The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl
I figure no matter how the final round plays out, I may as well have my part in it end with a tough of class.
I raise my drink.
"May your last hand be well played."
Perhaps not surprisingly, Trizo refuses to raise his own glass in acknowledgment of Savalos' gesture, choosing to glower at the acolyte instead as the cards are slowly dealt.
More in courtesy than any real camaraderie, Jeremiah Blitz tips his snifter of amasec in Thul's direction, murmuring assent to the sentiment, but even so, he appears to be supremely focused on the coming round. He eyes each of his fellow competitors intently, trying to gauge their reactions to their hands, all pretense of disinterest gone from this demeanor.
I then look over to the Daemon who I expect to win this game within the game.
"To Johnny."
Initially, the Changeling does not respond to Savalos' toast, but when he invokes Johnny's name, something seems to stir in the fractured duality of the being sitting at the acolyte's right hand. At first, it stares, fugue-like gaze upon the face-down cards dealt to it, but after a moment, the head turns slowly toward Thul, as if with great effort, and the dark eyes of his long-time friend briefly stare back at him, tearful, and rimmed in red.
Juan Rico raises the slender crystal decanter.
"Good luck, Sav."
He downs a swallow, and he turns his head back to the momentous cards resting before him. The cerulean blue stare is once again fixed and devoid of anything that could be confused for humanity, and just like that, the shade of Johnny is gone again, perhaps forever.
After a long time, the Changeling finally lifts its brilliant blue eyes, the old-fashioned Oremite arbitrator's tricorn cap casting his face in shadow, the indigo plume erupting from one side swaying gently with the motion. It brushes one pale hand against the black duct wolf furs it wears, and then smiles gamely, never examining the cards it has been dealt.
"Raise of nine."
Trizo's lip curls, but perhaps out of spite, he does not lift his cards to view them either, instead flicking a glance filled with pure spite at Savalos and the Changeling. His voice growls with withering sarcasm as he utters, "Call of nine then, and damn you both."
Jeremiah Blitz takes the gang-lords petit-mal tantrum in stride, but doesn't follow suit in playing blind. He casts his eyes over his hand, keeping it close to his face, and pushes forward nine chips of his own.
"I will call."
The dealer turns to Wardja expectantly.
As I watch my friends eyes flicker away for what may be the last time. I just hope I can do right by him. The toast in essence mourning his death. Just happy he was able to see the sentiment. I hope in turn I can do right by Sunshine. Her piercing blue eyes still have a hold on me. The image of she screaming out for life as Emrit was stitching her up as her life blood dripped between my fingers. Why does this image have a hold on me so? Why do her eyes still have a hold of me?
I shake off the memory. Time to play this part of the game to its conclusion.
Unduz II, Oremor 7th Legion Penal Claustrum, Designate Ylesium, Plantation 7, Husbandry Barn Cluster 177, Deep in the Tertiary Fallow Fields.
The pair pause at the barren row, listening, but all they can hear is the dull roar of the conflagration they have left behind. Still, it is evident that Ryuk has sensed something that has made him uneasy, and he turns to look back the way they have come, his eyes narrowing.
"We must hurry."
While still unsure of what he may have himself heard, but unnerved by the clone's reaction, Vincent needs no further inducement to press on. They cross the stalk-less patch of earth and begin to run through the mycoid forest beyond, the rasp of Vincent's breath in the respirator soon becoming his constant companion as he struggles to keep pace with the fleet-footed psyker.
Vincent is unsure of how much time passes, as full dark has now made visibility delimited by the diffuse beams of their lamp-packs bouncing through the thick fungal growth. It is for this reason that the clearing appears before him with the jarring abruptness of a sudden fall. He and Ryuk stagger forward from their momentum, finding themselves in a broad, circular field, carpeted in tiny, deep-green mushrooms that disconcertingly appear like analogues of grass on a summer meadow. A few taller stalks erupt from the ground, interspersed throughout the field, their broad caps listing gloomily overhead, blotting out the wan starlight above where they grow.
In the middle of the field stands a large, craggy stone, erupting at an angle to one of the taller mycoid stalks, pointing heavenward.
Hearing the Changeling speak I wonder. Does it suffer confliction or is it simply letting Johnny out to speak to Thul?
"Call."
I drop the chips on the table even though my hand is absolutely worthless.
The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl, Central Generatorium Chamber
I pull back and let the door close and then take a couple steps back to the others.
In a low voice, "OK, we have two suits and three Yellobouros next to the staircase. The gangers have handcannons, the suits laspistols. There is an autogun close to the Yellobouros as well, in the lectern. Next to our door are four pillars and their match on the other side of the room. What I propose is that we come out and from behind the pillars, and demand that they put down their weapons. If they do so, fine. If not, we gun down the ganger that is closest to the autogun, then the rest. I don't know if the suits are with the gangers, but they are not against them. so treat them with caution. Any questions? "
Private Kotts, deathly pale, with blood leaking through the thick bandage wound around his face, smiles grimly, surveying the tactical situation with a quick glance through the seam in the generatorium door.
"None."
Ivaanov moves silently into position adjacent to the door, his las-carbine cradled to his ruined shoulder, nodding in assent to his tech priest comrade, indicating his own readiness.
The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl
The Changeling declines the Draw with a slow, stately shake of it's head, fingers steepled above the unseen cards arrayed in a precisely-spaced fan before it. The inhuman blue eyes slowly shift to Trizo dol Soulard, who does his best not to look back at the daemon.
The dealer points toward the gang-lord's cards, and Trizo sweeps them up irritably in his golden hand, the brutal fingers scraping loudly across the midnight blue felt. He raps them ponderously upon the table, and then beckons imperiously with his other hand. The dealer passes three new placards to the leader of the Yellobouros.
Pivoting to Blitz, who stands just to his left, the dealer patiently awaits his decision.
Blitz surveys his adversaries a final time, before finally opting to exchange a single card, which he slides slowly across the table before peeling tightly up into his existing hand.
The dealer then turns to Wardja.
The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl
As the players receive their final cards, the tension on the mezzanine level is palpable.
Uriah, conversing with Iacton in the narrow aisle, cannot help but feel a deep uneasiness as he speaks with Krade's bodyguard, like he is talking to a hollow ghost.
Said softly, "We will talk later about what you have been doing, but for now, are you ready to do what it is necessary? I do not know if we can do anything about the daemonhost, but Trizo's witch must be taken out. She is the most dangerous to us. Next, are the armed guards. We expect the time everything is going to happen will be the end of the ninth round, which is the next round. We have people in place to deal with the ones on the stairway. Will you be able to be in position to perform terminus on the witch?"
Remembering that the feather is in the assassin's possession, Uriah reconsiders his initial request of Iacton, inwardly recoiling at his memory of what the thing felt like in spite of his best efforts to forget. The plume's importance cannot be understated, however, or risked so recklessly.
"Correction, Iacton, you can not be anywhere near the daemonhost, only go after the witch, if she is nowhere near the creature. The item you have cannot fall in the daemon's hands."
Iacton nods, his face and eyes hidden beneath the hood of his robes.
"My master has told me, the Game is almost at its end."
"Now is the time when everything must be risked if we are to succeed. Rest assured, Uriah Trantor, the witch will die, or I will perish in the trying."
I nod to Iacton.
"But understand, it is imperative that the item does not fall in the hands of the daemonhost. We cannot suffer those consequences. I agree the witch must die, but remember what I said about the item, unless your telling me it is not on you."
Unduz II, Oremor 7th Legion Penal Claustrum, Designate Ylesium, Plantation 7, Husbandry Barn Cluster 177, Deep in the Tertiary Fallow Fields.
Vincent approaches the stone, reaching out his hand to feel along its rough surface.
My words aren't meant for the dealer but for others around the table as I toss in my entire hand.
"What a mess. Can't let it end like that. Some of us are due for a reckoning."
Not caring too much about potentially giving away my hand I say, "That's better. At least I can go down swinging."
The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl, Central Generatorium Chamber
In a low voice I transmit <<Uriah Trantor we are at the bottom of the stairs 5 non Pearl staff in the way. 3 ganger, 2 probable associates of Leprade mostly small arms but it could get messy as I am the only one that is in good condition. Have minor cover but it might not be enough it they have reinforcements.>>
The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl
The Draw complete, the attention of everyone at the table and in attendance for the Tournament of Cassilda focuses upon the Changeling again. The daemon still has yet to lift the cards originally dealt to it from the table, where they lay face-down, like an ominous portent yet to be revealed.
The piercing blue of the thing's eyes has spread during the course of the tournament, and now seeps, cloudy, like indigo dye dropped in water, slowly spreading to fill the wides orbs that once belonged to Juan Rico. If anyone else besides those at the table notice the unnerving change, they dare not speak of it.
It's voice is a cold rasp now, devoid of the false humor and mocking banter it carried on with earlier in the game.
"A raise, then, of ninety-nine."
With the markers raked forward, the dealer turns to Trizo, who is slowly shaking his head in arrogant disbelief.
With only seventy-three chips to his name, there is no hesitation by the Yellobouros gang-lord, and he pushes them into the pot angrily. He glances back over his shoulder briefly, staring daggers at the witch.
Leprade sits quietly, apart from both of them now, staring desolately into the open hands resting in his lap.
Trizo, not looking at any one of the players, but clearly making the daemonhost and all of the other competitors the target of his threat, hisses furiously, "There will be a reckoning when all is said and done, you can rest assured of that."
His metallic fist clenches on his cards reflexively.
The dealer pauses a moment, waiting with trepidation to see if the latent violence of dol Souldard's words will manifest itself, and when it does not, he then turns to Blitz. The rogue trader frowns, and then tosses ninety-nine of his own chips into the growing pot.
"Call."
The dealer looks to his right at Wardja, waiting for his decision.
Unduz II, Oremor 7th Legion Penal Claustrum, Designate Ylesium, Plantation 7, Husbandry Barn Cluster 177, Deep in the Tertiary Fallow Fields.
Ryuk following closely, Vincent kneels before the wide stone and begins feeling across its surface. Disturbing the green, shoot-like stalks of the smaller mycoids, he tries to ignore the release of tiny, mote-like spores, probing for a hinge or seam that might indicate the presence of a hidden panel.
He finds it fairly quickly, under a nodule of raised stone, and pries it open with scabby fingers, after tracing the nearly invisible edge of the lower seam.
The panel is a simple keypad, barely larger than a smallish dataslate.
As he searches his eidetic mind for the requisite cipher, he and Ryuk both hear a loud series of crunches from the fallow field behind them and to the east. Looking over some of the lower mycoids at the clearing's edge, the pair watch a larger stalk topple over with the thunderous force of a falling tree, where it crashes into the mushroom forest, raising a plume of dislodged spores that float lazily in the night air.
The commotion grows louder as something large forces its way through the mycoid overgrowth, heading for the clearing.
The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl, Central Generatorium Chamber
In a low voice I transmit <<Uriah Trantor we are at the bottom of the stairs 5 non Pearl staff in the way. 3 ganger, 2 probable associates of Leprade mostly small arms but it could get messy as I am the only one that is in good condition. Have minor cover but it might not be enough it they have reinforcements.>>
<<I will help if I can, but we have no reinforcements. All we have are us and one other group of acolytes. Duncan will help us where he can, but his people are mostly outside.>>
I wait for Wardja's call. Never expecting to win in this house of 9's. Was a stacked house from the beginning, and I promised to see if through. ...To Johnny I promised to play a straight game. Still at a loss as to how to find, and save Sunshine. Once Wardja finishes his move I push in my bottom chip. I already got what I wanted from this game. I learned.
"Your right, there will be a Reckoning. Snake."
Only way someone will walk away winning from this table is if the Daemon wills it, or Fate plays a trick on it.
Orcut Hive, Vaxus District, The Grey Way, Alley Approach 9, Outside of the Gran Pallazzar
Albrek Vodak coughs into his palm, looks at what he sees there, and winces before wiping his hands across the clean fatigues leant to him by Oktammor earlier this day. He frowns, his eyes narrowing, feeling the pull of memory again.
Gritting his teeth together in the back of the cargo-8 he tries not to close his eyes, but when he does the images are still there, like they always are.
The blowing snow, the dying screams of his comrades-in-arms, and the plaintive wails of the infant, swaddled in insulated Munitorum packing cloth, as he staggers blindly through the blizzard, wind shrieking in his ears. The screaming stops, as it always does, but the wind continues to moan, the cold sucking the heat from his perforated environment suit. The questions and confusion return, thawing in his numbed mind like slowly-melting icicles, and just as ephemeral.
Somewhere, sometime---some time---he was tasked to come here, to Mara, by someone, but who? For what? Why was it only now becoming clear as his body was robbed of heat, leeched of life by the deadly cold.
He remembers a man, his face both familiar and strange, a man he was loyal to for reasons he could not explain. His regiment, the mission, the men and brothers he had come to love and admire, his place among them, it was all an act, an elaborate pantomime, flawless in execution, particularly when one of the players, he himself, had no prior knowledge of his part to play. It was necessary, he said. Albrek was no actor.
He looks through the frosted goggles on the respirator mask and scrapes at them with his heavy gloves, clearing the rime, so that he can look upon the objective once again, huddled inside his parka in a makeshift papoose of blankets and surplus insulation.
The child. It was all for this one child.
The lunacy of his newly found clarity forces him to stop, dead in his tracks, the tickles of insane laughter wanting to claw their way up from his throat.
All those years robbed from him, never to be returned, all those lives in his regiment, his home, lost, sacrificed, and for what?
With a tremendous boom from overhead, the guncutter descends like an angry angel, maneuvering thrusters firing in time, the dim glow barely cutting through the storm. It hovers a moment longer, blowing the dagger-sharp coating of blue ice from the frozen landscape around him as easy as a palm sweeping aside a losing hand of cards. In a blinding whirlwind, it lands, and though he may not remember in the days to come, he knows now what it means to serve the stern-faced man.
All to a purpose, he says.
His eyes snap open from his flashback to the present (future) with a start borne from the indoctrinated mind of a trained killer, an infantryman's paranoia dragging him back to the here and now like a slap.
The crack-hiss sound of las-fire is unmistakable, and he rises, with some of Dunkan's other enforcers, to look out through the narrow gunports in the side of the transport.
Folk are fleeing the monolithic casino and the surrounding buildings in droves, and the barked orders coming from the noncoms of the Oremor 1st, an oddly comforting sound to Albrek, fill the air even over the sound of the lasfire. He watches as their riot cordon begins to collapse, pressured as another press of staggering figures flows down the roadway, first in a sporadic trickle, fired upon indiscriminately by the guardsmen in green and gold, before turning into a momentous tide. Even from here, he can see that there is something wrong with their ungainly gaits, their flailing arms. They come on and on, despite the withering las-fire until the resolve of the soldiers begins to falter. They are the dead, most of them civilians, but many are guardsmen, like their prey, and they are hungry.
As Oktammor begins to shout orders from the front of the cargo-8, he feels the vehicle lurch into motion, nearly knocking him and the others to the floor. His hand clutches one of the leather straps on the ceiling to restore his balance as an afterthought, still craning his neck to look out the port.
For some reason his eyes go to the neon-lumen facade of one of the casino's neighboring night clubs, watching with dread as the gaudily lit sun on the sign abruptly goes dark. Something about that dead light, the black sun, makes the fear of the moment, the terror of his memories seem trivial by comparison.
Whatever it means, Albrek knows the end is near.
The Vaxus Deeps, Lift-Lobby 1241
Luceros fire his handcannon again, and is rewarded with a wet spray of corrupted gore and the dead-man falls down. The circle of the Pack tightens around him, interspersed with the red and white vestments of the surviving Redemptionists.
A strange pairing we are, indeed, he thinks.
He stumbles into the Castogaul, who rights him effortlessly with one long arm, before turning the other outward and spraying a cloud of liquid promethium from his hand-flamer into the undead host that has surrounded them. The friar, Savonar, exhorts and evangelizes behind them, shrieking a call to cleanse, his powerful, booming voice augmented by the laudhailer as the handful of surviving civilians they have rallied around desperately try to activate the ancient vehicular lift. His fellow Wolves fight with a tenacity and resolve that is admirable in the face of such odds, slug-throwers belching fire, scerridos piercing skulls when the bullets run dry. Though their numbers are far fewer than before, fewer still since the plague caused the dead to rise, their courage is something that the old She-Wolf would have been proud to see.
With the Sanctuary overrun, and all of the Vaxus Deeps infected or in flames, there is nowhere now to go but up. Luceros only hopes the Young Wolf and his companions will be successful in their efforts, or there will be nowhere left to run.
With a screech of metal, two of the Duct Wolves slide open the shaft, and the large band of gangers, Redemptionists, and civilians pour into the massive lift bay. Even so, there is not enough space for everyone, and the entry quickly becomes choked with bodies. Order is restored with a shout from his lips.
"Nine!"
Several of the Duct Wolves fighting the desperate delaying action move away from the entry, nodding to their Alpha without reservation, to stand beside where Luceros waits in his gore-flecked black furs. Into the stinking cloud of cordite and promethium, Friar Savonar sends out an equal number of his firebrand clerics, and they form a protective ring around the lift, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Duct Wolves so that the rest may escape. Before Luceros can throw himself on the proverbial pyre, surrounded on all sides by the walking corpses, the elderly friar signals to his second, and Castogaul bear-hugs Luceros, dragging him forcibly away from his men. Castogaul bulls him into the waiting lift before he can react. Taken by surprise by this perceived treachery, Luceros can only scream in frustration as the doors to the lift close, and with rocking motion, it begins ascending.
"Savonar! I will kill you old man! It was my place to die there, with my honor guard, for my Pack!"
As the Alpha unsheathes his scerrido, Castogaul stands protectively before his superior, blocking the way as the surviving Duct Wolves, Redemptionists, and desperate Underhivers look on.
Without raising his voice, Friar Savonar shakes his head minutely from side to side, holding his hands up, calling for peace. Working his mouth slowly around the horrible burn scars that mar his visage, the wizened old preacher speaks quietly, but his calming words carry weight nonetheless.
"Luceros, Luceros, my friend, your time has not yet come. It is He on Terra's Will that you will be needed before all is said and done, for your leadership to your people and Pack. Worry not, the time may still yet come when we will be able to sacrifice ourselves for our beliefs, whatever they may be. Now is not that time."
Still bristling with rage, the moment is balanced on a knife's edge, but seeing the exhausted looks of the surviving Duct Wolves, and the sincerity in the friar's eyes, he finally relents.
A deep breath wheezing out of him, he nods to the Redemptionist friar, "What now, Savonar?"
The frail old preacher smiles, his face a rictus of scar-tissue and arrogant confidence, somehow strangely reassuring just the same.
"Now comes the end."
His good eye then twinkles with a knowing, mischievous light from the mask of burns that seems particularly out of character for the old Redemptionist.
"Oh, and Luceros, please, call me Ishmael."
Geltdown Docks, High Above Landing Platform 9
The Inquisitorial gun-cutter shudders as its directional thrusters fire while on final approach to Geltdown Docks, while the pair of matte black stormtrooper shuttles that flank it follow suit, their weapons and sensoria nodules sweeping vigilantly across the landing vector.
From where he sits, the Inquisitor-Lord can see the blackened, smoldering ruin of Platform 7, and though knowledgeable about the events that brought it to such ruin, he barely spares it a glance, his gaze instead returning to the data slate resting in his lap.
A few keystrokes later, satisfied with what he sees there, he quietly leans back in the form-fitted crash chair and closes his eyes to meditate.
Even though the fate of Oremor and perhaps the entire sub-sector itself rests on the events of the next few hours, Inquisitor Ahmazzi shows no outward sign of anxiety, his face a self-possessed mask of impenetrable calm.
As the gun-cutter begins its final descent, Ahmazzi muses once again about the Great Game, the pieces, and their places on the board.
Vincent desperately tries to remember the code. He knows that whatever is crashing though the jungle towards them cannot be good.
"Ryuk, stay close and try not to attract attention."
Last hand anyways.
"Call."
I push across the additional chips.
Unduz II, Oremor 7th Legion Penal Claustrum, Designate Ylesium, Plantation 7, Husbandry Barn Cluster 177, Deep in the Tertiary Fallow Fields
With Ryuk standing protectively over him, facing the eastern edge of the clearing, Vincent closes his eyes and centers his thoughts. The noetic techniques of his peculiarly heretical scholam, meditative training that has perhaps been the most reliable thing in an otherwise chaotic life, proves as dependable as ever. With nary an effort, he extracts the requisite information from his eidetic mind and inputs the Inquisitorial ciphers into the keypad.
The thunderous tumult in the fallow field to the east is joined by a deep, bass, rumbling sound that originates from beneath the clearing.
Swaying on their feet as the ground shakes, Vincent and Ryuk watch as first the tech-priest, and then the two guardsmen come sprinting into the clearing from the eastern edge. The former is clearly wounded, clutching at his foreshortened left arm, which weeps blood and machine oil from the stump. Two of his swaying mechadendrites have been cleanly cut through, and shower sparks across his path as he runs. The nameless sergeant runs for his life, his respirator-masked companion following closely behind. Upon seeing you, the mortal fear on his face is jarring, and he waves his weaponless hands frantically in your direction, imploring you to run.
As another tall myconoid teeters, sways, and finally tumbles down into the hidden clearing with a resounding crash, you see why.
The dun and green camouflaged Sentinel scout walker that emerges from the fungal forest behind them is known officially as the Oremor Mark III Agricultural Pattern, but among the penitents and Guardsmen of the Oremor 7th Penal Legion, it is known more colloquially as the Reaper, a variant specifically engineered to cut its way through the thick fungal growth of the Unduz II jungles. Unlike the standard Sentinel, the Reaper differs from the base design by the addition of two gangly-looking servo-armatures affixed to the top of the legs. One ends in a pneumatic claw, while the other terminates in the sweeping curve of a huge chain chit-sickle. Even now, as the various technical specifications of the walker come unbidden to Vincent's mind in all of their meaningless minutiae, its chain-scythe rips through the last low hedgerow of mycoids, launching spores into the night air before the amber glow of its flickering head-lamps. The faint illumination reveals a metallic body caked in filth, gore, and the chaff of the vegetation it has carved through to reach this fateful rendezvous.
As it stomps forward, the operator pauses, raising his head slightly to make eye contact with the senior clerk. His eyes are agleam with the glow of the walker's head-lamps, but Vincent knows that they would appear to have the burnt orange color of a sick man's urine even had they not been illuminated. The pox-scars across the brow and nose, coupled with the angry knife-slash of a mouth, and the sadistic glee writ so clearly across the man's face leave no doubt as to his identity.
The walker's laudhailer roars to life with a disharmonious squawk of feedback as Glyde speaks, his voice filled with a mocking, bloodthirsty satisfaction at finally having cornered his quarry.
"Vincent!!! We meet again! Adjutant Triggs sends his regards!"
"Although he regrets he cannot be here, he asks that I return what is left of you to him in time for the Warden's desert!"
The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl
The acolytes add their own markers to the growing pot, and the bid again comes to the Changeling.
The silence in the Pinnacle of Pearl is absolute as the unsettling being slowly counts out a stack of the nonagonal chips, the light in the casino flickering momentarily with a barely perceptible shudder that seems at once physical and temporal.
The effects would be profoundly disturbing were any of the rapt audience able to avert their eyes from the endgame and bare witness to them, but as it stands, only the acolytes and the other players take heed.
Ornamental mycoid-plants wilt and die in their priceless vases, a steaming serving trencher of poached churraptus eggs abruptly reverts to a perfectly-stacked pyramid of spherical eggs, the shells making a gentle tinkling as they impossibly revert to their uncooked, intact state.
For a fleeting second, the dealer's voice clearly speaks in reverse as he asks the Changeling for the amount of his raise.
The only sounds coming from the players are the insistent murmuring of Keramiah Tor, which only now the acolytes recognize as the sound of stentorian prayer, and the strangled, gurgling gasps of Jashar Dol Geim as the medicae staff working to revive him begin to grow frantic in their efforts to revive him.
Although Savalos has noticed no clocks or timepieces in evidence within the Pinnacle of Pearl, from somewhere comes the tolling of an old clock as it strikes the ninth hour.
The daemonhost pushes the markers forward and they seem to blur and deform with midnight blue light as they move across the table.
"A raise, again, of ninety-nine."
His own chips expended, Trizo simply glares at the Changeling, golden hand clenching into a fist atop the table.
Blitz's reaction is different. For the first time since the game began he appears unsettled, wary even. He passes forward the rest of his chips with marked hesitation, eyes narrowing as he watches the daemonhost.
The dealer looks to Wardja, and the acolyte shudders when he finds himself looking into the weathered face and rheumy eyes of an old man; a centenarian at least, where once there was someone little older than he.
To Tilkeen "Beware, it is starting."
Doesn't take anyone with half a skull to realize a ritual is being performed. Unlike Tor the prayers I know are just a handful that the Old She Wolf use to sing to me as a child to chase away the nightmares lingering in the dark.
I grip the Golden Aquila tight in my pocket to where my fingers hurt and most likely bleed.
Reciting the prayer my mother taught me and I turn recited to Maia.
"Child O' Child,
seek not when you are content.
Accept no offer where your soul will be spent.
Ask not for power, or rich man's throne.
Be content with what you have that is your own.
Blood do not take unless the calling is just.
Or you will be drawn to its taste and lust.
Pray for your health, and judge not the weak.
or it will be you the reaper will seek.
Be as you are, not as the mirror see's.
Otherwise reflection will slave you for eternity.
In the darkness do not fright.
When it is darkest,
You are protected by the Throne's Holy light."
The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl
The dealer looks to Wardja, and the acolyte shudders when he finds himself looking into the weathered face and rheumy eyes of an old man; a centenarian at least, where once there was someone little older than he.
More manifestations of the warp. Instead of panicking I think of my old man. Served as an Adeptus Arbite for nearly 40 years. Regularly saw him come home nicked, scratched, bloodied, bruised--always dog-tired. But regardless of how bad it was he always got up the next day and went to work. 'You got a job to do, you do it,' he would tell me, 'Doesn't matter if it's a job no one wants.'
I toss in my remaining chips and rise. "All in." Winning the hand is irrelevant. The currency is worthless. More important to be ready for what follows. Lighting the lho-stick in my mouth I stand behind my chair, one step closer to the confectionary cart that hides my combat shotgun. May not do much good but at least I can go down swinging.
Vincent takes measured steps backwards, putting the majority of the shifting ground between himself and Glyde.
"Well, I guess you just have to come get me then."
The Gran Pallazzar Casino, The Pinnacle of Pearl
After Wardja rises to stand behind his seat, Savalos' quiet prayer begins in earnest, his urgent words a flowing counterpoint to Tor's monotone chanting.
The now-elderly dealer, weakened by his advanced age, gingerly rakes in the final chips, wincing with the effort required from his arthritic bones. His eyes, now sunken in his skull, look to the Changeling once more, expectant, as if pleading for release from his duties. He murmurs something unintelligible.
The daemon nods as if the temporal corruption surrounding them all is perfectly normal, and flicks the lambent pools of cold, blue fire that his eyes have become toward each player in turn, right to left, counterclockwise, beginning with Trizo and finally ending with Savalos.
His hands do not move, but the remaining stack of markers before him slide across the table of their own volition, some skipping, some bouncing on end to join the others.
The thing that used to be Rico keeps its gaze fixed upon Thul when it completes the disturbing circuit of competitors, wispy threads of cerulean corposant flickering across its lips when it speaks.
"A beautiful prayer."
"I once knew a child who shared the fervency of your faith, and spoke it quite often in the darkest watches of the night."
A thin, wistful smile creases the impossibly ancient being's lips at the recollection.
"She is precious, to you, no?"
I look up at the beast. No emotion in my eyes. This part of the game I have seen played before. Never with such stakes, but ultimately the same.
"Time to flip your cards. This part of the game is over."
The silence is palatable as everyone waits to show there cards and see there comparative worth. In the end no one wins. Everyone is a loser for we all had to show our hands at the table.