[center][u][b][h2]The Jade Citadel of Hongol[/h2][/b][/u][/center]

The city of Hongol was dying, like a beast with its hide pierced in a dozen places, it spasmed and resisted. But its end was inevitable.

A new wound had been torn at its heart, the palace at the center of the Jade Citadel had finally been cracked, and the doom of so many tyrants and petty kings that the Emperor had brought across Terra had arrived. And it had one name upon its lips, [i]Narthan Dume[/i].

            	A specter haunted the Jade Citadel. Gilded in gold, it drifted up through the weeping wound in the palace walls and dug deep into what few functional arteries led through to its thrashing heart. Where once desperate men huddled behind barricades with weapons clutched close, now lay only corpses with faces fixed in a death mask of simple confusion. Death came to them so swiftly and with such fierce mercy that they had never even known to be afraid.

Like ants before the sun.

It was kindness, the revenant had explained to her soulless flock. The braying beasts beyond the walls would not be so restrained in their slaughter. She could hear them working their way inwards now, a rising tide of desperate cries and defiant last stands against the Emperor’s overwhelming host. Room by room, and in whatever few ways the two yet remained distinct, the palace transformed into a charnel house.

And so the Custodian led her strike team deeper into the palace, pilfered plans and architectural data spooling out across her helmet’s readout to keep her on target. The Pacificans had tried, in these last desperate moments of the siege, to impede Imperial forces by what tools they had at hand. Together Reva’s retinue passed burned-out stairwells and navigated briskly around explosive ordnance stuffed haphazardly into the walls and floor. Had these lost and damned faced mere men today, perhaps these crude implements might have been enough, but these were neither cruel nor madcap enough to be the machinations of Narthan Dume, so Reva pressed on.

The further into the citadel they moved, the gaudier the décor became.  Baudy paintings sat beside titanic statues marking now fetid fountains. A few of her soulless soldiers snatched valuables off the tables they passed, stuffing their pockets with meager riches now abandoned. Reva did not stop them.  Worse plunder would come.

She found Narthan in the dust-clogged throne room.  Amidst the splintered sunbeams pooling in through a ruined ceiling and past the twenty-meter double doors from which Reva had entered, Narthan stood calm upon the dais. He was not dressed for war, opting instead to face the end in a ragged mockery of kingly clothes and with a scepter in one hand. Behind him lay the ruins of stained glass and shredded paintings in splintered frames. To either side of the room were portcullises of similar size to the main doors, each constructed from crude iron and beaten into the rough shape of a grate.

 As the ten witch-slayers spread out to guard their exit with swords drawn, Reva advanced with plain purpose upon the Dais.
“You are beaten, Dume.” She said, standing now only some meters away in what must have been the royal court. Ravings were etched into the walls in unknown script, and piled high in every seat lay half-functional scrap from humanity’s finest hour. “Your darkling empire fades. Sound the surrender and live.”

Dume’s was a great and powerful sigh, and the old man then spoke, any space for ire long lost somewhere in the siege. “There is no place of honor that would suffice.”

“It would not be honor, tyrant. You would be brought before your subjects in chains. You would serve in darkness at the Emperor’s mercy.” Reva knew Narthan was mad, and so she saw no reason to lie.

“An incredible negotiator, you are.” The tyrant replied, too tired to laugh but not so far gone to keep from smiling.  “I do not fear death enough for a half-life to be preferable. If my empire should fall, I will go with it.”

 Narthan Dume lifted his once kingly scepter, pointing the end towards Reva as if making a decree. He strained then, pulling at the skeins of the waking world, trying to draw familiar power from it and into himself. With such carnage about them, the empyrean was surely alight, both blistering and biting and in need of but a strong hand to give it direction in the affairs of man. He opened his mind to the arcane, allowing it one final time to scour his mind in exchange for unseen aid.

And, for the first time since the death of the Unspeakable King, Narthan Dume felt nothing, his scepter merely flickered with a sickly green light before sputtering back into impotence. Even the voices had gone.

Dumbfounded, Dume again tried to snatch power. Dismal silence was his only reward. It was then that Narthan jabbed a finger at Reva.

“What have you done?” The tyrant demanded answers, mad curiosity replacing cold acceptance. His eyes, once weary and half lidded, now beheld Reva with feverish awe.

“Surrender and you shall know. The Emperor has no need for such trivial secrets between allies.” Reva tempted him now, her tone shifting from one of winter to that of spring. “Already our army has outgrown any this world can muster, and now you see even sorcery cannot avail you.”
True though the Custodian’s words were, they stung Dume deeply, and never had there been a tyrant unruled by pride. “Outgrown? You speak so surely after ruining but one of my plans. Did you truly think me outdone after just the one?”

With sudden speed, Dume swept his scepter from side to side, pointing to both portcullises and activating them with the rudimentary technology housed within his staff. Old and rusted, the gates groaned open, and somewhere from deep down both hallways came crashing footfalls.

“You know it won’t be enough.”  The Custodian spoke neither in boast nor condemnation.

Explaining himself to the godling before him, Narthan said with resignation and an all-too-human little shrug of his shoulders, “I have to try.”

 “I would have been insulted if you hadn’t.”

She was upon him, lunging with blade drawn before her words had registered in Narthan’s ears, and a crashing blow from her vaultsword struck true against his side, sending the mere man clear across the room. The power field he’d tried to hide within the weaves of his clothes strained to diffuse the energy from the blow, and it was that same diffraction that saved his life when he smashed into the far wall and slumped to the floor agonized but alive.

Without Reva having said anything, her soulless host moved into the room now, trading blades for volkite weapons as the thundering footsteps grew nearer and shook dust from rafters.

Briefly, Reva considered securing her target and making her exit. Her mission was Narthan Dume, and she had him. But when she saw the hulking terrors shuffling out from both abandoned hallways, Reva knew she could not leave the Unification forces to put them down.

They were humanoid in only the vaguest sense and towered at over twice Reva’s height. Too many malformed limbs stitched together upon a vat-grown body, and whatever gene-engineering had been used to promote skin and muscle growth had never been coded with a cessation point.  Skin stretched tight across bulging muscles at rest and hung in loose, gruesome flaps elsewhere.  Loose, sloughing flesh at the joints had been peeled back and stapled out of the way in some vain hope to promote movement at the cost of comfort.  Their stout legs, each as thick as an ancient tree limb, dragged laboriously in front of one another, blood sluicing from unfinished stitching, until they finally emerged in full from the depths of Narthan’s lab.

Their armor, such as it was, had been beaten into rough shape from battlefield salvage and bolted directly into the bones of these abominations. When Reva’s eyes fell upon the armor itself, a tactical readout across her visor confirmed what she’d suspected. The armor had been pillaged in part from fallen Thunder Warriors, and Reva suspected the abominations themselves had been sourced from similar grave robbery.

Dume was not the first to create gene-warriors, nor even the first to try and reverse engineer Thunder Warriors themselves. Few had approached the concept with such vile and cavalier butchery. Scabbing brands upon the scalps of these shambling horrors marked them as the third and fifth of whatever abhorrent imperative Dume had enacted. Had Dume been afforded even a few more days in his lab, Reva could only speculate upon the scale of horrors he might have unleashed.

The mutants were armed with but crude weapons, steel rebar with a ferrocrete slab affixed one end as a brutish sledge. Each held the behemothic tool in one oversized fist. Other arms, grafted upon any joint heedless of whether it might support them, also clutched the titanic club for further support.

When the first mutant lifted the sledge and swung it in anger, a volley of volkite rose to meet him.  The stink of cooked meat clogged the air when the slayers struck true, boiling through armor and bursting skin to ash. Yet still the beast’s swing could not be stopped, redundant muscles assuring the follow-through.

It missed the witch-slayers, if it could even be considered aiming for them with how much distance they yet maintained between the two groups, and instead the great sledge slammed into the wall beside the mutant. The throne room shook, and more sickly sunlight spilled in from cracks spiderwebbing their way further up the walls. When the behemoth wrenched the weapon free, it took a shuddering stride forward and swung again in slow, sweeping advance.

Avoiding the brute was trivial for the soulless host, who stepped backwards in unison and fired their weapons once more. This time a shot took off half the mutant’s head, cooking the grey matter within. It merely blinked its remaining unfocused eye and tried to swing once more.
It collapsed in death halfway into the royal gallery after half a dozen more rounds of volkite fire had charred its thick hide. Smoke rose from the corpse in thick columns, dancing amidst the dust.

The death of its kin drove the second abomination to blood-madness, and its wild eyes settled upon the guardian in gold before it.  It tried to crush her with a savage overhead swing, but Reva merely raised her sword in answer, catching the ferrocrete slab upon the edge and feeling the ground groan beneath her from the strain. She twisted her body then and brought the gene-mutant’s cudgel down to the floor beside her, sending up splinters of stone.

The abominate creature was not given a second chance to strike.  The custodian’s first strike had taken out one of its legs, and the second had swept up from groin to shoulder as the brute collapsed forward, carving meat from bone until the misshapen horror split in half, collapsing to the gallery floor on either side of her. Already the flesh had started to rot.
In death, it too had looked confused.

With the deed done, Reva addressed her pariahs while she shackled the half-lucid Dume and heaved him to his feet. If Dume resisted, no one could tell. His legs were shattered in multiple places, and he breathed ragged through blood-speckled lips.
“Just needed a bit more time…” He managed to say before he spat up another mouthful of blood. “You must admit… they had potential.”
Despite the pain, the mad tyrant laughed.

Reva ignored him, instead addressing her retinue. “Collapse those two hallways. We’ll excavate them later should the Emperor have need.”
A pair of explosions followed soon after, but by then the Custodian had left the throne room. She dragged Dume, mercy-blade pressed to his throat, past the first swell of Unification forces that had broken through into the innermost sanctum of the Jade Citadel.  And though word traveled quickly, it was Reva’s voice that crackled through the voxnet to deliver the official word.

Across channels both Imperial and Pacifican, the Custodian’s voice was rolling thunder, “Attention all Imperial forces, this is Custodian Reva. Narthan Dume has fallen, and with him the Jade Citadel. This land and its people are returned again to their rightful ruler– the Emperor. Treat our new Imperial citizens well, for we have liberated them from a madman this day. As for any that still claw at independence?”

The line went dead for but a second before alighting again loud enough to be heard across the dimming din of battle.

“Kill them all.”