Skypiercer Part 2

The second chapter of the Skypiercer prequel splits neatly in two. First comes a murder mystery in the gilded halls of Cor’thun, where Elusia, Kaja and Atalantos find a corpse that has been running a business for six years. Then comes the long-awaited crossing into The Void, a homeland Elusia has not seen in three centuries. It is now overrun by shadow, haunted by things that eat light, and quietly waiting for its lost princess to come home.

The Story

Loose Ends

Vythorn needed three days to prepare the crossing, so the three companions spent them saying goodbye. Atalantos trained and settled his troops. He found Lucien, the drunk soldier, back at the bottle and passed out in a tavern, and asked another soldier to keep an eye on him. Kaja found her own farewells refreshingly simple. “A person in my profession, you find that a lot of your associates are dead, so you don’t have to worry about their feelings.” She said a fond goodbye to the Cor’thun library and walked out with two stolen books, a steamy romance and a volume on the arcane arts. Nobody stopped her, because the city was apparently too honorable to employ a librarian.

Elusia’s farewell was heavier. She meditated in the banquet hall where she had first appeared three hundred years before, and where she was greeted with drawn swords as an unwanted guest. Then she went down with a bottle of wine to the tomb of the emperors and empresses beneath the temple. In these halls of the dead, rulers lay on stone slabs under layers of candle wax, with their histories carved beneath them. She remembered Empress Juntikar knocking her flat with a tower shield in the fighting pits, and the lesson that came with it: stand your ground, or those you protect are left vulnerable. Surrounded by people she had outlived, Elusia wondered aloud, “And what carvings will I have at my feet? What stories am I worthy of creating?”

Atalantos had an answer when she asked him how anyone knows they are worthy to lead. He had been “just a simple gladiator at first,” then a soldier, and he had worked his way up. His advice was simple: “Instead of thinking, simply just do. Be the best that you can be today. And then tomorrow, be even better.”

The House of Gold

There was one last mission before they left. Someone was diverting Cor’thun’s southern aqueduct, so the trio went straight for the head of the snake, Plintos, head of House Plintos and leader of the Merchants Guild. Cor’thun had lofty ideals, but murder was not uncommon there.

The Plintos estate was a monument to excess. Gold an inch deep was cast over the marble, and a full-time crew did nothing but re-gild it. The outside was Roman and the inside Gothic. Diamonds and rubies were left out for commoners to steal. Plintos had many wives and many children, and each family lived in its own “mansion within the mansion” off the upstairs hall. Elusia pocketed a pouch of diamonds, and Kaja warned her that “sometimes history haunts objects.” Atalantos simply demanded “your finest diamond.”

Plintos’s own chambers were strangely bare. Plans on the table showed the southern aqueduct rerouted into a private oasis, complete with water slides and a tidal pool. In the bed lay Plintos himself, or what was left of him: a skeleton in sleepwear with a golden dagger lodged in its ribs. Kaja raised the bones and asked who had done it. The skeleton wrote two words: “My wife.”

An artisan on the estate told them the orders actually came from Plintos’s eldest son, Throm.

The Dead Man Walks

Throm was tall and broad with a black beard, and he spoke for the whole family. Kaja made herself into a flawless, half-decayed Plintos and stabbed the golden dagger into herself, a grisly little re-enactment. Throm cracked at once.

Throm: “No, no, no. You died six years ago.”

All the wives had been in on it. Throm attacked, and Elusia put a perfect arrow through his Achilles tendon that pinned him to his own marble floor. His defence was hardly a confession of guilt: “I saved our house. My stupid father wanted to give all of it away. All of it to the people.” The oasis was meant “for those among us who deserve it,” because, as he put it, “Their dirt taints us all.”

Then Throm’s mother, in vibrant blue robes, broke down. She was the one who had stabbed Plintos, and she had done it on her son’s orders. “I was only doing what he said.”

Into the wreckage stepped Thea, a daughter of sixteen or seventeen, who volunteered to lead the house. Elusia gave it to her: “Thea, this house is now yours. Goodwill shall be your home. Not these golden walls…” Thea’s charge was to bring the family’s wealth to the people. “Yes, I will do as you’ve said.” Kaja then killed Throm with his father’s dagger. The servants cleaned up without asking a single question. Elusia had the last word on House Plintos: “Behind every gold wall is a river of blood. Wealth hoarded is life taken away.”

Into the Void

When it was time to go, Vythorn poured a thick golden liquid from a silver ewer, added his own blood, and opened the portal. Emperor Thornos nodded his approval.

They landed in a dead forest in The Shadowlands. On the horizon stood The Dread Fortress, a rock shaped like an orc’s skull with one broken tusk, its eyes ablaze and lava glowing around it. It stayed in view whichever way they turned. A jagged tower in the Shadowlands had once been Agdrel’s home. Chaos storms, the source of magic in the Void, raged out of control overhead. “Welcome to my home, everyone,” Elusia said. “Please excuse the Shadowlands, they’ve never been in the best of shape.”

Vythorn was less charming about it. “Guard your minds in this place. This is a land of shadows where fears become real.” He also offered some hope: “There are still people here that would see your father’s line restored, would see order return from chaos.”

The Chasm

The nearest pocket of resistance was Atheranon, and the way there crossed a chasm strung with old rope bridges on stone pillars. Elusia, Kaja and Vythorn flew or leapt from bridge to bridge. Atalantos walked, until his foot went through a rotten board and a shadow tendril seized his ankle. He tore free, and Kaja’s blasts, shaped like silent crystalline knives, cut the tendrils away.

Four shadow creatures rose next, spinning like tornadoes of black tendrils, and their whispers were weapons. One drove a spike of pain through Elusia’s left temple and froze her in place. Another took hold of Kaja’s mind, and she found her hand around Elusia’s throat, squeezing, before she yanked it away in guilt. Kaja took on her form of dread, and her blasts became crystalline spears with jaws. Her necrotic magic did nothing to these things, though. It was light that broke them. Atalantos set his spear burning and Spartan-kicked one hard enough that its chest folded inside out. Vythorn, drained by the crossing, could not fight at all.

Elusia, free again, shot one through the head right past Atalantos’s ear. Then a tendril jerked her ankle at the worst possible moment, and her next arrow buried itself in Vythorn’s chest. He spent the rest of the episode bleeding with it still sticking out of him. Kaja’s reassurance followed: “Don’t worry, I’ve got my eye on you. I won’t let anything happen to you while I’m around.” Atalantos, meanwhile, tried chilling Elusia’s bow instead of setting it alight, just to see. The cold did nothing. “Sometimes sacrifices must be made for knowledge.”

The Nightwalker

Then something climbed out of the chasm. A Nightwalker, “an eater of life,” was a creature whose very presence drained the life from everything around it. Atalantos read the fight in an instant (“This thing will fuck your entire world”) and made sure everyone ran ahead of him. Elusia grabbed Kaja’s hand as they fled. Hand in hand, Kaja shared her resistance to death’s touch, and the aura slid off Elusia. “I feel embraced,” Elusia said. Vythorn flew backwards, shining a light from his bloodied palm, until the creature drank the light right out of it.

The Nightwalker swept one hand across the forest and flattened it. Elusia hurled Kaja forward by the hand to keep her out of its reach. “Don’t let go of my hand.” “I won’t.” Just then a line of mages slammed their staves into the ground and raised a wall of light that destroyed the creature.

Atheranon

Their rescuer was Craven Eldonbridge, a leonin with gray and black fur and a staff that shone with light. He recognised Vythorn at once and drew on him: “Vythorn? The Endless Scholar? Right hand of the Shadow King?” Vythorn answered by introducing the woman beside him: “I’ve brought with me the savior of the Void… Elusia, daughter of the Golden King.” Craven knelt. Word of Elusia’s death had spread after The Shadow King took power, he explained, but there had always been rumors that she lived. He also brought news of the tyrant himself: “People have said his mind is decaying. He’s unable to contain the energy he’s stolen from the realm.”

Elusia declared her purpose: “I’ve come to awaken all of the Void.” Then she added, “300 years is long enough. I will face my uncle.”

The plan came together quickly. “No living creature here in the Void can breach its defenses,” Craven said of the Dread Fortress. Vythorn, though, did not need a passage. He was “one such as myself who’s free to come and go from the Dread Fortress.” Craven’s army would draw attention outside the walls while Vythorn slipped the three of them inside.

The Family Arsenal

Craven opened a chest bearing the insignia of Faucius, Elusia’s father, smuggled out of the Dread Fortress. To Atalantos went Defender, also called Groundbreaker, a golden longsword that had belonged to Elusia’s grandfather and then her father. To Kaja went Life Stealer, Agdrel’s own staff of twisted black wood. Elusia warned that “it is dangerous and it speaks things.” Kaja was delighted: “Taking the weapons of a family to use it to strike down someone within it. It only seems fitting.”

To Elusia went the Oathbringer, a long, ornate golden bow that had belonged to her mother. Every morning and every evening, her mother had gone to the highest point and fired a flaming arrow at the sky, a reminder of her promise to care for the realm. Elusia bound the bow with her blood and swore an oath to defeat the Shadow King. “The oath she made to these people will not be forgotten.”

Weeks of Preparation

Weeks passed. Kaja taught Atheranon’s mages, who were powerful but poor at controlling the chaos within them, and quietly gathered a following around “the Great Dread”: “There is great duality in shadow and light. It is not an absence of the other. They coexist. Always.” She described it as a long-term seed, meant to protect the people and restore Elusia. Atalantos trained about five hundred soldiers and learned every name: “You are only as strong as the shield beside you… We will win as brothers in arms.” Elusia wrote letters and decrees, and people poured in from Prexmarin and from lands no one had yet discovered. In the end Atheranon grew from a walled village into a city in the woods a mile across.

The episode closed inside the Dread Fortress, among black and red banners, on a figure shrouded in shadow sitting on her father’s throne.

Notable Moments

• Plintos had been dead for six years, and his animated skeleton named the killer by writing “My wife.”
• Kaja disguised herself as the rotting Plintos and got Throm to confess on the spot.
• Elusia pinned Throm to the floor with an arrow through his Achilles, and Kaja finished him with his father’s own dagger.
• A stray arrow from Elusia ended up in Vythorn’s chest, and he simply kept it there.
• Elusia and Kaja escaped the Nightwalker hand in hand, with Kaja’s protection shielding Elusia from its life-draining aura.
• Elusia’s family weapons were divided up, and Kaja walked away with the Shadow King’s own staff.

Memorable Quotes

• Kaja: “What is morality anyway except something that gets in the way?”
• Atalantos: “At least believe in the me who believes in you.”
• Throm: “No, no, no. You died six years ago.”
• Elusia: “Behind every gold wall is a river of blood. Wealth hoarded is life taken away.”
• Elusia: “Welcome to my home, everyone… Please excuse the Shadowlands, they’ve never been in the best of shape.”
• Vythorn: “Guard your minds in this place. This is a land of shadows where fears become real.”
• Craven Eldonbridge: “Vythorn? The Endless Scholar? Right hand of the Shadow King?”
• Elusia: “300 years is long enough. I will face my uncle.”

Full Round-by-Round

Every beat of the episode, with timestamps (click to expand)

1. 0:00:03 — Recap, then the three days before leaving.
2. 0:03:04 — Atalantos trains and settles his troops. He finds the drunk soldier passed out in a tavern (Mudcat calls him “Lucius” here, a slip; he is Lucien, per Mudcat: “whatever I said first”) and asks another soldier to look after him.
3. 0:06:01 — Kaja says her associates are mostly dead, so her loose ends tie themselves. She says goodbye to the Cor’thun library and steals two books (nat 20): a steamy romance and a book on the arcane arts. (DM joke: the city is so honorable it has no librarian.)
4. 0:10:56 — Elusia meditates in the banquet hall where she first arrived 300 years ago (swords drawn on her as an unwanted guest), then in the tomb of the emperors and empresses below the temple, the “halls of the dead”, where bodies lie on stone slabs under layers of candle wax, histories carved beneath them. She brings wine. Memory of Empress Juntikar knocking her down with a tower shield in the fighting pits: stand your ground or those you protect are vulnerable. Theme of outliving everyone (0:13:59).
5. 0:17:13 — Atalantos and Elusia on worthiness. “Simply just do. Be the best that you can be today.” He was “just a simple gladiator at first,” then a soldier, and worked his way up.
6. 0:22:26 — Last mission: the aqueduct. They go after Plintos himself (“head of the snake”). Mudcat narrates that Cor’thun has lofty ideals but murder is not uncommon (0:31:08).
7. 0:33:22 — The Plintos estate. Gold cast an inch deep over the marble, a full-time crew re-gilding it; Roman outside, Gothic inside; diamonds and rubies left out for commoners to steal; Plintos has many wives and children, each family in a “mansion within the mansion” off the upstairs hall. Elusia pockets a pouch of diamonds; Kaja warns that history can haunt objects (0:44:49). Atalantos demands “your finest diamond.”
8. 0:52:57 — Plintos’s chambers are bare. Plans on the table: divert the southern aqueduct into a private oasis/water park with slides and a tidal pool. In the bed: Plintos’s skeleton in sleepwear, a golden dagger in the ribs. Kaja animates it (hero point) and it writes “My wife.” (1:10:30).
9. 1:16:32 — The artisan says orders come from Plintos’s eldest son, Throm.
10. 1:20:15 — Confrontation. Throm (tall, broad, black beard) speaks for the family. Kaja disguises herself as a half-decayed Plintos (nat 20) and stabs the dagger into herself. Throm blurts “You died six years ago.” All the wives are in on it. Throm attacks, is pinned to the marble by Elusia’s arrow through his Achilles (nat 20).
11. 1:45:58 — Throm’s motive: “My stupid father wanted to give all of the, all of it away. All of it to the people.” He wants an oasis “for those among us who deserve it.”
12. 1:48:45 — Throm’s mother (vibrant blue robes) breaks down: “I was only doing what he said.” She is the one who stabbed Plintos, on Throm’s orders.
13. 1:51:32 — Thea, a 16–17-year-old daughter, volunteers to lead the house. Elusia gives her House Plintos and charges her to bring wealth to the people. Kaja kills Throm with his father’s dagger. Servants clean it up without asking questions.
14. 1:57:09 — Departure. Vythorn pours a thick golden liquid from a silver ewer, adds his own blood, and opens the portal. Thornos nods his approval. (Ten-minute break, cut.)
15. 1:58:44 — The Void. They land in a dead forest in the Shadowlands. The Dread Fortress on the horizon: a rock structure shaped like an orc skull with a broken tusk, eyes ablaze, lava glowing around it. It’s in view whichever way you turn. A jagged tower is Agdrel’s former home. Chaos storms, the source of magic in the Void, are out of control. Vythorn: “This is a land of shadows where fears become real.”
16. 2:05:40 — Atheranon is the nearest pocket of resistance. Crossing a chasm of old rope bridges, shadowy tendrils grab Atalantos; then shadow creatures whose whispers stun and control minds (Kaja briefly chokes Elusia). Vythorn is too drained from the crossing to fight. Elusia’s nat 1 puts an arrow in Vythorn’s chest (2:40:10).

Fight log: the chasm and the shadow creatures (2:09:00–2:48:23)

• Elusia, Kaja (shadow-ball jumps, jump spell at will) and Vythorn fly or leap the rope bridges; Atalantos walks. His foot breaks through a board and a shadow tendril grabs his ankle; he pulls free. Kaja’s three Eldritch Blasts, shaped like silent crystalline knives, sever the tendrils.

• Four shadow creatures rise like spinning tornadoes of black tendrils. Their whispers deal psychic pain: Elusia is stunned with a pain through her left temple; another forces Kaja to attack Elusia, and she grabs Elusia’s throat and squeezes before yanking her hand away, guilty.

• Kaja takes her form of dread; her blasts become crystalline spears with jaws. Necrotic does nothing to these creatures; fire’s light is what breaks their form.

• Atalantos lights his spear with Crimson Rite of the Flame and Spartan-kicks one, its chest inverting through itself. He tries to use his blood curse to make one attack its ally.

• Elusia, freed, shoots one through the head past Atalantos’s ear. A tendril yanks her ankle on a nat 1 and her arrow lands in Vythorn’s chest (he stays bleeding with the arrow in him for the rest of the episode). Kaja: “Don’t worry, I’ve got my eye on you. I won’t let anything happen to you while I’m around.”

• Atalantos switches his Crimson Rite to cold on Elusia’s bow to test it; cold does nothing. “Sometimes sacrifices must be made for knowledge.”

17. 2:49:08 — A Nightwalker climbs out of the chasm, “an eater of life.” Its aura drains life with every moment. Atalantos reads the fight (“This thing will fuck your entire world”) and makes sure everyone gets out first. They run, Elusia grabbing Kaja’s hand; holding hands, Kaja shares her necrotic resistance so the aura can’t touch Elusia (“I feel embraced”). Vythorn flies backwards shining a light from his bloodied palm until the creature drinks the light out. Its sweeping hand flattens the forest; Elusia hurls Kaja forward by the hand so she isn’t caught: “Don’t let go of my hand.” “I won’t.” A line of mages slams staves into the ground and raises a wall of light that destroys it.
18. 3:01:03 — Craven Eldonbridge, a leonin with gray and black fur and a lit staff, leads them to Atheranon. He calls Vythorn “the Endless Scholar? Right hand of the Shadow King?” and draws on him. Vythorn: “I’ve brought with me the savior of the Void… Elusia, daughter of the Golden King.” Craven kneels.
19. 3:10:21 — The plan: the Dread Fortress is impregnable from outside, but Vythorn can come and go. Craven’s army will be the distraction outside the fortress while Vythorn takes the three inside.
20. 3:14:18 — Gifts from a chest with Faucius’s insignia, smuggled out of the Dread Fortress:
    • Defender (also called Groundbreaker), a golden longsword, Elusia’s grandfather’s and then her father’s, to Atalantos.
    • Life Stealer, Agdrel’s staff of twisted black wood, to Kaja. Elusia: “It is dangerous and it speaks things.”
    • The Oathbringer, a long ornate golden bow that belonged to Elusia’s mother, to Elusia. She binds it with her blood and swears an oath to defeat the Shadow King.
21. 3:28:07 — Weeks of preparation. Kaja teaches Atheranon’s mages and quietly builds a following around “the Great Dread” (“there is great duality in shadow and light”). She says it’s a long-term seed, meant to protect the people and restore Elusia. Atalantos trains about 500 troops and learns their names. Elusia writes letters and decrees; people pour in from Prexmarin and undiscovered lands until Atheranon is a city in the woods a mile across.
22. 3:37:47 — Ending: the camera flies into the Dread Fortress, black and red banners, to a figure shrouded in shadow on her father’s throne.