Welcome to Adventu, your final fantasy rp haven. adventu focuses on both canon and original characters from different worlds and timelines that have all been pulled to the world of zephon: a familiar final fantasy-styled land where all adventurers will fight, explore, and make new personal connections.
at adventu, we believe that colorful story and plots far outweigh the need for a battle system. rp should be about the writing, the fun, and the creativity. you will see that the only system on our site is the encouragement to create amazing adventures with other members. welcome to adventu... how will you arrive?
year 5, quarter 3
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[attr=class,bulk] A biting wind rustled through mountain brush as dusk shifted into night and Sleipnir froze, a blade once again pressed into his neck.
”You’ve slain me,” Sleipnir said joyously, and Barnabas gave a huff of laughter in return – the best he could ever muster – before he lowered his blade and stepped a few paces back, readying himself for another round of sparring. Sleipnir’s heart quickened at the thought, but his eyes drifted towards the deep violet horizon, head tilted in thought.
”The hour grows late,” he said. Not a suggestion. Merely a fact. Barnabas’ gaze rose to match his own, and he eyed the setting sun with both surprise and disdain.
”I can still fight,” he said, but it was a losing battle and they both knew it.
Sleipnir offered nothing more than a raised eyebrow, and after a long, defiant silence, his master gave a defeated huff as he fell back onto the hard earth, dark hair slicked with sweat and panting softly. Sleipnir sat obediently beside him, and for a long time, they were content in their solitude.
Those were days long past, days of Odin’s newly awakened dominant, lost in doubt and mourning. Far from the regal presence he imposed upon the castle of Stonehyrr, Barnabas had been nothing more than an unruly anomaly upon his mountain tribe with his ever somber eyes and stern countenance. He was a boy, not quite a man, and Sleipnir for all appearances looked the same.
The scarce plant life was rough and hardy. The ground was hardened by drought. Still, there was beauty in their makeshift sparring arena as the sky darkened, revealing a thousand pinpricks of stars for which he knew not the names. One by one, the grasslands were spotted with the drifting lights of fireflies as though they themselves were stars snatched and stolen from an infinite sky.
Beside him, Barnabas sighed contentedly, and for the first time in his short existence, Sleipnir was at peace.
The sky above was vast and unfamiliar as Sleipnir traced it with a gloved finger, failing to find any of the seasonal constellations. He could identify neither the telltale curve of Garuda’s talon nor the distinct v-shape of Bahamut’s wings carved into the canvas of the night. It was an insignificant change given his current circumstances, but a profound one. He had thought that no matter how many millennia might pass that the stars, at least, would remain constant.
Apparently, that was not the case.
A firefly flickered lazily above where he laid on his back, surrounded on all sides by a sea of long grasses. There was a chill to the night which was not altogether comfortable, but perhaps he had merely grown accustomed to the many comforts of Stonehyrr as the king’s lord commander. He longed for the bed he almost never used except to while away the hours in contemplation, eyes closed as though dreaming. He longed for sweeter sustenance than whatever food he could scavenge off the packs of those bandits unwise and unlucky enough to mark him as easy prey. He longed, at the very least, for a fire yet could not bring himself to start one when he had no need of sleep.
He longed, more than anything, for Barnabas.
His absence was a hollow ache that verged on madness.
He gave his master’s name and appearance to every passerby who deigned speak with him. He asked of notable swordsmen and sightings of knights clad in sheer black armor. So desperate were his pleas that he even gave them Rosfield’s name as well. As much as he was loathe to admit it, Sleipnir found himself alone, lost and unguided. He did not know how long he could stand to exist so contrary to his very nature and so he gave the only two names he knew which might yet wield Odin’s power.
What if Rosfield had inherited not only Odin’s power, but his egi as well? Sleipnir shuddered and banished the thought, but as the hours ticked by and the moon made its way in a graceful arc across the sky, the thought returned like a pesky fly. What might he feel if he were compelled by his very being to kneel at the feet of Barnabas’ murderer? Would Rosfield strike him down for his crimes or, in a moment of objective clarity, recoil in horror at the prospect of his new, unwilling servant? Would he distance himself from Sleipnir, refusing his most basic need of guidance in return for nothing but cold disregard? Sleipnir could think of no worse prospects, dwarfed only by that of finding no master at all.
And so he kept at his search. He could think of little else.
Such thoughts were shaken from him, however, by a soft, unnatural rustling in the grass.
They were footsteps, he thought, though far too careful to ever be human. Slowly, he rose to his feet, turning to face the shadow of the beast which stalked the grasslands. It was perhaps twice his size, feline in shape and in motion though it hesitated when their eyes met and it realized that this would be no simple ambush.
Sleipnir tilted his head curiously. Its actions marked its intent and its long, wiry antennae marked its genus. A couerl was a danger so close to a populated road. Killing it would be most ethical, he assumed, but he was not a being crafted with morality in mind. It would be far simpler to merely slip into the shadows, unseen and forgotten.
’Or you could accept an end to your suffering.’ The thought rose unbidden as a taboo. It was the most logical approach, but alas. Some hidden instinct drove him towards self-preservation. The same instinct, perhaps, which told him that his life was not his own – either to give or to take.
The couerl’s antennae sparked with aether in a violent show of blue and violet. Its muscles strained as it readied its attack, and Sleipnir merely watched, the shadows already dancing at his feet.
It was a kind of mercy, he supposed, to merely vanish in its grasp. He could not imagine that a being of aether and darkness would make for the most substantial of meals.
Somewhere on the Fractured Plains, Mikkel was en route to find one of the most convenient sources of magical energy one could find in the area: a coeurl. Coeurls were not creatures of subtlety, being more than twice as large as the average adult, still-living human being, and both hunted and defended themselves through the use of bright, hard to camouflage raw magic, the kind that shone more brilliant than even the moon and the river of stars overhead.
Mikkel patted his pouch and heard the reassuring glassy clink of the half a dozen cenocites he had prepared for that night. A cenocite was nothing more than a piece of exhausted magicite that underwent a purification process and was then enchanted with the ability to absorb magic energy from the environment again. Enough of them of the right size and potency could power an airship. He would know, as they used to power his own airship.
With that cloudless sky and the air so still, it would have actually been a good night to fly one. Soon would come the time where he could design and build something new for himself. He only needed a large and safe enough place and the materials for its constructions, both of which would have taken, in turn, time.
Ah, but time, time he had plenty of.
He stopped, his mind brought again to the present moment, when he heard a rustle in the tall grass, which was followed by another, and then more still, in ever quicker succession without ever quite becoming a continuous sound – that would have been the wind, and there was none to feel that night, which itself meant that the balance of probability was that the noise was caused by a living being.
So, Mikkel turned his head in its direction, and found the coeurl. With the creature not having seen it yet, and with there being no wind to bring his smell to its nostrils, Mikkel was in a rather favourable position. At the same time, one wrong movement could have alerted it of his presence, and the hunt could have ended up failing altogether. Moreover, with a coeurl weighing ten times his own weight, taking one on did not come without risks…
…and this was the kind of moment that would have called for slow, dramatic drumming and low-pitch chordophones to accompany the commentary of some well-educated, mellow, yet intrigued octogenarian, if not for the fact that the second the coeurl tried anything funny with him, Mikkel would have fried his sorry arse all the way to Torensten and then back.
Still, that would have been no less of a failure. Mikkel stayed back and watched. If the coeurl was on the prowl, then his best shot was with finding a spot with a good visual and no obstructions in the way, all while staying hidden in the tall grass for as long as possible. He took a few careful steps. He found it. He reached into his pouch for a small, round crystal, no bigger than a fist.
A surge. Mikkel drew his arm behind him, took aim, and then flung the cenocite at the coeurl. Silently, it darted in the air until it reached the source of the surge. It then stopped in mid-air, drawing the electric magical energy into itself and absorbing it as the coeurl snarled in surprise, and then in pain as it realised it could not stop. Voracious, the cenocite kept on draining at the coeurl’s magic for ten, twenty, thirty seconds that turned into a full minute before there was nothing else for it to take. As the night stilled once more, the coeurl thudded sideways on the grass.
Mikkel calmly walked up to the creature and recovered his stone, which was now glowing an eerie purple and giving faint crackles. He then placed a gloved hand on its chest, which rose and fell faintly, with the heart still beating inside it, which meant that it was still alive, that with any luck it was going to survive, and that soon enough it would be ready to be harvested anew.
He looked further down its length and found that the coeurl was a female, which made the situation even better, for not only could he draw energy out of her again, but he could also track her down to take perhaps a couple of whatever cubs she might have in the future. Surely there must have been some use for those long, rather sinewy whiskers.
“Ah, saved you by accident, didn’t I?” He said then to the tall human man that he had just noticed. Young platinum blondie or just plain platinum, no beard, must have been maybe seventeen. “Perhaps I interrupted a test of courage, or maybe a suicide? I can help with the latter if I find the reason you didn’t go for the good ol’ noose and let the ghost loose interesting enough.”
Sleipnir paused, tilting his head even as the shadows danced in wisps about his feet. The beast had lit the space between them in electric violet, but just as suddenly as the couerl had charged its antennae, that same power pulsed and then began to stream elsewhere to a point just above its shoulder.
In that searing violet light, Sleipnir caught the glint of a crystal hovering of its own accord. How…interesting.
The beast’s attack never came. Instead it howled in fury and pain, twitching slightly as its aether left it. Sleipnir merely watched until, at last, the crystal’s work was done and the couerl slumped to the ground, seemingly lifeless.
The grass crunched with the weight of footsteps, and a dark silhouette appeared, humanoid but thick with armor with two broken horns sprouting from a helmed head.
The figure bent down and reached for the softly glowing crystal. In its light, Sleipnir saw fleshless fingers curl around it, a wraithlike hand of bone.
Sleipnir’s eyebrows raised in mild surprise. ”You’re dead,” he said simply. Now that the distance between them had closed, he could see the figure more clearly. Its seemingly ancient armor was nothing of any particular interest, but the man’s face…
Could he truly call it a face? Or a man, for that matter?
The skeletal jaw clicked as the creature spoke. It wasn’t the words that interested him, but rather, the voice itself projected without a tongue, lips, or presumably a larynx. This was not a mortal being of the flesh. A construct of some kind, perhaps? Sleipnir eyed it curiously.
”Who is your master?” Sleipnir asked for such a being must have been brought forth by another’s hand – be it god or man. ”And what need have you of the beast’s aether?”
Had Mikkel still had eyebrows, they would have raised in near-clinical contemplation. He stood in silence, waiting for answers that never came, and then allowed for the pause to grow lengthier still, until it bent under the weight of the fruit of discomfort that sprouted from it and ripened not unlike a tumour. Mikkel waited for the young man to pick it up and savour it before finally weeding that pause out.
“Close,” he commented wryly. Sometimes, one had to concede that, for most people, a big bad rabid magical cat was not nearly as remarkable a sight as a walking and talking osteological exhibition. It was, Mikkel believed, a matter of predictability. With a big bad rabid magical cat, you knew where you stood, and even if that usually meant almost right before the gates of kingdom come, people treasured the little certainties in life. He, however, was a sentient, malicious, and rather creative fellow. A crossroads smack in the centre of nightmare town, as it were.
He conceded that right up until the man opened his mouth again. He was a sassy one. Faced with the prospect of being torn apart and then some by a wild beast, then rescued by pure accident only to look at death in the eye sockets once more and even more vividly than before, he would dismiss questions addressed to him and respond with a voice that was dripping with conceit.
“You know, I can’t help but feel I’ve just been racially profiled.” He searched into one of his other satchels until he produced a small bottle of ink and a thin calligraphy brush. He gave the bottle a vigorous shake. “And that makes cock-up number four for you in a little over one minute. You failed to get killed, you failed to answer my questions, you failed to identify me, and you failed to show me some respect. How’s dad, incidentally, since we’re already on the topic?”
Mikkel knew the type all too well. Of all the people one could meet out in the wilderness at night, he had just found himself a power bottom.
[attr=class,bulk] A “cock-up?” Sleipnir could have laughed. Perhaps he had grown used to the respect granted him for his position at the right hand of the king of Waloed. It had been some time since he had traveled without such recognition and now…
He could contain it no longer. He let out a short breath of a laugh behind his hand. Despite the creature’s clear inhumanity, its assumptions were so very…human. Was it not in human nature to assume? It assumed that Sleipnir had needed saving. It assumed its questions were worthy of answers, that it was worthy of his respect, and from its backhanded insinuations, there was the assumption, it seemed, of Sleipnir’s youth and a strained relationship with his father.
Sleipnir, of course, had no father. He was also over fifty years old. But Sleipnir had no interest in drawing attention to his own inhumanity, and so he merely smiled at the creature, head tilted slightly. ”As you say.” There was no use in arguing with the senseless.
This being was correct on a single account, however, and that was that Sleipnir had failed to identify it. It was not dead, but close. That riddle sparked his curiosity. He savored the feeling, tasting it as a long lost delicacy. After fifty-two years of sleepless existence, there was very little now which made him curious.
And so he stepped forward as a moth to a flame, his eyes glinting in interest as he took note of the yellowed weathering of the bones, the smooth motion of ligaments, and the disheveled hair which seemed to sprout impossibly from the skull itself.
”You are animated by aether,” Sleipnir stated in his almost musical drawl. He began to circle the being, steps as light as a dancer’s. ”I have known the ageless. Constructs forged from magic. Those consumed by aether until their minds are hollow and their bodies eternal. But they have all, in a way, remained beings of the flesh.”
He stopped where he began, head tilted slightly, lips drawn in a kind of smirk. ”But you…This, I have never seen.”
He laughed, that prematurely greying boy. Short as it was, it was the relaxed, comfortable laughter of somebody who covered his mouth with one hand while holding a stem glass in the other as they engaged in saucy exchanges with others at a trendy restaurant. Mikkel lived, for a lack of a better word, by the idea that if you drew a simile, it was just good work ethics to quarter it too.
Mikkel had also existed for long enough to tell the difference between confidence and mere bravado, with a few centuries to spare to grow accustomed to the idea that even confidence itself did not always come with the wherewithal to justify it. When the boy drew closer and began circling him the same way a lion would circle a lone gazelle, all Mikkel did was to follow him with his gaze with both bottle and brush still in his hands.
“Ah, where have I heard this spiel before,” he said flatly as the boy stopped right in front of him. He removed the cork from the bottle with one careful movement, he dipped his brush, turned to the unconscious coeurl, and painted two perfect circles on her fur. He then began adding runes, patiently, one by one. “Look, the last time I served anyone, I was still alive and in regular employment.”
One more line there to close the shape… Yes, there it was. Mikkel placed his distal phalanxes on each of the runes he had drawn, whispered a short spell, and watched sparks erupt from his person and sink under the beast’s skin. The magic circle lit up faintly for a few moments, only to disappear from existence altogether when it stopped.
“All done. Anyway, is what you have just described something you normally call an ‘Akashic’ by any chance, or is it a same phenomenon, different terminology or even world kind of deal for you?”
[attr=class,bulk] The creature seemed…apathetic. Most of the dead seemed that way, and it was difficult to pinpoint such a thing when one lacked the muscles and tendons required for facial expression. Still, from posture alone, the animated corpse seemed entirely unconcerned with Sleipnir’s interest, with his circling, with his questions. It seemed, in fact, quite unamused.
Humans rarely surprised Sleipnir anymore. He had grown wise to their motivations and their instincts long ago, and so it was with reluctance that he acknowledged that this creature continuously failed to act as Sleipnir thought it should. Then again, this creature could hardly be called human.
When Sleipnir stood to face it once more, the walking corpse merely spoke. There was no long humor in its voice. It was a statement of fact.
Sleipnir watched as the skeleton performed its arcane ritual upon the couerl which he now noticed was breathing despite the extraction of its aether. It painted upon the beast’s fur, the ink sinking deep within the hide almost as soon as it had been placed.
Strange. Sleipnir could not help the renewed curiosity in his gaze as he tilted his head slightly, watching. He had never seen anything like it.
When the corpse had finished, he addressed Sleipnir once more. If it had been some time since Sleipnir had been surprised, he could not remember when he had last been floored.
”You know of the Akashic,” he said slowly. There was much to make of that. It knew of them. It had heard tell, but had never seen them itself. This was not a creature from Valisthean soil then (as though he couldn’t have guessed) but it had encountered a Valisthean. Whether from Storm or Ash, it was impossible to guess.
Even so, this was the closest Sleipnir had come in his search. How unfortunate that it would come now and from this lipless mouth.
Ah, that sounded like caution, now, did it not. It always made for quality entertainment, to watch just how quickly cockiness flew out of the window when you hit the mark dead on. At the same time and on a completely unrelated note, between talks of cockups and of cockiness, Mikkel had to take a moment to contemplate the realisation that whoever that kid was, it reminded him, somehow, of a rooster. A funny little thing, the unconscious mind.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” said Mikkel conversationally. He rose to his feet, wedged the cork back on top of the bottle, pocketed bottle and brush both into the satchel, and turned to the kid. “Heard it from somebody I met some time ago during one of my journeys. A rather tall fellow, brunet. Akashic himself, he told me. A bit of a twit, if you ask me, but solid overall, eh? Nice chat, we had. But I forget his name.”
He lied on the last part. He wanted to see the kid cook for a while longer. If Mikkel’s hypothesis was correct, Zephon would not syphon unto itself anything less than another world’s most exceptional, and even if it did, it would not be a common blacksmith or miner to roam the monster-infested wilderness on one’s own in the middle of the night. Lil’ Rooster over there was from Valisthea and no mistake. So, either they came from wildly different times like Mikkel himself and pirate dragoon did, or he and King Odin in Aljana must have had a shred of a connection, whatever that might have been.
He made no attempt to mask his reaction. He did not believe they could have been masked. The skeletal creature did not say much, and yet in that short space, it had said everything. In its travels, it had met a Valisthean man. Tall, brunette, a bit of a “twit.” Akhashic.
There was only one Akhashic who retained the power of speech.
In an instant, Sleipnir fell to one knee, head bowed and knuckle flat to the earth. His heart was racing, and he felt his shallow breaths cloud his mind. This was an insult. It was, in its own way, a blasphemy. Sleipnir had never knelt for any but his master, and shame raged within him like an inferno. Who was this undead creature? Not a man, not a king, and certainly not his creator, and yet it held power over him all the same.
Sleipnir had made a most grievous error. In lashing out at the creature, he had insulted the only lead he possessed if he ever wished to reunite with his liege. And so he displayed his respect. His submission. His plea for forgiveness.
”Barnabas Tharmr.” He did not raise his head. His voice nearly cracked from tension. ”King of Waloed, Warden of Darkness, Dominant of Odin. He still lives?”
Night itself could not have concealed the change in the boy’s expression with its shroud of darkness. You could have pulled a drape over the sky itself right beneath the stars, but not the shock in those widening eyes, the panic and shock bursting through the gates of caution and reason and flooding his mind as half-army and half-deluge. A lightless display, yet one that shone brighter than any beacon.
Bingo.
Mikkel still recoiled slightly in surprise as the boy bowed before him without a prompt or an apparent reason. “Hmm?” He almost always had to ask for that himself. As a matter of fact, he had to insist most of the time, and even then not everybody complied. But this guy, this guy must have liked taking the initiative. He was well and truly, and Mikkel clocked him from the very start, a power bottom.
Once again, even if a little belatedly: bingo.
“Barnabas Tharmr,” he repeated pensively, savouring every last drop of anticipation oozing from the boy. He stood in silence for a few seconds, caressing his beard, and finally said: “Yes, that is exactly the name I’ve heard. Yes, the Dominant of Odin, and indeed a king. You ask me if he still lives…”
…even though he had just said that he was an Akashic, which Mikkel understood to be quite mutually exclusive with being alive no matter which meaning of the word one chose. Whether an undead thrall or flatbread with no cheese, an Akashic could only claim to be, at best, organic.
“…And the answer is no. When I left him, Barnabas Tharmr was no longer alive.”
