Lair of the Lamb session four:

All skin and bones and no skin

Annie wraps her arms around the book and holds it close. It's made of thin sheets of black iron. It has illegible angular scratches on its front that might be some strange script. Its sharp edges dig into her arms and its cold bites at her, but she doesn't care in the slightest. She's a witch! (probably. Close enough).

The book has a chain woven through its spine, which she wraps around her waist, leaving the book hanging by her side.

The rest of the party peers down the now-open sarcophagus, down the rough-hewn shaft, and see Annie standing giddy-faced on a pile of very fancy looking rugs. With some interesting practical geometry (enough people leaning over the sarcophagus' dagger-sharp sides from all directions all holding the same rope), they pull her out.

Even as she's ascending the rope she's babbling, about being chosen, finally, she's a witch she's a witch she's a witch, and as soon as she's back on her feet she grabs the spellbook hanging at her waist. With the squeak and creak of iron on iron, she opens it, and the first page is revealed.

In the Imperial tongue is written:

THIS

IS

A

TEST

As soon as Annie has parsed the sentence, a ghostly face emerges from the book. It is contorted into a silent scream. It flies at Annie and disappears into her head, where it hides behind her memories of Betsie (a cow), wide eyes staring out.

Alec's pretty sure he ought to adjust his rankings, but isn't sure whether this ought to put Annie higher or lower.

Nobody's sure what to do about the head-ghost, least of all Annie, so the party moves on. There's a crawl-way north, and they crouch through it, finding a room dominated by a mound of bone-pellets regurgitated by the late lamb. Some searching turns up an intricate silver bracelet, shaped like a bundle of veins, which Alec puts on his non-crab arm.

Annie pores over the black iron book with the others.

To control the dead, one must speak their tongue. It is named Cheolxic, after that most venerable and wise empire sundered by the perfidy of the Ostermen, sometimes referred to as Crepituspeake, Creepspeek, or Creppe by the more vernacular. It is natively and involuntarily spoken by all skeletons, carapaces, and keratinoids. A dialect is natively use by spirits, who...

It's dense stuff. It transpires that the tongue of the dead can be spoken by clacking together bones.

After all of this investigation, the party decides where to head next. There was a locked room near the bowl room where it all began. Milo's crafted a makeshift pair of lockpicks, brittle but effective, and once the journey's done he uses them. The lockpicks break (unlucky), but the door is open.

It's a square room, ten by ten yards, dank and unlit. By the left wall, a table with a fruit-link nodule on it; by the right, a wooden chest. Bolted to the ground by the far wall is a metal chest wrapped in silver chains, held down by lynchpins.

Lennie eats the nodule-thing. It tastes like salted meat, with an aftertaste of rotlike sweetness. His vision blurs. He sees both the room, now, and also his point of view slumped over, vomiting over the floor as the party looks on in dismay. Six seconds later, he slumps over and vomits on the floor as the party looks on in dismay. The lambfruit, whose name the old woman in the pit referenced, lets you see a glimpse of the immediate future. A nauseating glimpse, but potentialy a useful one.

The wooden chest contains a leather pouch of purple powder, a very fancy pipe to smoke it in, and a strange helmet, which has a great red fur crest and an attached mask, smirking with narrowed eyes. The pipe's stem could fit through the mouth.

Kes, connoiseur of the mind-altering, decides to try out the powder. They fill the pipe, take a puff, and slump to the floor, fast asleep. They dream of chickens. Several not-technically-violent attempts to rouse them fail.

Kes' brother is called Daniel or Damien or something like that. We will call him D-man. D-man grabs Kes and slings them other his shoulder.

Only one chest remains. Up close, Kurt Hammer identifies its gray metal as lead. Dull, heavy, poison. The two lynchpins poke out proudly.

Alec grabs hold of one one the lynchpins with his human hand, and gently pulls it out. As the pin clears the silver chain, everyone in the room is struck by a searing headache, as if the room were bathed in a Pressure caving in on everyone's skulls. The pounding abates after a few seconds, fading to a dull ache and a tingle on the scalp.

Alec slams the lynchpin back in and walks out of the room. He wants nothing to do with whatever's in that box, and tells everyone as much. D-man follows him out.

But Annie does want something to do with whatever is in that box, and so she kneels down before it. Her sticky fingers pilfer one lynchpin - there's the headache -

(Everyone still in the room is watching in a sort of awe, at this point-)

- then the second lynchpin, and the headache worsens, pulsing, and blood starts dripping from everyone's noses as Wrongness bleeds from the chest as if it's been building up in there, and Annie is right in front of it at the rivermouth and she's dizzy and her fingers and arms twitch a bit beyond her control, but still she pushes the chains aside and grabs the lid and lifts it up -

The room saturates. A deep hot cloying sensation, a smell that isn't a smell, of smoke and embers and hot fur and iron spiking into the tonsils, writhing and wrestling and pressing into the brain. Annie feels her bones buzzing as if in harmony with some distant vibration.

In the chest is a skull.

It doesn't look like any animal's skull anyone's ever seen.

It rattles, and turns towards Annie, and from what might be an eye socket, there is a beckoning sensation, a demand, JOIN, FEED, the wrongness turning from a blasting pressure into a current, a sucking vortex, and Annie's mind is scrambled and incoherent and all resistance is fleeting and -

Everyone sees Annie's skin slough off of her like a coat dropped onto the floor. Her muscles, her fat, her eyes, bubble and melt like chocolate in an oven, dripping and flowing as if gravity had turned sideways, falling towards the Skull.

It doesn't take long. A few seconds. The melting speeds up over time. By the end, it's as if the Skull was sucking her flesh through a huge invisible straw. It's going so fast, it might not even hurt that much! (It hurts a lot.)

Annie's bones are bare and lightly steaming as they collapse into a heap amidst her clothes and spellbook.

The turncoat flesh pours on to the skull, forming a spherical blob which starts to morph into the the crude shape of a face, as if a giant was pressing his thumb into from various angles. It shapes into something almost like a face. It opens its mouth.

"WHO WAKES DAVOK?!"

For a moment, Alec is stunned. Annie drops off of the bottom of the rankings on account of her rapid-onset flesh deficiency (and is not very high up on the separate ranking of 'who to resurrect if that ever turns out to be doable').

He starts gathering his bravery as -

"WHO ARE YOU LOT?! YOU DON'T LOOK LIKE THOSE ACCURSED MONKS! SERVE ME! CARRY ME FORTH FROM THIS PLACE, THAT I MAY REUNITE WITH MY BODY AND BRING PAIN TO THOSE WHO RENDERED ME SO!"

Kurt Hammer, seeing the raw size of the head, (and the pile of bones next to him), falls into a calculated kowtow. "Oh great DAVOK! We are but your humble servants! Of course we will do as you desire!"

Meanwhile, Lenny tries to sidle up to the side of the chest without DAVOK noticing, but is easily spotted.

"PERFIDIOUS MORTAL! OBEY ME!"

DAVOK's features contort even further and are for a moment lit as if by ultraviolet light, and Lenny feels as if a fist is trying to clamp around his mind and wrestle it into submission; but he slips free, keeps control of himself for the moment, and swings the chest shut just as D-man and Alec come sprinting in. D-man vaults on top of the chest and pits his and Kes' weight against DAVOK, and it's just enough for Alec to replace the chains and reinsert the lynchpins.

The pressure drops to nothing. Everybody slumps.

Annie's bones lie crumpled. A tiny light glints in her eyesocket for a moment, then vanishes.

Kurt Hammer's mind races as the party gets ready to leave. That - monster - DAVOK - it was powerful. Magically so. Like the promise of what Annie might have been able to do, years down the line, but now.

And it wants servants. Servants get protection.

Kurt thinks of his home.
Kurt thinks of his wife.
Kurt think of how LARGE DAVOK's main body must be.
Kurt thnks of how LARGE he could get under such a master.

As the party say their goodbyes to Annie, taking her spellbook and skull, and walk away, Kurt steps back, and lets the shadows swallow him.

"Hi, Akina."

"Have you gotten any rope yet?!"

"Look, not yet, okay - where's Kurt?"

"WHO DARES WAKES DAVOK? AGAIN?!"

"It is I, master! Your most humble servant! Kurt Hammer!"

"AHH, YES, THE POLITE ONE! ATTEND TO ME!"

"...Kurt, it killed Annie."