Chapter 296: The Master’s Sanctum Part 2

So we delve deeper into Anthony's lair! Still funny to me that such an evil person has such a normal name. They usually change the name so they don't have connections to their past, but not this guy! Ann's head is full of these villains. Humanity sure liked to come up with them, even if some were darker in real life. Those slasher villains have pretty normal names, though. Mmm, and that mask on Jason? Excuse me.

Picking their way through the first room was a massive pain. Rosalyn’s new skill kept her pretty stable, but Kat did not have nearly the same grace as her girlfriends. Her boots were big, and she stepped heavily, causing a couple of the tile traps to go off as she passed. They weren’t too much of a threat now that they knew what to expect, but it still slowed things down.

There were, as Ann should have expected, two doors at the end of the tunnel. Nothing in this place was labelled. Each of the doors was stone, each with a simple square pattern that Ann had seen a million times on the front doors of most houses. Both had lighting on the left and right, and both were identical.

Kat walked up and knocked on each cautiously.

No response.

She and Ann both listened for movement, but the things had to be thick enough to absorb all sound coming in.

“So, which one?” Rosalyn asked.

“Left,” Lucia answered immediately.

“Right,” Bren decided quickly after.

Ann squinted at them. They usually seemed to argue things like this out in their heads before answering. It was weird that they differed now.

“I dinnae. Not my thing,” Kat shrugged. “I’ll go wit’ ye, Ann.”

“Oh fuck it, left,” Ann sighed. She reached out to the place where a door handle should be, and tried her claws again. Sure enough, the stone sank away at her Bultrite-coated touch to reveal a handle. She gave it a yank.

The door swung open easily. Whatever Anthony was using for hinges was incredibly smooth. So smooth that the door almost slammed into the wall if it weren’t for Kat catching it.

“Easy,” the princess chided.

“I mean, yeah, kinda? Still, the door is really light,” Ann teased, then giggled as Kat blushed.

Like the previous room, this one was a black abyss, only lit by the open doorway. Ann found a light button to her right. It clicked in and lit up a storeroom. It was ridiculously tall. Taller, again, than it should be. The walls were smooth, pure white stone, marred by streaks of brown and red. Tables were arrayed with various cutting tools. Saws and cleavers, mostly. Ann craned her neck to see hundreds of hooks ascending in neat rows on metal rods.

“Think this is ‘is workshop?” Kat asked, staring up at the macabre spectacle.

The hooks were populated. Some just presented the upper parts of skeletons, while others had a simple skull. None of their flesh remained after so long, which honestly surprised Ann. Most other places had either magic or isolation that preserved their state for thousands of years, but this had been left to rot all of the easy stuff and leave the bones?

“Rosalyn, does it make sense for him to let all this go to waste?” Ann asked, not taking her eyes off the hooks. She didn’t want anything to move.

“What, you mean the flesh? I’ll need to get a closer look. Lucia can tell too, I’d bet. Thinking that the bones were hung up like that. No bits. Maybe some tendons? I mean, if they were hung up there like that with their meat, where’s the rest of them? Should be thousands of little foot and toe bones all over the floor, but there aren’t. Would make a heck of a mess, and we’d be crunching around right now. Especially Kat.”

“Oi!”

“Love you!” Rosalyn giggled. “So, yeah, think our first bit of business is getting these people down. Bren, you read up on any like… I dunno, spiritual stuff for laying people to rest?”

“For spirits trapped in a state such as this, simple prayer will not be sufficient,” the scholar said as he began to comb the space. “A ritual will need to be performed, and not a simple one. Since the mixture of deities we have sponsoring us is wide, we have options in how we do this. Considering Annita’s direct benefaction, I would suggest she lead the ritual.”

Ann grimaced as she ran her hand over a table. There were sets of scratches in it. Five rows each. “I really hope it doesn’t involve fucking. This place does not put me in the mood.”

“Ghost orgy would be damn interestin’ tae see,” Kat scoffed. “What d’ya think ghosts from back then look like?”

“Worse clothes. Thinner. Less food. Survival harder,” Lucia said flatly. “Magic make new animals. Things we think normal. Then others. Strangers are danger. Mentioned town. Who knows how long lasted.”

Ann nodded along with Lucia’s words. “Makes sense. Apocalyptic and titanic shifts in the world would cause so many problems.”

“Strange that he did not mention them. I would have thought they would merit note.”

“Maybe the magic was more important,” Ann guessed. “I really wonder how long that stuff lasted, or how actually cataclysmic it was. Africa and Asia getting shattered had to be nuts to live through.”

“Indeed. I believe I have found the lever to activate this contraption, and another to lower it,” Bren said. “I suggest we not take them down until we have located the rest of their remains. Should meddling with them cause attraction of their spirits, I would have the ritual be completable quickly.”

“Then that brings us to the question: Where are the rest of them?” Ann eyed the door joining this room to the one they didn’t take. “Should we see if that’s the workshop?”

Kat sighed, starting to clomp her way over. “Might as well. Feckin’ crypt o’ a buildin’. This is only the first floor o’ the sanctum, too.”

Everyone gathered up around the door. Scouting was out, so they arranged in breaching formation. Kat and Ann took the front, Lucia and Rosalyn behind to cover, with Bren ready to heal or shield in the back.

The door slid open with incredible ease, but Kat was ready for it and kept the thing steady. She took it annoyingly slow, though.

Ann knew what they were in for before the door even finished opening. Green light oozed from the crack, then poured into the room.

“The Green Place,” Ann growled.

Kat stepped into the sickly wash. Her boots clicked on tile.

Ann expected horrible. She wasn’t ready for whatever the fuck this was.

Cages were everywhere. They were set into the wall, hanging from the ceiling, set into the floor in a way that’d make their occupant unable to stand. Each placement was chaotic, never equally spaced from one another. Every one was made of glistening steel rods that didn’t look like they’d provide stable footing for an occupant.

And occupants there were. While the other place had held bones, this room held flesh. These people, long dead, were preserved as they’d been. Emaciated and near death. Hollow eyes stared out of unmoving faces, bearing silent witness to the horrors that had been committed here. Men and women. Ann braced for children, but she blessedly didn’t see any.

Ann had expected tables. There were a couple, all with straps for arms and legs, but they weren’t the main thing in the room. Those were the large chains hanging from the ceiling. Chains attached to what Ann could only describe as monsters.

There were six of them. Massive beasts hanging from meat hooks on the titanic chains. Each was easily twenty feet long. Long felt right, because they were not something that should be measured in height. Their bodies were a patchwork of hundreds of people’s skin melted together by arcane magics that Ann really didn’t want to think about. Still, the seams remained. Ann had no doubt that bones underneath the masses of muscles and skin had received the same treatment.

Their long arms were as thick around as a tree, bore three joints, and ended in a variety of parts. One had hands like a normal person, if that person had dozens of fingers that meshed into a bigger set of fingers. One had sets of claws like a lion’s, fashioned from who knew how many bones. Each “paw” up to the shoulders was covered with long hair of a dozen different colours. A two had plain cudgels for their limbs, and the last had just simple hooked blades.

Ann had to reconsider her earlier observation of their length, though. They were definitely bipedal, but they were hung horizontally. Each massive foot was still human, surprisingly. Sure, the toenails were yellowed and shingled like a roof, but the general shape was still there.

The faces were the worst part, though. Ann stared in grotesque fascination at the mangled mess. Each had a jaw and a single mouth, but nothing else stayed human. The one with the hands hands had three eyes, all closed, one resting in the middle of its forehead. There was no nose, and its mouth, which hung open, housed a set of discoloured teeth.

Next, the lion one had a single eye to the right of its face that was disgustingly large. So large that it was pushing out where the skull should have been. There was no closing that thing, and its orange gaze stared blankly ahead. Its teeth were sharp, some broken, and there were rows behind the front that Ann could see poking out.

The two cudgel-handed monsters seemed to be twins of a sort. One was clearly female while the other was either androgynous or male. Ann really couldn’t tell the difference except that the female had wider hips and breasts. It didn’t make either less hideous, as their faces revealed a nest of eyes under long black hair. The right side of the male’s face and the left side of the female’s were covered in nearly a dozen eyes ranging in size from double a normal eyeball to ten times the size. They were all closed, so Ann couldn’t tell if they shared the same colour, but she didn’t care. Glistening white human teeth with long golden canines filled their mouths and gave them a look somewhat like an Oni.

The last one honestly seemed incomplete. Its face was missing half its skin, and there was an exposed brain where some of the skull hadn’t been put together. What that revealed was probably worse than Ann wanted to see. She thought the brain was dirty at first, but as she walked silently around, she saw that it wasn’t dirt. It was hair. Hair and eyes. Hundreds of them. This thing, maybe all of them, had just had dozens of brains mixed together into their skulls. Ann really didn’t want to know why hair was in there, too, but had the awful feeling she was going to find out.

“Bren?” Ann asked, breaking the silence that’d clung to all of them as they moved into the room. “How big can this ritual get?”

“I suggest we move the bones in here,” Bren said. “It will be easier.”

“Yeah, but how big?”

“Big enough. This will take some very serious power, Annita. I hope we are up to it.”

Ann swallowed some bile as she saw one of the creatures shift, the chains it hung from rattling softly. “Cool. Lets say we get the fuck out of here and find the last floor before that?”

“Nae,” Kat growled. She was staring at the one that’d moved. Ann was not happy with that look. “If these things can be woken up, an’ their master is still around in some way, we don’t want ‘em wakin’ up.”

“Kat, how the fuck are we going to disable these?” Ann scoffed, gesturing at the titans. “They’re as big as a Mulsfar!”

“Guys!” Rosalyn called from further in. “There’s a couple missing!”

Ann and Kat shared a look that said they’d talk this over in a second. Rosalyn was the priority. They ran off to join her.

They found the woman staring up at not two, but three sets of chains with no titan attached. They were all still, thank the Gods, but the flesh that still clung to them told everyone that there had been something hanging there.

“Well, feck,” Kat groaned. “That makes things complicated.”

“Left. This way,” Lucia beckoned. She followed a trail of shattered tiles leading further away from the entrance. When they came to the wall, she stopped, cocked her feathered head, then pointed. “Portal. Old. No runes?”

As she said, the portal didn’t seem like any that Ann had seen before. Well, not like she’d seen many outside of TV, movies, and the one on Bren’s hip, but she still expected some sort of gateway. If Lucia hadn’t pointed it out, she would have thought it was just a decorative semicircle on the wall, the bottom third clipped off by the floor. The ring was filled with the same stone as the walls, and flush to the rest.

“A physical portal?” Ann asked.

“Ye mean a door, love,” Kat said, holding back a laugh. “Think the bastard just opened the thing up when he needed it. Gods above protect whatever he needed tae unleash these things on.”

“No kidding,” Ann said, looking back at the creatures. They hadn’t moved much more than just idle twitches, but it unnerved her. The actual fuck had been the point of these things?

“Nothing else,” Lucia shrugged.

“Odd that there are no records kept. Despite his inelegance, he did seem to have the habit of documenting his work,” Bren muttered, casting another glance over the glowing green space. “Do you think we can move the bodies? We will need… oh, good, the cages do have doors. I was worried we might have to take the bodies apart. That would not be pleasant for us, or the spirits.”

“Find the key, get these people out and into a more central spot, move the skeletons in here, then get to work on a ritual,” Ann listed their current objectives. “Once we do that, we deal with Anthony if he’s still around, or during, if he’s still around. I really fucking hope he’s not still around.”

Bren nodded gravely, his brow darkening. “A shade so old would be most powerful indeed. Unless the Gods saw fit to strip him of his powers. Has Orenous told you anything?”

Ann checked the chat. Still nothing. “Nope. I get the feeling she’s letting us handle this, though. Her last thing was about relying on each other. Can’t have a hand to hold all of the time.”

Kat scoffed. “Nae, we can’t. We’re their children. Gotta grow up eventually an’ learn tae fend fer ourselves.”

“Bryltia tells the same,” Lucia said. “Once taught, survive and grow. Seek strength and challenge. Die trying.”

“A bit grim,” Rosalyn half-laughed. Her hands were still tightly gripping her staff. “Think I like Eas’s version better. Gotta go where the wind blows and hold your own momentum. When the time is right, blowing away from familiar currents can be important. Find your next breeze until the time comes to move on once more.”

“Then there is Qu’Sella, who simply have sermons on living and learning all you can. If you have to move on, so be it. A dry turn of phrase, but effective.”

Ann ran through her growing knowledge of Orenous’s faith, trying to find the applicable version of the teaching. “God damnit. Live, laugh, love.” She groaned. “Like, I get that the phrase isn’t as vapid as it was in my time, but still. There’s more talking about following your heart and deciding with your mind when it comes to breaking off and being on your own, or tying yourself to another, but her stuff is a lot more surface-level.”

“There is more,” Bren corrected. “I will leave that to your own research. Better yet, perhaps Mother Superior Rowena could educate you when next we are in Korvas.”

“Yeah, educate,” Ann sighed. She’d hopefully be doing a lot more than education with Rowena, provided Kat allowed. The Thrundol matron was definitely an attractive woman. Still, she would never break her promise to Kat, no matter how much she teased the woman.

She shook off the thoughts. Not appropriate for this place, no matter how much she’d love to be having feral sex with the princess. Gods, the way their athletic bodies competed every time was incredible.

Ok, maybe she was a bit horny. She checked her libido and confirmed it was still far from capped. If that was the case, then it was her own hormones. She’d probably be swapping back to her original configuration. It’d been a while, and getting fucked did feel amazing.

“Dead bodies and horrible serial killers!” Ann shouted, grabbing her ears.

Rosalyn gave her a confused look. “You ok?”

“Really goddamn horny,” Ann groaned. “Not my stat, so I guess I’m just going feral right now. What the fuck? Let’s get this shit over with so we can do literally everything else.”

Ann caught Bren and Kat giving each other a look, but neither commented.

Ann stalked back to the first room with all of the traps. There had to be a staircase somewhere they could use to get further upwards.