Turn 102:
PREVIOUSLY
It was a cold, foggy morning of the kind common to the Realm of Silver’s autumnal period when the mercenaries and their scholarly employer departed from Windyshingles. True to Simo’s words, they left as soon as the sun was up for lack of horses, trekking down the packed dirt of the roads near the settlement at a steady pace. Every now and then they would pause to rest beneath the barren trees or to check the scholar’s map, ensuring they were on the right course toward the hamlet she had deemed their destination.
The roads were mostly empty of travellers that early in the morning, and so they were left to walk in awkward silence. Simo seemed to be in little mood for small talk, rebuffing any effort at conversation with sharp glances and near-monosyllabic responses; Sorus was likewise disinclined toward conversation, by her new employer’s uncompaniable manner as much as her own instinctive wariness when out on the roads. Degel alone persisted in trying to strike up some kind of chat, though even he would ultimately surrender the effort after a particularly annoyed look from his armoured colleague.
It was almost a relief when they arrived at their destination – a small hamlet by the name of Speechrags, nestled amidst a ring of old, crumbling monasteries in the Steppe of Ticks. The hamlet itself was a fairly typical one for its size: a series of wooden-walled houses, stores, and taverns, clustered together on the plains below the nearby grassy hillocks. A large, grey mead hall squatted sullenly on one of the hills, a single-storied building of stone and thatch staring down at the settlement below from its perch. Many of the windows in even the larger houses were still dark, despite the early hour, though a few coils of grey smoke drifted from the chimneys to join the pigeon-grey clouds and add to the clinging fog.
The streets were mostly deserted due to the early hour, beyond a handful of early risers heading out toward the fields or the main roads. Simo led the group into the hamlet at a gangling stride, moving purposefully toward one of the buildings that flanked the central road. Sorus paused for a moment to glance up toward the sign – hand-carved wood, shaped and painted to resemble a wooden crate filled with bottles of wine. In a rough, uneven hand, someone had added the tavern’s name along one of the beams of the sign-carving:
The Crate of Codlings.
Several sets of eyes turned toward them as they made their way inside. Perhaps a dozen people were seated around the tavern despite the early hour – most were hard-featured men and women in cloaks and the simple, durable attire of wandering traders; here and there, a few others sat, clad in the dirt-dusted clothes of farmers and labourers. Many of them quickly turned back to their conversations and drinks as the mercenaries made their way toward the bar, putting the new arrivals out of their mind, but a few continued to stare toward their backs with something between curiosity and a faint hope.
The barman nodded a greeting toward them as they drew closer to the bar, busy polishing a glass from his position behind the bar. “Mornin’. What can I get ya?”
“We heard there was trouble here,” Simo remarked, folding her hands on the bar top and looking him in the eye.
“Quite the mess of troubles here,” The barman’s moustache twitched slightly as he leaned over the counter. Sorus resisted the urge to snort at the sight – the motion made his moustache look like a pair of squirrels had been rammed up his nose, and were starting to become restless. “Beasts, bandits, people seekin’ long-lost treasures – an’ the damn thrall infestation.”
“A… thrall infestation? Where so?”
“Up there, at the old hall.” The barman raised a broad hand to point toward the hill where the mead hall squatted. Several of the patrons muttered something under their breath at the motion, turning their heads to exchange wary glances with one another. “Place has been sealed for weeks after we heard ‘bout what was hap’nin.”
“Excellent,” Simo nodded slightly, a smile passing along her features. “My thanks for your help, sir.” And then, to the figures of Sorus and Degel at her sides: “Come, both of you.”
The mercenaries quickly made their way up the dusty path to the mead hall – a squat, single-storey building of slate-grey stone with a thatched roof, seated near the outer edges of the hamlet.
Whatever windows or apertures it once possessed were now bricked up or otherwise filled with solid stone, creating an odd mottling of the walls where the yellowish granite of the newer bricks met the dulled, pitted grey of the original stones. The main doors had been locked shut with a strong beam of solid oak, and a cross painted in red upon the stained pinewood; even so, both bore the signs of decay and weathering from the steady action of the seasons and the rain. From behind the barred doors there came a low, insistent scratching, as of nails against wood or stone; every now and then, the doors would jump against the frame as something hurled itself against them.
“This is the place.” Sorus remarked grimly, raising her sword and eyeing up the hall’s doors with trepidation. Beside her, Degel quickly unstowed his axes from their sheathes, gripping the handles tightly in readiness for the battle to come.
“Indeed.” Simo moved briskly forward to stand beside the bar. She cocked her head to the side, listening to the low, constant scratching sounds from behind the wood; after a few moments, she nodded firmly and stepped back, unsheathing a pair of long-bladed bronze daggers from their twinned scabbards beneath her cloak. “I estimate at least six thralls inside – potentially more. Hard to tell.”
“This is going t’be rough.” Degel muttered, eyeing the door blackly. “Six against three, all of ‘em thralls?”
“No.” Simo shook her head firmly, raising a dagger to point toward the wooden doors. “Those thralls will have been inside for weeks. They’ll be malnourished; weakened by inactivity, and half-mad from hunger. Easy prey, compared to fresher specimens.”
Sorus turned to Simo, tightening her grip on her sword’s handle enough that the wood began digging into her fingers. The mercenary’s eyes flicked uncertainly toward Simo, to the mead hall’s decaying doors, and then back to Simo. It seemed incredible to her that the beasts lurking behind the mead hall’s door could be weakened by starvation like any living man, for something that was unquestionably unliving and inhuman. Yet gave a slow, almost distrustful nod toward the armed scholar, her mouth setting into a grim line.
“I’ll trust you on this one, Doctor.”
“Good. Oh, and do try to keep the bodies intact.” Simo gestured Degel toward the heavy oak beam, flicking a finger upward to make her intent clear. “I would rather not have to go picking through the dirt once this altercation is over.”
Sorus shot her a questioning, almost disbelieving look at that for a moment, before swiftly returning her attention to the door as Degel strode up to it. He paused for a moment, looking back over his shoulder to ensure the two of them were ready; at their nods, Degel clamped his arms around the beam of oak and levered it upwards with a grunt of effort, straining as he lifted the heavy wood out of the brackets and cast it aside before raising his leg and delivering a heavy-footed kick to the door. The door leapt against its frame on the first blow; the second splintered the wood badly, his bronze boot almost breaking through entirely, and the third practically broke the whole thing in half, sending it crashing to the stone floor beyond.
Degel and Sorus wasted no time in charging into the hall, their weapons drawn and teeth bared. The blood was pounding in their ears as they moved, their senses set on edge by the foes waiting for them. Thralls were dangerous at the best of times; even if these ones were half-mad and desperate from starvation as Simo claimed, a cornered rat could still bite, and bite hard. She could see the dark, lumbering shapes moving in the half-light of the mead hall, and tensed as the first of them came staggering toward her.
The thrall before her was a shambolic, even pitiful example of its kind: its body was bloated with dropsy and eaten away by disease, its movements slow and clumsy compared to either of them. Most of the man’s features had been replaced by a glistening cluster of blisters, subsuming all but the yawning mouth and carious teeth that stuck out from its ruined features. The others staggering beside it were in similarly poor condition, their skin mottled with discoloured patches of flesh and weeping sores.
Sorus smoothly stepped away from her attacker as it stumbled toward her, hands groping half-blindly ahead of it in a poor attempt to seize her and its head swinging loosely from side to side; her responding strike cut a deep gash into one of its shoulders before her sword was pulled free. As the thrall came in for another grab, Sorus made her counter. She thrust her sword forcefully forward, the copper blade slipping in between the ribs and through the limping thrall’s lung with surprising ease. It made a low, half-choked grunting sound as the air was driven from the penetrated lung, but continued to reach for her face with its half-rotting hands. Sorus twisted the blade in the wound by reply, tearing it sideways and out of the thrall’s chest amidst a welter of stinking blood; her next blow severed one arm below the shoulder in a burst of blood and fluid, while the next sent its jaw wetly to the ground. A fourth blow finished, the copper blade struggling not to bend as the mercenary drove it through the thrall’s skull, splitting the head in half down to the base of the neck.
On the other side of the room, Degel was busy fighting another thrall. His right-hand axe’s butt shattered the thrall’s nose on the first blow; moments later its twin indented his opponent’s skull with the crack of breaking bone, rocking the thrall’s head back on its shoulders. While it felt no pain or disorientation, the force was still enough to knock it off-balance for a few moments, sending its punch off to the side and leaving it wide open to a third blow from his axe – this one landing with enough force to take most of the thrall’s face off, its head split almost completely in half from right eye to chin. The thrall let out a wet, gurgling snarl from its ruined mouth and lurched forward with grasping hands, spitting hot torrents of blood into Degel’s face with each breath and jerk of its head.
He retorted with a trio of blows from both axes, throwing his weight into the strikes. The first two ripped chunks of diseased flesh away from the chest and tore trenches into its belly, the force slowing the thrall’s advance; the third cleaved partway through its collarbone with a wet crack. Despite the terrible damage and the blood streaming from its wounds, the thrall pressed forth with its attack, raking its filthy nails across the copper gauntlet on his left hand with a painful grating sound. Degel’s fourth blow landed a moment later, burying his axe almost to the hilt in the mutilated remains of the thrall’s head; it stuck fast, but the creature’s motions quickly began to slow and stiffen, its struggling rapidly tailing off. When he wrenched the blade free, about half of the thrall’s head came with it, the top sliding to the ground with a wet splattering noise.
Simo herself had not proven idle, either. Despite her scholarly appearance and manner, she had plunged into the melee as readily as the two mercenaries, her twin bronze daggers constantly flashing out to strike at the thralls around her. Unlike Sorus’ indiscriminate butchery or Degel’s deep, mutilating swings, Simo fought with almost surgical precision, her daggers finding vital organs or opening arteries and veins with every jab and thrust. The infected figures’ punches and grasps found nothing but empty air as she darted back and forth, her daggers cutting or piercing deeply into the thralls’ flesh before dodging away, leaving them to blunder about as the blood flowed from their cuts.
Kicking one of the thralls backwards as it sought to grab her shoulder, Simo brought her right-hand dagger down on its wrist as it fell. The bronze cut surprisingly smoothly through the flesh and bone, severing the creature’s hand from its arm in a spray of polluted blood. The thrall snarled up at her, before the sound cut off into a gurgling groan as she plunged her daggers down in a series of lethally accurate thrusts, piercing cleanly through the lungs and heart in three movements. Simo strode over the dying thrall without a backwards glance, already thrusting for the throat of a second as he came lurching toward the scholar.
With all three of them working together, it did not take long before the mead hall fell silent again, beyond the heavy breathing of the mercenaries and the slow, steady dripping of blood from the corpses. The bodies of the former occupants were strewn across the floor of the hall – many were missing limbs or hacked apart by the harder blows of Sorus and Degel, but for every mangled corpse was another exsanguinated one slain by a precise strike from Simo’s daggers.
“And that,” Simo sheathed her daggers with a hiss of released breath, carefully lifting the hems of her cloak as she edged around the cooling bodies toward Degel and Simo. “Will be that.” She raised a gloved finger to point toward the door leading into another of the mead hall’s rooms. “Kindly give me a hand and move these corpses out of here – into there, if you would please.”
Sorus’s brow furrowed and she turned toward Degel, her question dying on her lips as she caught sight of him already dragging one of the corpses into the other room. The mercenary rolled her eyes and moved to assist him, gripping the other end of the thrall’s body and lifting it upright, manoeuvring it through the narrow doorway before she none-too-gently dropped it to the stone floor. By the time the two of them had cleared the room of corpses both mercenaries were coated with a patina of blood and grime and breathing hard from their labours, while an unruffled Simo stood beside one of the intact tables, shucking her pack off onto one of them.
“Good work. Now go on; find some refreshment in the hamlet proper.” She gestured almost dismissively with a hand toward the two of them, not looking up from the tools she had begun to unpack. “I will call you once I am finished here.”
Neither of the mercenaries required much in the way of encouraging after the duties they had just performed. They were all too happy to leave behind the blood-coated, stinking hall and go traipsing off toward the hamlet’s buildings and homes. As far as Sorus cared, Simo could spend as long as she wanted in that place so long as her gold was good as it seemed to be.
“Let’s go, Degel,” She muttered as she emerged from the hall, nodding toward the Crate of Coddlings, nestled among the houses on the side of the main road. She shook some of the blood off her gauntlets with a grimace of distaste. It would take more than a little elbow grease to get the stains out after that. “I need a damn drink after that.”
“Make it two of us, Sorus,” The Hand of Planegifts nodded in agreement, rolling his shoulder with a wince as a sharp pain flared up his arm. “Think I pulled something in there, moving those bodies around. But if it’s what the boss wants…”
“I know, I know,” Sorus grumbled, stumping her way down the hillside. And then, under her breath,
“That’s what worries me.”
It was a few hours and several mugs of ale in the local tavern before a runner came from the mead hall: a wan-faced young man with a tremulous voice, informing Degel and Sorus that their employer had requested their presence. Degel quickly finished the remainder of his tankard in one quick swallow before eagerly springing up; Sorus was slower to follow, almost reluctantly putting down the rag she had been using to clean her sword before standing to join him.
The reason for his apparent fear became clear as they began to approach the hall. The stench of blood was much stronger in the air than before, accompanied by a pungent, harsh aroma emanating from beneath the damaged pinewood doors. Degel twitched sharply as it struck upon his senses: a witch’s brew of sharp vinegar, decayed flesh, and enough blood to put an abattoir to shame. A quick look over his shoulder confirmed that Sorus had smelt it too, her features screwing up in distaste at the stench.
“What the hell is that smell…?” He muttered to himself. The Hand of Planegifts’ nostrils wavered slightly as he drew closer to the door, the stench rapidly increasing in its potency the closer he came.
After a couple moments’ hesitance, he placed his hand on the door and shoved forward. It gave a terrible groan, the hinges damaged from the earlier forced entry, but yielded to the force and swung inward. The sight beyond was enough to send Degel lurching back with a shocked hiss; Sorus reacted little better, one hand instinctively flying to cover her nose and mouth.
In the space of the hours they had left Simo alone, the hamlet’s main hall had been transformed. A trio of zinc-topped tables had been dragged out of the hall’s rooms and into the centre, converted into a set of crude workbenches. Rows of green glass jars and containers had been laid out across one of them, each one containing a mass of dark fluid in which an organ rested. Each jar’s lid had been sealed with some waxen material to keep its contents fresh, and a handwritten label attached to it by a string. Another was crammed with the tools of the surgeon’s art, from saws and scalpels to rasps and probes, laid out on a pocketed bundle of leather or resting on blood-stained cloth.
Central to it all was the largest of the tables, where a corpse had been laid out lengthwise across the zinc top amid the labelled and sectioned portions of its inner anatomy. Its arms and legs were gone entirely, either dissected or discarded with the rest of the mangled corpse-parts from earlier, while its head rested at a far corner of the table – now little more than a cored-out shell of flesh and bone, its brain and eyes removed to join the other organs in the preservative jars, its skinned jawbone and teeth laid out on a separate piece of cloth for examination. While there was precious little to identify it as human, Sorus could see well the blisters and sores that marked its ruined torso.
The robed figure of Simo stood beside the gutted torso, the front of her cloak smeared with scarlet gore as she almost casually cleaned some blood from one of the tools with a loose length of cloth. She looked up at the sudden sound and gave the two mercenaries a casual smile and a nod, seemingly inured to the stink of blood and the sight of the eviscerated corpse on the makeshift surgical slab before her.
“Good evening, my colleagues.” Simo looked up from her work, giving the two of them an almost casual nod despite the carnage before her. “I see you received my message.”
“What in the hells is
that?” Sorus pointed her sword at the human wreckage on the table.
“‘That’ is part of the task I hired the two of you to assist me with,” Simo replied, seemingly unconcerned by her reaction. She finished wiping the blood from her dagger and hands, tossing the rag aside to join a pile of other blood-stained scraps. “And it has proven most… insightful.”
“Insightful?” Sorus couldn’t keep the disbelief out of her tone.
“Aye, though rather less so than I had hoped. Were the samples more
intact, perhaps there would have been more to learn.” Simo made a sound of displeasure deep in the back of her throat, before slowly shaking her head. “But I suppose it cannot be helped.”
“We’ll try and do better next time,” Degel stepped forward from the door, grimacing as he edged around some of the pooling blood. His slitted eyes flicked to the corpse on the table, then back down to his axes. The edges had chipped slightly from how hard they had struck, small indents forming along the copper heads. The grimace tightened further. He’d need to replace them sooner that he’d expected, at this rate. “We’ve not gone against thralls before, lady Cosmoscleaned.”
Simo regarded him for a moment with her hawkish eyes, before slowly nodding in acknowledgement. “Hrm. Very well, very well. Now, do come here, master Degel. I would speak with you on a pertinent subject…”
Hesitantly, the Hand of Planegifts edged between the organ jars and the dissected remnants of limbs, taking care not to disturb the occasional sheaf of paper that lay around or underfoot. They were covered in long, spidery scrawls of writing and unfamiliar diagrams, many of them stained with dark marks or crumpled slightly around the edges.
“I understand that your species do not require sustenance, in the traditional sense,” Simo remarked to Degel as he walked forward to meet her, leaning slightly against the table’s edge. “How is that so?”
“I… I would presume it is from our origins, lady Cosmoscleaned,” He answered, voice carrying a guarded, even wary note to his words. “We were born of necromancy, as the tales go – without need to sleep, drink, or eat.”
“These creatures are the same.” Simo gestured toward the corpse of the infected thrall. “By all accounts, these thralls require no sustenance; no food, no drink, no rest. Yet here,” Simo pointed a finger at the wreckage that lay on the bloodied tabletop. A rubbery, wet mass lay apart from the rest, slit open along the side to expose its contents; off to its side, the intestines were coiled into a wet, glistening tangle. “Look - the stomach remains functional. Scraps of flesh, cloth – even metal – from its latest meal, still in the process of consumption by the digestive acids. The intestines are similar in their contents, though quite unsurprisingly more degraded…”
She broke off mid-sentence, swivelling about to point at one of the dissected arms. Severed from its parent thrall at the elbow by Degel’s swinging axe-heads, the limb had nonetheless been examined and carefully picked part by the scholar. The skin had been peeled back from the wrist to lay bare the nerves and muscular tissues beneath, the ragged remains of blood vessels and bone poking out of one ruined end.
“And see here – the muscle and connective tissues haven’t decayed, or even atrophied. If anything, they look as though they’ve grown. But for that…”
“They would need food.” Degel finished, eyes widening as the implication in Simo’s words struck home. “So – what are you saying? That they’re… evolving, in some way?”
“Quite plausibly, aye. Look here,” Simo pointed down to the thrall’s jawbone. She seemed oblivious to the two mercenaries’ discomfort, continuing her narration with an unmistakable note of enthusiasm to her words. “The teeth are different to that of a human. They’re serrated and partly fused into the jaw; not so much growing from it as much as
part of it, like a natural outgrowth. Perhaps… Some kind of alteration to make it easier to bite and consume their prey? Yes, that would—”
“Is there a point to this, doctor?” Sorus cut the scholar off mid-stream with her question, exchanging an unsettled look with Degel. This did not resemble surgery or dissection so much as it did butchery, and crude butchery at that. The corpse on the table had once a human before the infection had ravaged its mind and body to the point of ruin, and the sight of it in such a state was still enough to stir instinctive nausea deep in the gut.
Simo sighed, as though irritated at her ignorance, before turning to pick up one of the fluid-filled jars. Carefully, she lifted the stomach and the tangle of guts from the table before placing them into the jar, screwing the lid on tight to keep it in place before returning it to its previous position. She carefully circled around the table before approaching the two of them, fixing the two mercenaries with her hawkish, unnerving eyes.
“My point, Chantscar, is this: we understand only the basics of these creatures’ nature, even after nearly a century of their existence. We know of how to destroy them, but not of how they persist. How they fuel themselves; how they do not simply decay away to nothing as the disease takes its toll.” Simo gestured toward the dissected thrall on the table, to the specimen jars and texts that lay scattered around the central dissection table. “What changes may occur. What weaknesses there are, beneath the skin.”
Understanding dawned in Sorus and Degel’s eyes, almost simultaneous in its occurrence. The human mercenary’s head snapped back toward the table for a moment, then back toward Simo, eyes wide.
“You seek to find new ways to destroy these ghouls?” Sorus asked, looking at the dissected body on the table with less disgust than she had previously felt. “Some inherent weakness of their flesh?”
“Indeed so.” Simo nodded, seemingly pleased by her realisation. She gestured to the jars and the notes around the room, strewn around in a scene of organised chaos. “Material drawn from the tales of adventurers and old books; from what few corpses I could acquire and dissect… they have proven useful, over the past decade of our work. Yet there is only so much that corpses and books can teach us about our enemies.”
“You needed firsthand experience.” Degel finished for her. He carefully picked up one of the paper sheets from the ground, eyes flicking across the spidery writing. It looked like a simple table of some kind, containing a series of dates spanning the past few years. Here and there a brief remark had been appended – a name or a place, or a word of jargon that meant little to him; perhaps a dozen times “variant” or “mutation” had been scrawled beside a name, and once, very early in the list, “Utter failure” had been scrawled in an untidy hand, followed by several points of exclamation and what looked suspiciously like a tear from a dagger’s point.
“Quite.”
Simo turned to one of the volumes on the edges of the table, resting a finger against the leather of its cover. An unfamiliar emblem had been stitched into the cover in scarlet thread – a heart and brain, twin daggers flanking them. She flipped it open, speeding through pages covered in annotations and diagrams drawn by a dozen different hands until she came to a blank leaf of parchment; quick as a flash, Simo had a quill and inkpot in her hands and moving across the page, adding whatever she had learned from her autopsy of the thrall to the knowledge of her compatriots.
“While I must thank you for your help so far,” Simo remarked, as she wrote. “There is still much to learn. These thralls were older, and in somewhat poor condition; I was able to learn little we do not already know of their flesh. The organs, in particular – perhaps five useful extractions, from a pool of dozens. I will need… newer specimens to properly expand our knowledge.”
“And where d’you suggest we find more of them?” Sorus called out from her position beside the pedestals. The mercenary was almost idly examining one of the jars as she spoke, pulling a face at the contents – a human brain, covered in small cavities and black lesions. It floated limply in the murky, yellowish liquid that filled the preservative canister, and she pulled away from it with a grimace. “With respect, Cosmosclean, I don’t exactly see much in the way of thralls ‘round here, and I ain’t heard of any new outbreaks nearby.”
“Indeed so, and it is for that reason that our path leads northwards.” Simo gestured to the side with her non-writing hand, one finger pointing to her annotated map over on one of the further away tables. “I have managed to identify a number of thrall-clusters beyond the Tundra, in foreign and familiar settlements alike. They will be our next destinations.”
“These places…” Degel murmured, peering down at the map. The Hand of Planegifts recognised some of the names there, circled in bright red and branching off the dark smear of purple that sprawled across the centre of the map like a bruise. “Goblin pits?”
“They are so.” folded her arms over her chest, giving him an unimpressed look as her fingers drummed restlessly up and down on her elbow. She raised a finger to point toward one of the mead hall’s ancillary rooms. “Now if you are quite finished with these redundant questions, fetch me the next body from in there. Much as I hold out little hope for further discoveries from them, it is an avenue I must pursue.”
She looked out into the world through sore red eyes. Shapes danced before her, blurred and smeared, but she could smell them. She could taste them.
Not yet. Not yet. Wait more. Watch more. The time would come. Her Lord would say when, and she would listen.
Her whole body hurt, burning with a crawling, cold fire. Her head seethed with it, casting a blur over the sights before her. Her tongue flicked out, slithering across dry, cracked skin, searching her lips and teeth for any scraps of meat remaining. There was none. Frustration boiled in her breast, clawed at the inside of her throat; she drove her teeth into her tongue to muffle the angry cry building in her chest.
She knew how to make it stop. The only thing that would make it stop was to take the flesh of the others. Not those around her. Not her kin, those that shared her hunger. The others. The ones that wriggled and screamed and stilled as she sank her teeth into soft, sweet flesh, tearing and ripping and –
Not yet! The voice thundered. Not yet!
She shook her head violently, a dog with a rat in its teeth. Sweat and pus flew. She was shivering and sweating and straining all at once, her skin itching and crawling as she tried to hold still. Her fingers curled, claw-like; dug into the uneven skin of her arms. They were studded with boils, like horrid red gloves.
Growling, teeth grinding, she turned toward her surroundings.
She knew this place. A big, open square. A block, a rock, a plinth in the middle. The shape of a man on the top. The man had a name. He was a hero. Yes, what was his name? He had a pole in one hand. A long one, ending in a curved lump. There was something on the base, bright and shiny. Her fingers scraped against it, tracing the marks cut into it. There were words for it, this shiny, bright thing before her; the hero standing above it.
Silver. Lord. Jas. Lord Jas. Lord of Silver.
Yes. Her teeth bared themselves in a grin. She still knew things. She still remembered. Old, familiar thoughts breached the murk. The big stone houses, the men, the ones wearing metal. Soldiers. Yes, yes, she still had the words in her. There was something they did, something done when their lord was near them.
Her arm jerkily raised to her forehead.
“Lord Jas, sir,” She intoned, the words clear in her head but coming out as a slurred growl.
The motion dragged something from the murk. Her head lolled, looked down at the thing at her feet. It was like the man’s, long and thin, ending in a broad, sharp head. There was a name for it. A bird? A beard? She shook her head, temples pulsing with feverish heat. Yes – a halberd.
She bowed her head, moaning softly. It hurt to think. It was painful, all these thoughts and memories and names coming back up after so long. And still they came, clawing up the surface of her mind, fragmented and broken.
She remembered ̜͈̥__T__r, . Remembered D__m__, dark and brilliant. __e_, one of their strongest soldiers. She’d held a tool thing just like that, before… before…
Before what? What? Why could she not remember?
Her nails dug into her scalp, tore through the skin with ease. Blood rushed down her face, her mouth watering as it touched her lip. Her tongue darted out to lick it away.
There was another. A huge figure. Tall. black. It motioned to her, its voice striking against her ears.
The words were nonsense, noise, sounds that set her head throbbing, but the voice was one she recognised. She growled and walked forward, standing beside the noise’s source.
When her lord called, she was to obey.
Two of the others dragged something between them. It dropped to the ground before her. Her mouth watered immediately. It had a meaty, juicy stink to it, so thick she could almost hold it in her hand. Her lips pulled into a grin, blood smearing around her mouth like a painted smile. She knew what this mewling, breathing thing sprawled out in the dirt was.
Her lord’s fingers moved, touched together, moved apart with a sharp, high crack. She knew what it meant. She knew it meant meat, meant life, meant she could seize the meaty thing before her and eat –
She sprang forward and bit down on the living food. She leaned back and tore a chunk of meat free, felt it struggle down her throat into her burning stomach. The meat tasted good. It always did. It filled her up with light, made her heart beat hard. Each thud shook the dark from her mind. More light came in. Words came with it. Memories. Thoughts.
She’d been here before. She’d served another, a Lord, a master of men and women. She’d fought a good fight, hadn’t she? Slain monsters. He’d been at her side, then and now. His voice, speaking to her, telling her what to do. All she had to do was destroy the rest of them. The corrupt ones. They were the only ones that could stop them. They were against her. Against the Realm she protected. They threatened her and her people, and for that she would destroy them all.
She snarled and dug in deeper, ignoring the food’s mewling. Her brothers and sisters were beside her, teeth crunching and biting like hers. They would kill this meat, slay the monster. Move on at their Lord’s command. She had to get strong, and clever – strong and clever again, so she could aid her Lord. He would command her, and she would obey. The enemy, those living things, warm and soft, would be swept away. They would march on them, her brothers and her sisters, all marching together.
Like it had been so long ago.[/i]
Author
Topic: Museum III, adventure succession game (DF 0.47.05) (Read 473272 times)