Blasphemia II: Deus Vult Pt. 02

Judith flailed wildly as she was dragged further and further down into the choking blackness. It was like being enveloped in tar - thick, hot, and putrid. She didn't dare to open her mouth for fear that the inky darkness would rush into her throat and cut off her ability to breathe. Celerity slashed back and forth, yet seemed to do nothing to the cloying void around her.

She turned her focus inward, setting her jaw as she thought as loud as she could. Lord, I beseech you, bless me with the power of your angels so that I may free myself from this void and fight back against this nightmare!

While God himself didn't intervene, the conviction of her words summoned her internal might to the fore. The inked words on her arm glowed bright, and Judith thrust her palm down towards the tentacle dragging her down. A blast of holy light lanced out and incinerated the disgusting appendage, shearing through the rotting flesh. Despite what she expected, there was no screech of pain or suprise from whatever was dragging her. It simply kept slithering further and further away until it was lost to her view, leaving her floating in the void.

Judith felt as though she were swimming, her lungs burning from her holding her breath. She couldn't hold it anymore. She opened her mouth and took a deep breath. To her surprise, air rushed in, cold and stagnant. She took another breath, less shaky this time. She twisted in place, holding up her glowing arm to try to see anything in the darkness, but it was impenetrable.

"Well how the hell do I get out of here?" she muttered. She muttered a quick Hail Mary to amplify her available power, then directed it to Celerity's blade. The sword flared bright, growing a foot-long extension that shimmered with faith's power. By way of experiment, Judith swung the supercharged sword in a wide arc.

The darkness parted like soft cheese with the swing, but then quickly snapped back shut. Through it she glimpsed a light, faint, but there. Judith set her jaw. "Oh no, you don't." Celerity was light enough that swinging it required little effort, and Judith set to it with a will, holding the blade in both hands as she cleaved mightily to and fro. Like an explorer clearing jungle foliage she forged ahead, cutting methodically again and again until the morass around her began to give way. Soft, muted light filtered through the gap she was making, but it was better than all-consuming darkness.

"No darkness can hold me," Judith grunted as sweat slid down her face. "I am the Lord's sword." She repeated the two phrases over and over like a mantra, her swings growing ever more forceful as she hacked herself free. The gap was taking longer and longer to close, and after a particularly vicious swing cleaved it wide open, Judith surged forward, tearing herself free of the oppressive blackness.

She promptly fell flat on her face, cold stone scraping her cheek. Judith rolled over and kipped up, her boots thudding on the floor. Celerity blazed with light as she held it aloft. She was in a stone corridor with a low ceiling, the air around her stale and musty.

Then she realized what was missing and spun back and forth. The all-consuming darkness that had held her simply... wasn't there. As if it had never existed at all. "What the..." she muttered, slowly lowering her sword. The Sanctum Templar was the deepest subterranean structure under the Vatican. There was nothing further below other than bedrock. So where in God's earth - literally, in this case - was she?

Judith raised Celerity again, turning in place slowly. The light from the glowing sword illuminated the dark edges of the corridor further away from her, and Judith saw the tunnel widen into a chamber of some kind. She crept towards it, her ears tuning out her breathing and footsteps in an attempt to pick out any other noise that might be audible in the tunnel. Her blood was up, but at least now she was ready to fight if something new lurched out of the darkness at her.

She stepped into the room at the end of the tunnel. It was a small semicircular space, holding a pair of coffins. Old adages about disturbing the dead flickered through her mind, but she had to know where she was. Judith slowly approached the coffins and held up Celerity. Inscribed on the coffins were simple crosses, below them short messages in Latin. "Wherever one shall go, the other shall follow, into the arms of the Lord," Judith translated under her breath.

A husband and wife then, buried together in their own crypt. Likely wealthy, if they could afford such a private place on their own. Judith wracked her brain for all the cemeteries in Rome and the surrounding area, remembering that there were, indeed, quite a few. But none of them extended under the Vatican last time she checked.

She turned and moved out of the burial chamber back into the tunnel, doubling back past where she'd escaped the darkness from and moving further up the passage. In theory, if she kept going this way, she'd hit the way out rather quickly. After all, burial crypts were hardly designed to be explored by the living.

At least that's what she thought. Judith stopped short as she came to a four-way fork in the passageway. She made a face as she turned in place. "The undercity?" she wondered.

Rome had an extensive network of tunnels underneath the surface, remnants of the more ancient cities that the modern one had been built on top of. But few ran directly underneath the Vatican. Those that did were supposed to have been filled with debris to avoid enemies of the Church using them for nefarious purposes. Had they missed one, and that was where Judith had wound up? It was certainly possible, but if so, why had she wound up in a burial crypt?

Judith shook her head. Focus. She needed to get back to the surface, to join the fight that was surely raging there for the sanctity of the Holy See. Unless the defenders had been overwhelmed already. Devout men in the heart of the holiest city on the planet should not have simply been susceptible to whatever had made them swell and burst like balloons, yet it had happened. Had every member of the Swiss Guard and the Templars met their fate in such a manner? Was she all that was left?

No. She'd been swallowed by darkness and was still alive. So had the Archbishop and Luca. They'd been taken as well, rather than simply obliterated. For some reason or another, she was still alive. And she intended to stay that say.

"Survey says..." Judith muttered as she placed Celerity on the ground and spun it. The blade twirled in three neat circles before stopping with the point facing down the hallway in front of her. With a flicker of thought the sword snapped back into her hand, and she set off down the tunnel.

As she ventured forth, Judith poured more of her power into the sword until it blazed like a star, illuminating the way forward. Without any kind of bearing on where she was, all she could do was have faith that she was going in the right direction. The real question was, what was the right direction? The Sanctum Templar was almost dead center in the city, and if Rome had been overtaken by darkness, the heart of it was where she needed to be. If she wound up going outside the city limits, she would have to double back. She also needed to go up, not down, in order to assess the situation on the surface.

A rumble passed through the tunnel, making her stop short. Judith dropped into a fighting crouch, her ears cocked to hear anything coming. Her heart thundered in her chest.

Nothing happened after several minutes, and she stood back up, loosening her grip on her sword. She set off again, moving as quick as she dared. Up ahead, a big metal door was illuminated by the glow of her sword. It looked as though it hadn't been touched in several hundred years, the metal warped from centuries in the dark. Judith set her shoulder against it and gave an experimental shove. It swung open wide with almost no resistance.

Before her was a yawning black void, the tunnel turning into a landing of sorts that dropped off into the abyss. She dimly heard wind howling somewhere in the distance, which was a good sign. It meant she was near the surface, or at least heading in a direction with a flow of air to follow to the surface. By way of experiment Judith held Celerity out over the gap and let the sword fall from her fingers. It spun lazily downward before clattering against a stone floor below her. Judith called the sword back to her, then looked around with it's light for a path downward. Grooves on the walls indicated there had been stairs to her left at some point, but they were long gone. Judith sighed, then tossed Celerity again and leaped off the landing.

She landed like a cat, slowly rising to her feet and calling her sword back. As she walked forward again, she felt vestiges of faith around her, faint and flickering like fireflies. She held Celerity aloft, and turned in a slow circle. After a moment, she began to pick out ancient architecture among the ruins around her. Marble columns lay shattered and broken, while others stood tall and held up the ceiling high above her. Something crunched under her boot, and she looked down to see a broken wooden spar from a pew.

"How long have you been down here?" she murmured. Further forward she found what was once an altar, though time had shaken loose dirt and debris to carpet the stone. There was no crucifix in evidence, but Judith wasn't about to go searching through the rubble for it. She had bigger problems.

As she was about to leave the once-sacred space, however, something caught her eye. It was a book sitting on a chair on the altar that had somehow escaped the ravages of time in this sunken place. Judith wiped dust off the cover and picked it up. The script on the cover was written in a language she didn't recognize or understand. Neither was any text on the pages as she flipped through it quickly. She was about to put it down when a picture in the book caught her eye: that of a massive, unblinking eye, surrounded by innumerable tendril appendages. Around it were words in yet another language, a bizarre kind of chicken scratch. Though she didn't know the words, she recognized the eye well enough.

"Azathoth," she scowled.

It seemed a dream still. Her being catapulted into another dimension by Satan himself, working with the demon and succubus who had broken and violated her to kill a creature that possessed a power unlike any Judith had ever seen before. It called itself a god, yet Judith had been the one to deal it a mortal blow, supercharged with angelic energy from the being known as Lilith. Though that level of power hadn't remained in Judith's clutches, ever since she's noticed her faithful magics packed a fair bit more punch. But along with that had come the dreams, the reminder every time she slept of what the Infernals had done to her.

A part of her wanted to leave the book behind. However, the pragmatic part of her knew that, should the Templar Order survive this, the tome could be a wealth of useful information. It was just big enough to fit into one of her gear pouches.

With the book stowed away, Judith left the broken church behind, following the whistling of the wind as it snaked through the passages around her. Every breath grew a little more clear, and she knew she was on the right track. Her early pondering about where was best to end up ceased to matter - so long as she was on the surface, she would figure things out.

Another rumble rippled through the tunnel, and again Judith stopped. An earthquake? she thought. No, not intense enough. Just a single tremor. Still, that doesn't bode well. She quickened her pace, winding along an upward sloping passage and still following the wind.

She turned a corner, hit a dead end, and almost tripped over the shattered remains of a coffin. This one was far less ornate than the ones deeper down, a simple wooden box with no adornment. But it was in pieces, as if it had been dropped from a great height to shatter upon the ground. Judith regard it with befuddlement for a moment, then looked up. Far above her was a rectangular aperture through which she could glimpse a blood-red sky, with orange-white clouds swirling like noxious gas. She looked down at the coffin again, and realized it was empty. What had happened to the body?

Questions later. She sheathed Celerity and dug her fingers into the dirt wall of the hole. Her digits protested, but she tuned out the pain, using her raw strength to claw her way up the side of the hole. As she ascended, she took care to jam the toes of her boots into the holes left by her fingers. Her progress was slow, but steady.

As she went higher, she began to hear noises. Loudest among them was the wind, howling like a gale. There was a rumbling noise, like a mighty earthquake. But most unsettling, underneath it all, was an inhuman snarling and snapping. Something, or somethings, was waiting for her out there. Celerity would be back in hand soon enough.

Judith hauled herself over the top, rolling and willing Celerity into her hand. Her first instinct was to look for threats, but what she saw on the horizon made her grow still, the sword falling from her limp fingers.

She was on a hillock somewhere on the northern outskirts of Rome, having emerged from underneath a hillside cemetery. Around her were dozens of graves, all of them sunk into the earth. Several miles away, Rome had been upended - literally. A crackling circle of arcane runes ran around the boundary of the entire city, sparking with red lightning shot through with black. Within the circle, entire blocks of Rome were hanging suspended in midair, held aloft by some manner of arcana. Some were right-side up, others were completely inverted, and others still were cracked in twain and hanging parallel to each other. Fire licked it's way across the ancient buildings, some of it magical in nature, some of it burning from severed gas lines.

In the center of it all was the Vatican, though it no longer looked like the place where Judith had grown up and been trained. The entire structure, including the secret underground, had been ripped from the surface and reconfigured into a jumbled mess, floating suspended above it's foundations in a configuration that made Judith's head hurt.

Dimly on the wind she could hear screaming.

"This..." she breathed. Her fingers clenched fistfuls of graveyard grass between them. "This is..."

A low moan brought her back to her senses. Something moved near a plinth in the corner of her eye. A human corpse, rotting through, animated by some kind of black tendril running through it like a puppet string. It gurgled and groaned as it lurched towards her. A crucifix bounced against its chest as it shambled towards her.

The sight of that holiest of symbols made pure rage flare in Judith's gut. She grabbed Celerity and lunged at the thing, cleaving it in half with one mighty stroke. Two soft thuds sounded as both halves of it hit the ground. She turned and made to yank the crucifix off the corpse's neck.

As she did, it's arms shot up and grabbed her, gripping with crushing force. Judith yelped more in surprise than pain and swung Celerity again, slicing through the thing's arms in plumes of black gore. The rest of the thing's torso flopped onto the ground, where it flailed to try to get closer to her, teeth snapping in an attempt to get at her ankles.

"Oh no you don't," she snarled. Celerity flashed, and the thing's head rolled away from it's shoulders. Judith peeled the still fingers back from around her arm and tossed the severed limbs away.

Then she realized it wasn't the only one. Far from it.

Drawn by the commotion, more of the shambling corpses had emerged from the graves around her, all of them in various stages of death. One looked as though he'd been buried yesterday, another was simply a skeleton, bones yellowed with age as it crawled towards her. Judith spun Celerity into a backhanded grip as her arm prickled with power. "Bless me Lord," she said, tamping down on her fear and revulsion. "You who trained my hands for war and my fingers for battle!"

The affirmation of her faith made the script on her arm blaze with power and light. Judith thrust her hand out. A cross-shaped flare of light burst from her palm, flattening several of the creatures close to her. She spun and hacked with Celerity in-between throwing out her absolutions, all the while uttering more prayers under her breath. The things were slow, which meant that she tore them to pieces quickly.

Unfortunately, it did little to stop them. Even when they were reduced to little more than piles of severed limbs, they still kept trying to come after her, single-minded in their determination. Unease rose inside Judith. She had never encountered an enemy who flat-out wouldn't die. How was she supposed to fight them? "Why won't you die?" she yelled as she beheaded two corpses with a single swing.

A clubbing blow knocked her down as a fat corpse threw itself against her back. She spun and sheared it's head off, but it's brethren closed in. Judith tried to form the words for an Immolation, a cleansing fire that would give her space, but the sight of a leering skeleton, eyes burning purple, caused her to falter.

"Oh come on. You beat an Elder God and it's fucking zombies that are about to do you in?"

Oh, God. Not her. Please God not her.

A pair of heavy chains, their links red-hot and molten, snicker-snacked through the air around her. They sliced vertically up through the corpses' heads, reducing them to ash in a matter of seconds. Another set joined the first, clearing out the area around Judith before snapping back out of her field of view. Judith scrambled to her feet, keeping a firm grip on Celerity.

Those chains slowly slid back along the ground like retreating snakes until they reached their mistress, coiling up and folding back into her arms, wreathed in shadow like a funeral veil. A pale purple hand reached up to brush silver hair away from violet eyes. Some details were different. Her hair was longer, her lips a deeper shade of purple. The outfit she wore wasn't a courtesans, it was more practical, though with a neckline that ended at the waist rather than the collarbone so Judith could still see some of the purple breasts that also, to her, seemed a little bigger.

But those eyes, that voice, and that utterly frustrating smug grin were unmistakable. "Filia," Judith snarled.

Filia lifted a hand and waved her fingers at Judith. "Hello, love. Miss me?"

Judith threw Celerity at the succubi's face.

Filia angled her head to the side, the blade lancing by her head like a thrown javelin. "I'm going to take that as a no," she said, her smug grin never wavering.

"What gave you that idea?" Judith said, clenching her fingers.

The succubus ducked, Celerity whistling over her head on it's way back to Judith's palm. "Come now, you really think I didn't remember that trick?"

Celerity spun into a backhanded grip as Judith dropped into a fighting crouch. "I've learned some new ones. Care to see?"

Filia frowned, her arms unfolding and hanging loosely by her sides. "Save it for the zombies, papist."

"The what now?"

"The..." Filia blinked. "Wait. Hang on. You don't know what a zombie is?"

"You mean the corpses?"

"They're not corpses if they're up and walking." Filia smacked the side of her face with her palm. "You are Italian, right? You've never heard of Lucio Fulci?"

Judith shook her head, waiting for the succubus to stop jawing and attack. It was her style, yak away until Judith dropped her guard and seize the moment.