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| Details |
| Author: | Saaron |
| Summary: | Sirie abducts Carden, Sandy's bully in Ratchet, and does a dark ritual with him. |
| Rating: | A for Adults Only 18+ |
It was late when it happened. Carden Blackwood was tidying up the warlocks’ shack, in Ratchet. He took pride in this role as he considered being the one breaking the summoning circles after everyone had left a sign that the other put great faith in him. In reality, everyone else was just happy they didn’t have to clean their own mess.
He dusted off his hands, proud of his job today, and headed off to the inn, ready for a good night's sleep.
But just as he left the building, he felt two, gloved, bony hands slithering on his chest and two deathly thin legs wrap around his waist. The left hand abruptly covered his mouth before he could speak or scream. The taste and smell of undeath mixed with Fel was almost unbearable, and Carden’s eyes started watering almost immediately. He tried to scream, but the pressure the Forsaken put on his mouth made it impossible.
“Ssssssh. Calm down, dear,” Sirie said, her voice hushed and sweet. “Are you Carden Blackwood?”
Carden shook his head, frozen in fear.
“Now, that’s what a Carden Blackwood would say in this situation!”
She giggled, then paused, wondering if she had caught the right person. He tried to pull her hands away from his mouth, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Her tireless, undead body was stronger than his fatigued, human hands.
“Ah, whatever, if you’re not, I can always come back for the real one another day. For now, you’ll do just fine!”
What could he do? Which spell to use? Immolate! That’s right! He could burn off her hand! Flames erupted from his fingers as he tried to burn off Sirie’s hand on his mouth.
“Hmph,” she let out, her hand unmoving. She started casting immolate as well, fighting fire with fire. The two kept doing this stand-off for a few more seconds, before finally, Carden let go, his flesh charred. “You’re an annoying little one, you know that? I’m going to have to get a new one! I know how to handle people like you, though!”
Sirie’s right hand swiftly slid towards his heart, a purple light glowing in between her fingers. Carden tried to fight back against her grip, running backward hoping to hit a wall and hit her spine, but before he did, the Forsaken pulled a purple Soulstone out of his chest, and he fell to the ground.
The Soulstone breaks. Carden wakes up to the terrible smells of the Undercity. He’s shirtless, his wrists and ankles tied up by chains to a wall, an old, disgusting piece of cloth in his mouth. He attempts to scream, but the sounds are completely muffled by the cloth. Sirie is kneeling on the ground, drawing a ritual circle with one hand. She turns her head to the sound of the chains rattling.
“Ah good, you’re awake! I’m almost done here!”
She resumes her drawing of the circle, humming as she does, copying the runes from her journal.
“What is it you usually say? Right! ‘Oh, shut up’! It’s not as if anyone here is going to help you anyway. People aren’t huge fans of living humans, around here,” she giggles.
She gets up, her left hand dangling from her wrist – if you can call it her left hand. It has a completely different color from the rest of her greenish skin, and the stitches connecting the hand and the wrist seem freshly done.
“Okay, next is preparing you!” Sirie grabs a ritual dagger from her belt and approaches Carden, a huge, happy smile on her face.
The dagger gently enters Carden’s skin. He shrieks and squirms in pain as Sirie carves the same runes she drew on the floor onto his flesh.
“Now, stop moving like that, or I’ll have to stop!”
Carden keeps flailing his body around, trying to kick the dagger out of her hands with his knees.
“Okay, now you’re doing this on purpose. This isn’t funny, Carden.”
Sirie puts the bloody dagger back in her belt and walks away from him. Carden keeps moving around, trying to somehow escape the chains, sobbing through the piece of cloth in his mouth.
She turns her back to him, unbuttons her dress, and lets the top fall onto her arms, crossed above her belly, revealing the intricate tattoo on her back. Her hands start glowing purple, and demonic runes light up one after the other on her tattoo, the letters seemingly randomly placed inside the bizarre design. Z-A-H-N-Y-S.
A breach to the twisting Nether opens on her skin, and a hand suddenly comes out, grabbing the side of her back and pushing – no – pulling itself out. A full arm now comes out of Sirie’s back, slowly followed by another, both arms push as hard as they can out of the thin breach. Meanwhile, the warlock seems almost unresponsive as she keeps focusing on her summoning ritual.
Soon, the female Sayaad’s head comes out of her back – first her horns, then the rest. She smirks as she keeps pushing herself seemingly out of Sirie’s body. Once her shoulders are fully out of the breach, the rest of the extraction seems to go a lot more swiftly, as Zahnys, looking up at the ceiling, puts her hands on the ground and does a back walkover, finally out of the breach. Almost instantly, Sirie puts her dress back on and buttons it up again.
“See, Carden, I don’t like doing my summonings out loud. When we do, people know the names of our demons and then you see them running around with a bunch of other warlocks,” she smirks. “This way, I can quickly do my summonings without anyone hearing, and the tattoo is quickly covered up once I’m done! I’ve got my Sayaad on my back, my imp on the back of my hand, my—Oh! Once, I put one of these tattoos on my bicep. I quickly got rid of that one – it cost me an arm!” She bursts out laughing. “Get it? It cost me an arm! I can just remove my arms and replace them! That’s why it’s funny.”
Carden does not laugh. He keeps trying to scream and free himself from the chains. All he wants is to get out of the Undercity and as far away as he can from Sirie.
“Okay, not in the mood for jokes, I get it,” she turns to her succubus. “You know what to do.”
Zahnys smiles and nods. She turns to Carden and raises her hand towards his face – he looks away and winces, bracing himself for whatever pain the Sayaad has in store for him. Instead, he feels her soft hand brushing against his face. He opens one of his eyes and looks at the succubus. No, he isn’t looking at her, he’s looking at Menara Voidrender. She smiles softly at him, and all he can do is stare at her, fully hypnotized by the presence of the one he loves. He doesn’t feel Sirie who has resumed the carving of his skin. He just stares into Menara’s eyes, lost in this instant of pure bliss, lost in her blue eyes.
Meanwhile, the witch proceeds with her monologue he doesn’t hear.
“You know why I’m doing this, right? It’s because you’ve hurt my son!” she giggles. “I mean, you’re not the first person I’m doing this to, but I’ve chosen you specifically because of how bad you’re treating him! This time, I have a righteous goal, just like all of you humans, hurting others because ‘that’s the right thing to do’!”
She keeps carving onto his skin, her left hand still completely unresponsive, just as Carden is, still staring into Menara’s eyes.
“You’ve hurt Leghan, so it’s only right to hurt you, right? It makes sense for you?” He doesn’t answer. “Then it makes sense for me too!”
Sirie finally stops with her rune carving and wipes her forehead with her wrist as if any sweat had come out of her body.
“Phew, magic always makes me so hungry. Don’t you get the munchies when you’re doing magic, Carden?”
She looks at his face, smiling. She nods.
Sirie grabs her dagger and stabs strongly into a random part of Carden’s belly. He’s finally woken up from his trance, realizing now that the one mesmerizing him has been the Sayaad all along. He shrieks in pain and in terror, as Sirie carves out a small square of his flesh. Once she’s done, she throws the piece of meat into her mouth and starts chewing.
“Hmm, a full meal just of amuse-bouches has always been the dream!” she claps her hands once, as Carden looks at his blood coming out of her mouth in horror. “Okay! Let’s do this!”
Sirie dismisses Zahnys and goes to stand in the middle of the ritual circle. She raises her right hand, and the demonic runes on the ground and on Carden’s skin begin to glow bright green. Soon, the will to even scream escapes from him as fluxes of green energy emerge from the runes carved into him to join the corresponding runes at Sirie’s feet. The runes on the ground start spinning, the energy mixes, then shoot into one beam towards Sirie’s hand, green fumes emanating from her nails. The green energy travels through her body. Crack. The bones in her left-hand make a cracking noise as if connecting fully with her wrist, the stitches disappear, and the warlock now holds both hands towards Carden, accelerating the transfer of vital energy.
Carden seems to go, finally at peace after all this torture. He slowly, painlessly, falls into a deep sleep, never to wake up again. His skin turns grayer, he looks progressively more emaciated, and his hair loses its shine… The man in his early twenties now looks significantly older.
Meanwhile, bones cracks inside Sirie’s body, stitches disappear, her skin takes a paler, less green look, her hair loses some of its green shade and some red locks appear once more on her head. Fel blood bubbles out of her empty eye sockets as if boiling inside her skull. Green tears fall on each side of her face, although the huge grin that draws on her face is a clear sign that there is no pain involved for her – at least not an unbearable one. She shakes and the energy traveling throughout her now not-so-decaying body seems almost too wild to control. But that’s not Sirie’s first time doing this ritual. She focuses on her spell, more and more Fel blood spitting out of her eye sockets – she can’t stop. She won’t stop. She couldn’t be much deader anyway.
The fluxes stop pouring out of Carden’s body, and soon, out of the ritual circle as well. Sirie sighs, her hands still shaking. The transformation is not full, she does not look that much more human than she used to do, but this way, she knows she can fight off the decay her body has been subject to since she became a Forsaken. She does not age. She does not decompose. Her wounds heal. The new body parts she takes to replace broken ones become fully hers. She is immortal.
She cracks her neck and makes sure that every bone, every bit of skin, is still in place. She observes her new left hand, now looking perfectly like the right one. She walks towards Carden’s lifeless corpse tied to the wall. She bites her lower lip.
“As I told you, Carden, magic always gives me the munchies…”