Memoir of Departure
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The conclusion of the Tribunal Elections was not as disturbing as the news of Gildor's conception. The growing baby posed a personal threat to Uraj's insanity and the granting of a new beginning by the drow was not something to be thrown away. If by the fabric of this half-elven birth extends its influence because of Arar being the father of the child, then the Madness would once again take its toll and the being known as Barnabus would once again unravel the lies surrounding him. Silanthia and Pete's relationship did not succeed, the conflict between himself and Sir Rione had been too much for Madam Di'Malen to tolerate. The affairs of elven love was strange yet it was more beautiful and more passionate than the single moments spent between humans, so Uraj's interference destroyed the bonds of relations. Yes, that was the past and his madness only grew afterward when he realized the destruction of a single couple's love was not enough. Onward Uraj held himself at bay as vengeance over his heart's betrayal was not satiated, his downfall brought him many enemies and Velsharoon was waiting for him to become a mindless minion that deserved to serve in failure. No, the drow had other plans.
At a turn of fate, Uraj walked in shadow of his past transgressions against man and was rewarded with his own laboratory within the drow city hidden in the depths near the surface town of Norwick. With Velsharoon out of his reach and other minions desperately trying to gather order in the sharded Church of the Vaunted, Uraj opted to serve Velsharoon's nearest ally, Kiaransalee. Although he was no drow, Kiaransalee shared an understanding with Uraj's sanity at that point. All life was better off as undead. It was just a wonder how the drow allowed Uraj to have his own small room for experimentations, to tolerate his presence as a surface elf at all.
Erynell was his advisor, one of the few lycanthropes, a hin at that, who carefully assisted Uraj in his endeavors. Lately their experiments were becoming dire, extreme to the views of surfacers and perhaps a bit strange to the drow. A few of the drow necromancers who were tolerated by that particular society in the region of Narfell grew slightly interested in Uraj's experiments and studies, coming in every so often with or without his presence to tinker and observe the contraptions of the surface elf's designs. The wererat halfling acted as both guard and assistant in the laboratory, pretty much the only person among the werefolk that Uraj permitted with him in the drow city.
"M-M-Master," Erynell raised a digit nervously as he trailed Uraj into Shai'lyn's sanctuary, an ebony dream of twisted spires and alien designs enveloped by the theme of arachnid behemoths. The drow mistress of Uraj was generous in allowing him to conduct his work here in a small annexed room deep inside the structure. Already the halfling was finding it difficult to dodge the maze of stalagmites that would easily trip and impale him, but it seemed to be mere luck that he made it to the door with Uraj who possessed a thrall necklace that gave the elf darkvision.
Walking the strange corridors of the place, averting his gaze from the drow sentries within the house, Uraj and Erynell finally made it to the web designed double-doors of his lab. Erynell still persisted to try to catch Uraj's attention, but the elf, wearing a dark and silver helm with two horns protruding from the top forward, did not seem to hear the diminuitive fellow.
Finally they were surrounded by vials, connection glass tubes, various cutting and incision tools, steel and wooden harness boards, electrode mounts, a set of shelves full of components and flesh parts, all the sorts of things a necromancer would ever need. The room was lit differently compared to the rest of the house, this one was lit by four magical spheres on tables in the corners of the room, using actual light than warmth as the drow could usually define things. Erynell tried not to look at a few of Uraj's experiments, bodies both partially living and some partially dead all tied down to experimentation boards or connected to various contraptions, all of which were too grotesque in nature for him to directly tolerate. The smell alone nearly made the hin convulse onto the ground, but after assisting Uraj for many weeks he built a tolerance for it.
When Uraj finally pulled his helm off and placed it on a table cluttered with utensils, removing his hood and cloth covering the lower half of his face, he turned to Erynell's youthful face sporting a fuzzy moustache, "What is it?" Uraj's voice drew out cold and deep.
Twitching his moustache like a jittery rat, Erynell shuffled his feet before raising his shakey voices, "T-There is a problem with the–"
Just then, a disturbed screech called both of their attention to a wooden board behind some silvery metal intertwining tubes. Raising a hand to hold the Erynell's announcement for later, Uraj maneuvered around a few small tables mounted with containers of creatures preserved in an unnatural living state within a thick liquid substance. Arriving to the source of the disturbance, the scarred elf of many burns and cuts, smiled with his mutilated lips with a clean ivory set of teeth untouched and undamaged.
"Awake now?" Uraj's gaze pierced beyond the thick of the tubed assembly of another experiment, watching the struggling torso of a human male with his head as the only think attached to it. Eyes missing, ears gone, all portions where limbs or genitalia should have been were seared off while the body and head were preserved through nutrient liquids served through clear plastic tubes coursing in and out of its neck and ribes.
The head moved frantically from left to right as though arms were moving in the same motion to resist his iron bindings across his neck and hips. It cried out in a mixture of groans and cries, as though communication was not the first thing on his mind after hearing Uraj's deadpan voice. The more the slab of flesh struggled, the more blood seemed to penetrate his cauterized severings and seep down its cold, pastey skin.
Erynell hobbled carefully up alongside Uraj and looked with sadness upon the struggling man, "M-M-Master Ur-raj."
Uraj glanced down to Erynell at his left, revealing his hairless, shattered features, "Yes, Erynell? I hope this is something important, not one of those squabbles between the Wererats and Werebats again."
The hin looked down, rubbing his chin in thought, but realized none of the information he wanted to give had anything to do with the conflicts of his clan with the newly found one down in Arnath. Looking back up to Uraj, defying his master's intimidating looks, "N-No. W-W-Well the city is showing di-distrust of us. W-We are fi-fi-fi-finding ourselves in hard po-positions. It-It-It su-su-seems a bit more hostile than you pr-proposed to us originally."
"Not surprising," Uraj turned away to watch the man try to struggle without limbs, the elf's teeth chittering together to express his amusement.
"M-Master," Erynell continued, "the oth-othe-thers are complaining. Ya-You need to mu-mu-make another plan."
Without looking to his diminuitive ally, Uraj motioned Erynell towards him, "Hand me a kriss. I want to see if the necrotic cyst spell is working on it."
Realizing his advice went over Uraj's head, Erynell sighed and walked over to a table nearby where various tools were neatly laid out --his personal Assistant Table. Searching the table with a finger to his lips, the hin then reached out and grabbed for the zig-zaggy dagger's handle then returned to the moss-colored armored master of his.
Taking the blade smoothly into his hand, Uraj then pulled around that obscuring tubular machine in front of him and approached the wailing experiment who now began to spasm every few seconds and bleed from its eyeless sockets. Chittering his teeth together again, Uraj proceeded to make an incision with the sharp pointy tip of the kriss upon the torso's sternum. With two fingers, Uraj dug his fingers into the incision he made and reached down under the sternum where he felt something wet and moving trying to push against his fingers. The man cried out in pain, buckling against the board, foam forming in his mouth then dripping down the sides. The cries turned to whinning, then whinning to whimpers, and whimpers to silence.
Yet on its own, the torso continued to buckle while the head flailed along with it silently. Uraj stepped back a few more steps as puss both yellow and purple in color began to push out from the incision made by the elf's tool. The torso's abdomen pushed out, a spherical growth suddenly making itself apparent, causing enough pressure within the body to push the veins and arterioles out like cracks all over the skin.
Uraj grinned, looking over to Erynell who then looked over to a block of metal not too far away where a dryad was tied down with many round puss orbs all over her skin while a slightly larger puss ball. Uraj turned to share Erynell's view of the broken dryad whose back was exposed upward, chained down while it was curled up as though bowing in the last moments of its life without a tree to nourish it.
"Leave your concerns for the fae," Uraj advised Erynell, "remember it is their caretakers who shun you and their gods who rebuke your presence. She was already dying so far within the clutches of the drow, it is but a service to Velsharoon that I was able to implant the Mother Cyst upon her for the birth of this one," Uraj then motioned at the continuing struggled of the creature within the dead man's torso.
Erynell looked back to the dead man, his abdomen began to populate with boils, followed by the flesh breaking apart down center to have puss start spewing out. The entire wooden board the torso was mounted on began to rattle violently as the spherical sac that contained the fluid and semisolid necrotic flesh, undulating as if in mockery of breath, began to show itself. Yet it just remained there, it did not proceed from the corpse, as though resting itself.
Placing the kriss onto the tube contraption, Uraj then clapped his pale hands together and cried out, "Marvelous!" The restless spirits surrounding his horned helm wailed and moaned at Uraj's new triumph in the necro-sciences. The elf's attention remained focused upon his accomplishment, never leaving that rare feeling of actually doing something good after being damned for such a while now in leaving Kelemvor's faith.
Off to the side, Erynell left the chamber and traveled a short distance for a small sack covered in mud and some pieces of grass. Slinging it over his shoulder despite the very little weight it possessed, the hin brought it into the place and started for a cylindrical container filled with purplish liquid. Pulling the sack down upon the table, an ungrown fetus lay at its base, nearly at the point of shriveling and where both maggots and earthworms would have found it quite a delicacy.
"Arizima's child?" Uraj finally came over to survey what Erynell planned to do.
Erynell nodded, "Y-yes, my lord." He picked up the fetus delicately and placed it in the thick fluid of the container, sealing it closed with a metal covering much like what covered its base.
Rubbing his chin, Uraj nodded. "We will take it with us. Arnath is still the same and Shai'lyn is no doubt aggravated with what has come up."
With a simple snap of his fingers, Uraj summoned forth two zombies that stood dormant alongside the double-doors. Lurching towards him, awaiting his command, Uraj retrieved his helm and slipped it back on, silencing the spirits surrounding it. "Tread careful in my wake," the elf commanded them.
The hin went ahead to collect the books and schematics that mattered in their research, putting it into two small bags and carried them over his shoulder. Looking up to thw zombies that watched Uraj begin his departure and so too did they follow, Erynell decided to attach each of the two bags to each zombie's waist. Turning around to fetch the container with the fetus, he followed them as well.
A drow necromancer stood by the doorway of the final exit out of the sanctuary, "What are you doing, slave?"
Uraj turned to the necromancer, chittering his teeth in amusement, "Setting my project out in the open. I will return when the experiment is complete. You may look and see its wonder if you wish..." Uraj motioned back to the lab behind him.
Before the necromancer would leave Uraj towards the lab in curiousity, a creature flickered through the darkness and slipped into the lab first. At the command of his master, the Shadow approached the Skulking Cyst that began to digest the corpse it was attached to and started concentrate negative energy into the creature to quickly develop and in the end create a mitosis that duplicated the Skulking Cyst into two.
As Uraj left the sanctuary, unknowingly stalked by a drow scout, he commented to himself, "Ah, what a wonder that Ramas Sepret is." Uraj lifted one of his left hand, unburdened by a pack full of tools and tomes, rubbing his fingers together with the thick mucous from the cyst. "Perhaps Barumar might find some entertainment with the Setite's soul." Leaving the region with wererat and zombies in tow, Uraj proceeded further into the darkness, away from immediate influence of the drow, and away from Arnath and the troubles that horrible city possessed.adc957520a
