Kulta Reimagined

[Azani]

I started writing a long story on Kulta the Skull Grinder, sort of an origin story, a few months back. In my opinion, G2 has a lot of great opportunities for world-building and serious character depth, and this is my first serious attempt at a fanfic. Hope that it’s good. Comments and criticism are awesome.

Chapter One: Untold thousands of years ago.

Two of the most skilled magicians on the island of Okoto dueled. A fierce, artfully measured battle bruised and bloodied the tapestries within the temple on the outskirts of a beautiful city. The elderly women and men of the city told stories of the temple, and how a beautiful goddess flew down from the heavens with a blessing of the city and a commandment to build the temple. An unbelievable colossus was built. Today, the tapestries within were threatened with destruction.

Ekimu was a war-lord, a magician, a mask maker whose past, even then, was a blank page in every history book. Now, he battled against a mask; some simple sheet of face-hugging metal. No one believed that Ekimu could possibly be murdered by a mask.

But it wasn’t just any mask. For longer than any elder of Okoto could remember, two wizened craftsmen had ruled the island, known as the mask makers of Okoto; two of the most powerful and most skilled sages when it came to both metal-working and magic. Ekimu and his talented brother, Makuta had served as the two sages and rulers of the land for such countless centuries, tenfold beyond the earliest known writings of the Protectors. Their army was a fearsome force among the nearby isles, as surely loyal to its commander, Kulta, as the blood of many a conquered enemy that surely kept time, drip, kept eternal time as it dripped into the ground. But Makuta had done the unthinkable, never before attempted by a mask maker; the magician dared to combine every single elemental force, failing to even omit the most dangerous of them all, the shadow. So it was that the talented brother harnessed the deepest force of Okoto, death in his vast powers. Now, Makuta screamed in his brother’s presence, the speech distorted by the empowering sheet of metal that he wore on his face.

“Do you remember the praise they all gave you? Have you forgotten about the gift-diamonds, the frescoes? I will not let injustice pass! Cannot!”

And Makuta began to draw up a calloused hunk of molten rock from the power of his mask, glowing and painfully hot to even be near.

“Not sure if you’ve heard that I’ve beaten you! Not sure if you’ve heard of my most pristine creation! So fresh, it’s barely out of the furnace!”

He hurled a ball of molten rock at Ekimu’s face. A quick dodge was all that was needed, and a swift follow-up to put him in his- yet, Makuta was swifter still than Ekimu even when the latter was angered, for he wore that mask, what a terrible mask! Makuta created a chasm in the earth to trip his brother, who fell quicker than any man could have reacted.

Today, Makuta wore a mask of power more horrifyingly unpredictable than anyone could possibly dream of, not the least drop docile or caring. A joke for the mask is waking you up off-balance after a drugged sleep. A favor is a smooth death with a well-sharpened knife. In Makuta’s mind a brave and brutal war is the same as a small quarrel. An annoyance is as harshly dealt with as a generation-spanning betrayal by a proven friend.

“You enjoy this, don’t you?” Ekimu rolled onto one side and began his long climb out of his trap.

“I find it quite sad, actually.”, the menace said, pausing in his duel. “Warring with one such as you is little more than a means to an end.”

Ho, Ekimu could not simply leave the best craftsman, closest ally, as the creature that he was on that day. But tales of the past had left him that Makuta could not be redeemed. So, with his last ounce of strength, he sprint-climbed out of the chasm and formed from around him his hammer, a gigantic blue war weapon. With one strong shot, he struck a flailing Makuta, a murky beast, into the air, knocking his mask of power from his face. No longer would Makuta dwell as a mask maker on Okoto.

…

It had been decades since Kulta had been rushing as fast as he was to the high pyramid of the mask makers in the center of the city. Dire though the note read, vague as it was, there was no doubt that he was almost late, and had been arranged to speak at an important funeral. Certainly, Kulta had paraded his army past the sacred site a thousand times through his untold years. But, he could never get used to the greatest site in the city, on the island, and as his brow jumped and his eyes widened yet again, all thoughts of careful pomp and circumstance left his mind.

Bellowing commands and spitting vulgar words in between thick gobs of saliva, Kulta’s twin drivers whipped the barely conscious horses on. One incredibly short and fat over fat, one spindly thin and hunched over like a bird of prey against the carriage ceiling that was far to tall for him, they were both slapped into niceties once the brutal yet beautiful image appeared before them.

What a wonder it must have been that they suppressed their curses and spitting, their crudeness and rudeness! Kulta’s pupils narrowed and his eyes burned as he forced his way out of the carriage and sprinted over to the procession, shocked. Trying to restrain himself from crying out, as many were, he attempted to think of his wife, his family. He could not pull a single name to his mind as the golden-blue coffin paved a path through the swarming crowd.

“Great spirits bless… why, that’s Ekimu!”

Knowing nothing but Kulta, the servants waited on him. “A, heh, drink sir?

“Better getcha a chare, ser.”

Kulta had been struck into a trembling shock, yet the stupidity of his servants came to his advantage on that day as he ordered them out. What a silly time for pleasantries and pomp, he quietly thought to himself. And he never thought that. An barren breeze blasted by him, and yet he did not waver, save to raise an arm, paralyzed by fear, in salute. By the spirits!- he could not waver. Scarcely fazed by the sight as they were, Kulta’s servants responded quickly.

“Should I bear witness to the funeral of a god?

Rather than deliver the speech that he had prepared, Kulta simply cast his eyes onto the farthest reaches of the ocean of mourners, which, like millions upon millions of pins bobbing up down, any which way in an endless ocean, obscured the early sunset almost completely, a gargantuan throng that shared the commander’s feelings at that very moment.

[Sonus]

Hey! This isn’t a MoC! Still. This was an interesting read. Nice work.

[Triple]

Very gripping story! I can’t wait for more.

[Lord_Tuma]

Wow! This was very well written! I can’t wait to see how this factors in to his attempt at melting the Mask of Creation!

Excellent work!

[Azani]

Second post guys. In this chapter, we see Kulta ponder the limits of life, death, and the power of the mask makers who he served for hundreds of years. Presenting…

Chapter 2

Presently Kulta rode back, pensieve and pondering in his gold-enameled carriage, weighted heavy by treasures no one but a mask maker past or present could aspire to equal. Value was every object to this man, as cost was none. Rare was the man who debated his clever bargaining, either. The keen calculations of Kulta had almost failed him but once, when he had sold a grisly old shack that he intended to use to pay for a fantastic mansion once owned by a notorious village prankster, graffiti artist, mask mangler. A shack for a palace? Only a possibility if the home was filled with tricks and giggles that could, provided careful and measured expertise, could be exploited for profit in a public tour. Shame that a prize such as that house was naught but a mask-generated mirage by the vagabond’s friend.

But that was a long time ago, said Kulta. I am wiser now. I know my own fate as surely as the fish in the sea know the path to their birthplace, the cold and cackling waters their answer to my long and laborious path. Yet I must know more; the cavern that is my knowledge must deepen until I can-

Startled by a sudden sound, Kulta spun his head to see a common livestock seller. Typical of the sad folk of the city.

And Kulta settled back into his crimson red chair, cleanly taut around the ebony sidebeams. He let the whistles and calls of the enormous croud fade out of his mind, the belchs and bellows of his servants descend into peaceful oblivion. Then he reached to his side, casting a thickly muscled arm towards a slim side compartment in the carriage. The world of the islanders began to change as a book met his hands. Kulta smiled as he read the title. His life and… death would never be the same.

There was nothing there.

Struck by the mind-spinning cataclysm that rocked his world, Kulta screamed at the drivers of the carriage to hurry to his home. Suddenly, the car sped out of control on the old city’s streets; ancient cobblestone streets. Horrifyingly off balance, the carriage was suddenly breakable.

Scarcely a second had passed when Kulta sprinted in, dashing up to his study on the uppermost level of the building. He would need to repair, he knew. He required time. And if he played his cards right, he would have all the time in the world.

[Azani]

Alright, here is…

Chapter 3

Gnawing pain racked the inside of Kulta’s soul which dwelt within its owner’s cool, composed armor. The long ascent to his private study gave the general plenty of time to think. Was there the slightest glimpse of solidarity? Never. Weakness? Zero. Compassion? Lower than that. Kulta always held turf. No trouble. Never… unless…

Anger sprinted through Kulta’s veins as he screamed in the isolation of mansion. Time blended into a tangle as Kulta kicked the door, down, crashing and splintering. Taking no time at all to run into his study, he shot a white-hot punch at his bookshelf, creating an earthquake of pain in the ears of every servant on the lower level.

Oozed one of the official’s carriage drivers, “Digja hare that?”

Okotoans held the belief that the slightest rudeness to a stranger was punishable by eternal torture, but one would not have guessed that from the look on the faces of the driver’s associates.

Shudder, kick, punch, kick- Kulta’s boiling cavern of uncontrollable passion and hate palpitated with warm, visceral energy, though unceasingly gibberish to his servants down the line. Slowly, the general crept toward a new plane of thought, toward unfathomable supremacy, drawing nearer and ever nearer to the pointed center of truth. Collapsing in a sweaty pile of limbs, Kulta’s mind leaped through alternatives, through back-alleys. Grounded to their own petty concerns, the servants of the house felt peace return.

“I desire the privilege, not the throne”, he thought to his esteemed self.

“Everyone has said that the key lies in the position of mask maker. But I am infinitesimally more than that.”

A grin swept over his face.

“Ekimu is dead. Gone. But I still live…”

Then, with a predator’s smile so excited that it bordered on childlike foolishness, Kulta stood up from his prone position of anger. He had painfully gone where the edge of sanity ended and precipice of adventure began, determined in flight as he was, not from an aberration but to an exclamation. A genius is what he was.

Naught but a fraction of an hour had passed ere Kulta had gathered his coat, a warmth-orb, and his hunting bow. Easily maintaining the regal- no, the reasoned stride of a sage, he endeavors his way toward the door.

Cascading back and forth across the shimmering walls of the mansion, a servant’s raspy “Kulta! Kulta! Kul-Kulta?” could be heard.

There would be no response for quite a while.

[Azani]

The story is updated with… Chapter 4

Kulta only solemnly walked out from his home of an epoch, into the harrowing outskirts of the city. Then, the ancient burial grounds. Finally the most feeble ring of antediluvian stones. Kulta hiked at the rapid pace of a fit soldier; thus, he soon passed by the city altogether. Swift was he, though danger would briskly befall him.

Night fell. With one solid pull, Kulta ripped his overcoat from out of his bag and cloaked himself within it. Now, the sage walked the wilderness. The wind was chilled, Kulta’s welcome home. Nothing would stop him in his hunt. Nothing other than his own doubts.

“Glad I have none” Kulta grimaced. Cracking into a blazing sprint, the creature destroyed himself in his hunt. As he ran, scantly tethered to the ground, his coat wrapped into a cape behind him, the world slowed in awe of his speed, and a powerful kwardian bull met its end at Kulta’s hands.

Boldly, he picked up the carcass, displaying admirable finesse as he hauled it over his shoulder. He was slowed, slightly, by the raw sensation of blood dripping down his back. Yet he continued on, shocked into a burning love for his new surroundings.

A distance of many miles had seen traverse in the span of a short period; Kulta hiked and trod and stumbled, rising back up each time. Reluctantly, he peeled a bit of flesh from the bull to cook and eat that night. He had no regrets on leaving society behind.

A fundamental strengthening ran through the sage. Demons that personified his inner torture raged inside of him. But his struggle had been partially sated. He was the essence of immortality out here.

[Azani]

Continuing with… Chapter 5
The earliest shivers of cold began to tickle Kulta’s frame, driving out unbroken waves of warmth that dissolved into the limitless wilderness and became an element of the tundra, leaving him forever. Tugging his coat, which now contained a number of tears and holes, closer to his frame, the sage winced. He could not feel his extremities; he shivered convulsively.

Times like this tempted Kulta to forget his mission of solitude and admire the beauty cloaking his surroundings. But he could not forget. He wouldn’t let himself. A bipolar rage racked his person, forcing out anger-filled grunts as the sage’s battle-worn boots scraped bare slivers of fabric against jagged ice, like broken glass on Kulta’s feet. And, immediately, Kulta’s mind turned to the dead.

Someone, he was sure, had stolen his most valued posession- the book of the dead, a primeval tome that had clawed up a legacy, from a family keepsake of some unknown okotoan tribe, to the price for a whole herd of Dayeesh oxen, to a required ritual for all mourning on the island. Every single woman and man who had passed on for countless years previously had a face in the book. Even the mask makers that, in some foggy epoch of the past, predated Ekimu and Makuta were immortalized between its leaf-like pages.

“Not to mention it’s price; and, of course, the collector that I bought it from thought it to be a simple guidebook. Sometimes, life is so particularly convenient.”

The sage grinned.

“And some fanciful fools used to say that the spirits of those that had passed retained some presence, living on in their portraits. But then, surely that is preposterous.”

Slowing his pace, Kulta gave in to the splendor that surrounded him, pausing. He could not avoid a cascading fountain of awe that was building inside of him as he stared at a monstrous flock of swans that smothered the sky above. They coalesced into a force field of chilly, primitive splendor which had no equal, in the city or the countryside, on heaven or on the island, and Kulta knew it. A fantastic sheet of grey and black, shimmering and trembling as it careened across the sky, as far as the eye could fathom into the distance. Kulta trembled, too. A fiery antecent to his quest had come. The sage began to run.

[Azani]

Fresh off the press is…Chapter Six

Faint, though focused, Kulta pulsed onward, controlling his speed perfectly by the sheer force of his will. The heavens watched as one tiny speck of a man sprinted across a humongous, flat, plain, fleeing from his home in a mad frenzy of awesome, permanent egress from the living. Kulta had realized an incredible truth. Finally, he had reached what he had seen ripped away from him, what he had desperately pursued, always in spite of nature, for so many years: the secret to eternal life, born from his meditations in the wilderness.

“All of those hours used up via the eternal hunt; and the perennial gathering. All of the ages absorbed through wild racing and hiking as the beasts of the land, swimming like the beasts of the sea, gliding across chasms like the beasts of the air. I have found peace- peace!” He shouted, repeating the latter as he anxiously crushed a beetle under his boot.

The sage’s clothes were but rags now. His face was worn and sodden with a layer of dirt like cracked wheat that broke, revealing some tanned skin, in an artful smile. His boot-straps were nary more than that - straps, and that alone, with a small, blotted scarf of leather that wrapped around the foot. On his skin- it was bloodless and broken in morbid callouses, no longer echoing the final vestiges of his decadent former life. Kulta was silent; his feet made no sound. Ever determined to meet his own bone-crushing standards, to achieve at an ever bolder standard, he could not bare to waste any time in making his future.

Soon, he arrived at the edge of a dense, tic-and mosquito infested marsh. Miniscule airborne leaches sprayed their sap-like toxins at Kulta and latched on like parasites to his skin, but Kulta simply brushed their muck off with porous fern leaves and marched on. His scalp and face began to break out in a muddy rash, the result of a blackened face-off with a Napham wolf the previous night. Not the sort of thing most would easily forget.

Yet, Kulta was different; he had learned to focus, almost pathologically, totally madly, merciless in his exclusivity, on his aim. And so, as the sage approached the fortress that he had journeyed towards for so long, he wondered. He had pursued the hideout of this murky seraph since it had dawned upon him that the shadows held the key to immortality; that the most absolute life-light could be redeemed from the most absolute of death. Ever since he was a child, the sage had heard terror stories from the village elders; there was never glint of horror, as all the evils were simply hinted at. Rarely was there a story that failed to concern a land of the forsaken, a realm of forceful shadow. And this realm is where their dead would go when they left this world. The sage’s tolerance for superstition had always been deep; now it was nigh to be tested.

First, Kulta weighed his entire chance of meeting his goal on a few scrawls in the mud. His hands trembled as they often did now; smoothly, he picked up a crooked tree limb, banged it against a stone to remove a chunk of animal waste, and grasped the foul-smelling stick, driving it briskly into the muck. Then, like a graceful and cordial fishermen, drawing his rod up and across, then back down, then back up in his craft, the sage commenced the scraping motions in the mud that, slowly but unquestionably, etched the symbol of Terak into the ground. Then Melum, where needlenose frost clips at one’s nostrils, and Akida, where moth-covered flora sticks like maple-sap to one’s liniments. Next Ikir, where salty puddles of sweat are greedily scarfed down by the noonday sun. Following was Uxar, where sparse pockets of oxygen fly heavy with pollen and oppressive sprays and musks that attack one’s senses with ferocity, and Ketar, the wasteland that Kulta had stoically trekked across, impenetrable to the blinding, numbing dust storms that raged throughout.

Last, but most surely not least, was one final symbol waiting to be etched a bit north of the aforementioned six, which lay in a taut line, seemingly beckoning to the sage to leave them in peace, crying out that they were the totality, that there were no other forces of nature as fearsome as they.

“But they’re certainly wrong” thought the sage. “There’s always a greater beast. This is what the legends instructed me to do.”

So Kulta drew the putrid stick up one more time, and drew a fearsome maw with a pair of ancient eyes. The mark of a hunter.

Kulta waited. And waited. Nothing came to pass. At the instant that he was about to turn around and walk back, he noticed a bizarre change in the swamp, quite recently bright enough to see each of the runes etched in the damp mud. He could no longer see the rock that stood less than a foot away from him. The sage paced back and forth, trying urgently to orient himself relative to the symbols. Or perhaps the glowworms - but their light had vanished, too. The stars will he- there was not a star seen in the sky. Anything - anything - Kulta began to panic. He could not see his outstretched arm.

Then a hoarse, surprisingly high-pitched voice spoke.

“Come with me, Kulta the old general who calls himself sage.”

Against all odds, Kulta began to whimper.

“Shadow is the only way. Forget your eyes, friend of the mask makers.”

The sage had no recourse. Therefore, he commenced his next task: following the sound. Down, and up; through rocky boulders and silky films of silt, as a follower and not a leader, for the first time in his life. Once, he tripped, and the shadow helped him to his feet. Once, he hesitated on the edge of a precipice, and the shadow lent him courage. Suddenly, he had arrived.

“Where are… we?” Kulta eked out a query for the shadow, a suffocating giant that was somehow all around him. He was not happy with how this was going.

“Hmmm. Should I let you guess, or should I tell you?” The shadow responded.

“Would you please tell me?” Whispered Kulta, vainly assuming that being polite to the shadow would help.

“You can figure it out” was heard.

Yet Kulta heard no ideas in his mind. Maybe it was… but no, it was too silly…

“I’m in the lair of Umarak the shadow hunter, the only being with a key to the shadow realm.”

Even as the words rose from his lips, the sage was certain that he must be wrong. It was the sort of thing that a five-year-old villager would say. Only the children believed that Umarak was real anyway, regardless of one’s tolerance for superstition.

“Better think differently as soon as you’re able, Kulta. I’m real, all right.”

Within a few moments, a tall, lanky marksman appeared before his eyes. Umarak, spry as ever after millions of years, sized up Kulta, a bruised and bloodied mortal whose face rash looked especially ugly to the spirit who represented all flora and fauna of the universe. And the hunter wondered if he should help Kulta.

“Could you point me toward Umarak?” After a long wait, Kulta realized that Umarak was waiting for him to speak.

“You fool - I am Umarak! Who did you think I was!”

“Perhaps a doorman, or a messenger?”

“You really are a prime specimen, Kulta the old general who calls himself sage. I have no requirement for doormen, Kulta, or messengers, or carriage - drivers, or servants to shine my armor. I do not need things like that, Kulta. Luxury, or a tiered system of master and apprentice, has no meaning for me. I work for no one, and no one works for me.”

Desperately trying to change the subject, Kulta said “I suppose that I was expecting someone a bit more impos-”

Kulta had no time to finish his sentence, because the hunter had punched him with incredible strength shooting him across the room as though he were being flung from a cannon. As his legs shot up into the air and his body, feeble relative to that of Umarak, curled in on itself, he still resisted the urge to regret what he had said. Kulta rarely ever ceded to another; it was his best defense against becoming one of the ordinary. Umarak probed lightly, and saw this.

“So you still fail to respect me? Let me ignore this single moment; there is greatness in you, Kulta. I will compromise with you. We will battle. If I win, you will leave, back to your slimy existence as an old general. If you win, as the benefit of some miracle, I will graciously, very graciously, grant you one wish. Graciously indeed.

As much as he hated it, Kulta was frozen in fear. Blood had dripped down from his head to his feet. His vision was blurred. He could not think. He had no chance.

“And before you ask, yes, I know what your wish shall be.”

[Azani]

The climax arrives in… Chapter Seven

With an enormous smile strangling the walls of his bony visage, the hunter beheld Kulta, formerly written of in the chronicles as one of the most fearsome and successful warriors on Okoto. Now the hunter was completely at his psychological mercy.

“I’ll let you in on a meager secret, Kulta. You are physically stronger than me; my superior, if you could bring yourself to believe that.”

“I could bring myself to believe a lot of things about you.” Kulta condoned this rebellious sentence as he was nearly certain that he could not possibly be put into any more pain. He was incredibly light-headed, with a scorching sting felt in each finger as he pressed his hand against the ground. It took incredible effort to see in the dim cave.

Umarak knocked him back, off of his feet and onto the moist slab of rock once more. “It is actually quite simple. You are unaccustomed to the shadow. I am venerable as a sage, yes, and eons beyond accomplished as a dueler, and yet my stature crumbles in the face of light. Not even a great amount of light.”

Kulta was certainly in an inconvenient situation; he could admit to the hunter- no, even think to the hunter that he was totally crushed if he could not extract the secret that meant all to him, a secret that he would extract from Umarak’s gruesome severed skull with white-hot hands if need be. Admit that he needed the hunter. Or he could forfeit, departing from the domain of the hunter and embarking back upon a life that, while rich in wealth and praise, was devoid of any real meaning. And would that be all? Well, of course not - there must be some other way, no matter the height of its impracticality. Light? Rivers of sunlight would continue to flow in gross excesses in the hot plains of the nearby Ketar, but none of it could be of use to the sage at this instant.

He had but one advantage left. As the ancient, fantastically powerful hunter glared down at him, absolving any possibility that Kulta could defeat him from his mind.

“Wait” groaned Kulta while he used what felt to be every shred, in final form, of his physical stamina to stand up and thrust out an arm. “Do we make war?”

“No, whispered the hunter in a tone that seemed to be of the same matter as the shadows that enveloped all his form, sans lips and a duo of limitless jaws. “I make war.”

Kulta was weaponless; he kicked, pummeled, jabbed at Umarak, who dodged him, raising a tall kick that imposed like a steam engine in the sage’s face. Kulta fell once more, barely able to see out of a right eye swollen with tissue and congealing blood. The hunter jumped clear over him, then fired a tranquilizing dart into Kulta’s upper back, lurching him toward the grim, icy stone.

“You… you’re good at fighting.” Immediately, Kulta pulled himself together. Deep breaths. The tranquilizer was a local one, thank god.

“Thin chances, Kulta.”

[Azani]

“He’s barely trying” though Kulta. No. Despair means defeat. Must stay positive.

Bounding to his feet in one grave, furious charge, the sage backed away from Umarak, his paralyzed arm tingling with the pricks of ten thousand needles. Suddenly, he had sought out the key to defeating Umarak.

“I’m not even worth his time” Kulta said, not resignedly but with an eerie pride.

“What was that?” The hunter cocked his head, sending a slip of moss that had been wrapped around one of his antlers drifting to the ground.

“I said, I’m not even worth a sliver of your time.”

Umarak dropped his weapons and pushed a muddy hand against his cheekbone, trying desperately to hear something different. Mouth agape, he bore a look as though he believed that his prime was long since past.

"Ah-ah-oh-I can’t fight someone like you."The hunter was no longer a threat, Kulta knew, but he still seethed in anger. Umarak was bound by his own ethereal moral code; after millions of years, he had lost the capability to disobey it. He would not-could not- fight anyone who willfully admitted that they were his inferior.

“You denied me a challenge, you slime-slithering, maggot-chewing, pus-sucking old general!”

Kulta was not fazed in the slightest. “Who won, then?”

“Y-you won.”

"Didn’t you swear me a promise?