palace misc

[laughitoff]

cw for memories: gore, whipping, torture, war crimes, emasculation, cannibalism, lots of undead/ghost/zombie nonsense, lots of body horror, lots of corpses and corpse bits in uncomfortable places

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the reckoning (a food stall)

[laughitoff]

[The stall the banner directs you to is hawking food, but probably not the kind you want to eat. The horned bearlike beast manning it is doing a brisk business, taking coin and passing out long pieces of barbecued meats for other monsters to munch on. It's only when you get closer that you realize that they're human legs, the feet and toes still attached.

A paper tag hanging off one of them catches your attention.]

-

The Wen Sect were fools, to have taken over another sect's home. It makes it very easy to move around unseen, to send in spirits at points where they'll wreak the most havoc and create the most paranoia among the occupiers of their home. You can taste it as well as any of your attendant ghouls, even from where you hide in the forest beyond the town walls. The fear is rich, thick and heady -- the promise of a meal.

You find every ward talisman on the outer walls during the day, and slip in through doors they don't know about to get to the ones inside. It's the work of a moment to change each ward, a few strokes of your own blood making it into a tool to attract the malice of the dead rather than repelling it.

When you prowl closer and the spirits touch their nightmares that night, you can hear them screaming within the walls. You smile. That's your signal to beckon the gathering dead, and tell them to get to work.

You also tell them to get creative, in the way only vengeful ghosts can be.

It's over within the hour. There's no one to stop you as you stride through the halls of your childhood: all the people in the compound are dying, or already twisted in death, in a hundred different gruesome ways. You follow a particular set of screams that's still going strong, though: you saved this one for last.

Wang Lingjiao and Wen Chao are struggling on the ground. It's the latter who's squealing like a stuck pig, hands clasped to a spreading bloody spot between his legs. The former's gnawing on what she's bitten off him, even as tears stream down her face.

They're the only ones you take care of personally, that night. Wang Lingjiao finishes it dead. Wen Chao's bodyguard rescues him, but not before you've handed him a knife and made him cut into his own flesh, made him cram it into his own mouth and choke it down around his braying sobs. Not before you mocked him for needing it to be cooked, and made him use a heated lamp accordingly on his face. Not before you've grabbed his wrists and made him offer his hands up to one of your favorite ghosts, a furious little child who died of hunger.

Ah, revenge. You did warn them you'd come back.

-

[Three ghosts appear after that very special memory experience finishes. Wen Zhuliu, the bodyguard, has clearly been strangled, his eyes bulging and his face blue, and his head lolls on a broken neck. Wang Lingjiao's entire head is bruised and deformed, and some kind of wooden stake protrudes out of her mouth -- it's been forced down her throat. The third ghost is just fully unrecognizable as Wen Chao at this point, but his continued torture past the memory is pretty evident -- his legs have been fully flayed to the bone, the fingers of both hands are missing, and his face is raw, exposed flesh.]