A little bit of fan fiction - The Plague

[Lord Raiden]

This short story here is written as a conjunction of ideas from numerous anime, books, and movies I've seen and I thought you guys might like it. Read, enjoy, then comment and tell me what you think

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Stenos slipped out from behind a tall office building and studied the street before him. Bodies lay everywhere. He frowned as the haggard, plague infested form of a man slipped into view from behind a car, staggered, fell, then lay still. This plague had now been going on for nearly three months and millions had already died in its ruthless grasp. Yet his group, the death hunters, had not found the source of the plague or even a single cause for it. It was their job to find the source of every plague, natural or super natural, and eliminate it, yet they had not. He knew that this plague was definitely not natural, because no physical cause, such as a bacterium or a virus, had been found. That meant that the only other possibility was that this plague was supernatural, and that meant a necrotan, a dark siren of death and disease come from the earth itself. He couldn’t explain why they existed, but only that nature periodically released them to wreck havoc on the earth when one or more species were overthrowing the balance of nature in their daily activates. He wondered if somehow mankind as of late had done just that.

He drew together all of his earth power and reached out with his senses, probing the world around him. He flinched as he felt death’s icy grasp everywhere. The smell of rotting flesh hung strong in the air. While he couldn’t smell it, his mind could sense that it was there, strong and pungent and deadly. He inhaled deeply and only clean, sterile, filtered air filled his lungs. While the plague raged all around him, and filled the air and the water, the earth, and everything living and not, him and his fellow death hunters were impervious to its effects. This was because each death hunter possessed a special power not given to normal men. They had become strongly in tune with nature through training and perseverance and had gained a type of symbiotic relationship with it that gave them a power that some described as magic. Stenos himself did not believe it was magic, but rather a harnessing of the power of nature that existed in everything. But this power was not just something that was there to be used, then disposed of. This power was alive, intelligent, and with a will of its own. It could guide him, and control him, but it would also answer to his commands should he require something of it. In doing so, man became the vessel through which this power would run and in return the power provided him protection for all harm and injury.

One benefit of this power was highly enhanced senses far beyond those of normal men. He sighed in frustration. He hadn’t sensed anything more than he already knew. He closed his eyes and searched again. A small breeze blew down the street and tossed his cape lightly in the air as he reached out farther with his senses in search of answers. Still nothing new. He opened his eyes and looked around, took half a step, then paused. The earth lines of power had suddenly changed and he could feel their shift immediately as the force of the change was dramatic and strong. He raised his hands in a defensive stance, blue energy glowing from the tips and reached out with his mind, asking the earth power for what had upset it so. But it remained silent. He reached out with his senses and probed the lines of power, searching for the cause of the sudden change. But he found nothing. The lines of power soon calmed and he felt the earth return to normal once more.

“A spasm?” he thought to himself.

It was entirely possible. Since the plague had started, he had felt a lot of them. But to have the earth lines go from total silence to such a strong reaction worried him. The blue energy around his fingertips faded as he lowered his hands below his cloak, then took several steps back to where he had been before. But he felt no change in the energies around him. He shrugged it off, then turned and walked down the street, his mind searching for the lines of death he had been following earlier. The trail was faint, but it was most certainly a trail of death. Possibly even a trail that would lead him to the plague itself. What intrigued him the most was that unlike previous plagues, this one acted like it wanted to be found. Most hid their tracks and their movements with overwhelming care, being sure to hide their passage from any and all eyes. Especially those of the death hunters.

This had in fact become so common place among the necrotan that he had become very good at finding the clues that they left behind as they tried to hide their passing. As he walked, he came upon a small hotel where dozens of dementia stricken plague victims wandered aimlessly through the streets and the lobby of the hotel, screaming, muttering and talking in strange, unintelligible sentences. He shook his head in disgust and was about to continue walking when he sensed something. He stopped cold in his tracks and looked around him. He felt as though someone had called his name, but he had not heard anything. He asked nature for its help in discovering what he had just felt. But it was silent as before. The silence worried him some, but not to the point of panic. Nature’s voice had been silent before in the middle of a great crisis, so it was not unusual for it to be silent now. Thinking it was nothing he turned again, and again he heard felt it. But this time he thought he not only felt the voice, but also heard it. A hollow, distant echo.

“Who’s there?” he shouted as he probed out with his senses.

But nobody answered him. He sharpened his senses and felt the complex dance of life and death swirling around him in the same way he had since entering the town, but felt nothing that was any different than before. He thought about the sensation, then sent lines of earth power rippling out in every direction like great waves upon the waters surface. He felt the echoes quickly return to him, some strong, some faint, and some that cried the mourning song of death’s embrace. He sighed and chuckled lightly.

“You’re being too edgy. Calm down. Relax. Find yourself as one with nature.” he said to himself.

He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply and as he was exhaling, an echo of energy appeared before him. He opened his mind’s eye in curiosity and studied it intently.

“All of the waves should have been back by now.” he thought to himself.

As he studied it, the image of a tall creature in a long, flowing black robe and wide, drooping hood appeared before him. He tried to pear into the darkness under the hood, but could see no face.

“Necrotan…” he thought to himself as his body came alive with energy that leapt and danced around him like great blue flames of fire.

He watched as the image of the cloaked figure reached out with one arm, its thin, bonny, decrepit hand and long dagger like finger nails beckoning for him to come. The sensation and the image soon faded away and all he was left with was the incredible amounts of earth power that danced around his body. He relaxed and the energy faded until no sign of its great power appeared anymore. He looked down at his hands, then up at the front door to the hotel. Whatever was calling out to him, it wanted him to go there.

He steeled his resolve and strode forward with purpose through the meandering crowd and entered the hotel. The lobby was a combination of the demented living, and the disfigured and decrepit dead. He scanned the room and saw with his mind a strange glowing of earth power in a nearby meeting room. He strode over to the door, scanned the interior and found it to be empty, save for a small sphere of earth power that rested in the middle of a great wooden table in the center of the room. It seemed to study him briefly, then leapt towards the rear wall where it stopped, spread out, then vanished. He walked up to the wall and placed his hand on it. The lines of earth power that ran through the wall astounded him! He closed his eyes and began to focus on the wall when he felt a presence enter the room. He turned to see a tall, muscular man in his mid forties stride up to him.

“You’re a death hunter? Help us! You must destroy this plague!”

Stenos grimaced as the man’s flesh seemed to melt off of him as the plague devastated his body.

“I am hunting the…”

“You will not discover the death bringer!” shouted the man as his expression changed and a look of murder flashed in his eyes.

He lunged at Stenos, but never touched him. A thick wall of blue energy appeared before him and threw the man backwards and out the door of the room. He collided with a nearby support column and collapsed to the floor. Stenos began to wonder what had come over the man when two more men raced through the door, screaming at the top of their lungs.

Again the wall appeared and both men were ejected from the room. Two more joined the second two and they tried to blaze their way into the room with brute force, but met the same fate as before as the earth power ejected them from the room. But the commotion had done something that he had not expected. Everyone in the lobby, and many outside were now turning towards him and approaching the room with murder in their eyes.

“I can repel a few, but not this many.” he thought to himself.

He thrust out his hand towards the door, palm facing out and shouted, “Barrier!”

Blue glowing energy leapt from his hands and filled the room. It then consumed the table, chairs, and many of the fixtures in the room and turned them into a roiling red blob of fire that quickly reformed into a series of steel plates that covered the doorway and the entire external wall of the room. He felt the power subside as he listened to the surprised, then angry shouts of the people outside the door as they beat against the metal wall with all their strength. But it did not give. Satisfied, he turned to the rear wall again and placed his hand on it. He felt earth power flow out of the wall, down his arm and through his body as he pushed earth power into the wall to study it. His eyes widened with interest as he felt something on the other side. It wasn’t another room, or a person, or anything local. It felt like a baron, deserted, far away place. But it was not one he was familiar with.

He called forth the earth power all over his body and found that he could push through the wall as easily as walking through water. He paused briefly, then walked forward. Moments later he found himself standing in the middle of a large dry lakebed surrounded by tall, black mountains. Dark gray and brown storm clouds boiled overhead as sharp green lightning ripped silently across the sky. He gathered his cloak around himself and thickened his protective barriers against the icy cold air that assaulted him. Unsure of where he was, he reached out with his senses and found someone standing behind him. He turned to see the cloaked, hooded figure of his vision standing before him. In his right hand he held a long battered staff of black ivory stone from which hung various talismans of death, disease, and suffering. Stenos’ body came alive with earth power as he shifted into a fighting stance and prepared to attack the creature before him.

The creature raised its right hand and said in a reverberating, sharp hissing voice, “Stay your hand death hunter.”

“What do you want necrotan?” asked Stenos, his eyes narrowing.

“I do not wish to fight you. I instead wish to give you something. A cure to the plague that ravages your land.” said the necrotan.

“And why would you do that?”

The creature gave out a long, raspy sigh, then said, “I have sinned against nature and my order, and while I cannot return to what I once was, I wish to make repentance by doing at least one act of good before you destroy me.”

The creature turned towards the mountains and studied them with interest for several moments, then turned back to Stenos.

“It is hard for me to say this, but I want to ask your forgiveness. Living in this land for all these years has made me realize my foolishness. If I could take back all the years I have wasted, and all the harm that I have done, I would. But I am accursed now and as such I am banished to this form and this land until death takes me or time passes away.”

Stenos raised an eyebrow in interest, but did not lower his defenses.

“Who are you?” he asked cautiously.

The figure raised its hands to its hood, paused briefly, then threw it back to reveal the deformed, withered, half rotted face of a man. Stenos gasped in surprise as he recognized immediately who it was!

“Yes, it is I, my friend.” said the man. “I, am the plague.”

The End

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Ok, have at it.

[Catgirls]

Nice...I kind of like that. I printed it off to read again later.

[Mincemaker]

The deathbringer seems to resemble the Forsaken undead in WoW.

Anyway, yeah, this is a very well-written story.

[Lord Raiden]

Thanks.