A Thief’s Path

Plot Outline

The film takes place in the same city as in thief. The time period is just before and during the events of The Dark Project.

The main character, Marcus, is a thief, he is not the worlds greatest thief, but would probably be a close second if he cared.

The film opens with a classic thief intro video, where marcus breaks into a mansion and steals a gem on display. He is spotted and makes an exciting escape into the night.

Marcus has a voiceover where he talks about recent changes in the city. Fences are dissapearing left and right, in the city watch’s move to clean out the thief’s in the city. He is forced to use an unreliable fence named Cassius Borden. Cassius is a grimy, son of a bitch, gangster who has many connections in the city. He goes to deliver the gem to cassius, but is betrayed as cassius reveals his plan to turn in Marcus to the watch for the bounty on his head. Marcus manages to escape after throwing down a flashbomb.

Marcus makes his way back to his apartment, accompanied by a voiceover describing how he will have to leave town, because Cassius is pissed and will see to it that there won’t be anyplace safe in the city anymore.

Marcus reaches his apartment, but finds a recently dispatched corpse on the ground, he recognizes it as one of cassius’ men who was sent to kill marcus. He grows suspicious and expects someone to kill him but instead hears a knocking at the door. After the person outside the door explains that they know he is there and that they are there to offer him a job, he starts talking to them.

They explain that they are in need of a talented thief, and that they were the one who killed the man in Marcus’s apartment. The man behind the door is very eloquent and seems upper-class. He is somewhat mysterious and leaves an address of a tavern where he will meet with marcus in an hour. Marcus decides to meet with the man because he really has very few other options.

Once he gets there he find out that the man is Lucas Silvarnas, who was sent by an unknown and mysterious nobleman to have Marcus acquire an object, an ancient text, known as the blood initiate, that has great worth to certain collectors.

Lucas informs Marcus that his job is to break into Stonesoul cathedral (a Hammerite church) and make his way underneath the cathedral, into the prison beneath the church, to find a man. The man, named claiborn, was the last person who knew where the text was kept. Marcus and Lucas agree on a price, 50,000, gold for the job. Lucas makes it clear that Marcus will not have to worry about Cassius’s connections as long as he is working for his mysterious employer. Marcus has every intention of leaving town when the job is done.

There is a short scene of marcus talking about what he has heard on Stonesoul cathedral and the horrors that go there. This cuts away a scene of a hammerite priest torturing a common criminal with a hot branding iron to make him repent his sins. This is meant to introduce the audience to the fanatasiscm and cruelty of the hammers. Marcus breaks into the cathedral and makes his way beneath to the prisons. He finds Clairborn, but he is not what he expected.

Clairborn is an insane pagan, who talks in riddles. From him Marcus discovers that the text he’s looking for is located deep in the pagan woods near the city. Clairborn has been working magic while they are talking and now it is apparent why, he has weakened the structure of the cell block he is in, so as to kill himself and strike against the Hammers when it collapses. Why he does this is not entirely clear, but he is insane. Marcus makes it out of the cell block in time, while being pursued by some Hammerites, but his way out through the cathedral is blocked. The Hammerites are left behind and cannot pursue him through the rubble. He has to make his way out through the crypts beneath the cathedral.

The scene with marcus escaping through the crypts would include encounters with zombies, haunts, and other undead. This scene is not very critical to the plot at this point, which is why it will either be shortened or cut entirely. Though I will still be writing it and animating it. Marcus eventually escapes and makes his way back to the tavern, where he was supposed to have already found the text and delivered it to Lucas.

Marcus is angry that he was not fully informed about what was going on, and demands to be payed double for the text’s retrieval. Lucas reluctantly agrees.

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Following this is a scene of marcus making his way to the woods. This is accompanied by a voiceover explaining that he has discovered that the only place the text could be at is an abandoned Hammerite colony established in the woods years ago to "convert the pagan heathens." The colony not only "converted" the pagans by way of torture and death, but also tore up the land and "refined" it to the builder’s ways. The place was overrun by pagan magic and forces, but they still won’t go there because of the amount of death and destruction that took place. It is supposedly inhabited by dark presences beyond pagan or hammerite origin.

ADD CONTENT HERE

Marcus also discoves that the hammerites are on the look out for him, as they know it was him who broke into Stonesoul.

Marcus heads into the woods, but is being followed by Hammerite trackers, assassins, and guards. He slips past them but runs into a group of pagans in a grotto, who soon encounter the hammerites and Marcus is caught between the two sides fighting. A showpiece of this scene is when a treebeast is called on by the pagans and attacks the hammerites, but is set on fire by the hammers. Marcus slips away to the colony.

As he is working his way through the creepy, broken down colony, marcus discovers that there is more to the text than he thought. The hammers took it and locked it away because they felt it was a great weapon for the pagans. They could not destroy it however… The text was created by a powerful being, a rival of the trickster himself, it’s purpose is not made clear, but it is definitely more than just a simple text. Marcus finds and takes the manuscript, which is a roll of lambskin parchment, but stirs something up by doing so. It seems that the being that created the text is bound to it, and that when the hammers locked it (the text) away, the being soon followed to reclaim it’s creation. The spirit wrecked havok on the colony, allowing the pagan forces to overrun it, but the hammers managed to bind the being to the colony before they were wiped out, locking it away from the world in a sense. Marcus learns the gist of this from the spirits of the dead pagans, which take the form of a chorus of voices, with one voice either a woman or a child’s that stands out from all the rest. They are the ghosts of the pagans slaughtered by the hammers years before. The being grows enraged at the loss of the text, and the colony begins to shake and warp from it’s rage, but Marcus manages to escape from the colony into the woods and away from harm.

Following this is a short scene in the woods where marcus, his curiosity growing, takes a look at the text. He is shocked by an aspect of it that he find mystifying, but the audience is not shown what it is yet.

He meets Lucas at a Lucas’ master’s mansion in the city. Marcus throws down the text on a table and asks Lucas, who has his back to marcus, what’s going on. The text is blank, there is absolutly nothing written on the scroll. Lucas’s form changes, he becomes monsterous and pagan. He is a wood imp, who follows the trickster. Lucas subdues Marcus and cuts his (Marcus’s) hand to spill his blood onto the parchment. Lucas, now fully transformed into the imp, says something like "you fail to comprehend that ‘blood initiate’ is not a name, but an instruction." The "blood of the non-believer" causes text to burn into the parchment. Lucas says something creepy like "see how it hungers, see how it feasts upon the blood of the manfools!" and "The eye of the one, the blood of the other, such glory will you bring to him!" Marcus passes out from blood loss, and the last we see of him is from his perspective, things are going fuzzy. He sees Lucas’s face looking down at him, and hears Lucas say something like "your sacrifice shall bring his glory." The screen goes black.

We see Lucas enter a room where a man is looking out the window, overlooking the city. The man asks if "preparations for the ritual are underway", and Lucas replies yes. The man asks if "she has contacted the other" Lucas replies, "yes, he should be arriving here shortly" The man says "place the sword at the highest point possible, we will see how good this thief really is" The film closes with the man saying something like "my ascension shall return this world to my grasp" and we finally see and understand that he is Constantine, the trickster. The last shot moves out the window and moves over the city then cuts to black.

Credits.