally set fire to a pool of spilt alcohol (and such was the intensity of the fray that no one had been available or willing to put the fire out).

“Fools!” thought Dark Moon angrily. No amount of thugs were a match for a powerful Kai Lord, particularly one augmented by Naar’s fell power. “Fools,” he whispered to himself, with slightly less force, but no less vehemence. “How dare they?!”

Forcing his mind to work on healing his various cuts and bruises, anger raced through him, making his body shake from the effort of maintaining his concentration. He had always been somewhat impulsive and inefficient at meditation, but these weaknesses had led towards him being an excellent warrior and righteous champion of Kai.

“Fools!” he screamed, as the final cut healed on his cheek. “How could you be so blind?” The Doomstone was aching unmercifully above his heart, expressing its pleasure at being called upon so much, but also extorting its price for sharing its power.

Just then, a chair fell from the top of a large pile of broken and charred furniture. He turned and glared at the furniture pile, the highest point in the now open-air taproom, and his Kai senses alerted to the presence of a thinking mind within the pile. What was more, he thought he recognised it.

“Stop hiding, you cowardly worm,” he snapped at the unknown person within.

A muffled voice replied, “I’m stuck!”

“Fool,” hissed Dark Moon, this time directed at the hidden person. However, he shifted a few of the largest pieces of furniture and, before long, he could see someone crouched in the hole between the walls of piled furniture. “Get out,” he said peremptorily.

A short, weaselly-looking man, dressed in ageing and formerly expensive clothing, clambered out of the hole and stood wretchedly in front of the fallen Kai.

“Lord Dark Moon!” the man said, a false tone of pleasure masking an undercurrent sullen malice. Dark Moon casually raised his arm and slapped the man with a resounding backhander, who staggered back clutching his newly bleeding face.

“Vasool,” said Dark Moon, who had no trouble remembered this man.

Vasool was the son of a Lyrisian commoner and an escaped Vassagonian slave. Brought up in relative poverty and complete obscurity, he had been trained as a Sage of Lyris during Gwydion’s tenure in Varetta. He had not been at interested in the fate of the common people and had spent most of his time toadying to the corrupt nobility of Lyris.

Then, one day, when he had been conducting some dishonest business in the Lyrisian city of Soren, he had run across Dark Moon when the Kai Lord was passing through on a mercenary expedition. Dark Moon had sensed the inherent Evil in the Sage and had returned to Soren to recruit him for his vile schemes, when Vasool had become obsessed with dark power in an attempt to make his rather forgettable career well known.

But now, here he was, also weaponless and in the Dazhiarn. Clearly he had failed but, as Dark Moon reflected, if a powerful fallen Kai had been bested, such an apparently worthless person would have no chance of success.

“I crave your forgiveness, Lord Dark Moon,” the Sage began, his voice oozing with sycophantic obeisance. Vasool even fell to his knees and stretched out his arms towards Dark Moon in supplication.

“Get up, cur,” Dark Moon snapped, spitting on the floor in front of Vasool and then landing a well-placed kick in the man’s ribs. There was a cry of pain but nothing more serious – Dark Moon was well-versed in inflicting just the right amount of pain.

“Come with me,” he continued. “We have much work to do and I have an old friend to pay back.” He spat the word “friend” with such venom than Vasool cringed in terror, rather than stand up and face Dark Moon’s anger. “Debts should always be paid back and yours, you treacherous good-for-nothing, will be paid back now.”

He turned abruptly on his heel, his Kai cloak swirling around him, and then he strode arrogantly out of the ruined inn, the whimpering Sage cringing along behind him.