MY FEET HIT the cobblestones and I can immediately feel the difference from earlier.
Everything feels … spongier?
Like it’s made of sponge.
Carcosa has gone all squishy and porous.
And it’s even darker, the not black of earlier now a pure ink.
The coat flares around me and I feel its anxiety against my skin.
The teleportation sucked up a lot of the magick I yanked out of Ashtoreth, but I still feel strong and ready, not sick and weak like I normally would. Before I move I do two things, kick my magick out to find the Man in Black and shake my hand to make the Mark on my palm flare so I can see.
Ashtoreth’s energy has mixed with my magick and the colour of the light I cast is a pale violet. It flares out from my palm and lights up the cobblestones under my feet.
And reveals a trail of corpses.
The moment I see them I can smell them, a throat-closing bouquet of raw iron hemoglobin and the green stench of torn gut. There are tangles of legs under sections of white canvas stained with blood going rust coloured.
These were the followers of Hastur, the King in Yellow, the lunatics.
Slaughtered, no attempt made to hide them or to mask what has been done. The bodies look like they’d been hit by a train, all of them twisted together, some torn apart.
The Man in Black.
I begin moving, running as fast as I can with my hand held high to light the way, trying to not trip over the corpses under my feet.