World of Warcraft - Interbellum (IC Thread)

[MrAbdiel]

Spoiler: {Fluff} Marion's Ritual - Untwisting the Nether

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So far, the search for the cadets has relied on mortal senses. Not just the traditional tracking senses, like the keen eyes and ears of the high elf but also the skilled and ingrained wilderness sense of the human huntsman. In these things, Marion can assist, but cannot leverage her full expertise. But there are other senses than even these, for those with the strength in their convictions and steel behind their eyes; senses that reveal things not strictly that are, but instead things that should not be and yet are. It is such illicit sensory power that Marion is forced to draw on now.

Well; perhaps not forced. Afforded, maybe.

The other members of the party watch as Marion gazes down into the ring resting in the palm of her hand. She incants the strange words in the wicked language that causes all who hear it to taste ash in their mouths. The runes she has scratched in the dirt pool up with sourceless smoke, and then a glimmering smoulder of green flame. And the ring in her palm stirs, shifts, stands upright on its edge, and begins spinning. Lazilly at first, then faster and faster until it seems to be a whirling silver ball in the warlock's hand. Her eyes, too, have taken on the same silver sheen, and they flutter and track left and right as they orient to a whole new world of perceptions.

To Marion's eyes, her ritual works, and she partially penetrates the veil of worlds to see an overlay of how the Twisting Nether comes close to Azeroth. Varghast is there, in some splash of a scene on another world drawn close enough to your vision by, you must assume, nothing more than your affinity for that particular demon. In a dark crystal sphere the size of a moon, he swarms in shapeless oneness with millions of others of his kind. The nature of this union is incomprehensible to you; and you force your attention away, and back to the task at hand - targeting not the demon you have bound to your service, but the one to whom this little trinket belonged. Your gaze tracks across distorted miles of the Netherscape, and you cannot find the imp you are looking for. He is gone far away, or perhaps, he is unsummoned in some other Netherplace to which your senses cannot reach with your power. But what you do see is enough to make a difference. The places where the overlay of the Nether you are perceiving and the 'real' world intersect light up the path of this imp's passage in this world as clearly as if it were a story you already knew by heart; an only slightly uncomfortable sense of coming to know that is imparted upon you without a strict understanding of how this information is sluicing into your mind in this phantasmagorical pseudo-sight. It was summoned into being near the road from which you departed a dark before; moving a little south before being unsummoned again only to be resummoned further down the same path. In and out of the world, in and out, like a sewing needle penetrating the fates of these young men and stitching up their graveclothes, the imp was conjured likely to be glimpsed by the young soldiers to lure them further and further from the road. These cadets are too young to have fought in the third war, so they cannot have known the cunning of the legion; but they know the songs of valor and tales of sacrifice in which their fathers and grandfathers die to spurn the conquest sought by these demons. It's not hard ti imagine them being easily enticed by a chance to stomp out even a minor creature of the Fel.

Once they got to this campsite and gave up their chase, the imp was summoned again - this time in the midst of the fire - and immediately was struck with something flat and hard. A cooking skillet, you speculate; enough to nearly kill it and to draw the victorious focus of the cadets while some greater ambush was sprung upon them. In the ensuring combat, the imp was killed and rendered unmanifest; but it has been summoned back into the world just one more time before its trail vanishes from your supernatural sight - far to the south, close to the ogre mound and encampment known as Stonemaul village. If the binder of this imp has taken any of these cadets as prisoner or trophy, they have taken them there.