Good morning, and happy holidays!
As with the Halloween update, I have prepared a spooky story to go with the current sale. This has been split across three different chapters, which will be released through the day. In addition, these announcements will feature artwork by three talented artists. A friend of mine who has played the game has commissioned them to produce images of her hunter, Liliana, and this seems like the perfect place to show them off.
The second is by Rosekasart (https://twitter.com/rosekasart).
I hope everyone is having a great holiday season. Please enjoy the artwork and story!
A Winter Tale Part 2 – An Open Fire
Warmth and flickering light brought the woman back from the dark place her mind had retreated to. She couldn't yet recall her name, and still felt like a stranger in her own skin. But she began to perceive the world around her in more than the vague, ghostly manner she had been trapped in until now. Her head turned, slightly, and she looked directly into the flames.
She recalled fire. There was something she remembered seeing come out of a great cloud of multi-coloured sparks. The men, the ones with her, had screamed its name in a language which was not language. She had screamed too. The inferno had reached for her with wings of white-hot iron, which was when the hunter had come.
A stabbing anger in her chest made the woman's doll-like expression twist into a scowl for a moment. She was torn. On the one hand, the hunter had saved her from the creature of flames (hadn't she?), but at the same time she hated her. She felt, somehow, that the hunter's interference had stopped something important. Some greatness for which she believed she was destined. She thought she remembered embers being drawn into her nose and mouth, then stumbling away as the chains holding her were shattered with a slash of the hunter's sweeping blade.
As she watched vacantly, the fire in the grate began to give off thick plumes of smoke. These twisted together like ropes and drew towards the woman in a way she thought might have been unnatural. But then again she remembered so little about herself and the world around her. Her mind felt like an old book of prayers she had once tossed into a fire just to watch it burn. Little pieces of her personality flared brightly in the darkness of her skull, and then were reduced to drifting ashes in the void.
The memory of the burning book was replaced with one of another tome. It was open and massive, inscribed with names in hundreds of hands over the centuries it had existed. It was a covenant, she recalled. Had she signed it? Had she run from it? She could not remember. The woman found that she no longer cared either way, and the memory became ash. As did her hair, which smouldered and crumbled from her head as the temperature in the room spiked.
She had almost died in the cold, she recalled. The spark of life within her body smothered in the dirty snow. The doctor's coat ignited around her shoulders as her eyes boiled in the sockets. Stumbling out of her home, she had steamed like a boiling kettle, but moment by moment the warmth had retreated deep into her chest to escape the lethal touch of the cold, the cutting bite of the winds. She had run for sanctuary, then trudged, and finally just stumbled blindly forward. She hadn't even the wit to get into shelter. But now she was here, by a roaring fire which overflowed the stone hearth in her presence. Foot-long tongues of flame began to spread over the wooden mantle and up the wall.
Something inside the smouldering woman uncurled. The fire in her memories burned brighter with every second. Soon she felt less like a person and more like a delicate eggshell containing a raging bonfire. A great heat twisted in the hollow cave of her body, roasting the meat from the inside out. Her bones blackened and cracked, her viscera crumbled to cinders. But still she lived. Or, more accurately, something lived inside what was left of her. Just a spark, but enough to burn nations.
The last thing the woman recalled before she was gone, burned away, was a memory of a stern-faced man telling her that this was her family's legacy. To burn bright to bridge the gap between this world and her blazing angel's plane of existence. She remembered the exquisite pleasure of knowing her life had meaning. She remembered seeing the barbed and flaming being who's secret her family had carried within them. She remembered nothing more as what was left of her ignited.
The charred thing which used to be the woman stood, knocking over the flaming chair with a casual swipe of its blazing claws, and screamed.