This Place is a Temple

—

Enki had first discovered the thief not long after he had entered the dungeon, a skeleton and a ghoul flanking his sides. The young man, imprisoned beyond saving himself, holding a girl’s doll, had jumped up and removed his sword when he saw Enki.

Enki understood why. Accompanied by the undead and with the grim atmosphere of magical potent about him, it was easy for a stranger to get a bad first impression. The thief calmed down significantly when Enki commanded his ghoul to break down his cell door and offered him an escort out.

“I’m only too pleased to be of service to someone else facing the same ill fate that I am,” Enki had said to him, voice level, back stooped slightly forward. “I am seeking a man kept captive in the depths of these dungeons, it’s no skin off my back to set a few more free.”

“Would you believe it,” Cahara replied, pleasure turning his eyes into moon-like slits, “I’m looking for a man who’s trapped down here too! Why don’t we look together?”

Enki could not have been more certain that the man meant him ill if he had charged at him with his blade. But he was young, strong, sharp; willful, but that could change.

If Enki was hunting gods, he was going to need strong weapons. Mistakenly, most people in the business of forging weapons turned to steel or sorcery. But there was no weapon like man; there was no method like flesh. The excellent marriage of wit and sinew before him was the only thing that made gods, and the only thing that murdered them; a human.

“I’d be delighted,” responded Enki. “I thought that depending on my knowledge of things arcane, I would make short work of these dungeons; some of its tricks, however, have put me more on my back foot than I like to admit.”

“That’s why you have to stay on your toes!” said the young man jovially. He approached the open door of his prison cell; Enki still stood on the other side. He then put an arm over his stomach and bowed at the waist. “Cahara,” he said, “is my name.” Then he straightened up again and his eyes glittered as he waited for the response.

Enki raised one open palm, showing off his bare weapon sure as a man of arms bore a sword. “When I ascended to the priesthood,” he replied, “I chose the name Enki, and I have been so ever since.”

Cahara’s eyes followed the open palm as he cocked his head. “Is that how a man greets another where you’re from?”

“How a priest does, yes,” Enki replied. “Should I have inclined my head to you?”

Cahara paused. Then laughed. “I didn’t know I was in the company of one so esteemed! I might have gone to the ground before you. But forgive my impertinence; the ground is so dirty, I do not dare.”

Was the thief betting on being able to pressure his new companion into bowing his head so that he could strike? Enki wasn’t totally sure, but the easy-going malice, the willingness to strike at any time but to refrain from striking if the kill wasn’t easy, rolled around the smiling man like wind.

Enki hoped that it was so, that this stranger was playing games with his rescuer, new-met, trying to find ways and opportunities to kill him; if so then his mind was sharp, his heart stone, his resolve steel, and with those qualities he might make a masterwork weapon. The young peasant might even retain some of his wits after he had been fit to the will of his better.

“We need not cling to propriety in such a place as this,” Enki responded. Then he took a step backward, and another, until his undead servants were between him and the thief, before turning his back. “Come now; we have a long way to go.”

Cahara looked to both side of him, at living bone and living flesh, and smiled to each. He wisely chose to refrain from knifing Enki in the back while his bodyguards were flanking him, but he followed behind nonetheless.

Cahara chattered cheerfully for a while, then he fell off his chatter into humming, and then finally into silence, and Enki was not surprised in the least when in a dark corner the thief slipped away and disappeared. He had only stolen silver; Enki found himself uncertain whether the thief did not realize the value of the things he hadn’t stolen, or if silver was of more use to him than even the soul gems that Enki clutched.

No matter. He was likely to see him again, if they were truly both going deeper.

—

Enki was willing to let one go (and potentially come back, or potentially meet his own end in the winding halls and sudden pits of the dungeons) as he and his servants explored the upper levels and assessed the dangers there. The malformed guards, intimidating at first, turned out to be easy work for a few undead servants, and findings hosts to make more servants was almost facile in a place so glutted with the dead.

It did take it out of him, but he was pleasantly surprised to find stashes of opium in the desks of long-departed captains and untouched, pleasantly ages barrels of wine around; an evening break as the sun set red through the leaves of the courtyard and cries of pain and ecstasy floated around him like cicadas did him well.

Then with his entourage he picked himself up to begin his descent again, but just before he reentered the dungeon and just as night was setting came face-to-face with the hard, bright-eyed face of an outlander.

Enki was being held by the point of an arrow by an incredible example of manhood, bare-chested in the dungeons, though that may have been because he had just enjoyed the services of the cult of Sylvian under the heavy boughs of the hickories. Enki could smell the sex on him; he could see how hale and flushed he was despite the hardness of his eyes.

He had some solidity of character, if the servants of Sylvian hadn’t totally sucked him in. Despite his bare skin he had few scars and no deformities, meaning he had gotten this far in the dungeon without being seriously troubled by anything he had met yet. Enki put up both hands in a gesture of peace in response to the threat. “Hail,” he said, hoping the outlander spoke the common speech of the land.

He was pleasantly surprised by the outlander’s eyebrows rising, and his response in not just comprehensible but brief and eloquent speech. “I see you are still sane,” he said, arresting Enki in place with a glare just as no-nonsense as Cahara’s had been testing and changing. “It is pleasant to meet someone else who has his mind here, to be honest.”

“Likewise,” Enki replied.

“But what are those creatures that flock about you?” he asked, his eyes travelling from one ghoul to the next, fixing each with his eyes for a fierce, stabbing moment.

“I am a priest of the old gods,” Enki answered, still holding his hands up, “and these my acolytes. They are merely empowered corpses, but I still ask you not to harm them. They have kept me alive in this terrible place.”

The outlander looked decidedly uncertain about the undead. He kept his arrow aimed at Enki, but Enki saw already that his grip was softer, less serious. “You are sane,” he said, “but are you evil, or do you remain good as well as sane?”

Enki could not keep back a laugh, though he kept it light. “I follow the gods,” he said, “and their ways are above those of men.”

The man unnotched his arrow and then lifted it away from the bow. “Time will tell,” he said as he returned it to its quiver. “I’ve known many men who claim to follow their gods. Many of them have gods, it seems, with no interests their priests do not.”

They spoke only briefly, as night was coming on and both were eager to find a place to wait out the deadly dark hours. Enki was very interested to learn that Ragnvaldr was hunting the same man he was, though, he gathered, for very different ends. He sought to destroy the same things which Enki thought to safeguard and make flourish. HE did not let on that they had divergent goals but sought to share as much information as they could in the lengthening twilight.

Ragnvaldr quickly impressed him with his comprehensive and often cutting grasp of local religion, culture, and custom. He had not been in Rondon long but, in his own words, always learned his enemy before he slew him, like the stalking hunter that lives almost as one with his preferred prey. Enki fancied he impressed Ragnvaldr in return with his knowledge about the exact arcane arts that his prey was trifling in.

He didn’t think divulging so much would turn out to be much of a risk. The outlander, though sturdy, had farther to delve than he realized, and insisted on doing it alone. Enki accepted the declined invitation without fuss.

He was still interested in the quick, clever thief, but Ragnvaldr’s steadiness of character, his utter submission to his goal, was almost more appealing. Still, there was no forcing him, and if he had mapped the catacombs beneath their feet aright he was likely to meet with this potential weapon again.

He still felt a little impatient as he let another one go and turned his back, but there was a library that called to him, stocked both with rare tomes that the kingdom had sought to protect behind the walls of a prison and the mad but enlightening scrawls of the guards who had gone mad there; that would lift his spirits well enough until he was on the move again. He read through the night, sipping wine, listening to the sounds of men dying that broke through the silence of night like the peals of a clock.

—

Enki had been willing to catch and release, to play a statue and let birds come to rest on his outstretched hand, before he met the lady knight. Watching her rage, her bitterness, her bigotry, her hate, Enki lost his composure. She would be in his service. Her detestation of the vile world around her, her fascination with a world of purity which was created only in her mind and which could lead her onto ever more delusion, her single-minded sexual obsession with an uninterested man and unerring devotion to that lascivious goal had turned the woman into a weapon already.

It was not early to bend a young person’s mind such that they responded to slights of honor with the urge to genocide; Rondon had clearly perfected the art. D’arce had clearly been wronged by the subhuman cave dwellers, but watching her petite, plain face go from wonderment to red rage in a moment as she decided to kill not just her abusers but each soul in the entire village was a sight to be hold. She chattered at Enki, ranted to him; she hardly looked at him. He could have been anyone, he could have been no one. She did not care; she had one man in her life and the rest was dross, fit for the fire.

Enki indulged her. He kindly offered his services in the extermination of the cave dweller village, and the knight called him a noble soul, putting her gauntlet over his thin hand for a nearly courtly agreement for steel and flesh. Then Enki walked behind her and watched, the steel arc of her sword as she slashed it overhead, the grinding toe of her boot as she trampled their scared idols and statues and snapped the bones of the relics, the light of her teeth in the torchlight as she bore her hatred down at the weak creatures. Enki commanded his servants to assist her, and lost one of the ghouls in the massacre, but no matter.

Hanging back, casting spells with his left hand and clutching a goblet of wine he used to refresh himself in the right, Enki emerged from the end of a culture unscathed. Fallen torches guttered, splitting rocks of crumbling houses echoed in the silence after D’arce silence the gurgling of the last throat.

Enki lit another torch and walked up slowly behind her now-still form, humming so that she would hear his approach. Her mind was weak, susceptible to passions and quick to follow them; she might be in a state of twined bloodlust and shame, now, that she would not be able to control easily.

Indeed her eyes in the fire were wild when she jolted over her shoulder to look at them, but the battle-light was quickly smothered. “Father,” she rasped, putting a hand up near her lips, “I thank you humbly for your aid in cleansing this place.”

“I have not aided enough,” he responded. “You were hurt.”

She winced while sheathing her blade. “They fought with staves and stones, but they were many. I am glad I protected you, Father, for I see now that you are frail.”

“Adherence to piety and aestheticism has made my body weak,” he said, but did not stop his certain gait as he approached her. He held out his left hand and, because she had called him Father, said, “Come, child.”

She did come, though not as innocently as a babe; she looked to the hand, then his face, then his form, and Enki thought in her hesitance he saw what had made her so eager to kill her captors.

“Le the Gods soothe your wounds,” he said, softening his hand, deemphasizing his body with a slight curl of his spine.

D’arce caught the glimmer of a holy symbol around his neck as he approached; she nodded. Still, when Enki drew near enough to touch her, she closed her eyes firmly. Enki saw that, in her captivity, under torture, she had not cried.

He called upon Sylvian (his preference as well as the most apt choice for the task) and gentle green power gathered in his palm. The whispers of the Goddess, stirring in the light, made D’arce’s closed eyes flinched. Enki said nothing as he lifted up those loving whispers to her face, spilling between his fingers like wine.

They poured over her eyes and her lips, lighting up all her features; they dripped into her armor and down the skin deep inside. She shuddered and gasped at Sylvian’s touch, eyes snapping back open in a moment of sharp shame. Then they shuddered closed again as all the light disappeared in her armor, shining like star-twinkles through the gaps in the plates, and worked her shoulders and ribs in slow rolls through the soft healing pleasure.

Enki knew better than to comment on the knight’s strong reaction to Sylvian’s healing. “It won’t rejuvenate you completely, but Sylvian’s blessing has saved you from serious wounds or lasting damage.”

D’arce’s eyes stuttered open. She avoided looking at Enki’s face. “I thank you,” she said, “and Her Ladyship, though it is usually Alll-Mer I depend upon for my aid.

“The Gods aid in different ways,” Enki replied. “It may be Alll-Mer you must depend on for the rest of your healing, as Sylvian has done all She desires to do. Come; you need to rest. I saw a room a while back which is well-hidden and show no trace of habitation.”

After some understandable hesitance, Enki managed to convince the knight to follow him at least out of the slaughtered village, and then every step of taking her down the halls, into a small, cold, unused room, and convincing her to remove her armor and rest while he kindled a low fire was easier than the one before. D’arce slowly drooped with exhaustion as the weight of all she had endured and the rough violence after pressed on both her mind and her heart.

Once she was dressed in her under armor and sitting exhausted against the wall, Enki gave himself assurance that he could find her there again by the final touch of offering her a pipe of opium. She was uncertain for only a moment; the priest’s promises that it would soothe her mind and let her sleep quickly won her.

Once she had begin to smoke, Enki bowed and removed himself. He used a little more of his already-taxed energy to cat a ward on the door to make it harder for anyone to enter. Then he lit a pipe of tobacco for himself, snapped his fingers to get his servants moving again, and hurried down the hall; first back to the destroyed city of the cave dwellers, now going dreadfully dark as the fires went out, to find the artifact that D’arce had not so much as glanced at as she slew its guard.

The glittering cube seemed to sing in his eyes.

((wonders which of the men he should get, decides to leave it to fate, cut to refinding r. in the thicket.))

He hid it away in his robes, then took himself and his servants quickly to the way out of the caverns and back to the dungeon. Now that he had a dam, and one that he was not willing to pass up—she was a perfect vessel, perfect—he would have to choose one of the sires he had left in the floors above. Out of all the men he had seen so far in the dungeon, the only ones who were serious contenders were the quick, sly thief, Cahara, and the bold, sharp-witted outlander, Ragnvaldr.

Both were appealing, in their own ways; the maiden made up for the faults they had individually. Enki decided he would leave the choice up to fate.

—

Fate dealt him Ragnvaldr. Enki smiled a little too much when he found him, leaning against a wall of thorns, breathing heavily, nursing a wound in his stomach. The guts of the thicket were so dark and damp that though Enki could not see all of his curled, hulking body, he could see the brightness of his sharp eyes, the beads of sweat catching the light of his torch.

“Hail, Priest,” said Ragnvaldr, voice thin, both more amiable and more anxious than it had been when they first met. “I am more pleased than expected to see you again.”

As was Enki. He had taken his time retracing his steps in the prison complex where he had found Cahara but ran across no trace. He had, then, intended to return to the surface mostly to enjoy the services of Sylvian’s Cult but stumbled on a soft patch of the ground and into the thicket. He had had to replace several of his undead servants with the thicket’s more recent victims, most of which were merely shields against him and his enemies, but necessary shields.

Because of that, he was low on his comforts; he instead offered the outlander a vial of blue essence. Ragnvaldr’s eyes widened when he saw it.

“Nay,” he said, “No, keep these things for yourself. I can handle my own skin.”

“I insist,” said Enki. “You’re wounded. To be frank, I could use some help going forward. I have delved deeper into the dungeons than this, but found myself unable to face the dangers that lay therein.”

“You would have me journey with you in exchange.” Enki could see Ragnvaldr calculating in his eyes as he considered this. (Considering how well he spoke a foreign tongue, Enki could only wonder how fair-spoken, how wise he sounded in his own; he had to be a king among his kind.) “I think I will accept. I have had harder dealings in this strange grove than I imagined, and the more I go, the more I think I would like the company.” He accepted the vial, and added, “Even the company you keep, magician.”

Enki tinkled with a laugh. “Please pay my retinue no mind—I know that the art of necromancy is not a sight for sore eyes, but they only do as bid. They’re no danger to you. Nor do they compare to human company; they can be strong, but have not the skill or intelligence of living muscle.”

Ragnvaldr nodded, though his eyes stayed fixed on a ghoul as he lifted the vial to his lips and drank. Enki watched as his eyes closed in pleasure, and then as the redness on his stomach shrank and softened.

He sighed in relief. Then, though he was not at all fully healed, he straightened up and asked Enki for no more assistance. “This twisted place is deep and strange,” he said, “it reminds me too much of my time in Vinland. No matter where I go, there is a dungeon deeper yet; no matter how strange, it becomes strange again.”

“This place is a temple,” Enki responded, “a home of the Gods, and as they desire they dress and undress it, shape and reshape it. It better fits a man to accept it, not to question it.”

“I do not seek to check the ways of foreign Gods,” said Ragnvaldr, “only to correct a man who climbs too high, and threatens lands not his own.”

And so Enki learned that the outlander intended to kill LeGarde if he found him. Enki himself did not care if the old knight lived or died, and what Gods came or or changed through LeGarde’s boldness, only that he progressed himself in the struggle.

“The ways of man can always stand some censure,” Enki agreed, “and if they cannot, maybe they should not stand.”

Ragnvaldr smiled, a surprisingly honest smile, then nodded curtly. “Then. Enki. We go on.”

–

Though once reluctant to accept company, once Ragnvaldr had it, he stuck to it. He was quick and precise in combat, ready to deal death with bow, with sword, or with palm if necessary, though not without his weaknesses. Enki and his servants were able to cover for those weaknesses nicely, and Enki found himself becoming bold in crossing the wide, dark corridors of the prison, retracing his way down to the depths. 

He had judged from her reluctance that D’arce had no personal familiarity with opium and guessed that her incapacity following the drug may take the whole night, so he did not rush Ragnvaldr either, which made him glad, because he would not rouse the patient but watchful man’s suspicion. They rested and ate together not far from a corpse that the outlander had slain and butchered, sharing bread, cheese, and wine among them. Ragnvaldr watched curiously as Enki fed his ghouls; he kept glancing at the slain guard behind them, and Enki had to admit he was not totally sure what distracted the hardened warriors about this corpse, what had his severe face in a look of lostness like longing.

It was after they were already making their way through the mines that Enki told him, again so as not to be caught hiding things from him, that he had, as he said, journeyed a little way further than this; in the farthest chamber he had gone, he had left a woman convalescing.

“A woman,” repeated Ragnvaldr, frowning. “Why did you leave her behind?”

“Though she is a woman born, she is capable in arms,” Enki began, “And I left her secreted in a cavern room and hidden by my magic arts. She is safer than you were bowered in the thicket. Though still, the longer I leave her secluded, the more the thought weighs on me; I would like to recover her and put her under my care again.”

“Who is this woman, capable in arms?”

“A knight of Rondon,” Enki told him, knowing that lying would be found out eventually and putting the two at further odds with each other did no good, “trained in war and fierce in fighting. That she has a sex seems immaterial to their brotherhood, as she was in nature no different from the knighted men I have met in this country. Still, despite her nature she was because of her body in especial danger from the creatures of this mine and needed to convalesce.”

Ragnvaldr paused, then nodded. No one could stay in these dungeons for long without seeing what that danger was, and that it did not pose its threats only to women. Having come himself from a place where men and women fought equally among themselves for blind power–he had taken a knife to his own sister after all–Enki found the squeamishness around sex in Rondon amusing.

“Let us retrieve her before we continue our descent,” Ragnvaldr agreed.

So they went. But fate had other plans for both of them, or perhaps someone’s luck had run out, because they found something else first.

Enki took another way back down through the dungeons, wanting to avoid Ragnvaldr seeing the carnage D’arce had wrought in the village of the cave dwellers before he saw the maiden herself, hopefully still in a fetching, drugged slumber. In that effort he found himself in a back-channel he had not yet actually explored but was confident would loop around again, and then suddenly, walking by yet another dark corridor leading to yet more dark rooms, he and Ragnvaldr both stopped.

Enki looked down that hallway. He saw Ragnvaldr was looking down it as well. They looked to each other.

Enki had stopped because he felt especially strongly, for a moment, that he was being watched. But there was no sound; no monster growls, no dragging or shuffling, no beating of wings. Only a watching darkness that made him feel an uncertainty in his gut. Ragnvaldr’s canny eyes conveyed the same.

Enki moved his attention to the Relic from the God of the Depths that he held in his cloak, but it did not react to the presence of whatever waited down the hall. How ghouls seemed to see nothing; it was a human sense that told him something waited.

Ragnvaldr held up a softly curled palm to suggest Enki stay put. Enki inclined his head and let Ragnvaldr walk before him, but he followed behind. Ragnvaldr noticed, with a quick glance over his shoulder, but did not move to stop Enki again.

The sense of a presence intensified as they rounded a corner. Enki watched the shoulders and back of the man before him tense, a hand tighten around his bow, but then Enki heard a wordless exclamation.

A man appeared in the shadows, lithe but powerful, left hand on a scimitar. “Enki!” he exclaimed, an uneven smile on his face. “I didn’t expect to see you alive again!”

Some twenty feet ahead of Ragnvaldr, smiling sweetly and visibly ready to strike, stood Cahara.

Enki, himself, could not help but gasp. What God was it that favored him so highly, to have given him back each of the birds he let fly? Sylvian, who had blessed him with her healing touch? Alll-mer, who approved his hunt to learn; Grogoroth, who loved his hunger to destroy? But he showed hubris in counting his full catch while the maiden still slept, and could have been discovered and killed for all he knew.

((Unfinished))

“…Of course!” said the bright-eyed thief, his hand sliding up the hilt of his scimitar, tapping at the top, nervous fingers pretending they just had a tic. “You know what, I think I will travel with you now!”

“How good to hear,” said Enki, smiling only slightly. Behind him, the barbarian crossed his arms and huffed, unconvinced.

Fortunately, the man who called himself Ragnvaldr had not seen Enki’s first encounter with the thief, or he might have protested more stridently. Enki did not want him to protest stridently. With an open palm, he welcomed the snake-tongued sneak into their little crew, his eyes going down his flank, his calf, the back of his hard heel.

Cahara regarded the tall, thin priest with equal suspicion in his black eyes, despite the genial smile beneath them. Enki turned his head as he walked by to clasp Ragnvaldr’s hand in greeting—their very first, unless Enki was drastically mistaken—and just to provide himself plausible deniability, he let his gaze linger on the thief’s  rear as he passed.

Cahara’s eyes snapped forward and his grin widened into toothy pleasure as he decided he could safely ignore the queer priest and should focus on the intimidating barbarian instead. Enki drifted back, pleased, as the two men observed each other, trading bloodstain for bloodstain by clasping their dirty arms.

((then Enki sees the tension between them and considers joining them for the first time, but he still wants D’arce more just based on who she is so disregards that compelling notion. In this fic when they mention D to C, he goes oh, a woman, why’d you leave her alone? Perhaps he saw her but avoided her. we find out he saw a girl for a while, but she died. Already dead in this thread.))

–

((Enki follow behind all three companions, letting them get married, first R. to D., then M. to C. Then the finally kill the marriage to he can rouse it again and bind it to his will. The marriage, in love with itself, has a pull and grotesque sexuality Cahara can’t quite help being compelled to, though it is repulsive as well. Enki notices this and abuses it. Make sure to have everyone smoking opium at least once.))

((Finds D. post gang-rape (canon), gives her opium, healing whispers, and leaves her somewhere to recover. Determined to have her so goes back to find one of the men he left. Delighted to find both, Ragnvaldr in the thicket, then Cahara in the lower dungeon. Runs them all around and leads them purposefully to the crow mauler, who fucks up D and R enough they marry. That marriage is determined to ‘have’ Le’Garde and it turns out that means ‘kill’, though Enki enigmatically says that in his mind, that does not necessarily mean R ‘won’ the debate about what to do with them. Then into the city, on Enki’s argument that something more was going on here—Cahara intends to go in anyway so its an easy sell—how Cahara is seduced in part two I likely want to play to discover, but eventually, wounded, he consents to join with the marriage, which Enki then stabs in the back and raises as an undead servant, bound to his will.))

((But before they reached D’arce’s chamber in the winding subterranean caverns, Enki secretly sent a servant on another way with orders implanted on its mind by magic to cause a cave-in ahead that would block them from going further and force them to journey about. They were too close, now, to the bottom of the dungeons where Enki presumed Legarde was being kept; he would have his new companions spend a little more time together))