Part Two
It was just over three cycles before Unamorel met the man who wrote that pamphlet. After she had found it and quit her studies, it took her several weeks to find any information of the organization Dakkru’s Enlightened and Devout. Her first clue was a mark, a small engraving in the stone masonry of a municipal works building just off site of campus. It was the same as the logo printed at the bottom of the pamphlet, three spheres entangled in a trefoil knot., and she recognized it immediately. This let her know that they were in the area, and she kept her eyes open. Just three blocks down from the mark, she came across it again. This time it was painstakingly rendered out of cast billon bronze, down to the finest detail, each individual strand that made up the chord of the knot, hanging as a marker on a green-painted basement office door emblazoned with the acronym DEaD.
Three knocks later and she was being greeted by a young, short-bearded dwarf with thick glasses that magnified his eyes so large they completely filled the frames. He blinked at her a few times behind the lenses without inquiring her business. She coughed to break the awkward silence and held out the pamphlet for him to see. “Your symbol on the door matches the one on this pamphlet. I wanted to see if I could find some information on it,” she stated, with a slight lift of inflection tacked on subliminally at the end, to announce at her discomfort with speaking to the bug eyed dwarf.
He quickly snatched the pamphlet right out of her hand with grubby fingers, blinked at her twice, and slammed the door shut on her face, just as she lifted a finger to object to his treatment of her. “Well I never!” she harumphed and stamped her foot. What sort of place is this? How do they get away with treating people like that!?
She turned, and just as she was walking up the steps back to street level, she heard the door creak open again. She spun and was faced with a tall slender Dermorian woman, with long, straight, brown hair and wearing a lengthy black gown, with spindly silver embroidery thick at the cuffs and gradually fading up the sleeve like jeweled arangma webs spun along her arms. Her hands were held together in front of her but remained hidden within the baggy folds of the sleeves. “Hello,” she spoke up the steps to Unamorel, who promptly cleared her throat and replied.
“Yes, I found a pamphlet and...”
The sparkling Dermorian beamed and cut her off sharply, “Yes! You found a pamphlet! Do come in. Come in,” she turned aside and gestured with a smooth wave of her draped hand. As Unamorel walked past, the graceful elf added, “Please excuse Brother Aegrochk, he has taken a vow of silence, all the Brothers here at the abbey have, actually.” The Dermorian overtook Unamorel in a few swift steps and led her down the narrow hallway.
To her left and right Unamorel peeked into a series of identical workshops, each inhabited by a dwarf identical to the one who had greeted her at the door. They sat on high stools at workbenches and drafting tables, hunched over shining plates of metal, fastidiously engraving them with tiny, precise tools, a unique combination of glyphs brimming with arcane energies beside them.
“These are the Brothers Goia,” the Dermorian explained with a showy wave outward with her hands, as she briskly kept the pace down the long corridor, “They are all actually brothers, born of the same mother. They’ve dedicated themselves, their entire lives, to the art of printing. What you see them doing is painstakingly copying original manuscripts written by the masters of our order, etching them onto copper plates. A special ink is washed over the plates, fills the etched grooves, and then pressed into paper. Those glyphs you see? They actually create lenses, by dilating the rays of light that bounce off the manuscript and into their eyes so they can see every minute detail in the original. Oh, and the ink they use is made from Poison Carkarass blood. Oh! and not one of them can rise from this position until they kill their father, who developed this technique...” they reached the end of the hallway and a nondescript door, painted the same color as the walls, grey. She reached for the doorknob, winked an eye at Unamorel, and added, “And they don’t even know who he is.” She generally seemed excited about getting to share all of this information.
The door opened into a dark room, dimly lit by high windows along the ceiling which marked street level and several candelabras set on stacks of books and artifacts. The room was cramped by its occupancy of boxes and crates which filled the space. “This is my office,” the Dermorian said in a gleeful whisper, “come on in.”
Embedded in the center of the room was a hunky desk, which the lanky Dermorian had to climb over a few things to get behind. It looked like a routine she had become deftly familiar with, a lithe, noodle-like agility as she wriggled and squirmed to avoid precarious stacks, while steadily balancing on others. Her flight landed her into a chair, and she plomped her elbows onto the cleared portion of the desktop, grinning up at Unamorel where she stood, absolutely overjoyed to have someone to talk to even slightly interested in what she knew.
The girl’s name was Marscini, Unamorel found out, amongst a wide variety of other things. Marscini gobbled on and on about the Sect’s practice of ascension through murder, her recent ascension to the rank of Shade which landed her this position of assistant of the Kali of the temple above, and management over the printing department of the coven. “Oh, that’s just a title,” she boasted with her hands slipped smoothly behind her head, “those guys out there, they’re non stop, they live for what they do! They don’t need a manager. Mostly I do personal research for the Kali,” she gestured with her eyes the variable stacks of obscure texts and treasures, “and I get to learn all about this stuff!” She said it while biting her lower lip, an expression of lust, the motor of passion. Unamorel had never been passionate about anything in her life, but she read it on the Dermorian's face, and she felt a small flame ignite within.
“Here, this is what she’s got me looking at now.” Marscini reached for a book atop one of the many stacks on her desk. It was a tome of illustrations, detailed hand renderings of cadavers, corpses, skeletons, and variable parts of bodies exhumed from burial wells. “That’s a copy,” she said leaning over her desk to place the book in Unamorel’s hands. “Brother Aegrock made the plates,” she informed her with a quiver.
Marscini became Unamorel’s first teacher, and her first kill. It did not take long for Unamorel to realize she had equaled the Dermorian, and what she lacked in eagerness she surpassed her in ruthlesness. She did it with joy and with menace. It came in a way Unamorel felt was pungently poignant and appropriate for Marscini. She brewed a tea, a specific blend of herbs who’s oils when mixed in the digestive tract, act like an embalming liquid, systematically shutting down her vital systems one by one. It took Marscini two weeks to die.
