[Erdawn Il Deus]

Ladies, gentlemen, those between, this is it. Doom. The doom. The signal flare to me and Cam's hiatus from VGF and hopefully the spark that will ignite your attentions and supercharge some spirit back into the 'fields. This topic is about nothing but pure carnage on both sides. We will walk away one at a time. And by "one at a time" I mean the other or both evac'ed by a funeral chopper. Spectators are welcome, but any kind of interference with the battle will end in the beating, booting, and killing of you character, and no, I'm not kidding.

Anyways, I'm already stretching this and eating up some space for what really matters.

They will tell stories, and bards will sing songs, and the children will remember and the old ones will speak in reverence of this fight.

Or maybe it'll just be saved to various hardrives. Whatever the case, the beginning of the end begins now. Erdawn versus Wyborn in a bout that will hopefully burn one's name into the stone of the Gunjin and light the hearth of a new age for the battlefields.

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Weeds swayed with softest grace in the cooling eastern breeze. The sky was overcast with clouds the quality of a bruise, cracking, tearing with spurts of rolling thunder that grew fat across the horizon and voiced a throat full of stones and gods. It was the beginning of a storm, a great and terrible storm that would shake the earth in its fury and echo across the memories of those who witnessed it for times and times in history. A sky pregnant with rain gave nothing but haphazard sweeps of droplets, almost bursting with a downpour but holding back. The field might well have been endless -- it stretched horizon to horizon for what might have been parsecs in every direction, a baked land of yellowed grass overgrown and lecherously tangling amidst the bleached bones of dead beasts. Small tufts of dust caught in the wind and wafted across the expanse, as if to survey a grim handiwork.

Five people stood in the field. Their eyes held a different quality, but the same weight in sombre anticipation. They had been called here, by something deeper than words and more ancient than the rock would remember. Thunder cracked and growled deep from an Olympian belly.

Erdawn stood with a noble patience that befitted a king of more than one world. Pale blue locks of hair fluttered in the breeze, a crown of tangled spikes braided behind his ear with segmented metal beads, braided again into a small ponytail behind his skull. Behind his ear was stuck two falcon feathers. He wore a beard cut short, trim and elegant, fitting sharply angular cheekbones. He was armoured with a tight cuirass of boiled leather fitted under segmented steel plates sewn into the material, covering his chest and abdomen in almost neatly-cut squares and rectangles. He was clearly fitted for war -- bare arms striped with slithering tattoos etched up and down cords of muscle. Similar sigils curled and curved around and from his eye socket and down his nose, giving him a feral, savage-like appearance worthy of Ares. He was decked out with weaponry and armour of interweaving ages and technology. Leather belts criss-crossed across his waist and crotch, looping arrays of small throwing blades and ammunition cartridges, laden with an assorted of small arms and a sleek Romanesque sword, sheathed in sweated leather. Slung over the snow-grey wolf-pelt mantle on his back was a metallic, alien rifle, shining bluntly in the faint storm lights. He was chewing on a blade of grass.

Yuri stood taller than all of them. He was dressed almost ceremonially, for war and battle. Bleached blonde hair grew coarsely from his head in a mane, his face was shaven, revealing the smoothed network of crafted angles and jagged abruptness than made up his cheeks and face. Red and white and black paint covered the left side in symbolic designs and pictures, brutal and blunt, drawn by a finger of anger. The hunter was laden in what must have made a ton of iron armour, red as blood and heralded by heavy, coarse bear pelts between the plates, taken from the hide of the largest beasts in Centerearth. Blood pumped rivers through his veins, and his every sense was tuned, supercharged to an ambient frequency in the air. His body tingled. He could smell the blood before it was even spilt, and his heart beat a drum of glory and blood in his chest. Eyes like splintered, electric ice gleamed. This would be a day remembered across all the ages. Perhaps his death and the death of every man here… but it was so right. Calloused, knuckled fists tightened on the pommel of his crushing and enchanted war-hammer -- the weapon of his teacher, Kaja-Rang the Red. This would be a day of glory. The other hand clutched a chain necklace of small, stone-carved figurines.

In the center of the group stood a strange and disturbing man. His was grinning with alien broadness, thin, scimitar-like with a rapacious quality that was unearthly and inhuman. His face was a knife-blade of pale, almost white skin scissored between shoulder-length hair black as pitch that had a dead quality about it, ornamented by a pair of wire glasses gleaming of ruby lenses reflecting circles of bloody light. He seemed an image of eccentricism, crowned with an impossibly large and floppy leather hat as red as his circular glasses, and wearing a large, white coat of silky, snow-white fox-furs, sparkling and glittering with cut beads and buttons and shards of brimstone. He was giggling silently, tittering to a point that past the leylines of man's sanity, and as he did his shadow danced behind him. Its shape was oblique and immense… and monstrous, but why could not be pinpointed. This was Richter, Richter Arkham, Richter Delacroix, Richter the Hatter.

The fourth warrior was shrouded in heavy, thick baboon pelts. They were perfectly hideously -- all the same charcoal grey and even bleached, radiated white to the point of a poisonous, wretched quality. The pile bulged in places where there shouldn't have been any swelling, and the character beneath them gave no sign of breathing, or even life. His face was hooded and shadowed completely by the cloak of furs, and he stood still and immovable. This was Sunday, kin to Saturday, Amari Adom-Rah of the Ven wastes.

The final of the five that had come did not look like much of a warrior at all. He was sitting in the grasses and leaning on a beautiful crafted solidbody electric guitar that looked to have been carved and chiselled from ice crystal itself, glowing vibrantly and surreally, as if lit from within by pale blue lantern lights. He was thin, practically gaunt -- and looked like a heroine addict if not for the sparking intelligence that flared behind his eyes. His face was unshaven, his hair curled tightly against his brow, his skin like new leather. Heavy, calloused hands coveted the instrument with love. He was wearing a suit for all the purpose not suggested for the wearing of a suit. White shirt un-tucked and loose, a wrinkled tie flopping lackadaisically down his chest, sleek black shoes built with steel heels to tap, like a dancer. He was smoking a cigarette. This was Ice Hendrix, the Cursed Guitarist.

They made a motley crew, by seemed powerful in their own right.

"Time, yet?" said Erdawn, pacing, hands stuck in his pockets.

"Patience," boomed Yuri. "They'll come. This is too important. Destinies hang on a spindle. We will fight, we will win, or we will die. There is no more, and no less." Erdawn nodded. Hendrix merely smoked, putting on a pair of crystalline ruby sunglasses.

Richter laughed, and strode around the field, moving energetically.

"This will be fun, paisans. Stop looking so down. Turn your frowns, upside-down!" He halted, tapping his chin. "Now speaking of the devils, where in Hell's pajamas are they? It's gonna rain soon! This will ruin my faaaaahb-ulous coat!" He snickered. "Weeheehee!"

The cloaked figure chuckled darkly from within the folds of his robes, and dismissed them. They were coming. He could see the switchblade grin on that bastard Hunter's face as he crossed his arms over his chest. They were coming, and doom was coming with them.