Akael

“I’m sorry. A little distracted. What was it you wanted to know again?”

“Ah. Yes. That. Hmmm…”

“No. It’s just I am surprised you asked about that and not about, well, what everyone else always asks about.”

“You know. The… the coup… Everyone always wants to know about it… About my part…”

“Huh. You don’t? Ok, so just about when we opened that door in the old tunnels? You know that happened during the coup, right?”

“And you don’t care… See that makes no sense to me. Why would anyone ask-”

scritch, scritch

“Did you hear that? No? It’s starting again. I need to get out of here…”

“What? Oh. Yeah, you did pay. Shit… Shit, shit, shit… Ok. Let me think…”

…

“Ok. Yeah, but it has to be q-”

scritch, scritch

“Shit… It has to be quick. I need to go… Real soon… You probably should leave when I do too… But go in a different direction… Shit…”

“What? Yeah. Right… The door… That damn door.”

“See it was what, the night after we failed? Two nights? Hard to remember. We thought we had won, you know? The mob… Some blood, but not too much. The boss thought that would be enough, which of course wasn’t the case.”

“He got away, of course. I don’t even think anyone believes he was a part of it. It is such shit. I mean, he orchestrated the whole thing and all we-”

“Right. The door…”

scritch, scritch

“Shit. Ok. Quick. We were on the run, trying to get out of the capital. Maybe seven or eight us snuck down into the old tunnels. You know the ruins from the old city? Yeah, we had an exit strategy in case things… well things went the way they did.”

“So we got lost. There is no other way to put it. The place is old… I mean old. Tunnels collapse, passageways disappear. It is pitch black and silent. Easy to get spooked and easy to get lost… which is what we did… Got lost.”

“Getting lost down there isn’t good. You run out of light… Run out of food… Man… It is over for you. So you can imagine, we started to panic a bit. We were standing at a dead end and not sure what to do… Which is of course when we found the door…”

scritch, scritch

“Damn it… Need to get through this… Ok… The door… We opened it. What?”

“It was a door. I don’t know. A door that wasn’t supposed to be there. What kind of question is that? We were in the dark scared for out life. Why the fuck would I care what was on the door or what it was made of? Seriously?”

“And you don’t hear that? That noise? It’s like a scratching noise… But like it is coming from the inside of your skull. You don’t hear that?”

“Never mind. Just… Let me get though this…”

“We opened the door and found stairs going up. They were slick. Some sort of slime on them. The walls too, so it was slow going. Seemed to take forever. I think we all hoped it would get us to the sewers if not the surface.”

“It did. Or it did for me… The others…”

“Well, maybe an hour on those stairs is when things started to go sideways. We had hit a landing and catching our breath, trying not to touch anything. That’s when I first heard that noise. That scratching noise.”

“We all heard it. Didn’t think much of it, but it spurred us on. Maybe twenty minutes later… I don’t know… You lose track of time down there… But that was when we lost the torches.”

“They just went out. No idea how or why. They just stopped. It was terrifying until we noticed we could kind of see. There was a soft glow coming from up the stairway… but also the whispers started.”

“It was all around us, so we started to run. Taking two stairs at a time, trying to get to that light. I didn’t care what was there, I just needed to get there. The others… They fell behind.”

“And that is when the screaming started. I didn’t look back. All I heard was horrible wet sounds, that scratching noise, and what sounded like flapping wings…”

…

SCRITCH, SCRITCH

“No… NO! I have to go…”

“If you know what is good for you, you will run too.”

~ From Taubha’s Lesser Book of Names

Akael of House Heuegh is an agent of strife and disharmony. They are not so much a single being as a collection of small, winged humanoids that terrorize mortals for their own amusement. It is a mystery to scholars what they might have been prior to the Madness and very little research has been completed on their nature.

When using Akael in a game they are very effective as a troublemaker that turns deadly. Because it is actually a collection of many little winged monsters, they can get into all sorts of mischief. In Torchbearer terms, they are a twist making machine as an adversary.