[center][img]https://41.media.tumblr.com/225da4272957c557fe727109bac3c076/tumblr_o6e8pd1fqt1u5gf80o1_r1_500.png[/img][/center] [i]The killers leave the desert, and through the subjective lens of my perception, my journey seems to have accelerated. They have names for themselves and I listen keenly. I listen, categorise, and listen again, not to confirm what I know but to interrogate it for flaws. From the moment of my first thoughts, cognition has been exploding within the Other-mind that blackens my worldly form, and weals of red twist themselves in among the filaments, embroidering my thoughts into my frame. Or, maybe, they are unrelated. I cannot say. Many are winged. These are called angels- It is beyond my conjecture to guess whether that means a species, ethnicity, order or family. If they are weary, it does not show. Gliding in formation, their bodies seem familiar, distantly, a cautious intuition I struggle to trust. But the arrangement of my own shape does not escape me. Torso, hands, legs, cranium- Sometimes, when I do not watch myself, I cease to flow over the ground with the centipedes, and I walk. I knit myself into a shape with scythed arms, a short but sturdy spine, ears fourfold- Even, though the material doesn't not suit the shape, teeth, and a forked tongue. Do I only imagine these moments? Do I only imagine everything [i]else[/i]? Other things walk, too. Some of those whom we encounter are in the likeness of the angels. They are tall, upright, darkened, endurant. Perhaps they came first, and the angels are in [i]their[/i] likeness. Beyond my scope of knowledge. We 'encounter' them, indeed. Fur from the remains of their scalps sustain my body. I do not know if death is a curse or a blessing or a mystery but the old part of my whole, that which was hair before it had spirit, it marks out the carnage with revulsion. The ravenous horde of Chaos considers it a curse, and bestows it freely for that reason. Pale ceramic bone clads the the bulk of our party, the other kind, hain; and over this armour they wear spear-belts, clubs, quivers. I do not often get close to them. Dislike, discipline, sheer coincidence- Their minds are unfathomable to me, but something internal keeps them away from me. The tall humanoids we encounter do not have that privilege. Sometimes a hain will swing at me. It damages me, and I think I feel pain. So I flee, to follow the horde elsewhere. Humans aren't so quick. They crunch. They break. They smell nice on a bonfire. We all restock with whatever materials fuel us, and push on. When we are first exposed to the Ground Folk, they repay us for all we owed to mankind. Everything I see when I return from escaping the mania and blood suggests that the hain horde is nearly lain to waste. My imagination, burgeoning as it is, is still not yet equipped to simulate other explanations, imagined scenarios that I yearn for like my companions desire water. I am not again to have the chance to observe such a conflict. The powers that be intervene long enough to grant us a guardian. A deeper force thrusts contemplation away from me, and, for a moment, I stand as I did long ago, reclaiming a rare fragment of certainty in my bitterness. God has joined us. I did not see him arrive. He is fast, or stealthy. Perhaps he was always with us, always [/i]part of[i] us, and only now reveals himself. In all cases I must accept that this is the reality I am part of now. He is here. I watch energy simmer from his armour and feel the old emotions of birth bulge in my every hair. Hatred. Fear. Defiance. Pity. Disgust. I do not know whether to hide, or run.[/i] [center]* * * * *[/center] [i]Morning. Today. My last day alive, maybe, or my first. Maybe the only day in all of existence, preceded by false memories. Yesterday? Today. It is still cold upon the sparsely wooded fens. Mist lies over the waterlogged peat, peat which lies in a cold, dead fire heap, barely burned. I think it is plausible that the hain have heaped and lit the sedge and sphagnum last night, trying to find enough comfort to sleep. That the mist rose from the sodden earth then and will disperse come noon. These are doubtful ideas, even for me, who doubts much. At some point in this bog, time either lost its meaning or gained its truer, more frightening one. Something has slowed perceptibly and painfully. My body is intact but my thoughts grow redundant and loop into knots for hours on end. Days drag on, leaving us to sit, and stand, and pace, and drink the icy bog-water, and sit and stand and pace with little conversation and an aimless gait. Nobody walks. Not with any purpose. Not with the same ardent drive- Lack of drive?- That beset them to take us so far. We look at each other and look away. Reality's seams are unwoven and depression sinks in. We are slowed. I watch the hain endlessly, and the angels with them. They aren't spending much time in the air. My mind offers the possibility that something above the mist has been blocking them like a hand, and though I see the looks of confused apathy in their eyes, I cannot disprove it. They do not often look back, even when I am arranged to have a 'front' and a 'back' to turn. Stagnation breeds familiarity, complacency, and even the beaked fighters tire of standing away from me. I hide less and less, but for the thing on the far end of the crude encampment. Even the pace of God had dragged into a trudge. Maybe he was waiting for us. Maybe the slow madness coming over us gripped him worst of all. Maybe he had [/i]caused[i] it. Maybe, maybe, the world is uncertain, and God is the least certain thing of all. There's a straw-haired angel giving me bladed looks from the other side of the water. There are plenty of possible outcomes of her curiousity, and most of them leave me wary.[/i] [center]* * * * *[/center] [i]A night grows late and I feel them coming. Tremors of movement carry far through the waterlogged peat. I envision the faint noise as the rumble of a great crawling insect in the earth, or as the natural fizz of mire-gas released by a small earthquake. My imagination is clear, but it cannot discredit the familiarity of the sound. It is far from the first time that the Ground Folk have sought us out. A hain stares at me skeptically as I stand, human-like, with my feet in the frigid puddle. Does it know what's coming, or did I just startle? Neither they nor angels sense vibrations as I do; They are deaf or apathetic or both. But they are watching me now, the hain and the dangerously curious Angel who has stalked me languidly since the depression began. Reflexively I swivel my 'head', as if I have eyes. At the far end of the encampment sits God. Masked. Unmoving. Too far. I face the hain and she stands down, a little, taking grip of her javelin. I coil tightly but don't move closer, though the noise draws close. Through bared teeth, she says something hainish, challenging. I've never stood up to one of them like this before. We barely differ in height but muteness makes me feel small. The earthen shiver is urgent. Strategic thought takes a pause, and I point to the ground- I communicate. It's the first time I try, and it mounts on the roiling anticipation for what is coming. Though she looks, the hain realises late. Matted turf blows apart as the Urtelem breaches the surface, clad entirely in grey black peat. Its arms gouge the ground as it forces itself forwards, absorbing the movement on its arched back, rolling. While I lose shape and collapse into the porous earth, the hain shrieks warning and runs, and God laughs, utterly sure, utterly unsurprised. My stunt buys me little time. The boulder unfolds over me and slashes its fist outwards, heaving great hunks of earth into the air while I flow to evade. Its weight squeezes water from the ground and it pursues me into the mire with a burst of low, grating sound, but I am untouchable, unfindable, liquid. From elsewhere, I hear chants, and the groan of metal shattering rock. God sees to his own. A hefty palm swings through the water and gouges a furrow of air into it, sucking me into the whirl. Only one surface presents itself to me as I seek grip to readjust and I find it, curling up and over the Urtelem's body. I lament the fact that a body which can crush stone is too strong to be infiltrated; I don't have any other means to defend myself from the creature. Not everyone thinks about defense. A hefty 'clack' sounds from the Stoneman's body along with a sharp jolt, and I see a glimmer of golden magic dissolving around a chip of rock. In the hands of a viciously grinning angel swings something like a pickaxe, a congealed, heavy light. Its weight swings behind her as she flies, finding momentum for the next pass, and the Urtelem twists to the source of the pain, working itself deeper into the morass. I slide over its body in a moment to cover its eyes. When it claps its hands to its face a moment later, I'm already gone, and the savage angel is diving, dropping. The weight of her fall from the sky only adds power to the swing of the weapon and again the skull of the Stoneman is chipped. Comprehending its injury, the creature drives itself face-first into the water, gouging through the layers of peat to seek the stone below. The organic debris does not part for it the way clean stone does. A third strike lands on its upper back. It curls itself into the sandy under-layer and tunnels. I cling like a barnacle. No obsidian-smooth Ashling ever dislodged themselves from my grasp when I lived in the desert, and no Stoneman ever will. I dig in as deep as I can into the rough skin of the being and sense our direction change as it tries to scrape me off against the ground. Too tightly twisted onto its shape, I remain. Even as it wearies of the rapid burrowing I cling to its joints and furrows and force its direction to change. The earth may blind us both, but my sense of direction is keen, and when it emerges again to breathe, it breaches into sodden layers of sedge. It struggles to roll without slipping, but I'm in its eyes, between its fingers, pushing mud under its feet, and soon the fallen angel returns. It is not alone. Angels are creatures of unity and cooperation, even in chaos. The blows land upon inch-thick layers of rupestrine skin. Nothing cuts the Stoneman, but, one chip at a time, the armour of its neck and head comes apart, cracks, cracks further under the beating force of magical hammers and chunks of ferrite lugged from the desert. Its braincase begins to split, and it groans horribly. Its first attacker is also its last. Swinging its enormous fists until the end, breaking wings and legs and hips wherever it isn't blocked by blue magic, the viciously grinning angel drives a golden spike into its brain, and it collapses. There is loud noise, the sound of God laughing, the sound of hain screaming. The other Urtelem are long gone. This one's miscoordination only earned it a slower death. I regather my mass back into a two-legged shape. It doesn't feel like noise. It feels like quiet. Pink angels are seeing to the wounded, but the straw-haired one, the one with the savage smile, is watching me. I watch back, and after a moment I face her. A familiar hain-javelin lies in a puddle. Broken. She picks it up by its point, and offers me the splintered handgrip. I can envision a multitude of possibilities arising from my refusal, and even more from my acceptance. I take it.[/i] [hider=Writing first-person stuff in an interesting way is hard]This post is basically just adding detail to things, trying to enliven the exact mechanics of how Vestec slowed down his horde and the kind of terrain the inevitable battle might take place in. Violet travels with the horde of hain and angels, which eventually grow used to them. When the avatar Violence appears to lead the rabble, they slink away and stay as far as possible. Vestec causes the horde to slow down by imbuing them with a creeping collective psychosis, causing them to grow depressed and apathetic, spending most of their time sleeping, staring at the mist or trying to overcome insomnia. The stagnant army finds itself in an expansive, cold peat bog, with occasional trees and slight hills separated by ponds. A pack of Urtelem attacks the horde. Violence destroys most of them, but one had the misfortune of separating from the rest and was eventually disorientated by Violet and slowly killed by a bunch of fallen angels dive-bombing it with heavy stones and weapons of light, not without injury. The angels appreciate Violet's contribution to the fight, and they seem to accept him as one of their own.[/hider]