7591/1000 Faces: Triskaidekaphobia - Brunnhilde

1000 Faces: Triskaidekaphobia - Brunnhilde
Date of Scene:	29 August 2021
Location:	Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Synopsis:	Brunnhilde gets her revenge by murdering Erlik, the Turkic god of pestilence, death, and evil. But not without getting poisoned.
Cast of Characters:	Jane Foster, Brunnhilde
Tinyplot:	1000 Faces of Death

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Jane Foster has posed:
A spell transformed a pleasure boat on the Haitian shore into a castle, the likes of which Haiti has never known. The French aristocrats who reaped obscene wealth from the plantations and sugar fields might know ghosts of that Asgardian wealth, the gasping gold walls and shining architecture so far away from the rotten, squalid banlieus just a mile and some down the road.

For those feasting and prepared to sacrifice Hermod, the messenger of the All-Father, the setting's much less impressive. That does not prevent them from being locked in rooms and hallways known to the Odinsons, their friends, and soldiers or servants. At least seven powers confined to a prison by the Trickster Prince of Asgard still wreak havoc in search for Hermod.

Brunnhilde is too old an Valkyrie to be entirely unfamiliar in those elegant hallways crafted with a loving eye for detail. Lavishly engraved pillars incised by traditional Aesir knotwork and heaps of gold extend down narrow aisles, latticework doors opening to chambers spaced out rather far. Clattering boots and feet echo off the stonework, adding another confusing dimension, scattered across floors. Clearly the boat-turned-palace has become as multileveled as the real thing in Asgard, but sustained on a smaller illusory scale, for even Loki's powers have limits. Especially in a domain not his own.

Brunnhilde's hot pursuit of trouble then splits when she reaches a crossroads. Whiro-te-tipua, the Maori god who flung a breadfruit at her, has no desire to square off with an enraged psychopomp with a drink and no taste in fruit. She'd have caught it in her teeth otherwise. A chilling wail from his lips combined by the assault of banging a fist to his own chest while he runs shakes the foundations, sending statuary clattering and those flower arrangements Frigga loves so much smashing to the ground. The ground shudders in answer to him, and forth come the bugs. The things of deepest places, bloody and horrific centipedes and crawling shadows confined to the dark, where old dreams of sea snakes and great worms under the water burrow hard into the volcanic soil of a homeland. They erupt like some monstrosities, chewing at stone, carving chaos in their wake to add to the Trickster's own.

Thus the very rules are a bit unstable. She can turn and go for the flight of stairs for a higher level and different quarry, though the ground rocks under her with earthquakes. She can smell the sea churning in its unstable wrath. They all hunt Hermod, and in turn, she hunts them. Who to choose?

Brunnhilde has posed:
"Gross" Brunnhilde mutters to herself as the crawling things erupt from the cracks of Loki's illusion. She squishes them beneath her feet as she turns.

One sent running distracted from his hunt. If he will not fight her, she lets him flee. She longs for death in battle, blade to blade, surrounded by companions. Stalking the night, pursuing her quarry, feels like Paris. So she goes in search of that familiar face.

Jane Foster has posed:
Trying to consume the stone is akin to eating the Asgardian sorcerer's spell, but holes and rents appear. Subterranean creepy-crawlies armed with drill-like mouths full of many, many teeth probably inspired sandworms in Dune, albeit these bear the viscous poisonous carapaces of rainforests and reefs more than deserts.

Whiro has his own business, and he halts at one of the caged doors to force it open. Clearing the grounds when in pursuit of the messenger god, then, is a priority. He won't give Brunnhilde the pleasure of combat, throwing those awful insects in waves after her. They scuttle on walls and floors, pouring into cornices and pursuing her in favour of anything else. Well, other than looking for Asgardian flesh. Mm, messenger flesh.

The saturated death here is like Paris but infinitely worse. If Paris was a contest of two gods, this is a presence of seven atop the most fragmented death-ridden territory in the New World. Haiti's torment feeds the violence. Outside, enchanted mortals die by the score, felled, feeding whatever dread, dark storm flows into the sky. She can feel it in her bones, a psychopomp being called to reap souls and those souls going nowhere but to vanish.

Ahead of her comes the stairs, a lofty span arching back into the forested thicket of columns. Up there on a mezzanine should be spaces given over for royal prerogatives, greeting rooms and a feasting hall, things that Loki has given enough texture to be vast, believable. One of the pillars is smashed. A red-skinned creature no longer in the likeness of a happy gentleman coming for a meal hunkers low on a balustrade and shoots arrows straight into doors. Where the bristled things collide, they eat holes into the very firmament, rotting away the spell or at least giving him a fine idea of what lies inside.

Jane Foster has posed:
He resembles this fine fellow, save with a Turkic bow: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/gods_and_demons/images/1/11/Cihan-engin-754a1661908743-5a7dab5e46e0a.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20200815213252

Brunnhilde has posed:
Arrows she can dodge. Moving as fast as a Valkyrie can, she closes the distance between them. Perhaps this one will fight.

Jane Foster has posed:
Arrows are fired in rapid order, the black shafts fletched with the eerie energy blotted shades of yellow from the steppes, the desert, places that civilised cities and lands fear. There is nothing good associated with that shade, nor the illness sallow skin foretells. The clouds of dust of the great khanates or their loosely aligned confederacies follow in the miasma whirling around Erlik when he continues to fire into the doors and they crumble in pestilence or rot.

When that transpires, he turns a sharp orange-rimmed eye to see if Hermod exists within. Going up has not resolved his predicament, but the woman hurling herself across the landing for his perch brings a sharp smile. His mouth is full of porcine-like teeth, hard and hard, his horns curling back as he throws his head back. "So eager! You might have been good sport in bed." Words crowed in that guttural, dark voice echo the thunder of hooves on the plains, and he sends a volley of arrows at Brunnhilde, one after the other.

His dark lower body unspools, embers flowing around him in a strange cloth of skyfire, clashing against the ground when he practically charges for her on a zigzag.

Brunnhilde has posed:
Brunhilde comes up the stairs, evading the arrows. The volley slows her as she avoids their sting. She has no wish to be unmade. Or, somewhere in her soul, she wishes to live more.

She leaps for him, knife in hand, blade extended to strike.

Jane Foster has posed:
Slowed: a feature commonplace to the gods of death, for certain. The entropic auras they possess in the fullness of their power does not leave much ground to move quickly. Death keeps its own sense of time, which is none at all, for eternity is without need for such transitions as the living cling to. Therefore when Erlik springs to action, the arrows flying from his curled, leathery fingers, the need to pull them from a quiver is no matter at all. The missing shafts explode into the ground, burrowing holes into the spell, which might well be covered over.

But for Loki, the cost will be high.

Spiralling risks come flying as the heavy scent of brine washes from downstairs and a pivotal /shriek/ rails through the halls. The ocean, so near and so bestirred by earthquakes, rises in answer. Here on the second floor, surely that is no trouble. Unless this really is a boat anchored to the shore and Brunnhilde might have things to worry about, like if it flips over or breaks. Or gets carried out on a tsunami as the area is prone to.

Her death-wish may be used against her, if true. If she slaps her knife astray, he will be there to meet it with fire, for is it a fair fight to wield those pointed projectiles in flight and as stiletto-like blades too? He does at that, a handful clutched in his fist and used to jab. The noxious heads are dangerous if they graze, leaving sickly stains and rotting cloth where they strike Brunnhilde's armour, and help her if they reach flesh and the colours join. Another phasing huntsman spider searching for another target flashes into existence, scampering up with /keen/ interest.

One enemy? Try two, and the spider's only partially in reality. It skreeeeees with absolute joy. Dinner!

Erlik's bare arms might seem a fairly obvious target, but the rest of his highly stylized armour formed to him like a second skin is probably not so cleanly cleaved. Bare fire on said arms and head and around him isn't nice either. Evil is evil.

Brunnhilde has posed:
Brunnhilde aims for his arm, hoping to find a nice artery. And if his devil's flame should heat the knife in to a more brutal weapon, all the better. The spider she ignores, until it comes within striking distance. She parries and thrusts, her attacks fueled with battle-rage.

Jane Foster has posed:
Erlik's greater bulk does not equal Brunnhilde's speed exactly but the arrows he jabs at her face and throat probably warrant moving back. One of them stabs at her knife, making it slide sideways while he more or less runs directly into the Asgardian warrior. When in doubt, take the most direct approach, bashing his head at hers and getting a shoulder down to hurl her past the balustrade he was on before.

The immense heat rolling around them isn't pleasant, and the fire scorches at the mundane parts of her armour if any. The metal bits themselves heat up rather quickly, and those spikes on his chest and shoulders certainly are not for show. They jab and pierce, as much as her knife grazes his flesh in her rage. Stone shatters; it never had a chance to begin with. The wooden pillars of the castle nearby are flame-licked and nibbled at, another stress against the chaos that sends spars crumbling in yet another matrix for gods to climb through or dismember to reach their sacrificial victim.

And yet, will it be /her/?

Brunnhilde has posed:
Letting out a scream of frustration, she reaches up to pull him over with her. In the struggle, she attempts to wedge the knife into that soft spot near his armpit, where the overlapping armor shows flashes of skin. And then she's reaching out, without a care for the spikes and his burning flesh, to strangle him as they fall.

Jane Foster has posed:
The burns lace over her skin in reddish sparks, but not with the healthy reddish pink of flesh burning quite the way it should. Something stings in that flaming creation, sickness leaching in from the various pricked parts and jabby bits. He gives as good as he gets, laughing when he aims to throttle them. His face cannot possibly get any redder.

The palace streaks by and they crash into the floor, spiderweb cracks surrounding the break in the polished stone. He flings aside the arrows at that jarred landing, yanking at the knife he's got wedged by her very hand to stab her back with it. Whether he finds a space at her neck is another matter, though his blood pours out weirdly.

Then again, it's ichor and the ichor is made of sluggish flames. It ought to behave weirdly. Like causing the floor to buckle and probably drop them into the cellars...

Brunnhilde has posed:
Rolling away from the knife, Brunnhilde lets the movement carry her to her feet. She circles the flaming, oozing man. Her skin crackles where the heat blisters and the poison of his veins burns a sickness through her. She leaps onto his back to wrap him in a chokehold as the floor disappears from beneath their feet. They tumble, falling further still.

Jane Foster has posed:
Another crash through the foundations, down, down to where a goddess of war fled.

Cellars open. The kitchens crumble past in a blur and a bound, bleeding man on a table cowers. Hermod tries to open his mouth, but his tongue is severed, and no more than a gurgle comes out. Even All-Speak can't fathom /that/.

Erlik lifts his head from the woman crushing his windpipe, at least a little more, and then snarls in an ancient Turkic tongue. <<Go forth and tell them!>> He'll waste the last of his voice and breath for that, sending a lashing of fire upward. The huntsman spider who /was/ up there has to come skittering lower to catch up since the damn god and psychopomp decided to leave it out.

It waves its legs furiously. Pedipalps flicker. The thing screeches, <<But dinner!>> It has little enough choice, flickering out of existence to another realm.

And then... there is Brunnhilde.

There is her own knife hurled at her chest with terrible strength from hands singed, blackening, as her battle rage surely bleeds the world red, red, red.

Brunnhilde has posed:
As the knife flies through the air at her chest, time slows for the Asgardian. Not the death god's entropy. But her own battle sight. In a single breath, a single gesture, eons of training align. She grabs the hilt of the knife just before the blade can pierce her skin. It's tip hovers, almost caressing her armor. Brunnhilde grins.

Wild and savage. And alive. Her veins glow with his infection, But she doesn't care.

She tears towards Erlik, almost flying. Her knee makes contact with his abdomen. Her blade makes contact with his throat. She cuts him open. His ichor covers her hands. She doesn't even feel her skin blacken and peel. She is lost to the blood and the fury.

Jane Foster has posed:
The infection ripples and roars. It will have lasting effects, at least more than this place, this time. For no matter Loki's efforts or the Court of Death, time is ephemeral and reckless. It accelerates only to be held in check, waves piling up. When free to flow again, it can rip forth in a violent rush capable of tearing down dams or wiping away barriers. Her ageless union with violence in all its manifestations is surely apparent in the way Brunnhilde strikes and slips, waiting for those moments to draw tight the noose. To slit the bonds of life.

Who better than a psychopomp to know the high cost of living and demand the tithe?

Erlik's skin parts in a strange way under the blade, and he burns, crackling, as the immortal shell comes away in a frisson of skyfire. Not lightning, the flames of chaotic destruction released from the friction in the atmosphere. Crashing down and around her, the cuts bleed more of the blaze as surely as if she'd taken a blowtorch to them. Outward they roll and blaze until the failing shell cannot hold, crackled and ripped to pieces. The earth shudders underneath them, the waves rising as one of the Court signals her outrage through the rising swells bashing the shore with increasing vehemence. If Brunnhilde even knows what assaults the former boat, the castle of 'Asgard' hollowed out.

Erlik makes a sound and then implodes, ichor and fire raging through the cellar with flaming chunks and embers in the air long after his being has come undone.

Brunnhilde has posed:
Brunnhilde blinks and sputters, covered in gore. She wipes his blood from her face. "Gross," she mutters again.

Jane Foster has posed:
There is no sign of Erlik's body. How could there be? When killing an idea, is there a corpse or words eroded on the breeze, thoughts scattered thereafter?

Crows croak. The building trembles again. In that cellar, fire rages to consume the walls, the ceiling, and spreading outward in a ring that may well cause greater troubles still.

Especially when the ground tears, and a multipronged assault turns. If she's not careful, she'll be buried entirely under the wreckage of a boat. Castle. Somewhere.