By the virtue and power of me mostly Muttonhawk and BBeast, we have the finale of Xos' arc after something like 5 or 6 years. This collab itself was been written on and off for a span of some two years, but let none ever say that Mk. II is dead!
There's an epilogue that will get posted by one of the others later tonight, too.
2+ years in the writing BBeast, Cyclone, Muttonhawk, Rtron
Long ago, Zephyrion was banished to Chronos. His isolation was interrupted by the plane-destroying battle between Jvan and Vowzra, forcing Zephyrion on a desperate jaunt through the Mechanism of Change. The turbulent journey split Zephyrion into three entities: The meditatively creative Zephyrion, the enigmatically prophetic Aihtiraq, and the murderously destructive Xos/Zyus, who was the dominant personality. They forged the Primordial Spark, a destructive source of limitless power, which Xos used to wage war on Galbar, vowing vengeance against the gods who failed to stop Zephyrion’s banishment and to bring a new age of desolation.
First Xos murdered Kyre, who confronted Xos when he silently approached Galbar, and hid the remains in the Shattered Plains. Yet Aihtiraq witnessed the murder and warned Toun, while also sharing the circumstances of Zephyrion’s "death". Toun took it as his personal quest to track down and stop Xos, preventing further divine deaths (including Xos’) at any cost.
Meanwhile, Xos confronted Ventus in the Celestial Citadel for stealing Zephyrion’s power. He destroyed Ventus, sundered the Celestial Citadel, and carried the uppermost spire (which contained a scrying mirror) to greater heights. Vestec, who had discovered Kyre’s remains, sought out Zephyrion in the Celestial Citadel. Xos attacked Vestec, eating his arm, and Vestec fled with mortal injuries. Teknall responded to Vestec’s cries for help, healing his injuries and building him a prosthetic arm. Toun, following Xos’ trail, came to Vestec. They hatched a plan: Vestec would wield the Tomb Weaver against Xos (with some conditions) to deflect Logos’ suspicions. Vestec was given the Tomb Weaver, ready to appear when called.
At this time, Xos attacked Jvan, against whom he had a special grudge. The fight ended in a stalemate, with Xos resolving to attack Metera and Oevadis instead. Jvan sent recordings of the fight to the other gods. Toun then tracked Xos to another planet. There Xos ambushed Toun and Toun fled. In the aftermath Aihtiraq visited Toun with three prophecies: that Xos will slay one more, that Aihtiraq will reclaim from Xos something he stole, and that Aihtiraq will extinguish himself but something new will dawn. Toun and Teknall then met up to exchange intelligence before resuming the hunt.
Xos found Lazarus. In exchange for sowing atheism among dwarven refugees, Lazarus told Xos that in order to create he must calm his mind (for Xos cannot create). Lazarus also told Xos of the weaknesses of his enemies, including that Teknall had offspring.
Teknall visited Ilunabar and Kinesis in Pictaraika to discuss the threat which Xos posed. He warned Kinesis to lay low. He and Ilunabar also made a device to track where the scrying mirror in the Celestial Citadel was looking.
Xos, meanwhile, had returned to Caelum, Zephyrion’s planet he had taken with him from Chronos. There he used what he had learned from Lazarus to make a corporeal form for himself. He then persuaded Zephyrion to come with him to Galbar.
By sending elementals to target Kinesis, Xos managed to bait Teknall into the open and ambush him. Although Teknall weathered a direct blast from the Primordial Spark for record time, Xos eventually overpowered and nearly killed him. Miraculously, Teknall was revived by the combined efforts of Toun, Ilunabar, Kinesis, and Conata and a little assistance from Aihtiraq. (Aihtiraq also hinted that Xos may be fated to consume himself through self-loathing.) Teknall was left partially crippled, though. He and his daughters gave Goliath some substantial upgrades to compensate.
Toun had meanwhile continued the hunt, after a brief diversion to do a favour for Aihtiraq. As Toun closed in on Xos, Teknall created the Hyperspatial Barrier, a mobile shield specially designed to block the Primordial Spark. He hands it to Goliath to give to Toun. He also deployed spy satellites to watch for Xos.
All parties are rapidly closing in on Xos and they have power to burn.
Against the speckled black of space above Galbar, Toun's clay robe floated heavily about him like hair under flowing water. It betrayed his stillness and hid his predatory gaze. So still he hung on the planet's gravity that he could hear – smell – his quarry through the vacuum. The acrid black smoke between the stars.
Ahead, between the curving planet and a metal speck of orbital sensors crafted by Teknall, was the crumbling turret claiming the last vestiges of Zephyrion's Celestial Citadel. Therein containing Ilunabar's spy mirror. Curse it. This was its lair. Toun watched, his hands creaking tight around the haft of his porcelain spear. He watched with his one blue eye and his gambit in mind.
* * *
Motes of dust and pulverised stone drifted in weightlessness through a desolate, floorless hallway open to the planet far below. The walls were cracked and all the more lifeless for their deathly white hue, and there was no sign of life. There wasn’t even the faintest of sounds now that the Celestial Citadel had crested Galbar’s heavens and ascended to airless heights.
A projectile arced up from the wispy clouds below and rocketed up with deadly precision, tumbling and reorienting itself once the glinting spires came within view. It was a massive stone, and it struck squarely upon a wall and half-demolished an entire room within the ruined alcazar. The stone was shattered amongst the cloud of floating dust.
The destruction was no matter, for the stone had been a mere vessel for something greater. The Vizier Murmur, djinni lord of sound, had abandoned the vessel’s medium and transferred himself into the very walls of that hallowed place while he awaited his master’s arrival.
While hosting the living explosion, the walls faintly resounded to the tune of Murmur’s rhythm and his impatience; but alas, there was only one soul – or rather, a piece of it – around to hear his song and cower. Zephyrion waited in the highest chamber of the spire, where Ilunabar’s magical seeing-mirror rested beneath the colossal gemstone that adorned the tower’s top and bestowed the fortress with flight.
From the heart of the decrepit divine, a gentle breeze spilled forth. In the days of old, the god’s very presence conjured an unyielding storm. Still, even this remnant of his power was enough to fill at least that one chamber with a thin air, windows and all, and so Murmur extended half his body out from the marbled floor and walls.
"Lord Zephyrion," the new Vizier spoke, "I would have you know that I did not seek this station, nor turn against noble Ventus."
"Lo! Ye, the true, the brave, ye who remain here in the orts of mine own demesne, claim no treason? When the first of mine seed was cast down and Zyus searched for a replacement, ye answered his summons and accepted this lofty station."
He did not deny it.
"Just so."
And he did not stomach it.
"Just so," the god spat back, breath tainted with vitriol.
The two of them were silent thereafter.
When it finally came, the Shadow’s sudden arrival was more subtle than Murmur’s. There was an almost imperceptible sense of dread, a surge of divine power, and then a rift from which Xos emerged.
"My lord," the Vizier greeted him. Yet Xos had been looking to his brother, who returned the look with only baleful silence.
"I must compliment this new mien. The enemy will tremble when they behold you."
"Hmph." The dark god looked down, sparing a moment to admire his own handiwork and simulacrum. His armor and robes, black as the void between stars, were now also like supple putty before his will and adamant against the feeble blows of any adversary. Terrible was the Shade’s look, to match his withering aura.
Yes, he thought that Teknall had trembled upon his arrival. "My might has grown, and in more ways than you can observe. I have spent the past days tracking a precious thing, and I have found it. It will be most useful in the work to come: as things stand, I believe Teknall either dead or mortally wounded. Like Toun, I drew him out into a trap, but the crafter predictably did not fare so well in a real contest of strength."
Zephyrion was aghast. Teknall, this ruined citadel's creator, struck down.
Fortunately, Murmur was enthralled by his master’s words, and Xos likewise enjoyed his gloating too much to spare any notice.
"But the others would surely be wise to such ruses by now. So I would burn the tumor that is Jvan, bit by bit, until it is small and weak enough to be torn out completely. Firstly, a direct assault on Jvan’s bastion in space…"
* * *
He's arrived, Toun, with company. Shall I strike now?
Toun's eye flashed in space and then narrowed. "You will stay put, brother. Your daughters may have revived you, but it was by small chance Xos had not obliterated you entirely. Convalesce in safety." He huffed to himself. Teknall could at least send his Goliath instead, if he was so eager to make use of his new barrier. "I sense him. Shortly, he shall sense me in turn."
* * *
"This plan is folly, nay, anathema to reason," Zephyrion at last spat, "Teknall and even Vestec were dear to me, and I counted them among my friends and loyal…"
He stammered, struggling for words.
"Lapdogs? I inherited your memory, brother – or at least pieces of it. I remember their derision and looks well, and they shall mark as much on my countenance when I butcher them in the sight of mortals, djinn, and their peers!"
"…disciples, perhaps. Errant little siblings too foolish to see my wisdom, not some twisted enemies. Do you not recall Teknall laying the divine stones of this very palace?"
"An empty gesture that means even less now than it did those aeons ago. Let his blood be the mortar of a terrible new fortress."
"You kill them all for what, pride? Amusement?"
"I kill them because their mere existence is an affront to us. I am the God of slaying gods; these doubts of yours are unbecoming, and besides, it’s far too late to stray the path. Even now, I sense that one of the wretches skulks outside."
But the skulker's voyeurism had ceased.
Zephyrion pointedly turned towards one of the balconies looking out over the planet. Easing onto its cracked tiled floor was Toun, elegantly transitioning from a weightless hover to a determined gait, heedless of the rushing gas pushing against him. He had his eye only for Xos and his spear held behind in one hand. He stopped and threw Zephyrion a brief, ambiguous glance.
"Toun!" Zephyrion started. But then further words were not forthcoming. What was there to say? How could he even begin to speak?
Toun, though usually one to castigate at every turn, was wordless. Dangerously wordless.
Xos still faced Zephyrion and did not even deign to spare the porcelain god a glance.
"Found your courage?" Xos sneered. The words were probably addressed to Toun on that balcony behind him, but his empty gaze was transfixed onto Zephyrion. It bored into him, searching. Xos was displeased with the emotions he saw in his brother.
Toun's eye flashed. First slowly, and then speeding to a snap, his spear found both his hands and was pointed forward. Toun kicked off the floor with a shockwave behind him.
Xos turned.
A deep, echoing voice spoke in the same instant. It was neither Toun nor Xos.
"I have found your end."
A bewildered spin brought Xos around just in time to witness the heavens themselves rippling through a great window. A figure emerged from the void between stars, light itself bending around to conceal his winged form. His light-eating blade swung towards Xos' helmet, and the Shade’s movement left only enough measure for the divine sword to find his torso instead of its intended target. Its insurmountable edge cleaved through armor and inky flesh alike.
Xos was cleanly bisected from the shoulder down to the waist.
Toun’s spear struck Xos with as much effect as his diversion could have been expected to; the point of feeble porcelain had shattered upon contact with the sable metal.
Still, an otherworldly, agonized howl echoed out from somewhere within the murderer god’s helmet. Toun tsked. Xos was still very much alive. He cast off his helmet with enough force for it to strike Toun and send him stumbling backwards, then sloughed out of the rest of his shell of armor. A viscous, inky mass remained from the clattering plates. The two soupy halves of Xos, little more than black ichor, congealed within a heartbeat. They recombined. Now the Shade stood even taller, his horrific form bared, his wrathful visage all the more terrifying. He regarded his sword-slashing ambusher with an unflinching, baleful glare.
The ambusher was two white lights peering back at Xos from a divinely wrought helmet between two great, feathered wings. Their gaze had a weight of inevitability almost as heavy as the gloss-edged black Pleroma Plate cladding him, his cold gaze almost betraying his disgust. The sword of Singularity burned the very space to black at his side. Logos – the king god of order – was returned. The blade turned to slash again.
And just as soon, the wounded Xos cast him away with more force and fury than mortal eyes or minds would ever be able to grasp: As Logos closed the distance, Xos split his own flesh to produce the Primordial Spark from where it had been hidden within. From that wellspring of magic surged forth an endless tide of power that crackled in Xos' grasp. Xos threw an opened palm out to strike Logos squarely upon his breastplate. The self-proclaimed King of Gods tried to sever the shooting hand with a cut of his sword, but the humming Singularity barely moved too slowly.
In that small area before Xos’ hand, space itself expanded at a physics-breaking speed. The energy marshalled by Xos was intended not to burn or shatter as was his usual wont, but to push and expand. In an instant, Logos, the window that he’d stepped through, three balconies, and half of that entire wall of the Celestial Citadel were expelled at a speed far faster than even that of light, tiny lengths of space erupting so fast and in such unimaginable quantities that even the spaces between atoms became great enough to rip molecules apart. All that remained of the bits of air and stone hurled out was a fine trail of particles that extended for lightyears. But, some ineffable power of Logos or his armor had spared him from being torn asunder. Xos could sense that much.
Despite his best efforts, the dark god shuddered and heaved. Black blood spilled out of his maw. Logos’ cheap blow had done more harm than appearances had first suggested. It only took a moment’s reprieve for him to recover enough to tell the vermin in his presence just what he thought. "Hmph. The so-called King of the Gods cannot match me!" he spat, "...I will enjoy ripping your crownless king asunder! You hear me, Toun? Zephyrion?! You’ll never find all of his pieces! I shall hack and tear and cleave until nothing remains of the wretch! His Natural Order will be burnt away!"
Spittle and blood flew as Xos wildly raved, the droplets burning holes through the alabaster-white floor where they landed. He held the Spark up high and drank from the fount of its power, reinvigorating himself. The thing's radiance was still blinding, almost bright enough to give substance to Xos’ shadowy mass. And yet.
Teknall’s voice commented in the back of Toun’s mind. The Spark is… dimmer. Perhaps he’s drained its power somehow? He’s done something amiss, anyway. I’ll run a proper analysis on the spectrum.
Toun glowered as he silently responded. "Perhaps your analysis can explain why he still thinks he may prevail?" He flicked his spear down and a new point shot from its end as if telescoping from the broken haft. "Xos is no fool. Logos was not harmed by him and yet he believes himself capable of more."
Meanwhile, Zephyrion pleaded with the shade out loud. "Always did I contemn that Pretender’s arrogance, his claim to lord over us all; Logos deserves your scorn and wrath more than any other. Cast him down, but spare the others!"
Toun glanced back at Zephyrion. His eye rounded in a shock of reality he had obscured to himself until now. "I wished you were alive, brother," he said with a sincerity unexpected even by himself. "Now I wish you were better than this. Have you no idea what he has done?"
It was only then that Xos finally cast a glance towards Toun. No mockery remained in his mien now; only lethal intent. In one hand he still clutched the Spark, smoking fingers like a cage spindly around it as he drank from the fountain of might. His other black hand moved in some gesticulation so quickly that it was only a blur, and then by the dark god’s power Ilunabar’s mirror (still miraculously intact) was wrenched from its place atop a cloud of magical vapors. He flung the whole thing at Toun.
"Vestec! Must I signal you again!?"
* * *
Spiralling, chaotic tumbling within a nimbus of seething radiation and tortured space. Unbefitting of one such as Logos. He stretched out his wings and order returned in an instant. Logos stood unmoving like an anchor in the starscape. The excess energy from Xos' attack radiated off the outside of the Pleroma plate, equilibrating with the void.
As Logos' eyes scanned the foreign starscape, he had a brief moment for reflection. This Xos, this shadow of Zephyrion, had delivered a mighty blow, but not beyond his preparations. It was power that could shatter planets. Logos was familiar with such power. But Xos wielded it crudely, immaturely. Through making an example of Xos, Logos would show the others why he was the only true King.
He found a wake of stretched spacetime, the trail that had been left by Xos’ blow. With a single beat of his wings, he crossed the vast distance back to Galbar.
* * *
Time crystallized in the tower, stretching the moment to infinity.
"Power belongs to those who know how to wield it, child."
With a wave of his hand, Logos compressed gravity and tensed space. The moment of frozen time snapped, and the pent up force struck Xos. Through some clever manipulation of the Primordial Spark he deflected some of it, and even that tiny amount of recoil was devastating to the surroundings. Ilunabar’s mirror, still in mid-flight towards its target of Toun, was shattered into a million pieces of jagged shrapnel. Only its divine nature spared it from being utterly vaporized. Toun shielded his eye with his forearm and found his form blasted back to the balcony he arrived through.
Even the bulk of Zephyrion’s halituous form was sent hurtling away. "Woe and wanion!" Zephyrion cursed at Logos, or Xos, or perhaps even the world itself. He flailed, but whatever vestiges of power that the First Storm still clung to were not enough to rebuff the explosive force, to the disappointment of none.
By some inexplicable means, Xos’ discarded armor held fastly and clung to the floor where it’d been cast even as the entire remnant of the Celestial Citadel began tumbling. And as for Xos, for all the power that had recoiled off of him and his terrible weapon, he was still flung unceremoniously down towards the great blue orb that was Galbar.
Toun slowed to a stop and reoriented to observe the aftermath. "Teknall, is our brother Vestec an accomplice to this mayhem? WHERE IS HE!?!"
I can’t spot him on my sensors. I’d bet he’s waiting for a time of maximum inconvenience to make his dramatic entrance. Oi, Vestec! Hurry up or you’ll miss the show!
Furious, Toun's limbs grew and folded in extra joints. "Argh! Is this the time he chooses to subvert his own promises!? When the murderer-!?!"
There was a cataclysmic shining explosion, and Galbar’s sky bled and was awash in crimson light.
Toun had been still too long, he realised. He held his spear in preparation to travel down, only to find his direct path blocked by an unexpected foe. Xos' own discarded armour stood in full form.
The porcelain god's smooth face sneered. "Stand aside, elemental. My family's lives are not worth your impudence!"
The armor buckled, bent, and deformed as it shambled closer with disjointed steps. The Vizier had somehow entered it; his flicker reverberated through every bit of the ebony metal, animating it with uncanny spasms.
"You’ve thrown your lives away with this futile plot," Murmur proclaimed. The air was sparse and too thin to breathe, but the djinni lord’s voice thundered through the stone floor. There was no further warning – in the next instant, Murmur threw himself forward, the armor itself grasping hold of the Porcelain Sire.
* * *
Xos tore through the stratosphere at relativistic speeds, but he had been buffeted by winds far greater than this, gales more violent than the blow that had cast him out of the Citadel just then, forces more terrible than anything that the likes of Logos and his ilk could ever hope to muster. They were fleas compared to the mindless, chaotic, raging fury of the Mechanism of Change, and he had a way to show them – a portal to that place rested right there in his palm. Its burning winds spilled forth.
Zephyrion’s Shade discharged a pulse of energy downward from the Spark, levelling a few meaningless mountains and villages on the surface below in order to quickly negate most of his velocity. Once he’d finished arresting his motion and arrived at a stable float, he released the Spark from his grasp and allowed it to float in the space between his two hands. Wrenching it further open, he expanded the mote to a few thousand times its size, from a pinprick to an orb as large as his own head. It still glowed with the fury of a star, and indeed it would have scorched Galbar like a second sun were it not for Xos’ own shadowy mass incidentally shielding the planet’s surface as he put himself between the two, moving the orb to his breast and leaning back so as to point it at the distant heights of the Celestial Citadel.
Clouds all around him were suddenly transformed into raging infernos as the molecules of water vapor were split into hydrogen and oxygen, then left to violently recombine – collateral damage from what discharge was now erupting from the widened Spark.
Even through frozen time, Logos’ musings on power had reached Xos, and the dark god had spent the last few moments ruminating upon them. "I couldn’t agree more," he laughed across the sky and space, right into Logos’ hearing. "Witness it!"
A ray of divine energy, twisted by Xos’ destructive aspect and malevolence, beamed towards Logos and the Celestial Citadel.
* * *
Death ray incoming, announced Teknall's voice to both Toun and Logos.
Logos cast a dispassionate glance to Galbar and Xos below. He flicked Singularity and projected a spell of knotted gravity. As Xos' ray ascended from Galbar, it lensed around the concentrated lump of gravity, was deflected by a few degrees, and sailed past the Celestial Citadel, past the ring of ice and rock girding Galbar, and into the void. All the palace and its inhabitants suffered was a wave of heat from the near miss.
On Galbar below, the burst of incandescent air stopped growing, contained by a faint ring of blue light. Please try to keep the fight off Galbar, Teknall whimpered.
* * *
Cast out from his own dilapidated bastion, Zephyrion flailed about. The whirling winds that made up his body had been near totally flayed away by the violence of the blast, but now his essence seized at the rarified air all around. He drew it into himself, a living squall once more, and with that mass was able to exert some drag and finally arrest his own motion. He regained his sense of orientation, and with a start, beheld the Celestial Citadel in the distance at nearly his own altitude. It was falling faster and faster as the last traces of the enchantment that had held it aloft for countless eons were broken, the magic fading not in one singular puff but more as a drawn-out sigh.
Zephyrion watched in mute shock, unable to move and scarcely able to think. He had neither eyes nor ears, but his divine perception was still sharp enough to sense the ongoing struggle even from afar.
When the armor fell upon Toun, Zephyrion could see his brother's senses were assaulted. The sable metal was deathly cold. It leeched warmth and life alike with its mere touch, and in their place it left emptiness and traces of Xos’ withering aspect. Its guest brought the indescribable tumult that resonated through the armor, into Toun’s body, and into his mind. Vibrations with a force terminal to mortals and frenzying or fainting to other beings lesser than a god rang out in a maddening din. Toun’s divinity spared him, though the insufferable noise was still distracting. That was all the Vizier could truly hope to do.
Toun brought back his spear in one hand and drove its point into the pauldron of the armor, but the brittle tip shattered feebly. Even if it had pierced the metal, what could it have done to the living explosion puppeteering it? The suit’s appendages flailed, a gauntlet striking at Toun’s face. Words of conviction cut through the deafening cacophony, "The master is invincible! His might ineffable, His triumph inevitable! By His will, Galbar will be remade!"
The words struck Toun in a place Murmur may not have been aiming for. From where his face was struck to the side, he slowly turned his unharmed head back to the helmet of Murmur's armour. The clay around his one eye crackled outward with enraged carmine fractures, and he bellowed into Murmur's consciousness. "You speak of a brother of mine!" The words ended with Toun taking the haft of his broken spear up from below and bodily lifting the armour up and over his head, twisting to slam it against the remaining floor of the chamber. "Not entropy itself! He is my kin!"
In that moment, distant Zephyrion at last steeled his resolve. He breathed in deeply, drawing in a great bulk of air, and then exhaled it behind himself so as to rocket through the sky. The clouds, still far below, bore witness to the crashing spire and its ancient lord’s desperate pursuit.
Back within the Celestial Citadel, Xos’ animated armor suffered not so much as even a scratch from Toun’s spear; however, the blow squeezed out just an ounce of the foul magic that had gone into the plate’s making, and that was enough for a patch of the floor below to be shattered into pieces so fine as to be dust. That was no matter; the tower’s rapid descent imbued them all with weightlessness, so next they reorientated so as to make the once-ceiling their new floor and carry on the fight. Stone dust filled the air. A wave of white marble-sand struck Toun in the face, carried by the Vizier’s cackling. "And what does that matter? He’ll kill you all the same! He’d sooner die himself than suffer the thought that anyone could rival His might!"
Though it was unbreaking, the armor could be deformed. Murmur’s reverberations warped one ebony metal gauntlet into a wicked spike, then plunged it toward Toun’s exposed eye. Toun grabbed the spike an inch before its target without even a shiver.
"And yet He cannot die," the thousand-thousand year old lord of thunder insisted, screaming through the spike. "Your fate is bound to Him, your demise the only possible outcome."
Toun's blue eye grew manic. Again, his retorts ran silent for a telling time. The cracks around his eye grew to encompass his cheek, forehead, and the smoothed over place where an ear would have been.
But Murmur was no god. The eye narrowed and shone brighter. "You are incorrect," Toun whispered deafeningly back to Murmur's mind. "He must not die."
A porcelain foot cracked into the armor at the shoulder joint, sending the cuirass and the rest of the suit flying away from the spike-formed arm Toun held. It tumbled off without slowing and hit a wall, Murmur’s deleterious form pulverizing the structure behind as though the impact had been meteoric in its power. The suit sheared cleanly through the alabaster stone and spun wildly as it tumbled away into the vacuum of space, but Murmur remained undefeated, for the Celestial Citadel itself groaned as he moved through it.
Cracks and fissures erupted all along the ruined floor, forking like branching lightning towards Toun. Masonry and tile flexed and warped as though they were rubber, and from the growing cracks erupted stone dust fine and pale as flour. Through his feet, Toun heard the elemental’s mockery, "So what? You think He can be contained?" The rhythm of the Vizier’s voice quickened with laughter. "The hubris to think that you might be His jailer! The mere thought of Him erodes your will and cracks your feeble shell. More seemly is the thought that He would imprison you, if only that He might enjoy your droll demise for that much longer. But fear not; I doubt that His humor is so great as to deny you the grace of swift oblivion."
"My jailor?" Toun would have sneered if he could. "Wasted words. I should have crushed you rather-..." Toun's senses prickled above his head.
From outside, a familiar voice called out, "He comes!"
And in the very next moment, oblivion closed in.
* * *
Perturbations in the physics of his immediate vicinity offered Logos a heartbeat’s warning before Xos tore his way through spacetime. He, and the much-expanded Spark within his left palm, seemed to erupt out of nothingness. Once again amongst them within the Celestial Citadel, Xos immediately began a renewed assault upon Logos: he held the Primordial Spark out before his body, but did not unleash another mere beam of energy. For all his crudeness and brutality he had a murderous instinct and had seen the need to adapt. Just as a spear’s thrust could be easily sidestepped or parried, mere beams of energy had proven easy enough for Logos to deflect.
So with dizzying speed his right hand struck the Spark in scything motions. Each time his shadowy mass sliced into the blinding mote, it unleashed a pulse of energy that surged outwards in a two-dimensional plane parallel with the hand. Dozens, scores, hundreds of pulses he hurled at Logos, the planes coming to test his guard along every conceivable angle like slashing swords. Logos was a competent swordsman and parried many with Singularity, but many more of these waves of energy struck true. The resulting energy rocked the Celestial Citadel. Where Logos had set it into a lurch, the great spire was now tipping even further and threatening to come onto its side.
But the Pleroma Plate weathered each blow like a cliffside rebuffing the tide’s waves; through widening the target area of his attacks, Xos had diminished the strength behind each strike. It would take aeons to weather away the armor with such paltry splashing.
Yet Xos did not have aeons. A swing of Singularity cleaved a path through the planes of chaotic energy. With a grunt and two beats of his wings, Logos forced his way past Xos’s barrage, energy scattering off his star metal armour until he was within sword’s reach of Xos. There he lashed out at Xos with Singularity, only for the blade to cut at nothingness. The Shade vanished. Into nothingness he had slipped, and back out he returned. Now suddenly behind Logos, Xos fired a concentrated beam from the Primordial Spark before Logos could even spin about. He targeted the backside of his foe’s armor in the hopes that it would be weaker there, but the beam only flowered out over the Pleroma Plate, deflected into scattered flames of chaos. The manifestation of Order did not suffer errors or imperfections in his artifice, it seemed.
"Your handiwork impresses," Xos admitted. Logos answered with a slash that might have severed his foe’s head, but Xos raised the Spark; it sputtered, and from its mere hiccup erupted a shockwave potent enough to throw back Logos’ arm, and Singularity with it, mid-swing. "But did you really think it would be enough?"
Crowning that highest room and greatest spire of the Celestial Citadel was a great gemstone that Zephyrion had imbued with his power so long ago. That crystal, enchanted with the divine wind of a god, had held an entire fortress aloft and defied gravity for thousands of years, but no longer. It took Xos a mere instant to succeed in what the late Ventus had attempted, siphoning the jewel of its power. It shattered and exploded violently. The ceiling above was torn asunder, with mortar, shattered bricks, and shards of the crystal flying everywhere as shrapnel. The floor and the surrounding rooms below, all that was left of the spire, began to tumble wildly and descend into a long freefall as Galbar’s pull inexorably dragged them down. None of that mattered in the moment, of course, for the surroundings were so laden with power that space itself seemed to shimmer golden and distort like the warm air above a great fire.
Now, in that magic-drenched place, reality itself was almost a slave to Xos’ will. He unleashed the Primordial Spark’s full fury as a concentrated ray, and Logos prepared to deflect it like he had done before, but this time was different – it did not simply travel as a straight and predictable beam, but writhed and twisted like a snake. There was nowhere to dodge as space itself bent to Xos’ will, fighting against Logos’ own command over physics, and filled every direction with the beam. With an imperious shout, Logos subjugated the space around him. The physical congruities – the very relationships from point to point to point – bent around him and connected across imperceptible dimensions. When he twisted just as the beam closed in, Logos moved in a new direction and out of harm’s way.
The omnidirectional beam, free of its original target, barrelled through the Celestial Citadel towards where the porcelain god was wrestling with Murmur. Yet Xos' attention was wholly on Logos.
"No barrier of yours can stop my coming," Xos proclaimed, "and no trickery will let you evade my grasp for long."
The Shade reached into the very Fabric of Being and grabbed at the threads, ripping and pulling. A fifth dimension came unfurled, and then a sixth, and in the bubble of maddening and incomprehensible space that he had created, Xos maneuvered with all the grace of a giant stomping through a marsh’s muck. He and his Spark were so energetic that they needed no agility, not when every contour or obstacle in their way was seared out of existence.
More beams shot towards Logos like lances, from unknowable directions that mere eyes could not even comprehend. That was no longer the only threat, though; in his recklessness, Xos had torn a hole in the Tapestry of Creation that the gods had wrought in the beginning of time, and through this hole peered eyes from a lower, baser place, another layer of cloth inextricably tied to the first and yet meant to be forever separate.
* * *
While Toun had been watching Murmur echo through the floor beneath his feet, Xos was pouring immeasurable power into the surrounding space. Toun glanced up from the vexing djinni to see dark lightning from the Primordial Spark close in from every direction.
Suddenly, the furious roar of the Primordial Spark was replaced by bright blue light and a dampened crackle. Appearing with this sanctuary was a newcomer: a set of adamantine armour wrapped in distorted light with four legs and six arms, each holding a weapon. The figure pivoted at the waist to face Toun, staring at him with four glowing red eyes and revealing a circle radiating burning heat in the centre of its chest.
"The Goliath," Toun said, distracted.
The friendly voice which issued from the robot was at complete odds with its menacing appearance. "The Barrier works," said Teknall’s voice, with the robot Goliath pointing over its shoulder to the dome of blue light surrounding them. Outside, the fury of the Primordial Spark continued to arc against the Hyperspatial Barrier, which blazed white and blue but did not yield. Though Goliath’s face was expressionless, Teknall’s voice suggested a proud grin.
"So it would…seem." Some of the cracks around Toun's eye receded, but not all of them. His gaze darted around the energy ahead of them. "But that magnitude. That…encompassing across energies." Toun's voice took on a quiet quiver. He had all but forgotten about Murmur behind him. There was disgust and fear. "There is something there between Xos and Logos. Peering. Aching."
Goliath was silent for an uncomfortably long moment.
"You see only the ghost of a shadow; a singular facet of His incomprehensible might," the bothersome Vizier boomed from below. He was entirely ignored.
The Spark had stopped hammering against Teknall's barrier, but that only revealed a greater horror unfolding beyond. Toun was struck out of his rumination when the blue bubble surrounding them folded up into a point in Goliath's palm.
Goliath floated forwards and pressed the blue mote into Toun's hand. "Go. I'll handle the elemental." Goliath's other five hands armed and aimed their weapons.
Toun closed his spindly white hand around the barrier and spared Goliath a glance. "Mind Zephyrion. He is without and seeking ingress, despite his frailty." Toun gave a small nod, before shifting himself so suddenly into the greater fray as to cause specks of masonry dust to shoot away from his wake.
Murmur scoffed. "We have a score to settle, Artificer! You slew my lieutenant, but you’ll find me more formidable than Anshal!"
A compressional wave of energy surged through the stone floor at the speed of sound, racing for Goliath’s feet. With a small hop Goliath floated off the floor and its shimmering aura of reflective force effortlessly deflected the fraction of the shockwave which made it through the air. Goliath swung down a glaive edged with fire like the heart of a star, slicing through the floor to intercept the shockwave, but Murmur was not there.
"One thing I despise about you elementals is your hubris," Teknall growled as Goliath’s weapons scanned around it. "Galbar will be a safer place without the likes of you." One of the railguns snapped to attention and, with a hypervelocity adamantine slug, gouged a deep furrow into the floor. The shot was answered with a vengeful barrage of broken tiles, which bounced harmlessly off Goliath’s Mirror Armour.
A great chunk of the floor was then torn away, the freshly liberated ton of masonry propelled towards Goliath. Goliath answered the projectile with Teknall’s Maul, the hammer smashing and deflecting the great chunk of stone. The shattered masonry lazily rolled upward and away.
Halfway toward Goliath, though, a smaller chunk of the mass had freed itself and broke off in an arc towards the wall. Then it was the mangled floor that rested still, and the walls that reverberated with Murmur’s presence. As the Celestial Citadel continued its tumbling descent towards Galbar’s surface, thunderclaps coursed through the stone as well as the rarified-yet-slowly-thickening air; the Vizier maintained a relentless assault by blasting torrent after torrent of debris at the bulwark that was Goliath. And each torrent was answered by a staccato of gunfire which tore masonry into dust. Yet always Murmur seemed to have moved on to a slightly different part of the wall.
Enough delaying. Goliath, execute sequence.
Goliath paused its counter-assault for a moment. Another blast of gravel scattered off the construct as it drew a different set of weapons. Then, in a blink of an eye, it teleported across the intervening space and struck, and again, and again. But none of these blows were aimed at Murmur. Instead, a railgun shell sheared this part of the wall, a pickaxe struck a crack right here, a plasma sword sliced there through a support column, and an explosive shell blasted that fracture. In that moment, the Avatar of the Mason had isolated Murmur into a large chunk of free-floating stone. Too late had the Vizier realized his foe’s intentions, for all of his attention had gone toward maintaining his frenzied barrage, pressing the assault as the Goliath had seemingly wavered.
In the next moment, Goliath teleported into open space, caught the stone with three hooked chains, and pulled. Vibrations rippled down the chains. One of them suddenly went slack and tumbled away, its adamantine hook having been warped into a mangled mess and cast off the stone. Then the shivering scream of tortured metal sounded out as a second chain had several of its links ripped into splinters by the elemental’s furious oscillations. The third vibrated almost imperceptibly as Murmur attempted to probe his way along the links, but his advance was rebuffed as a stroke of lightning arced down the chain.
Goliath then teleported behind the stone, the final chain coming loose as it did so, and slammed the head of Teknall’s maul against the stone, shoving the chunk of masonry out of the Citadel. Murmur was truly trapped.
He might have shouted out pleading to his master, but here the rarefied air would not carry his voice, and even the Vizier suspected that there were no words to stir any semblance of passion or mercy in Xos.
In desperation he reverberated through the boulder with enough fury to sunder it, a task made easier by Teknall’s adamantine maul having cracked the stone. The would-be sarcophagus was broken, Murmur having stolen himself into one of the dozen pieces; but now he was helpless to do anything but hope, praying that Teknall would not thwart his escape before gravity brought him low enough for the atmosphere to be a suitable medium.
"Unlikely, Murmur." A speeding pellet of lead struck each marble chunk, sending them tumbling and briefly vibrating. This impromptu seismology revealed Goliath’s target. Goliath drew Teknall’s railgun, that large piece of high-tech artillery, pointed it at the stone containing Murmur, and channelled the Stellar Engine into its capacitors for a moment. "Begone."
The adamantine shell left the barrel of the railgun at stupefying velocities. It left a trail of incandescent plasma in its wake even in the rarified air. When it passed through the stone, the rock was near-instantly vaporised in a flash of blinding light. The shell continued unimpeded, trailing plasma for a short distance then continued its silent, endless flight into the void beyond. Behind it, the stone which held the djinni exploded into a rapidly-expanding burst of plasma and dust, billowing away from the Celestial Citadel due to the shell’s momentum.
Goliath stared at the explosion for a few moments. Satisfied that its quarry was no more, it turned back to the divine fray.
* * *
Mere moments ago the Plemora Plate had been as an impermeable citadel, but now it was dead weight. In this pocket of space where dimension after dimension had come unfurled, Logos was now exposed and vulnerable. He moved, translating through six dimensions of space to evade a deadly ray of energy, inching closer to the enemy – and then he was struck. A flare of pain radiated through his being as he sustained a glancing blow from one of the Primordial Spark’s ruinous rays, just for an instant. A mountain might have been disintegrated, but the King of Gods pressed on: his purpose was inexorable, his body divine, and his will utterly unbreakable. Logos dodged and wove around another half dozen testing rays and strikes.
The flurry of rays knew no end; this adversary was proving to be infuriatingly tenacious. Grimacing, Logos stepped backward to evade another strike. He was becoming quickly cognizant as to the difficulties of battling in these conditions, and fearful of the growing Void to the Gap beyond. Logos willed space to mend itself, pouring his strength and will into the task, but then was struck again, some unfathomable angle allowing the Primordial Spark to scorch him. There were a vast multitude of pathways around the once all-encompassing armor; in this warped space, the Plemora Plate proved no impediment to that which found no difference between without and within.
Xos laughed and tore the dimensions free again as quickly as they could be righted by Logos’ will. It took so many more pains to defy entropy–to fix, mend, create–to submit to this pretender’s ‘Natural Order’. Such a law of reality only affirmed the axioms of Xos, and the inevitability of his triumph.
As Logos found his shoulders beginning to sag ever so slightly beneath the weight of the Plemora, he beheld Toun’s entering the fray with relief. Toun flashed in and out of perception erratically back and forth in the mess of dimensional threads, but with a true and real direction. Xos, still with his claws tearing at reality felt a porcelain spear fly through several disconnected spaces until it appeared impaling through two of his shapeless limbs, pinning the shade momentarily to conventional space.
Toun could barely speak through all the mental effort he was investing in tracking the torn fields around him. "Have you forgotten what lies beyond, Xos!?! The Codex has Gaps and you beckon them!" He boomed from behind the Hyperspatial Barrier around him.
The porcelain skewering Xos cracked and groaned, as though it were a thin veneer of ice beneath a giant’s boot. Xos seized the shaft of the spear and violently pulled Toun’s body within his grasp, within the pocket of space pinned to a mere three dimensions. Distracted momentarily from his duel with Logos, the Shade sneered at Toun with a look that betrayed he hadn’t forgotten.
Toun's eye grew inflamed in its blue. For a moment, he wished Logos would end the destructive shade.
Logos already circled around in search of a vulnerable angle towards the now-entangled adversary. The distorted space immediately around Xos and Toun heaved, the Shade twisting the dimensions in unfathomable ways such that Toun was forced into a position precisely between Logos–or rather, the god’s Singularity Blade–and Xos.
He would end me to do it, Toun thought. He reassured his grip on the spear and resisted.
The two continued their grappling inside their bubble of normality, Logos left wading through the shredded spacetime outside. The deleterious aura of Xos crumbled Toun’s spear into dust. Another bone-white weapon sprung into the Porcelain Sire’s grasp just as readily as the last, but close-quarter bursts and beams of the Primordial Spark’s boundless energy rapidly forced Toun onto the defensive. Though the borrowed Barrier deflected the Spark, it also hindered any counter strikes.
"You must have forgotten how our last exchange ended. This time, you can’t escape from me," the black god harkened back to their previous battle on Soul Aonair, the fourth planet from Galbar’s sun. Maneuvering out of their pocket and back into the hyperdimensional space that filled the rest of the room would indeed be difficult. Toun was effectively trapped right there beside Xos, in a prison of his own making.
The space all around them bent and twisted in incomprehensible ways while they could only watch, like flies glued upon some sticky facet of something grander. Something much less comprehensible. Toun could feel it clawing, pulling, like a scorpion in his retina.
"If you will not mend what you have broken…" Toun shuddered out the words. The Gap was almost open. He drew up a clawed, shaking bare hand. "...And Logos cannot stop it…"
Toun's hand jolted into his eye socket with a sudden, sickening crackle of clay grit and flesh. His entire body bent in suppressed pain as he slowly, with sinewy strings snapping, pulled out his own eye. It was mixed in colours of blue, black, and carmine. The scrap of Jvan implanted there since before the universe's creation pulsed and shuddered in heart-like beats. Toun's mouth formed and contorted open as he screamed in pain, rage, grief, and despair all in one.
The first oily tendril of the Gap emerged to probe Xos' serrations in reality.
Toun had seen what to do via the construction of the Tomb Weaver. He knew that its inspiration – the insipid Chiral Phi – was more than just an empty prison. Toun had the materials to make his own tesseract. By Toun's will on his eye, the grander reality all around them crumpled and flattened and joined with their space until it no longer seemed so strange. It bent and reconformed around Toun's bloody eye. The eye shrank into an imperceptible sutured line in space.
The Gap was repelled. The gods were over Galbar once more.
All of the gilded Zephyrean power that had filled the plummeting Celestial Citadel and enabled this trickery had been either spent or thrust out into the aether. All that was left was Xos, Toun, Logos, and Zephyrion in the falling rubble.
Toun's empty eye socket dripped red. There was nothing but white clay within it and a few scraps of flesh. The red cracks around his head shrank to pure porcelain once more.
There Xos was bewildered, a fish suddenly cast out of the water. He let out a single, breathless exclamation, "How?!"
Unobstructed, the God of Physics triumphantly strode forward, blade held back in anticipation of a thrust. Toun's injured lethargy snapped away as he broke free from an alarmed Xos just in time. Logos struck forward with a blow aimed right through the Shade's darkened breast.
The Shade managed to lift up the Primordial Spark at the last second.
There was no shockwave or burst of power to fling back Logos or his weapon–not this time. There wasn’t even a blinding glare to muddy his aim, for the Spark’s glow had completely vanished. In the radiant mote’s place was an infinitesimal point, blacker than any void between stars.
Logos’ strike met no resistance and seemed to carry through, the god’s eyes locked with his adversary’s, but in those vacant eyes of Xos he saw only mirth. With genuine astonishment, Logos god broke his gaze and looked down to behold half of his sword simply gone. The tiny mote that was the Primordial Spark had swallowed it; somehow the Shade had inverted his weapon such that it did not emanate energy, but rather drank it. He threw himself backward, trying to wrench the Singularity Blade free with all his might, but there was no release.
It can do that? That's… hmm. I’ve seen that before…
"This game has gone on for long enough."
The Shade’s words dripped fury. Logos’ futile exertions produced nothing; sliver by sliver, the Singularity Blade was inexorably being dragged into the utterly black maw of the Spark, though the King of Gods pulled at its hilt with all his might.
"How you struggle and thrash against doom! Your wills are strong, I concede that much, but witness now the desolate truth: you never stood a chance."
Logos’ unyielding grasp at last came unfurled as he abandoned his weapon. The moment that his fingers slipped away from the hilt, the Singularity Blade was completely devoured. Nothing remained of it; the Primordial Spark did not even hiccup. In this strangely inverted state, the black maw simply drank and drank, sucking in the buffeting air and dust that billowed all around inside of the falling spire.
The air was thick enough now that it screamed and whipped at them, scraped and bit at the tumbling structure’s stone facets. The friction produced flames that filled the once pristine white chamber with an infernal glow. From amidst the hellish red flames, there emerged a yellowed flame. A presence filled this godly fire; a brilliant golden glow. Spurred onward by some unknowable objective, the flame’s grasping fingers writhed and contorted through the cracks of a shattered wall and crept into the room. Toun felt the familiar warmth and turned his blind head.
Xos, meanwhile, was once more on the offensive. He advanced, oblivion in his grasp, reaching for Logos, but was halted when a hook on a cable lashed out from behind and wrapped around Xos’ torso. Goliath, who had appeared a short distance behind the Shade, hauled the cable tight; the Shade raged, seizing the cable in one hand’s deathly grip.
"Watch out! He has an Orb of Darkness!"
On hearing the warning, Logos backpedalled and his eyes shined, hinting anger. The Orb was an anathema with which Julkofyr had scarred the universe. A deliberate spite at the King of Gods.
Simultaneously, the blinded Toun's head snapped to attention. One more murderous trick? Even wallowing in his own sacrifice he broke his temper. He did not back away from the danger, instead opening his unnatural porcelain mouth. "VESTEC!" Toun bellowed into the near-vacuum. He did not keep the name restricted to himself and Teknall any longer. "Our deaths mark you as a traitor to your sworn word!"
Xos had meanwhile pulled at the cable to draw Goliath inexorably closer, tug by tug, to the Primordial Spark-turned-devouring-maw.
There was a disembodied giggle. Then another. Then a third.
Though for a moment he might have fancied himself a winch of doom; Xos' own deleterious power undid the plan. The cable rapidly corroded until a link frayed into dust and the whole thing snapped free of him. Even Teknall’s handiwork was evidently incapable of weathering prolonged exposure to Xos. Goliath retro-thrusted to stop itself flying back.
The background laughter distracted them all to idleness, then. A cascade of titters and laughs surrounded the fighting divinity.
Mouths of every mortal race and every creation of the gods appeared, latching onto Xos and restraining him once more. Several of them gathered around Toun and whispered in his ears. "You wound me, Toun…"
A portal opened up behind the blinded god. Its nature was strange and constantly shifting. It was a shining white doorway. It was a tear through reality, bleeding energy like a wound. It was a fleshy maw, screaming as it tore itself open. It was shattered porcelain, sending jagged shards rending through space. It was a multi-colored orb, blinding in its brightness. It was all of these and none of them.
Through this portal the masked Vestec stepped forward and laid a hand on Toun’s shoulder. "I would never betray my word like that! You should know better! We all have our rules, don’t we?"
Xos, as quickly unfettered from Vestec’s magic as Goliath’s cable, cleaved his way through reality toward Toun and Vestec. With a swift pull Vestec yanked Toun through the portal and away from Xos and his Orb. In the instant before Xos was upon the duo, they had similarly blinked elsewhere.
Behind them, Zephyrion lurked just outside one of the Citadel’s many crumbling windows, witnessing the charade in mute fascination.
Vestec continued. "Besides, you all seemed to have it in hand up until this point!" He shrugged with a giggle, the metallic side of his mask twisting into a grin. "More or less at least!"
"Vestec…" Toun growled.
Vestec's voice suddenly raised – and if Toun had been able to he would have seen the metallic eyehole wink at him – as Vestec gestured dramatically to the gathered gods. "Don’t worry brothers! I have crafted a way to stop this fiend and ensure that our Oath of Stilldeath remains intact! Behold! The Crypt Wright!" Vestec whipped out the Tomb Weaver with a dramatic flourish. It was, in a word, ruined. Gone was the elegant form of the needle, ready to be directed at a single thought or flick; surrounding it was an ugly pipe of metal, with crude scrawlings in the imitation of Tounic Calligraphy all along it. The needle itself was at the edge of the pipe, a string of divine energy pooled around it and ready to be launched with a swing of the pipe itself. Unseen in his Workshop, Teknall cringed at the corruption of his craftsmanship.
Even the Shade’s attention had been seized. "What is that thing?" he growled, his gaze transfixed on every hyperdimensional facet.
"Zephy! Or Xosy! Or whatever you’re calling yourself in your cannibalistic madness! This is your doom!" Vestec paused, his metal half mask grinning at the monster that had wounded him so severely. Xos’ stare remained solely upon the weapon.
"But I am a generous doombringer. I will let you strike towards me in an attempt to finish the job you so woefully failed to do when we fought!" He bowed, then gestured disdainfully at the inverted Spark. "With that very same little toy, that you’ve been so eagerly trying to blast my brothers with. Try again?! I mean, you missed last time and only got lucky because I came back! Surely you don’t want everyone to think that it was luck that allowed someone as…limited as you to hit me!" He clapped his hands together. "So! Let’s try again! This time with feeling!" Vestec’s hands were held out wide, waiting. "Don’t mess it up this time, yeah?"
"Your ploy is transparent, worm," Xos spat.
Vestec shrugged in a ‘you got me there’ motion.
The Spark that rested upon the end of Xos’ shadowy appendage glowed blindingly white once again, then was the blackest of voids, and then the brightest of lights. Effortlessly and nigh-instantly, he demonstrated his capacity to flip it between its energetic and inverted states. Goliath watched the Spark, analysing its new behaviour. Logos continued to circle at a safe distance, warily watching both the darkened Spark and the ever-unpredictable Vestec as he calculated his next move.
"In your pathetic desperation, you thought that if I could be goaded into reverting the Spark, you might have a fighting chance. Hah! Know now that thing, whatever it is, will be annihilated just as easily as Logos’ sword if it should come anywhere near my grasp. Turn and flee, you wretched fool; once I have dealt with these others, I’ll see to it that your death is merciful!"
"To be fair," Vestec retorted. "Logos’ sword was built upon the idea of order and reality. Your little bauble is nearly as opposite as I am. This however," Vestec swung the Tomb Weaver around a few times as he spoke, punctuating his words, "is made by me. Far more like the Darkness than Logos’ sword."
Toun clenched his fists.
A thought from Teknall whispered to Toun and Vestec. Hmm, I wonder if the Tomb Weaver’s field can withstand the Orb of Darkness? It might, but current data is insufficient.
And how do you propose we get more data? I could just chuck it at the Orb and see what happens, but we only have one of these. Vestec replied, watching Xos. You know what? No time. I’ll just try to stab him with this while keeping the orb away from it! Easy peasy!
The Tomb Weaver’s divine thread retracted until the needle was a spear head on the crude pipe. Vestec lunged forward at Xos, disappearing in a flash of multicolored light and appearing behind the cannibal. He stabbed forward, his eye carefully watching the Primordial Spark and the Darkness it contained. But then the Shade likewise translated positions. Just two paces forward and turned face-to-face with Vestec. The dreaded superweapon was directly between them. Its darkness was replaced with a blinding white, and Vestec teleported out of the way just before another lance of divine energy erupted from the mote.
The wayward beam escaped out one of the tumbling spire’s many windows directly behind where Vestec had been. The death ray traced a straight line all the way down to Galbar’s surface, where it levelled a whole hillock in an instant and left only a smoldering crater.
The Chaos god was back in an instant, the Tomb Weaver darting to and fro in attack as he searched for an opening.
Toun murmured privately to the gods against Xos. This is useless while he holds the Orb. We must take it from his-
Goliath appeared beside Toun, touched the blinded god with a metal hand and reached another open hand towards him. "The Barrier?"
Toun anxiously tightened his hold on the gift. "Mm. I can no longer fight without my eye." He roughly pushed the Hyperspatial Barrier back into Goliath's possession. "Go then."
"Keep low and stay clear," Goliath advised before leaping into the fray.
As Xos cast out his arm towards Vestec again, this time a plane of blue flashed in front of him. The Spark's destructive energy lanced forwards, was blocked, and then was backscattered into a blinding, burning light by the Goliath's Barrier. What would have incinerated another god could hardly undo Xos – he had been born within the Mechanism of Change, that hellish realm from whence the Spark drew all its power – but little wisps of black vapor evaporated from his dark mass. He loved not the light; that searing brilliance left him agonized and disoriented.
This one moment was enough to seize upon. Goliath attacked Xos from behind, thrusting with three spears at once. Simultaneously, Vestec launched and jabbed at the thrashing cannibal from the front. One of the spears grazed the Spark and was vaporized in an instant. Not even their adamantium was capable of withstanding direct contact with so much energy.
The second spear missed the writhing Shade.
The third struck true. Xos let out an enraged scream.
A spattering of corrosive viscera erupted from the wound, and Xos’ black gore spread up to devour the spear that impaled him as well as the mechanical arm holding it. Weightless blood erupted outward from the Shade’s breast with every frenzied analogue of a heartbeat.
Vestec darted backwards and hissed in pain from the spattering despite his agility. The Hyperspatial Barrier flitted around to interpose itself as a disk in front of Goliath. It barely shielded its sensors from the corrosive blood.
In his rage, Xos grasped and squeezed at the shaft of the spear. Spiralling cracks ran through the metal pole from unnatural corrosion – for adamantium did not rust – plating its surface finer and finer until the whole spear crumbled to dust.
Zephyrion peeked up at the melee from behind some floating rubble. His brow tightened at the strange coalition against Zyus, but would it be enough? Did the god of wind desire it to be?
Goliath already had its second spear drawn back to thrust from behind the cover of the Hyperspatial Barrier like some manner of hoplite. Xos translated his position again mere inches to the side as if vibrating in place. He seized the haft of this spear as it passed by. The Spark in one of his hands emitted a surge of electricity that arced to the other like lightning, travelling through the spear’s haft with enough energy to melt the adamantium, straight into Goliath's hand. The mechanical hand spasmed, recoiled, and glowed white-hot, but Teknall's engineering spared the rest of Goliath from catastrophic damage with the lightning dancing over Goliath's Mirror Armour before arcing into the Citadel’s falling rubble, which flared and cracked as it absorbed the energy.
Goliath barked, "Get him, Vestec!"
Vestec, for once, did not reply with a quip. He appeared in an instant and swung the Tomb Weaver like a sword. Pure Chaos energy shone around the pipe, leaving random changes in its wake. Droplets of magma, miniscule bizarre and frankenstein flying creatures, visible notes of song and sound, poisonous flowers, and a multitude of other creations flowed from the energy as it arced towards the appendage that held the Spark.
Xos was prepared, spinning with such swiftness that droplets of blood from his still-gushing wound were hurled across the room like hailstones. Even the Lord of Chaos was too slow, too predictable. The full fury of the Primordial Spark was unleashed right at Vestec’s chest.
But then Vestec suddenly was not where he had been a moment ago.
Blind Toun was the first to realize the rapid consequences. He was standing a short distance away from the mayhem. He could sense the different essences of his brethren, the strong and the weak. He could sense the blast of the Spark shooting out from the melee. "Stop!" Toun reached out. It was an irrevocable instant. He could sense the Spark's essence flying through the weakest essence present – his brother Zephyrion – and to his horror, Zephyrion's essence scattered like so many flecks of hot iron struck against flint.
"Zephyrion!" Goliath’s gaze had followed the beam of destruction and saw, just outside the window, the sputtering remnants of the god of air. In a moment Goliath was beside Zephyrion’s remains, but for all its many weapons it had no tools which could repair such damage. All it could do was clutch futilely at the vapours as they dispersed into the thickening atmosphere.
Xos was already craning his head around, searching for the vanished Vestec, when the Shade realized the horror of his recklessness. For the first time in his existence, the Shade knew regret.
Vestec's giggles escalated into hysterics from where he had moved himself behind Logos. The chaos god's chest positively convulsed with his cackling. "Oopsie!" He mocked. "I hope you didn't have anything left to say to him before you destroyed everything!" He threw back his masked head and laughed in glee, but stole no further reaction from a stupefied Xos.
Toun stood with his fear rapidly ceding to a deep sense of hopelessness in his chest. "An essence only for destruction…" He said as if the partial thought escaped from his many whirling and paralyzing emotions. "This course…cannot persist."
Xos remained catatonic and still, a motionless shadow where moments before he’d been the terrible, writhing Shade. The gore no longer dripped from his still-opened wound, for his breath and heartbeat alike were arrested.
Order remained unfazed. Another Pretender had been extinguished, yet the battle here was hardly won. Without another moment’s hesitation, Logos stretched out his wings. The air stilled for a moment, then a beam of molten light screamed out from a point above Logos’ head and connected with Xos. The spell slammed into Xos with incredible force and seared the remaining stones of the Citadel. Even over the plasma’s roar, a maddened shriek pierced the room. The King of Gods advanced towards the enemy, and through force of will the entire room was jerked such that Xos’ mass would meet him all the sooner.
The blinding ray abruptly ended as Logos fell upon his foe. A new blade, black as night and deadly-sharp, was in Logos’ hand. This was no masterpiece like Singularity, and not nearly so lethal, but it would suffice. Teeth gritting from the sound of Xos’ unending, breathless, piercing wail of rage and agony, Logos thrust forward.
But Xos' desperate temper had been smote before Logos' blade drew near.
In the next heartbeat, between Logos and Xos, there grew a volume of all-devouring oblivion. The Primordial Spark’s light had been a great flash for an instant as it had expanded so wide as to be greater than even Xos, but then its radiance was utterly extinguished. An Orb of Negation was spilling forth, warped and distorted even as it tried to snap back into a spherical shape. Space and physics trembled; a proverbial mountain was being forced through a mousehole.
Xos did not care as to what unleashing the Orb of Negation would do to Galbar, himself, or anything else around; there was no longer any brother of his to urge or demand restraint. He was at last unhinged and free and miserable and mad. This was Xos’ grand weapon, his cleverest trick, the Armageddon that would deliver all of these wretched creatures into the same torturous oblivion that filled his black heart. It only needed to be released…
This moment was what Teknall had feared, but his calculations were already in place. Combining his prior observations with two moments of spectroscopy was enough to fill in the last unknowns. It would take too long to communicate a plan. There was only one thing to do.
In the Workshop, witnessed only by Teknall, every relay in the Stellar Engine fused shut and lightning flooded everything with burning white light.
In the crumbling Celestial Citadel, Goliath rocketed away at impossible speeds. A lance of energy obliterated a spire beneath Goliath, the avatar slammed through a crumbling wall, and it retreated towards the void above, accelerating away.
Logos gave but a moment's thought to Teknall's cowardice. The King of Physics could feel his domain unravel as the Orb emerged. Julkofyr's spite radiated from it and weighed on every part of his authority. The Pleroma Plate cladding Logos, that impenetrable fortress, now dragged him like an impossible burden. He conjured white fire around him, dimmed by the deepening shadows, as he called upon every power he could to lurch forward. Xos would need a greater gambit to stop the inevitable–
Target velocity reached.
Goliath blinked back to the Citadel, appearing beside Xos with the shimmering blue Hyperspatial Barrier like a scoop between them. In that same moment, Goliath slammed into Xos with all its built-up speed, catching the Spark too with the Barrier. In a tiniest slither of a second, the shadows withdrew from the Citadel.
In the next few fractions of a second, Goliath grappled with the raging Xos as they continued to accelerate away from Galbar. With a flurry of blows, Xos broke free. One final concussive blow batted the metal avatar away but momentum was still carrying him and the Spark towards the empty, lifeless heavens.
Toun tried to follow the feelings of the beings shooting off with the Spark, flying blind through space. "What in the name of Amul do you think you are doing!?!" He shouted ineffectually. "That orb will swallow everyone on the planet!"
None other than Vestec's mechanical hand snatched Toun's arm and pulled him out of harm's way and back onto course to follow the melee. "Focus on the fun bit, Touny boy! Let that big strong Logos handle it."
"Unhand me!" Toun struggled angrily. He was powerless to escape.
A few tense heartbeats later, the Orb of Darkness finally broke free. The light of hundreds of stars in the sky was snuffed out by a darkness which dwarfed Galbar itself. The shadows enveloped the pale twin moons Vigilate and Scitis, which shattered in slow motion as their gravity was erased.
Behind the great darkness, Goliath receded into the distance as a tumbling point of red light. Beside the Orb was a brilliant white pinprick and Xos' malignant presence. The Shade turned to cast a baleful glare down to Galbar’s surface, where his divine sight discerned the Celestial Citadel’s ruined bulk as it finally united with the surface. That was good. Degradation and ruin came for all. Death and destruction and entropy were the only constants, doom the inevitable ending of all. That was the meaning of Change, the one called Zyus knew.
Smoking with rage and scorn, Xos grasped the Primordial Spark with gaunt fingers. It roared to life by his will, and even his black and incorporeal frame was aglow with blinding white light. The approaching Toun and Vestec, those wretched reminders of Zephyrion, they would watch their precious planet crumble before they, too, were Changed.
With a pulse from the Spark, the Orb was sent hurtling towards Galbar.
* * *
On the other side of the orb, Logos glowered between Galbar and the dark maw that reached to swallow it whole.
He felt it drag on his impenetrable Pleroma Plate. All his influence was being resisted.
The pretender that inscribed these blots on his demesne. Julkofyr. He created orbs like this in futile rebellion.
The murderous Xos shall be quelled. All rebellion shall be quelled. Julkofyr's impertinent creation was but a childish tantrum. It would take more than some warped physics to stop the King of all Gods.
Logos threw his sword aside spinning into space, showed both his palms forward to the Orb of Darkness, and drew upon raw power the likes of which went beyond time, space, all things material. His numen and his right.
The Orb halted its advance with a pressure felt like a thumb on the back of a black slug. It oozed and slipped, and failed to escape.
"Begone," Logos willed.
The Orb began to move, repelled away from Galbar. The planet saw the darkness recede and the obscured stars reappearing. It was saved.
Logos dispassionately turned. Then was tugged. Then was held. Galbar receded from his own vision. With a sour realisation, Logos found himself drawn into the darkness by the weight of his armour, so powerful and representative of his order that Julkofyr's scorn grew hungry for it.
There was no moment to remove the armour or escape from its clutches. Logos had brought himself too far into the Orb's influence in repelling it.
Julkofyr, wherever he remained, had his last laugh.
Though, I shall be here again, Logos knew. I shall be here and every place beyond. This is but one moment in an infinite existence.
Only Logos knew his fate as he was devoured by the Orb of Darkness. His very essence disappeared in its clutches.
* * *
Toun found his words deadened. "I can no longer sense Logos…" Overworked grief mixed with dread. Their advantages were disappearing.
Venomous laughter spilled from Xos. He guffawed as Logos struggled and was dragged into oblivion, undone by the hubris and regalia that had instilled him with that insufferable, false sense of superiority.
The Shade, who now fancied himself the manifest All-Destroyer, the Dark Lord of Ruination, gazed down toward a despairing Toun. He saw also that treacherous, writhing viper, that vermin, the wretch Vestec beside Toun. He would tear Vestec asunder last, and most slowly, he decided. Even as Teknall’s avatar spiralled away into the heavens somewhere far behind, Xos knew that the Craft-God would also hear his mocking and triumphant words,
"Another pretender falls, and his death shall be for nothing. If only you could view yourselves as I see you! If you could understand how pathetic and insignificant you are, then you might thrust yourselves into doom and join with Logos! Fear not; I will usher you to him soon. But first, witness your precious rock below as I shred it from reality!"
Toun gave no satisfaction to Xos as he glared with what was left of his face. All his remaining might kept the growing hopelessness from showing through.
Xos lifted the Spark high over his head. Its radiance was like a thousand suns as he called upon its power to seize the Orb of Negation. The great darkness of that sphere, though already so far gone as to be indiscernible to mortal eyes on the planet below, was still perceptible by divine senses. The gods saw clearly the threads of energy with which Xos reached out, weaving a great net to catch the orb and then drag it inexorably back toward Galbar.
But he never succeeded, for somewhere within the blinding pinprick of light there had hidden a small golden djinni named Aihtiraq. Glowing in his triumph and focused entirely on the hapless gods below, Xos hadn’t even sensed his second brother as the wish-djinni crept up from behind him, and with a great sweeping gale, wrested away the Primordial Spark.
What!? Impossible! Toun thought and almost shouted.
Stupefied, Xos looked backward. He caught a glimpse of the golden djinni, who now took the shape of a golden lion’s head with a legless body of wind, as it swallowed the Primordial Spark. With a snort at this petty trick, Xos summoned his Spark back. It was his tool–only a fragment of Zephyrion’s soul could control or possess it, as Toun had learned on Soul Aonair, and since Xos had smote the pretender Ventus, no wretched elemental could lay claim to such a power.
But Aihtiraq was no mere djinni, for he was the third piece of the Storm God’s shattered power, and so the Spark would not–could not–be compelled to leave his grasp.
With a hideous howl, Xos willed the Spark to flare, and so flare it did. A nova of divine might erupted within Aihtiraq’s body, but he weathered it unfazed. Aihtiraq had already withstood the hellish winds on the other side of the Spark, within the Mechanism of Change. That was the place from whence Aihtiraq had emerged, and that which had birthed the golden djinni had no power to unmake him.
There was nothing that Xos could do besides reappear right beside the djinni and seize at it, trying to pry the Spark free with his own vaporous, black fingers. As he grabbed at Aihtiraq, the golden wind burned away at the smoke and shadow that had been wrought into Xos’ analogue of flesh; his groping fingers could find no purchase clawing at the golden lion, and Aihtiraq was bounding through space straight toward the Orb of Negation with all the speed that he could muster.
Toun broke from his shock and processed the moment. He turned and grabbed Vestec by the top of his mask, turning him to face his eyeless face. "Enough bloodshed! Enough games!" Toun threw a finger out towards the grappling brothers. "They will both be taken by the Orb of Darkness! Fulfil your oath at once!"
Vestec cackled as he patted Toun on the shoulder. "Now now, Toun, since when have I ever let you down? I just had to let the show play out."
Vestec drifted a few paces from Toun, spooled a loop of white-blue light out of the Tomb Weaver with a twirl, then flicked it towards Xos. It flew through the space between with nothing but purpose. The Shade jerked to a halt as a lasso of twisted space wrapped and tightened around him, letting Aihtiraq escape his clutches with the Spark.
Toun suddenly reached ineffectually when the two separated. "Wait! The golden one too!"
But he spoke in vain. Aihtiraq, whether unwilling or unable to rise from the darkness, serenely fell in. There was no sound, no flash, no belch as the golden djinni and the font of limitless power alike were swallowed out of existence; maybe the utterly black surface of the great Orb rippled ever so slightly, like the surface of a dark lake, but in the next instant it was still once more.
Toun then understood in Aihtiraq's last moments his prophecy. He raged internally at the worth of the djinni's suicide, his fists creaking. "There is so little Zephyrion left to save…and you would still choose to die!?"
Yet Xos was not indulged to observe it. "Get over here, you cannibalistic bastard!" Vestec pulled on the thread and yanked Xos towards himself. Vestec flew forwards to meet Xos in the face with a fist coated in explosive chaos energy. "Not so tough without your Spark!"
Xos writhed and twisted, but he was entangled by the Tomb Weaver’s inescapable thread. He tried to translate himself away, but there was no teleporting through the horribly stretched and broken space wrapped around his back. A wordless and guttural shriek erupted from the Shade, but his clawing counterattacks were now feeble.
Another of Vestec’s blows landed with a chromatic blast. Then another. Xos recoiled, gurgling.
A greater danger was the black ichor that escaped his body with his many wounds. Vestec flinched slightly from the corrosive blood splatter, conjuring a cloak of multi-coloured flames to burn some of it into less-harmful forms of entropy. Vestec had no interest in prolonging his exposure to Xos’ ruinous influence.
Vestec flicked out more loops of light to tangle Xos’ arms and keep the shade’s claws bound. "I could tear you limb from limb," Vestec growled as he grabbed and twisted the shade’s arm with an adamantine grip. "It would be fun, too. Payback for my arm." He brandished the Tomb Weaver in its crude iron casing, which flared with chaos energy. "But I have a far slower fate prepared for you."
Vestec thrust the weapon forward, and a needle of light pierced through Xos’ shadowy form. The first stitch was made, pinning the shade to space itself. The needle then flew around Xos in rapid loops, weaving a cage of folded space.
"No. He is all that is left of our brother…" Toun said to himself.
He sensed the movements of Xos' thrashing form failing to defy the Tomb Weaver's bindings. He thrashed and clawed at his prison. Just as Toun thrashed and clawed in his weakest moments. But Xos had nothing left. What would he become in that prison but a pure form of everything that drove him to murder?
He had no one.
Two long arms, black as oil, shot out from gaps in the cobweb of a cocoon that wrapped around Xos, who by now surely realized the instrument’s purpose and his impending doom. Yet he did not try to catch the needle.
Instead, his long limbs strained and stretched to seize a triumphant, smug, and surprised Vestec. Shadowy fingers grasped at the chaos god’s adamantine prosthetic with a deathly grip, clutching on with the last vestiges of strength that remained within the Shade. All the while, he still shrieked some otherworldly and breathless howl of rage. The Tomb Weaver faltered in its rapid orbit as its wielder struggled against the Shade. Yet Vestec had leverage, space, and spare stamina. He pushed off against the Tomb Weaver’s cage and wrenched himself free of Xos’ grip. The holes that the Shade’s arms reached through were tightening, constricting them, for even if the needle had slowed from his thrashing, its work hadn’t been truly stymied. The grasping limb grew ever more incorporeal, resembling a hazy, transparent smoke when moments before it had been coagulated darkness. The baleful scream broke at last into a woeful wailing.
He had no one.
With a growl, Vestec flicked his hand to direct the needle to hasten and at last finish its flight.
The barbed needle weaving Xos' prison instead clanged to a halt.
Toun had it grasped tight in one thin clay hand. His head was sunken forward, gazing at nothing. The corrupted shell of the needle crumpled and the polish of its original form peeked through between his fingers.
At this moment, Teknall’s distant presence made itself known again. Toun, what are you doing? Vestec’s almost got him.
"He will destroy himself alone." Toun said, clearer than ever. "No more death."
Well, we can't just let him go. Not after everything we've gone through, everything he's done.
"We shall not. There is one last way. One last golden thread."
What… No, no, you can't, Toun! He'll just kill you too!
Toun turned the needle's point around. "He shall not."
No, please, I don't want to lose you too, Toun. Vestec, stop him!
"What?" Vestec’s face flashed different colors in rapid succession, but his voice was not wrought with so much turmoil as Teknall’s. "Dear Toun, I have to say that this is a surprise! Perhaps my ways have been rubbing off on you… But no, Teknall, to get in the way of our brother’s noble sacrifice would be rude. I’ll miss ya, Toun-y boy, but I’ll be sure to take care of your stuff!"
For once, Toun's reflexive anger towards Vestec was completely lost in pure resignation. With his clay spear drifting from his other hand into the weightless vacuum, he raised the needle up and clutched it with both hands. His carmine-painted eye socket bled one last drop.
"Siblings, children, Amul-Sharar…Forgive me."
Toun thrust the needle through his navel. He willed it to spin its own cocoon connected to Xos' new prison. The Tomb Weaver flew in such rapid orbits as to constrict them both to complete obscurity in moments.
In a flash, the two tied gods collapsed into the Tomb Weaver’s inescapable confinement within its crowning gem. All that was left was the gently spinning artefact before Vestec.
It was the quietest moment of his life.
Xos meets Zephyrion and Vizier Murmur in the Celestial Citadel, which is ascending into space.
Toun stakes out the tower while corresponding with Teknall (who is monitoring everything with his spy satellites from the safety of his Workshop).
Toun launches his assault with Logos as a surprise backup.
The battle is intense and breaks physics a bit. Xos is slippery and wields enormous offensive power, while Logos is impenetrably armoured and intrinsically powerful. They are closely matched. Several blasts from the Primordial Spark strike the surface of Galbar.
Murmur grapples with Toun, both physically and verbally. He is made more durable by occupying Xos’ armor, but he still poses little more than a distraction–it’s his sycophantic worship that inadvertently humanises Xos to Toun that causes a problem. Toun realizes that he does not want Xos to die, even after everything he’s done. But Goliath then arrives with the new Hyperspatial Barrier artefact, which provides protection from the Spark. Goliath defeats Murmur, leaving Toun to confront Xos directly.
The physics-breaking battle between Xos and Logos is exacerbated by Xos drawing the last power out of the jewel at the summit of the Celestial Citadel and using it to rip apart and unfold space even in defiance of Logos’ power over physics. This threatens to open up a portal to the Gap. When alerted to this by Toun, Xos does not seem to care.
In desperation, Toun tears out his own eye containing the shard of Jvan from before the beginning of the universe and fashions it into a tesseract akin to Chiral Phi. He uses this to stitch reality together again at the cost of his ability to fight. Xos has no more power in the citadel jewel to pull off a physics-ripping stunt again.
Logos closes in to kill Xos, but Xos then switches out his Primordial Spark for an Orb of Darkness he had found earlier, and it swallows Logos' artefact blade Singularity whole. Things are not looking good for Logos.
Only now does Vestec appear with the Tomb Weaver and goads Xos to fight.
In the chaos of the fight, Vestec jukes out of the way of a death ray from the Primordial Spark and it kills Zephyrion accidentally.
Xos gets truly enraged and expands the Orb of Darkness to its full size to kill everyone present and swallow Galbar. Goliath overdrives its engines to scoop Xos out of the area before the Orb fully emerges and destroys Galbar; the Orb instead swallows the twin moons of Vigilate and Scitis. Goliath is blasted away by Xos and is out of commission for the rest of the fight.
Xos pushes the Orb of Darkness towards Galbar.
Vestec pulls Toun out of harm's way.
Logos uses his raw divine might to will the Orb away from Galbar. While successful, his Pleroma Plate armour is heavy and he is unable to escape the Orb's hunger for his Order. He is swallowed by the darkness, never to be seen again.
Vestec is unable to deploy the Tomb Weaver against Xos while he still wields the Primordial Spark. Toun is unable to help due to his new blindness. Xos lines up to kill them both.
At the last moment, Airtiraq appears from hiding to snatch the Spark. He is unaffected by Xos' means of preventing its seizure, as they are both shards of Zephyrion and lay claim to the Spark's power. Aihtiraq shoots for the Orb of Darkness. Xos catches him and tries to wrestle the Spark back.
Toun demands Vestec enact the plan as he promised. Vestec uses the Tomb Weaver to grab Xos, but does not listen to Toun and does not save Aihtiraq. Aihtiraq willingly falls into the Orb of Darkness, taking the Primordial Spark with him.
With no more weapons or tricks left, Xos is wrapped in the Tomb Weaver’s ensnaring threads.
Toun has an epiphany that Xos will most likely destroy himself in the Tomb Weaver prison and does not want all this to end in just one more death. He stabs himself with the Tomb Weaver to join Xos in the prison so that Xos might live on.
Vestec is left alone in space. Logos, Zephyrion, Aihtiraq, Toun, and Xos are gone.
With little more than a snap, the almighty Galaxor had thrust knowledge and thoughts right into the minds of goblinkind, but with those revelations had not come a full understanding. Could the mysteries of time magic ever be fully understood? Still, with the way illuminated to them, there was an itch to discover more and attain mastery over this new art.
Unfortunately, for all the understanding and divine intellect that Galaxor had imparted unto a generation of goblins, it’d taken only a singular mundane rock to undo it all for Gemless Gerry. See, he’d been a bright young goblin lad bound for the Library, but after the Dominion was consecrated and the earthquakes came, some rubble landed upon his head and he’d never been quite the same after that. The rubble rolled right off his noggin and then he was fine afterward, except sometimes his memories also rolled right off his noggin. Usually he was fine afterward, in a sense, but it was enough to keep him from every earning any gems. He’d tried every trade there was, and then tried most a second or third time because he couldn’t remember his first, but forgetting everything made it too much to even earn so much as a sapphire in any field of import. He had a few quartz crystals and maybe an opal to show for his efforts, or so he sometimes said, but he’d forgotten where those things went. Or what they’d been awarded to him for!
Gerry was an aging goblin now. A perpetual state of amnesia lended him to a forgiving nature (for he couldn’t hold onto any grudges better than he could put names to faces, grasp skills, or remember anything important) and he never did mature out of his boyish state, so he was at least amicable enough to be liked rather than just pitied. Healers tried to un-rock his noggin, but it always seemed to serve no avail. This was just the way that Gemless Gerry was meant to be. Fortunately there was no crime in the Dominion, so nobody sought to take advantage of his forgetful nature, and a place was found for him in a laboratory. Though he wasn’t of any real help researching, even if he sometimes thought that he too was a diamond-ranked scientist just like the rest of them, he was always happy to help his colleagues and fellow geniuses whenever instruments needed cleaning or moving. Provided it wasn’t anything that took too long, he could usually remember what he was doing long enough to do it!
“...are we really the first to discover anything? Perhaps we are wrong to think in such ways,” echoed the voice of one of his esteemed colleagues–though if Gerry remembered right, that one might not be the shiniest diamond of the bunch–from down the corridor. Gerry shuffled towards their voices, eager to join in the scholarly debate.
“Time, being cyclical, could lend to the hypothesis that there is no state of being first. Properly compressed and twisted, any innovation could perhaps be sent backward, so who can truly claim to be the ‘first’ to uncover some truth when it will inevitably be shared with ancestors and predecessors? And then only Galaxor can untwist the timeline that follows when the original inventor needn’t invent anything at all, and is taught his own revelation in the Library…” another philosophized.
“But,” chimed in Gerry, who’d at last entered the room, “not everyone can compress time!”
There was an awkward lull in the conversation as Gerry’s genius stupefied them. Finally, one came to grasps with that revelation, but then gasped dramatically. “Gerry, you must’ve misplaced your diamond! You’d best go find it before it’s lost!”
Gerry looked down, and indeed saw that he was gemless. “Oh Galaxor, I’ve done it again! Any idea where it could have gone?”
“It probably fell off in the testing room,” that other scientist offered helpfully.
“Wait, why are you sending him in there? Marvin is still taking measurements from the latest–”
“Thanks, I’ll go find it,” Gerry promised, surprisingly choosing the right hallway to go down this time. He barged into another chamber, startling a hunched over figure who’d squinted into the scintillating depths of some enchanted jewel. “Oh, there is it is! Melvin, do you like my diamond? I think I earned it from mastering the skill of, uh….”
Brushing past the fourth scientist called Marvin, Gerry reached out for the jewel where it was socketed on a table. “No, wait!” Marvin cried, trying to stand in the way, but Gerry barreled right past him cackling, “Time never waits!”
He seized the jewel and yanked at it. It was stuck in the socket pretty good, so Gerry twisted and pried. He twisted really hard, hard enough to where the oversized gem’s facets dug into his skin and he pulled his hand off to wince and contemplate his next move even as Marvin dove as if to take cover beneath another table–what a silly guy. Melvin was probably the dullest diamond of the lot, on second thought. But as Gerry thought that, strange things happened. The iron socket holding the jewel rusted and broke apart; the gem came out free.
Gerry reached towards the jewel, but before his elbow could even flex, he saw his hand touching the gleaming surface. Then he saw it release its hold, and move backward towards his side. Marvin flew up from under the desk, and was standing upright and talking backwards like a lunatic. Then Gerry was suddenly flying backward down the hall. Time was rewinding. He was remembering everything! Every lecture, every lesson from every discipline he’d studied in the Library, from every failed apprenticeship, every tidbit that had gone in one ear and out the other was now flying back in and sticking. Yet Gerry felt like he was caught soaring backwards. He kept on falling into his bedchamber full of energy and going to sleep full of energy, and then falling back out as though waking up exhausted. He was exhausted, but then he toiled at menial labor and chores and found his vigor renewed. He felt himself suddenly feeling different, and realized that he was young. TIME WAS MOVING BACKWARDS!
He felt all sorts of sudden aches and pains that grew sharper and worse with each passing moment, until there came the sweet relief of the moment that he received the injury. The worst of these was when he felt a rock jumping off the ground, skipping up to his head, bouncing off his noggin and back up to the cavern’s ceiling above.
He scrambled, willing himself to grab onto something, but time was not some river that you could simply swim through or oppose if you grabbed onto something. His will was powerless. The river flowed harder, faster, inexorably dragging him back to the beginning. The Dominion was no more, this was the Goblin Union again, seen through the eyes of a goblin toddler. He could no longer walk, now he was crawling backwards. Everything blurred.
There was a bright flash of light, then an all-encompassing darkness that not even goblin eyes could discern anything through. He wasn’t sure his eyes were even open. All that he felt was a feeling of warmth, but also of suffocation, of being unable to move. He couldn’t breathe, but then he didn’t have to.
He was suddenly an adult again, cognizant of how his hand was touching the jewel powering this time compressor device–he understood everything in this experiment now. What was this?! A second chance? An alternative timeline?
Then there was a blinding flash of light, and the flakes of iron that surrounded the entropic-catalyst time accelerator jewel disappeared. He only had a split second to ponder his peril before there was another blindingly bright flash. Even his newly-repaired mind didn’t have time to register what happened before his body was shredded into oblivion at an atomic level, the entire laboratory blown to smithereens as the compressed time expanded into space and ripped everything apart, stretching matter tortuously at an atomic level, shredding molecules.
Inexplicably, Gerry opened his eyes, and he still saw something. Another timeline? Was he doomed to be trapped in a loop of endless death..?
No, this was something new. Something he’d definitely never seen before, that no goblin had ever seen before…that was, if time chicanery even permitted such concepts as ‘never’...
This was a very dark place. The air was oppressive and stagnant, but not in the ways of the caverns. This air here was thinner, with less weight bearing down on it, as if they were on the surface instead of in the bowels of Galbar–not like any of them knew or could describe such a difference in sensation.
Them? Why did he speak in plural? Oh yes, because he looked to his side and saw Marvin–of was it Melvin?--as well as Tarm and Elmo (those two philosopher-scientists that had been debating the nature of time in the laboratory’s other room) right there beside him. Immediately, the four goblin researchers were relieved to have the company of one another, but terrified of their new surroundings.
The darkness of this place was not one that their cave-adapted eyes could pierce.
Yet it was not totally devoid of light. Like tiny little distant light-jewels, there were twinkling glows. Almost like the stars, which were a legend down in the caverns. But these were not stars, because they were not merely overhead but also set into the crevices and recesses of this place, and this place was not even Galbar per se, certainly not a place with a sky and clouds and stars.
“What has he done?!” a bewildered Elmo demanded, balefully glaring at a distracted Gerry. “You didn’t stop him from touching the time compressor?!”
“I couldn’t, he just pushed me out of the way, and it was unstable, I was, was, was afraid to get close once he was reaching for it–” Marvin stammered.
Tarm paid neither of them any mind, too bewildered by this strange plane. “Where are we?”
Gerry at least had an idea, and began to answer Tarm, “Could it be that our time-compression field failed, and during the rupturing event we had a sudden expansion of time that resulted in a backwards flow until the resulting distortionary waves weakened enough to match the current flow and result in destructive interference. Do you understand the implications of that? Our localized time moving backward at the exact same rate as time elsewhere moving forward could result in a total cancellation, with the effect of essentially deleting us from reality. Except, as we are demonstrably still sapient in some state, could it be that we were expelled from our native plane of reality? It is possible that we ripped through the fabric of time so thoroughly that we created a hole, and fell through it and into some lower–” he stopped to think for a moment. That was perhaps a poor choice of word, ‘lower’. It assumed too much, some sort of hierarchical ordering or even general proximity of planes, when such metaphysical constructs were only hypotheticals and had yet to be rigorously proven–bah, this whole idea seemed awfully flimsy, and now Gerry regretted opening his mouth so prematurely, but he felt compelled to at least finish his thought. “--erm, maybe not lower, so much as a distinct, foreign plane? In other words, could we have tunneled from one reality into another one altogether, not merely some variant along a different timeline?”
The others looked at Gerry, dumbfounded that the Gemless scientist could vocalize something so sophisticated, even if it went above their heads to the point that they still dismissed it as the garbled nonsense that he was wont to usually spit out. Gerry, meanwhile, was deep in contemplation. After a few long moments, he concluded, “No, it seems more likely that we’re all just very dead and this is some sort of afterlife.”
For Galaxor Week Turn, I present a post wherein some goblin is tragically subject to some sort of severe concussion or other head injury as a child, courtesy of the earthquakes that came due to Galaxor’s renovations. The result is that this goblin, named Gemless Gerry, isn’t really good at anything despite having tried many skills, and ends up just doing menial labor inside a laboratory (labor in a laboratory, totally fitting and makes sense right?) working on time compression technologies. All his colleagues are very dismissive of Gerry, but his amnesia makes him good-natured and oblivious even if he’s a goon and a clutz.
Gerry accidentally tampers with a magical gem that’s part of an ongoing experiment in time compression, and weird shiz happens. Time moves backwards, Gerry’s head is un-borked, he’s now a genius because he remembers everything from every lesson he’s ever forgotten, and oh yeah–the lab is totally blown to pieces and the four goblins are maybe in another plane of existence. Or maybe just really dead. Genius Gerry hasn’t figured it out yet.
If there’s interest maybe I’ll continue with a followup post about these four intrepid chronomancer-philosopher-Goblin-scientists.
It was neither in her room, nor in his bedchambers, that the Lord Quickblade’s wife found him in the morn. He was similarly not to be found in the great hall breaking his fast, nor in the stables inspecting some fine new horses and other beasts that another lord had just sent after the two men had finally settled a dispute over the fate of some war-captives. He was not addressing his men in the courtyard, nor meeting the foremost steward by the well, nor taking any of the usual and expected places that the castle’s lord might occupy in the morning. Rather, Quickblade’s wife found him lurking in the shade of a parapet atop the mighty walls of his hill-fortress, those which split the wind and bestowed it the deserved name of Fort Skybreak.
The lord looked out vacantly into the distance, casting his eyes over the village that had cropped up around and beneath his walls, over his demesne. This shielding under his protection stretched as far as the eye could see and then further, to encompass the land tilled by the Renevits and many other hamlet-folk. He gazed into the wildness and infinitude of the beyond, to a place that the eyes could not see and the mind could not grasp.
The heat didn’t help; Itzala had scorched away the clouds, so even this morning was warm. Above the ground in places the air distorted slightly and seemed to simmer from heat alone, as if the dry grass was alchemically generating a sort of substantial fume out of nothingness.
This broiling air threatened an afternoon that would make the laborers lugubrious in their toils, the children restful when they should have been riotous and gleeful, and the warriors slothful and content when they should have been drilling. This was why Quickblade rested in the shade of the parapet–sweat already started to glisten upon his temples, and soon it ran through his long hair and make his beard stick to his lips.
“Hmph,” Quickblade grunted as his wife greeted him by way of wiping away the sweat on his head.
“O my good lord, why be thee now alone? For what grievance have I these past days been banished from my lord’s side, made as much a foreigner to thy mind as thou has been to thy sleep?”
His retort shocked her. “Men hath gone mad,” he stated with the sort of conviction and demeanor with which one might say, ‘that Quickblade doth keep a sharp sword,’ or ‘Fort Skybreak hath high walls,’ and went on, “...or perhaps the world meets its end! I took the word of strange and monstrous beasts for bruit at first, yet sith the fourth sighting, my gut has sat unwell.”
Beneath his golden beard, Quickblade’s jaw was clenched. His chiseled face was all hard stony features, like a terracotta effigy, and his brows were furrowed such that they might have resembled the deep rows that those pigmen tillers of distant lands gouge into the earth.
So Itzala climbed and morn erstwhile passed, with Quickblade staring into the horizon. Within his eyes dwelt an intensity that threatened to set those lands aflame just as surely as the sun’s own baleful glare. His wife rested there beside him, hoping to lend comfort through presence of body if not through word or mind. The reverie was broken only when a lone chariot–that of a courier–raced across the drylands, towards the fortress and its village. Quickblade’s visage did not move, but his eyes traced the cart and its dusty trail as it slowly approached. As it came up to the gate and was admitted after a short time, there were a few shouts and cries between charioteers and gatemen.
Quickblade waited in his place, as befitted a lord, until one of his retainers came to attend him. “What intelligence cometh alow?”
“Villains!” the soldier reported, “Knaves! Reavers! They come to raze your hinterlands, m’lord!”
There was a flash of distinctive golden steel and, like lightning, the lord’s sword was unsheathed and raised high. “Hark ye!” the shieldlord called out, his booming voice resounding through the courtyard to all his levies assembled around and about, “To arms! Courage! To the field! Battle hath come! Ready mine chariot!”
“Peace, my lord,” his wife suddenly implored, “we heard naught of their count, their bearing, their mien, yet ye would charge out with sore swiftness to meet your foes upon the field!”
And to that, Quickblade spat out, “Fie, woman!” He brusquely shoved her aside, nearly knocking his wife off her feet. “I quoth long agone that none may test the swiftness nor the surety of mine blade–that oath I keep smoothly. Reavers, ha! That be a foe mine blade knoweth well and hath tasted before. Brigands be a pestilence mine arm can solve; not pestilence, not bruity!”
“Ye alow,” the shieldlord boomed to the charioteer who’d come to bear this fortuitous news, “lie not, for your work be not done still. Ye must lead our host to these foes!”
The already wearied man nodded with bitter disappointment muddled with determination. He had hoped for a deserved rest, but the Quickblade was not one to brook argument, objection, or any other manner of dissent.
Especially not when it came from his wife! Still, she nagged at him and tried to caution him with that sagely sort of warning that an old crone might give! “Plain not over thy shieldlord,” he bade her, “for my victory shall be great, and mine return swift. Thou knowst well that there be no throne I favor before the seat of my war-chariot!”
“At least suffer the paint upon thy face and thy horses, that you may go with the gods’ favor,” she implored. And he answered back with a “Hmph!” and yet tolerated her to gather an orange pigment and quickly daub their peoples’ sacred signs: one upon his forehead, and then as the horses were being yoked to the chariots, more upon their sides and foreheads.
And he would hear no more, and soon he was gone, and that was the last that the Quickblade’s wife there ever saw of her shieldlord-husband.
Between four dozen chariots, each drawn by two horses apiece, nearly all of the shieldlord’s mighty horses had mustered for this counter-raid. Yet he brought just about six-score men-at-arms and levies. None went afoot, they all rode two or three to each chariot, even if some would dismount. When the time came, even those foot-spears would be rested and ready.
In this manner, they rapidly advanced across the shielding, a great cloud of dust kicked up by the hooves of their horses and the wheels of their carts rising to herald the host’s coming. But there was no escaping chariots on these dryland flats! The courier led them in the right direction, but soon his guidance became unnecessary, for the plumes of black smoke showed the way to these barbarians.
Quickblade’s gilded sword was still bared, the shieldlord waving it to and fro to direct not just his chariot driver, but the men all around. He left the sheathe back at Fort Skybreak–he had no intention of hiding away the blade until its thirst was whetted!
The marauders betrayed themselves for recreants when they beheld the great approaching dust cloud, witnessed the chariot-carts beyond counting, and promptly turned and fled from the village they’d been plundering. But if they were too cowardly to give battle willingly, at least they were too foolish to hide between the burning hovels and make a fight in the narrow dirt paths where chariots could not so easily maneuver. Flailing his sword about to raise attention over the sound of the thundering chariots, lord Quickblade bellowed out the command for twenty swordsmen to jump off the chariots and make their way to the ruined huts anyway, to relieve the survivors and extirpate any raiders that had stayed behind. Then the rest of them gave chase.
It was a blistering hot afternoon. The sun was watching their triumph with something that might have been cruel glee, so Quickblade tore off his tunic and cast it away. Sweat covered him, and he glistened, but soon enough the dust kicked up by horse-hooves and chariot wheels would coat him, just as it would eventually cover his long-forgotten shirt where it lay abandoned on the yellow grass.
It was not long before they overran the fleeing enemy! Foolishly, the rearmost stragglers of the retreating band turned about to face their foes rather than be cut down from behind, but their disorganized formation could not stand up to the charioteers. There were a few quick exchanges of fire, javelins and arrows shot both from and at the chariots; the shieldlord’s eponymous buckler caught one, but then before his driver could even bring him about to cut down the archer, a second arrow soared from behind Quickblade’s right shoulder to strike down the enemy. The irate lord might have cursed his own man and his well-marked arrow for having robbed him of that kill, but there were foes enough to go around.
Lord Quickblade taking to the field!
One by one, the raiders were trampled, shot, skewered. The first two or three dozen of them were butchered before someone further ahead, presumably their warlord, managed to rally together a body and form some semblance of a battle-line. Quickblade and his charioteers wheeled about, circling around this line. None of these men were true warriors; the mere tone of their skin said as much. Their darker complexions betrayed their blood as that of swineherds and farmers, the sort of peoples in the outer villages that Quickblade’s own ancestors had conquered generations ago. That was why they were dying so poorly, he realized, that was why they were being trampled like mounds of dirt.
But when Quickblade squinted, he thought he saw one taller than the rest and not so swarthy, a commanding figure with a lordly countenance–there was a horrific scream as javelin pierced horseflesh, and then the sky was spinning and Quickblade was tumbling, the dirt and grass scraping at his exposed flesh. His sword slipped out of his sweat-filled grasp, but its golden metal scintillated in the Hate-God’s brilliance, so Quickblade found and raised it just in time to confront the charge of a bellowing warrior–the very one that had wrecked the chariot with a well-aimed javelin throw. Quickblade’s sword was swift, but his feet had more alacrity still; he danced just out of the way of a spear-thrust. Once, twice, he dodged the metal point to the sides or by leaping back, until the third time he twisted around the spear’s head to close in on his assailant. One brutal overhead slash from Quickblade’s sword met shoulder, tore through clavicle, and cleaved deeply, perhaps deep enough to rip apart the lung. But in any case, a gruesome spurt of blood erupted from the dying, thrashing warrior as Quickblade kicked him down and wrenched his sword free. Covered in dirt and dust and sweat and blood, Quickblade resembled something like a demon out of myth.
With his free sword, he slashed again at the spearman’s throat as a coup de grace, then swiveled his head about in search of his buckler–he’d lost his grip on it too when he fell out of the crashing chariot. As he looked around, he saw the driver of his chariot only just now crawling out from the wreckage in a daze. Before Quickblade could find his shield, or rally to the side of his man there, he was met with a sudden pounding of footsteps from behind.
He spun about, and beheld another reaver! He tried the same ploy again, to dance around the spear’s tip and then close in, but this was a more skilled warrior than the last. As Quickblade moved to close in, the man both backpedaled and slipped his hands further up the haft of the spear, keeping its point ever in front of the shieldlord. Quickblade hated spears almost as much as he detested those lowly peasants that were wont to wield them. He spat, “Ye favor that loathly husbandman’s tool? Fie!”
He made as though to step forward, and the spearman practically leapt back, but it was only a ploy to create space. Seizing the chance afforded to him by the gap, Quickblade stooped down to snatch up a rock with his left hand, and he hurled the stone straight for the spearman’s chin. The man leaned out of the way, but in so doing he let fall the point of his spear, and then Quickblade was already upon him, for he’d charged in the same motion as throwing the stone. A vicious slash of his blade was followed by a swift stab to the gut, and just like that the Quickblade had felled another man.
Where in the goblins’ hole was his shield?
Quickblade’s left eye was watering, his vision blurred by dust. He made to wipe it with the back of his left hand, but that just smeared fresh blood over his face and into his brow. One of his chariots wheeled past, the archer riding as passenger in it, firing to fend off any more foes from nearing the shieldlord. But it did not seem that many were even trying; this makeshift stand had already turned into a rout once more. He made his way to his own overturned chariot, seized the driver by the elbow, and roared in the man’s ear, “Up, ere the knaves yonder levant! The score needs be settled!”
It was already too late. One of his charioteers, recklessly heroic to the point of madness, had been glory-starved enough to drive right for the enemy’s warchief, that lordling that Quickblade had spotted just moments before his own cart had crashed. Yet it seemed that the lone chariot had been overwhelmed, the driver pierced through the chest by a javelin and the rider dragged out and impaled. Even now, the pale-skinned lordling was climbing into the commandeered chariot–for the horses yoked to it had somehow survived all of that unscathed–and making as if to drive away. Blinded as they were by the din and chaos of battle, the rest of Quickblade’s charioteers were circling around elsewhere, apparently not seeing this calumny as it unfolded.
Quickblade would not have it! “Egad!” he cried out, thrusting his reddened sword to point the way, but none of the charioteers heard or saw him.
A whinny from the side roused his attention. The second horse of his chariot was still alive! A streak of madness suddenly entered the shieldlord’s mind. He was about to do what no man had ever attempted before. There was no time to deal with the fastenings; with a quick slash of his sword, he sheared through the rope that yoked the horse’s harness to the chariot. The smell of wet blood upon the blade upset the animal, but not as much as what happened next. With a great leap, Quickblade threw one of his legs over the animal’s back as it was standing up from where it had been trapped on the ground beside the wreckage. The animal whinnied in outrage and surprise, for men did not sit upon these magnificent animals that pulled their chariots–it had simply never been done before! But this particular horse was of magnificent breeding, a large and mighty creature, that was why the shieldlord had chosen it to pull his favorite chariot. And now that size did more than just win him prestige and awe from onlookers, it enabled the beast to bear his weight, even if it was bucking wildly and trying to throw him from its back.
With his left hand tangled into and gripping the poor creature’s mane and his right hand grasping his sword with a deathly tightness, Quickblade let out a mighty warcry, and the panicked horse did what panicked horses do–it ran. It raced forward with the swiftness of the wind. There was a great and heavy load upon its unsaddled back, but there was no heavy chariot weighing it down, and so its charge was swift. It was as if the fighting froze there, in the heart of the field! Around the periphery men still ran and died and fired bows and threw spears, but there in the center, within sight of this mad and terrible shieldlord, ally and enemy alike stared with jaws agape at the sight.
And as the horse thundered forward, it made for the fleeing chariot that bore the enemy’s lord–perhaps it could sense the Quickblade’s indomitable force of will urging it that way, or perhaps the path cleared by that chariot was the only one clear enough for a terrified animal to flee through, or perhaps it saw the two horses yoked to that chariot and wanted to follow the herd. Maybe it was just destiny or the silent working of benign or mischievous beings hidden and working beyond the realm of sight. But either way, Quickblade thundered toward the chariot, quickly overtaking it. None dared impede his charge. And in the last minute, just as they came within a spear’s thrust of the chariot cart and as the horse beneath him reared up one final time, bucking with a strength that would have surely thrown Quickblade from its back, the shieldlord twisted off to jump-fall-crash into the back of the chariot cart. The maddened, blood-covered Quickblade hacked and chopped and cleaved at this lordling that had thought to lead a band of brigands into his shielding, smiting him with a fury that conjured the image of butchery.
With his victory complete, Quickblade surveyed the routing enemies before him, allowing the horses to pull the reclaimed chariot gently along. The form of his slain adversary was draped over the side, blood dripping from him still and wetting the earth below. The broad-shouldered Quickblade twisted his mouth in distaste at those who fled and harrumphed into his moustaches. What wretched recreants they be, the lot of them. Was it for this that he drove the chariots forth? Was it for this that his birdbrained wife wetted his form and horses with her weird symbols and paints? She had always been an odd one–blessed by the gods, his mother had convinced him, a good luck charm and promise of fair victory. What empty prattle - what charm had he need for against such weak foes? What he needed, in fact - and he felt his pulse quicken with sudden anger - was a strong, healthy heir! The wench had given him nothing but daughters! Daughters!
He spat to the side, inadvertently getting it all over his felled foe. He kicked the corpse from the chariot in annoyance and finally reined the horses to a halt. He descended and got to cleaning his golden blade with some dirt. Before he was finished, hurried footsteps reached him and a loud voice. “M’lord! M’lord!” Quickblade stood and spotted the running servant emerge from the dust that had been kicked up everywhere and was now like a great blanket billowing over everything. Quickblade frowned suspiciously at the man, who was dressed in his wife’s colours and wore the distinctive braids of the shieldlady’s courier corps. The very idea of a ‘courier corps’ had always struck Quickblade as utter foolishness and a waste of resources, but the woman had insisted on it. They were always to be found in the oddest places, those couriers of hers, and seemed very adept at finding whoever they sought. It had always irked and disturbed him.
And then Quickblade was suddenly awash in a wave of exhaustion, the tribulations of the ride and the chase and the battle having at last caught up to him. Here he was, filthy and wounded and painted red, surrounded by equally ragged men who were trying to take account of their casualties. His ears still rang as though hearing the echoes of the hooves and wheels and clashes of steel, the whistling of arrows–it would not be until night’s cool that his mind could calm and his ears find peace anew. Yet right then and there, this bootless fool dared approach and shout at him!
“Thou dost remit my rest,” he acknowledged the mummer without bothering to mask the disgust and ire in his tone, to hide that he was dried with rage and toil.
“Forgive me m’lord!” The courier shouted, coming to a halt before the shieldlord. “But I come bearing a most urgent word from her esteemed ladyness, your most ennobled and glorified self’s immaculate spouse; whose immaculateness is but the impoverished reflection of your fuller, greater, truer immaculance, m’lord!” There was no such word as ‘immaculance’ of course, but the dithering fool thought to make up words willy-nilly even as he shouted on. On further observation, there seemed to be something quite odd about the courier - but whatever it was seemed to flit out of sight just as it seemed to become apparent. Quickblade was too tired for such things. “Her supreme ladyness says this m’lord,” and the courier stood up straighter and cleared his throat, “my lord! Oh my lord! Prithee send word of thine good health and sure victory- the gods know well mine heart and know well that it is with great pains I had thee go from my most loving and adoring breast- oh my lord! E’en now I know the tiredness that surely is upon thee when these mine words fall unto thine ears! So forgive my callousness and urgency: as you most bravely fought and grasped victory from the jaws of thine foes, as the recreants they most certainly are did they strike your subjects and plunder their harvests! Oh my lord, ‘tis not for such as I to give thee commands, but I can only beseech thee rush to the aid of your most adoring servants at the ploughlands of Renev!” And so speaking, the courier took a deep breath and stood to attention.
The mazed shieldlord caught perhaps half of that. He’d thrust his sword into the ground and was now leaning upon it, breathing raggedly. Before them, four of his men bore off the lifeless form of one of their own, that man who’d been pulled from his chariot and slain. Elsewhere there were others ransacking and looting the corpses of the enemy, or slaughtering those that yet lived–no prisoners were being taken–and then dragging them about that they could eventually be piled and burned. The killing was done, yet there was yet much to do before it would be time to abandon the field.
Several chariots had also been wrecked or otherwise put in need of repair; one soldier, who bore a lost wheel back to its broken cart, brushed up against the pomp messenger, whether deliberate or by mistake, and caused him to leap away with face twisted in disgust. “Oh fie, fie, fie on you!” The courier declared, reaching into the pockets of his obnoxiously large trousers and emerging with a small pouncet box that he proceeded to raise to his nose. “Have you no mind for the noses of the living, sirrah?” He asked another soldier who was busy dragging a bloodied corpse by. “Oh ‘tis most unseemly to drag such broken bodies, their bladders all emptied and their tongues hanging out, by one of her most illustrious ladyship’s couriers!” He raised the pouncet box to his nose again, waving his other hand before him as if to blow whatever stench he had imagined away. “Fie I say, a thousand times fie on such unmannerly ways! Verily ‘tis an age where good character is slain and at our door are the end of days!”
It was enough to madden a man! Quickblade spat on the insufferable knave. “I contemn thee and thy womanly mannerisms, thy loathsome bemoaning the reaping of a tilt thee didst not see! Thou art a poxy blight upon these eyne! Avaunt!” With a grunt, the shieldlord tore his blade up, freeing it from the earth that it’d pierced. The courier took bounding leaps back at the sight, wiping the spit from his clothes.
“Oh m’lord, m’lord, m’lord! I’ve spa’en aught but truth! Am I a gloried reaver as you to love the stench of bladders and defecation? I have no heart or nose for such things! Only the mighty and great are like to keep such a fellowship- and I’ve made no claim to mightiness or greatness, no I ha’en’t! Oh m’lord castigate me not my love of rosewater and musk, had I the incenses of all eastriverne lands I would have burned them here to spare you this stench! But I had forgotten that the glorious and great very much love such odors - though by what addlement of mind or sinus that is so I cannot say! Oh m’lord, placate thine blade and forgive your most blathering slave - not for mine own sake, no! But let the memory of your most beloved ladyship intercede for me!”
What little patience Quickblade possessed was long since expired; it was only his fatigue that had stayed him from living up to his name then. Grasping his sword by the dirty and blood-caked blade, the shieldlord at last struck the courtier across the jaw with its pommel. “Avaunt, I say! Methinks little of thy trite words. Avaunt with thee, mine lady-wife, and the blighted husbandmen of Renev!” Quite displeased at being struck, the courier snapped to attention and drew a twig from his idiotic trousers.
“Well now!” He said, his voice quite unlike before, “aren’t you just the most spoilt, ungenerous, profanatious, unstandable human I’ve ever known! And to cast the barb of your tongue on your own wife too!- who, might I add, is nothing less than a saint!” The man waved his twig about like a lunatic, having become quite unreachable despite Quickblade rushing on and on towards him. “Ickity pickity packity pock! Tickity tockity goes the clock! Off you’re going for a trot! Run-run-run or you will rot!” And waving his twig with finality, he leapt into the air and was gone with a poof of light that sprinkled everywhere.
With a roar of outrage, Quickblade hurled his infamous golden blade up into the air, towards the retreating and flying courier. But as he looked up, Itzala’s brilliance scorched his eyes. He blinked, squinted, and then was met with the sight and thud of his sword reuniting with Galbar, its tip sinking into the soil. And worse–the scoundrel was nowhere to be seen!
“Meseems that picaroon was some manner of familiar,” Quickblade finally realized aloud, stating the obvious. It was quickly dawning upon the shieldlord that he may have just committed a grave error. “If it should show that meek visage once more, seize its pate! Part head from shoulder! Sith that be what I wast to do next!”
The warriors around him nodded or spoke their words of affirmation, and with that done, a grumbling Quickblade moved to help them with the work that remained. It was exhausting, but as dusk approached, the sickly smell of burnt flesh filled the air as they set fire to the pyre mounds. Their own honored dead were wrapped in what cloth was on hand–mostly the sweat-stained tunics of the survivors and whatever ragged clothes of the enemy hadn’t been covered in filth–and then loaded into the back of the chariots, and then they made to set off for home once more.
Quickblade was terribly thirsty, his waterskin having long since run dry. They’d left hastily and light, having expected to be returned to the fortress in very short order. Fortunately, there was a well in the village that they’d just delivered from the marauders’ wrath. Yet as they urged the horses onward–Quickblade sitting again on his throne of a chariot seat again, for the moment of battle-madness was past him now and he was not so eager to risk his neck mounting a horse again–they did come upon the village where it should have been. Instead, the dryland went on and on, ever onward. They advanced for two hours when the journey should have taken a quarter that time, and still there were no signs of the village, or of civilization at all for that matter!
In the distance was an unfamiliar copse of trees. The shieldlord wondered if it was a thirst-induced hallucination, but he forged a path to it regardless, hoping to find some landmark to regain his bearings. Had he lost his mind in the battle? It was a fool of a lord who became lost within his own shielding, and yet his men were just as befuddled as he!
It was as they’d hoped: in the shade of these trees, which upon closer inspection looked to be of a strange and exotic type, there murmured a small stream. Parched and bloodied still, the shieldlord and his retinue climbed down to rush for the waters that they could bathe and drink; the more merciful and thoughtful of the men unyoked the horses from their chariots that the animals might drink too.
Yet in their stupor of thirst and exhaustion, none in the party had noticed the sigils, the figures, the altars and the talismans situated in the river’s vicinity. Yet again, how could they have? They resembled nothing any of them prayed with, ranging from stacks of river shale to shells of river oysters. Feathers in the trees could have been mistaken for the birds that once wore them. The camouflage was weak, but their senses were weaker. The tranquil sound of the stream, deafened by the slurping of men and animals parched in the sun, coated their ears with cotton. They did not hear the branches break, the leaves rustle, and before that final sip that quenched their thirst for now, more assailants skipped out of the bushes. They ignored the horses’ nervous whinnying, thinking the animals merely impatient for their turn to enter the water’s respite. Hardly a minute passed before they were all surrounded by tall, bipedal frogs armed with spears, staves, and maces of wood and river coral. Their bodies were dressed in jewelry, feathers, scented spices and aromatics on string. Their numbers were many, and their leader stepped forward, a frog whose crown of feathers and gold was nearly as large as his torso. “Who dares?!” he demanded and gestured widely, “I say again, who is it that dares drink from All-Mother’s Duct?!”
The shieldlord had just about finished washing off the spatterings of dried blood that caked his bare torso (at least the front of it!) before the booming voice made him spin about, whipping up his sword from where he’d left it to rest by water’s edge. “Mine own name? Ha! Quickblade!” Usually the shieldlord’s reputation preceded him.
But then he beheld the speaker, and his eyes widened at the sight of these monstrous beings–were these the horrors that the rumors had spoken of? They narrowed into a squint as his jaw clenched and his grip on the sword tightened. “I rule Skybreak, and all these lands lay within mine shielding, ‘r close enow to make no matter! I come fresh from the field and mine temper still runneth hot–test me at thy own peril!”
“Insolence, the heretic dog yaps back!” chastised the leader and pointed his shell-tipped spear in Quickblade's direction. “Whoever you are or consider yourself to be, dryskin of Skybreak, your lips have so voraciously molested the Tears of Creation; a thousand egg-spawn to come will be sullied by your salty sweat and filthy beard. As tradition dictates, I will offer you a chance to split your throat yourself and give back the water you stole. Your blood will surely quench the wrath of the All-Source that is certain to come should you leave this place alive.” The croaker's flanking companions drew shell-tipped arrows by the score.
“Yond riv’r be thirsty, say? Then let us slake it!” He backed from the riverside into ankle-deep waters. Quickblade’s own men were confused, eyes darting between their shieldlord and the enemies, but by now they had at least formed rank and made some semblance of a shieldwall.
Quickblade stopped beside a few of the horses that had been brought to drink from the stream. Now even those beasts had their backs to the water, nervously whinnying as they looked at the oncomers. He raised his blade up almost perpendicular to his neck, but when the knaves may have thought he meant to cut his own throat, he instead slapped the nearest horse upon the rear with the flat of his blade. Then he poked the other one with its tip! The panicked animals cried out loudly and thundered away from him, barreling right toward the biggest, loudest, most pomp of all these frog-men. And right in their wake followed a frenzied Quickblade, bellowing like a demon, driving forward his shieldwall of men through the sheer wildness of his charge.
The frog in charge seemed momentarily stunned by the incoming charge, but then skipped high into the air, landing safely in a tree. The warriors closest to him rolled out of the way, and the riff of loosening bowstrings played like an orchestra of murderous harps. From the canopy above, the leader’s voice bellowed, “Spill their blood, honour-guard! Quench the thirst of the All-Source!” The archers were quickly backed up by soaring javelins coming from the woods and the war-croaks of scores of frogmen charging out in zealous frenzy, armed with shell spears and coral dagger-axes and armoured with bark and kelp cloth.
A flying javelin narrowly missed Quickblade, burying its head into the muddy ground as he twisted out of its way. With his left hand he snatched it back up; with his right, he flagged his sword forward, urging his men to advance and fight their way out of this ambush. The steady clattering of arrows striking the wooden shieldwall sounded almost like a sort of rain. But it was punctuated by the thunder-claps of war: there came the screaming of one of the exposed horses as it was struck by an arrow, and the shieldlord’s back was then painted by yet another spray of blood from somewhere behind him, one of his warriors struck in the throat by an arrow that skirted his shield from the side.
Through the chaos and the din, Quickblade spotted the great frog up in the trees, and with a grunt, he hurled the stolen javelin right for the croaker’s belly. The croaker chieftain had caught the sight of him at the last minute and managed to dodge to the side so that he wasn’t speared, but the javelin nonetheless sliced along his right lumbar region, leaving a strip that quickly began to ooze white croaker blood. He growled fiercely and swung around underneath the branch before kicking off, becoming a spear-headed rocket diving for Quickblade’s person. A corner of the shieldwall began to cave as croakers utilised all three dimensions to fight, jumping at their adversaries from the front, the side and above. Spears elevated to the skies were lucky to catch maybe one or two overzealous frogs coming down, but those armed with swords and axes found that their strikes would connect only in time for a croaker body to crash into them first. Religious fervour incited the locals to throw all sensibility out of the proverbial window.
Quickblade danced just out the path of the chieftain’s spearpoint, having had time enough to see it coming and knowing that the brute would not be able to change his path in mid-flight. From the very instant that the chieftain handed, Quickblade was all but on top of his slimy skin, grabbing at the spear’s shaft with one hand using the other to hack wildly at the croaker with his sword, bellowing some frenzied cry all the while. Screams and croaks filled the air already; death was all around as both sides took heavy losses in this chaotic melee brawl, the shieldwall all but shattering as the fight devolved into two dozen individual duels between man and croaker. Yet before long, Quickblade was looking down on little more than a pile of green flesh and white goo bespeckled with gold jewels and rainbow feathers. An instant later, the mess was spotted by one of the duelling croakers, who kicked his adversary back and disengaged to a safe distance.
“Misfortune to no end! Dead! Pond-Guru Balhamrajah is dead! Gods’ mercy be with us, for he is no longer! Retreat! Retreat!” As though programmed, the lot of the croakers fell back as quickly as they could, disappearing into the woods around the river stream as quickly as they had arrived. They did not collect their fallen comrades nor their equipment – like leaves taken by the wind, they were gone in a breath. Yet the area still did not feel safe. The fighting may have stopped, but red eyes like orbs of human flesh could still be spotted in between the bushes and trees. Quickblade’s men quickly looted the fallen, friend and enemy alike, divvying up what armor, weapons, and other spoils were to be had. In the chaos a few horses had bolted off, but with their numbers diminished, enough remained yet to pull their chariots.
For his part, Quickblade cut out the grotesquely long tongues of a few choice specimens to keep as trophies. He reckoned his wife and daughters might squirm at the sight of such things, but he never did make it back to Fort Skybreak, for there he stood in the Indias.
They retreated from that accursed river and the wood around it, fearful of another attack from the leaping monsters, and wandered a long time before they encountered any signs of other men.
Remember that mysterious lord QUICKBLADE that Kho’s Renevits alluded to a few times? Here he is!
He speaks in Shakespearean prose (because modernspeak is reserved for peasants, you pleb) and has a well-earned reputation of being a wild and violent man, dismissive of his wife and angry that he only has daughters. He and some of his warriors seem to be of a different sort of folk than the Renevits, probably some lordly caste descended from a different tribe that conquered them a while back.
Anyway, it’s really hot outside and there have been troubling rumors of strange beasts, but Quickblade’s relieved when he hears about some bandits marauding the outskirts of his land–that’s a problem he knows how to solve! He assembles a band of warriors and they ride out on chariots, a bloody battle ensues, and then some strange messenger (who appears to be a sort of fae bound to Quickblade’s wife) comes to call Quickblade back, for the Renevits need help. But Quickblade is tired and blood-crazed and does not much like this messenger, so he whacks the fae and then he and his whole army get forever banished to the Indias in punishment.
He doesn’t understand what just happened though, and when he and his horses and men get really thirsty and lost, they stumble upon a stream and are forced to fight another battle, this time against a band of croakers. The humans barely come out on top thanks to Quickblade slaying the croakers’ chieftain and demoralizing them. With man and croaker now enemies, Quickblade cuts out some croaker tongues for trophies–perhaps an omen of what is to come–and then he and his diminished army runs off, where it’s said they wander for a long time before encountering other people.
When Urist Gusilreg and his expedition struck the earth, their objective was simple. There had been a shifting in the stone. As Galbar had shrugged, a new bend had opened somewhere in the cavernous depths where before there had been only a wall of bleak diorite. The first miners to stumble across the void had peered down it and explored a short ways before returning to report that it seemed to go on for a long ways, if not endlessly. And its walls, they were lined with glorious seams of limonite and malachite and pyrite and banded iron! For the glory of clan Gusilreg, the depths had to be thoroughly explored and a new mining outpost established.
So Urist had led a sizable band there at once, to claim that reach for the Gusilreg before any of their rival clans could stake a claim first. More than a hundred they were in his expedition: prospectors, architects, masons, and miners of course, for such were needed in the establishment of any new colony, but there also came some warriors, fungi-planters, brewers, smiths, craftsdwarves, an engraver or two, and even a renowned soap-maker. Many were those who gleamed at the prospect of joining a colony in its founding, when the most glory and land and wealth were to be claimed. And Urist certainly intended to establish a lasting settlement, so he brought along all who had some mettle and a mind to follow him. He would find work for them all, for any colony worth its granite gates would have its own fungi farms, its own still and craft brews, a few dozen smithies, and walls upon walls of engravings to remember its legacy and celebrate its culture…
The expedition leader mulled over all that during the journey; this turned out to be a long and arduous trek, for the ground was uneven and unexplored, their destination not even entirely set in mind, let alone in stone. The going was slow through these unknown tunnels–especially when the rock was newly wrought apart and might still be unstable! But this perseverance rewarded them, for eventually they came upon a mighty seam of iron ores in a defensible corridor, and Urist knew that this was the place where his band would make their fortune. So there the miners struck the earth, and the masons began walling off the passageways and fortifying the tunnels at their backs, the farmers began sowing spores in the dampest cavities, the architects mapped the springs and engineered well-cisterns.
All was well, phenomenally well. After some time and success in these endeavors, Urist sent a party to retrace their steps and return to the Gusilreg capital and report the colony’s great success to the king, to bring maps of the new territory and then request additional waves of settlers and supplies. Urist was in high spirits; he expected that in due time, this colony would be formally incorporated, and he would naturally be declared its baron.
But by then they had dug exploratory tunnels deep into the heart of the iron-vein, trying to explore its twists and gauge the size of their mineral wealth. And where the iron had ended, there was a yellow gleam! GOLD!
Madness followed.
There were no farmers to tend to the mushroom fields, for all of them had set down their tools to clamber into the mine-tunnels and dig for gold. What use were the warriors’ swords when a blade could not dig? They discarded such trinkets and took up battleaxes, anything with enough heft and weight to dig. There was more gold than anybody had ever seen before! The purest of ores, so soft that even a tiny hammer could pry the seams from the stones and cold-beat the unpurified metal into shape! That was good, because of course all the forges were cold as the former smiths became gold miners like everyone else. They were all absurdly rich beyond their wildest imaginations. Urist, more than anybody, was consumed with ideas of grandeur. He wouldn’t have a mere barony. He’d be satisfied with no less than a duchy at the very least… or more seemly, a throne. Yes, which of the clans had a king with more gold than he? They had delved deep, deeper perhaps than any dwarves had gone before, and still this vein of gold seemed endless. This river of wealth would carry him to glory and legend, would win him a kingdom or three–!
Yet then, in that moment he remembered something troubling. He remembered the delegation he’d sent back to the clan. He’d been panting, laboriously toiling to chip at the gold alongside some of his miners, but the heat of the moment instantly turned clammy. In that moment of cold sweat, he wondered what would happen if the other clans heard of this–or even if the Gusilreg would try to take it…the Gusilreg?! He caught himself thinking that way and felt self-disgust and guilt and loathing for a moment–that was his own clan, his own kith and kin and people–how did he already think of them as an other? But then, would they remember him as such when they learned of his great wealth? Had they toiled down in their shafts as he had, breaking their backs for every nugget?
Would these fresh new arrivals expect a share of the gold deposit beneath their feet? Of the wealth they hadn’t helped to find? Had they come to take from his share? King Urist clenched his jaw and ground his teeth at the thought. The power of avarice overcame all other emotions.
He turned to the miner beside him, and shouted loud enough to be heard over the frenzied pickaxe swings, the echoing sound of metal scraping and chipping stone, “Stop! Stop!”
The man grunted, but even in the near total darkness, that gleam of the gold in the wall before him spoke louder than any words. The miner swung his pickaxe again. “STOP!” Urist roared, seizing the dwarf by the shoulder. That shook the gold-sick miner from his craziness. If only his people could pay attention!
“Gather the others,” King Urist told the miner, “We have to go back up and man the mine’s entrance, fortify it further. That’s a defensible position. All the gold in the world will do us no good if others can trap us down here, or come in to steal it!” And at once the miner realized that Urist was right, and made to do as he was ordered.
None of them now lived up above in their first settlement; all had moved deeper into crude, crowded forward camps carved deep into the mines. For sustenance they had only stale and dwindling food rations, and they drank the dirty and metallic water that had flooded a few of the more carelessly dug shafts… it was high time they’d returned upward to resupply anyway, before digging to the next level.
But they had already delved far too deeply. When some glanced back, briefly, from their work to see whether any word had come from the sentinels dispatched to the mine’s entrance, they could no longer recognise the tunnels they had just themselves dug out and trodden. And why would they have? As long as the beckoning shine remained ahead of them, any rock shorn and chopped aside was in the past, and so was the space it had once filled. The vein remained inexhaustible, the earth’s own generosity bared to them; but it wound and twisted in its bed, and the web the dwarves had carved in its pursuit was now as wild and tangled as their beards.
It was then with some surprise that King Urist found the corner of his eye lingering on a particular passageway. Only after some repeated glances did the reason for this become clear: the mouth of that tunnel, gaping in a patch of dusty brown soil rather than rock, was too small to admit the compact frame of a dwarf. This opening had not been dug by one of his party, but it must have predated their delving! What could have been skulking here, deeper than dwarf had ever ventured - and was it a threat to his riches?
All these things were to be answered in the space of a moment. Something poked out from the earthen hole, a long, ugly leering snout crowned with tufts of dirty fur and a pair of maliciously squinting eyes. The creature, some sort of forgotten beast whose name the dwarves didn’t know and whose likeness they’d never before seen, grinned at him with a mouth of huge yellow fangs. Then it snatched a great handful of the chipped golden nuggets that had been piled behind the king, before vanishing back into the tunnel from whence it’d emerged, Urist catching no more than a flash of its burning-red backside as he stared slackjawed in disbelief.
In the next moment, he surged forward toward the narrow crevice, trying to force his body to contort through the gap to give chase, but he could not. With an ear-splitting wail of agony and rage that echoed through the whole of the mines, if not the whole of Galbar’s underbelly, he cried out. Immediately the miners down a half-dozen other passages (for this was a twisting and expansive vein!) hurried to the sound, fearing a cave-in or something minor like that. This was far worse.
Words tumbled from the king’s mouth like a rockslide. “A thief! An intruder! Enemy! Some beast came and it stole from my gold! The kingdom’s gold! From your share! It stole it!”
He needn’t have spoken even half as much; already there was a raucous outroar and his people were ready to take up arms. A pickaxe to the skull was as deadly as any blade! Woe to the thief!
“And it came from there, and went back that way,” King Urist finished, pointing to the narrow passageway. Right away, some of the more eager diggers began to widen the gap with their pickaxes. One dwarf had the lucidity to ask, “What manner of foul beast was this thief?”
King Urist was then suddenly at almost a loss of words–how could he describe the thing? He remembered only its great fanged teeth, mangy fur, and bright-red rear. The very attempt to imagine a whole built of the misshapen flashes he had seen perplexed him, until it found itself resolved as suddenly as it had shown itself.
The dry earth the beast had disappeared into was yielding under the dwarves’ shovels and pickaxes, tempered as they were by the sterner stone, and before they knew it they had gouged a long trail in their pursuit. A wall crumbled ahead of them, and they stumbled into a small circular cavern in the soil. There on the ground, rocking in a shallow pool of murky water, sat the thief: a thing shaped roughly like a dwarf, but hairy, with long grasping limbs and a curling tail, crouching like a gnarly elder. In one of its feet - which were, Urist saw with astonishment, indistinguishable from hands - it clutched the ill-gotten gold, as it chewed on something resembling a fleshy heart, blood-like juice dripping from its maw.
Hearing at last the commotion at its back, the creature spun around, and dropped its meal with a shriek as it saw pursuers it clearly had not expected closing in. It made to bolt for a tunnel, but found the way grimly barred by the crowding miners as they stormed into the chamber.
King Urist squinted at the beast now; it was not quite so monstrous or horrifying as it had seemed when he’d first spotted it, but there was certainly still an unsettling air about the thief, and then it was hard to be afraid of anything when you had it surrounded and trapped. Still, not wanting to be mocked or made a fool of for having been so afraid of a beast his own size, King Urist hefted his pickaxe and advanced, roaring, “I’ll take back that gold myself!”
A murmur came from the back of the chamber, “Think we could eat it?” And then that turned into a chorus of ayes and whispers; day after day of only dried mushrooms and stale jerky had been easy enough to ignore at first–there was gold to be dug, after all–but such pangs could only be set aside for so long before they started to gnaw at even the hardiest dwarf’s mind. “We’re all hungry, the fresh meat would do us good,” another voice behind King Urist agreed.
“Wait, wait!” the beast screeched in a creaky voice, throwing up its hands and dropping both the gold and its grisly meal, “Don’t kill me! I heard you stomping and circling and digging yourselves so far you’ve lost the way. You’ll never know how to get out of these holes, and you’ll starve to death!”
“But we could eat you, thief,” King Urist retorted, echoing the voice of his dwarves.
“I’m all dry and mangy and bony, I don’t taste very good,” the beast babbled, and then grinned as it eyed the thing it had been eating. With a foot it caught it up and tossed it to a hand, then dusted it before tossing it to the king, who caught it with one hand, the other still clutching his pickaxe, and then warily sniffed at the sticky fruit. It smelled ripe and sweet, stronger than any mushroom he had ever seen. “But this! Wouldn’t you like to eat of this?”
King Urist indulged just a nibble, and his eyes widened. Nothing in all of the caverns held such flavor. He took a second, far more greedy bite, then remembered himself and passed it to the dwarves behind him. They each took their modest share, which amounted to little more than a lick apiece, but they were all just as enchanted as him. While it was passed around, Urist found his voice again and boomed, “You mean to say that you have more of these treasures? Where?!”
If he could monopolize control of this wondrous and exotic food, coupled with his already vast mineral wealth, he would truly be the wealthiest dwarven king to have ever lived.
“As many as you can carry after eating till you burst!” the thief cackled, “This way! After me!”
It swept up the gold, scampered with frightful agility between the dumbfounded dwarves and dove into the burrow it had reached for earlier, beckoning them with its tail and the bright crimson beacon beneath it. “Dig here! I’ll mark the way!”, and he dropped a golden nugget at the mouth of the hole.
King Urist was aghast at how the thief had kept the gold, had seemingly thought this some sort of trade, but then what were a few nuggets when he controlled the greatest gold mine in all of Galbar? When this sweet treasure was even rarer in the dwarven realms than gold?
“Very well,” he started, but then caught himself. “Not so fast! What are you, creature? And you must stay close at hand until the bargain is done.”
Occasionally, they used a sort of rope down in the mines to lash tunnel supports together, or to explore down any natural faults and crevices that they came across in their excavations. So the King had only to glance around the room for a short time before he caught the sight of one miner with a length of the stuff coiled about his own waist for safekeeping, like a sort of belt, and he pointed at that one, “Bind this creature lest he escape from us before delivering upon his promises.”
“All right, all right,” the hairy thief loped up and stood still for once as a length of rope was run around its body and fastened, but its eyes watched the hands tying the knot intently. “Now hurry! We’re nearly there!”
King Urist did not ask many questions, for his mind was already racing with wild ideas of what sort of cavern this strange creature and its sweet treasure could have come from, so deep in the bowels of Galbar. With renewed vigor, even without the gleam of that previously omnipresent gold vein, the digging team started to make headway tunneling in the direction that the creature had marked. The king stood close to the thing, so as to keep an eye on it, but its stench was enough to make even the filthy and sweat-stained miner of a king want to keep a small berth.
Soon, however, his mind was taken away from it, for the rhythmic beat of pickaxes, which had been steadily turning upwards, lost its dullness and began to ring louder and more hollow. Then one blow parted the earth, now dark and dense, in a cascade of soil, struck something hard, broke through it and there was light. Urist and the other dwarves stumbled back, squinting and shielding their eyes. The rays streaming through the opening overhead were the brightest thing they had seen in a long time, since those days, now fabulously distant, when they had first set out from the Gusilreg clanhold. In some of them, perhaps, beneath the ever-consuming thirst for riches that had come to cover their minds, there stirred a remembrance of home.
Yet as soon as they stumblingly emerged from the hole, begrimed and unsteady, all was dispelled in the face of overwhelming awe and fright. They had not struck the open surface, nor any vault of familiar dwarven make; instead they found themselves in the middle of an incomparably vast hall, one that could have easily swallowed a score of houses into itself. The light they had seen blazed forth from many gigantic braziers, and only a little dripped in from tall and narrow windows set vertiginously high above.
The chamber was the widest at the bottom and tapered to a vaulted ceiling, its polished stone walls inset with huge white bands whose true nature birthed a sudden chill from its understanding. For they were nothing else than bones of colossal size; the entire hall, imposing as it was, sat in the hollowed-out ribcage of some inconceivably large monster, and the masonry that formed it was nothing more than an extension of this tremendous carcass. The four bright pillars they saw towering at even intervals around them were themselves carved from singular arm-bones, reared to prop up the interior of the titanic body they had once grown from.
So faint and dizzy were the dwarves with the dread of this revelation that they had not immediately seen they were not alone in the macabre hall. Indeed, the marble floor around them was crowded with dark shapes adorned with bright cloth and gleaming jewelry. These were beings not unlike the thieving beast that had shown the way, but upright on their legs, tailless and massive, more than twice as tall as any dwarf. They were covered in black fur like moles, and had huge staring eyes and snarling tusked mouths, but their attire and bearing was that of courtiers of some outlandish kingdom, clad in cloaks of bright red and vibrant yellow, with clasps and diadems of gold and gemstone.
At the closest end of the hall, atop a dais, rested a cushioned throne whose seat was a gargantuan jawbone tipped with menacing teeth. Two of the hairy creatures, larger even and more wizened than the rest, sat side by side upon it, one dressed in white, the other in black. A wide bowl lay before them, and in it a sphere of what seemed to be clay flecked with gold. Both enthroned fiends had a hand within the bowl: the white-clad one worked the clay, stretching it into spikes and tracing intricate spiral designs on its surface, while the black-clad one followed it closely, smoothing all it had wrought and returning the sphere to a pristine state. The motions of their fingers were dazzlingly complex, yet neither of them looked down: both had their severe gazes fixed on the intruders.
The mangy thief gave a shrill cackle, and, working nimbly with its fingers, slipped open the knot it had been tied with. “There’s as many sweet fruits as you can eat in the palace’s larders!” it called as it bounded away and slipped out through a door, “Baboon always keeps his word!”
The maddened eyes of King Urist darted back and forth, from the trickster that had fled, to the great cavity in the marble hall’s floor from whence they’d emerged, to the many great hairy creatures that now surrounded and outnumbered his expedition. He found himself clenching his pickaxe so tightly that his knuckles whitened as the blood left, even as his heart raced. “Steady,” he murmured to the dwarves all around him. Then, louder, he called out to the two upon the chair, who he took to be the sovereigns of this strange place, “I am King Urist!”
Some of the dwarves around him looked a bit taken aback for having not heard of his new title, but they did not question him in that moment of tension. The king continued, “That scoundrel, that trickster, that thief, he stole from us but then led us here while we were hungry and lost, promising the succor and nourishment of some strange food in return for our mercy. We had no intention to trespass upon your hall, or to breach its fine floor–but if I may be so bold as to ask, who are you? And what is this cavern that we have entered?”
One of the red-cloaked brutes stepped towards him, and leered at the small and travel-worn thing that so boldly proclaimed its kingship.
“Ha! A fine jibe he has played, that flea-blighted old trickster,” he snarled in a voice like cracking stone, “Know that you stand in the presence of Guptaka and Siddhi, Raja and Rani of Sri Rajarata, and of us all their progeny. This palace whose floor you have profaned was wrought from the bones of the unmatched Rakshasaraja, who wrought the entire world that we tread upon and fell in battle in its defense. I am Ghosayitnu the firstborn who speak in their name, and by their rule I proclaim that you all will be in our bond forevermore. A throne like ours has great need of subjects!”
“Is that so?” the dwarf-king shot back, trying to mull some way out of the predicament. “Well, I have more of the gold that enticed the thief so. I might give some to you willingly, that its glow would lure subjects from across the world to your cavern, if only for the secret and source of that sweet food that the thief promised us.”
“What need we for your will?” Ghosayitnu laughed, “You are in our domain now, and we might compel you. Bow before our throne and you will be fed, else…”
Upon these words the ground seemed to shudder, and a huge shape stepped out from behind the jawbone-seat. It was another of the black beasts, but taller still than any, and more massive. Most striking were the four arms, rather than two, which radiated from its shoulders, and its eyes which flared with bright sparks of fury. Unlike the rest of the court, the giant wore a brazen cuirass, and carried a long, broad-bladed sword with a flat point in two hands. Its impressive jutting tusks dripped with savage froth as it stalked forward across the hall.
“It is clear that you are mighty beings, so even as a king I might bow before you as my overlords, if you will bring that might to bear in the protection of my kin and my gold,” King Urist tried.
“You will be under our ward as our subjects,” Ghosayitnu nodded satisfiedly, “But your gold will be ours.”
Urist did not have to say anything to that, for all the dwarves around him grew enraged. Spittle flew from their mouths and they menaced their pickaxes with a fury that would have intimidated many, even starving and outmatched as they were in that hall. One voice that Urist recognized as that of Tekkud, one of his expedition’s original miners, proclaimed, “No one parts a dwarf from his share of the gold-hoard, not even a king!” And hefting his pickaxe mightily, Tekkud leaped forward to swing at the kneecap of the armored hulk that stood before them. Not to be outdone, the king and the rest of them followed that courageous display and joined the charge.
His blow never landed, however, for in the moment while he was in fight, the colossus who had seemed so firm on his feet suddenly snapped into motion and threw himself into a manic dance. First he swatted aside Tekkud the miner, and then his foot caught King Urist and sent him sailing through the air with a deft kick, until he struck one of the great bone pillars.
Dazed and aching, the king watched through darkening vision as the fiendish courtiers hurriedly cleared the center of the hall, where the giant fell upon the dwarves that came pouring from the fissure. He swept through them like a storm made flesh, the steps of his martial dance scattering their bodies like so many pebbles and outright trampling some unfortunates underfoot. The tremendous sword lashed like bursts of lightning, severing heads and cleaving foes in two with brutal ease. For all his bulk, the monster stepped around the hole faster than the eye could blink, and the warriors who emerged from below gaped in disorientation, scarcely able even to land a blow on his thick hide. And the great blade that he wielded so deftly in but one hand was not the only danger; he had three more palms and two heels with which to strike, and seemed to be merely toying with them, or else preserving the lives of his new playthings, for he would deliver battering blows more often than not and only cut down the most ardent of attackers. Soon, the dwarves realized this, and lost heart.
Then the two looming regnants seated atop the throne ceased their belabouring of the clay sphere, leaving half of it wrought and half smooth, and raised their hands in a gesture of halting. The giant’s dance steadily spun to a stop, until he stood still like a great glinting spire among his battered adversaries.
“See now that you are vanquished,” said Ghosayitnu with a smirk, and at his beckoning his fellows crowded around the hole, barring the dwarves from fleeing down it, “Give yourselves and your riches to us, and we may yet be merciful.”
So it was King Urist I was called Urist the Kneeler, when he might have instead been remembered forevermore as Urist the Goldfinder. As to Clan Gusilreg, in their distant caverns deep in the bowels of Galbar, they did arrive to meet with those first few sentinels sent back up to the initial colony; a second wave of migrants had arrived to reinforce and resupply the new settlement. And when they heard the tales of that mighty gold vein, they delved deep into the mines, but lo! The tunnels had collapsed in many places, and they could find nothing more than seams of blighted iron in the rock, and here and there some traces of gold dust, much to the chagrin and despair of those sentinels that had been sent back up who now lacked for their share of their gold-hoard, for it was a miserable existence as a dwarf, to lose one’s gold and yet still live to suffer at its memory.
In any case, none who had returned knew of the thieving Baboon or the discovery of the Indias, and none who had made it to the other end were ever able to return. Instead they became the dwarves of India, yoked to the great Rakshasas of the great Bone Palace, they who lorded over the hottest of the three Indias, that southern region called Sri Rajarata.
Urist of Gusilreg, one of the twelve great dwarven clans, leads an expedition to found a new colony within some rift that was opened up in the caverns by some tremor or earthquake. They get to digging and building and all goes well, typical Dwarf Fortress gameplay, until they strike GOLD.
Madness and chaos follow, and King Urist (yes he’s now a king, because he’s richer than you are!) and all of his people go down into the tunnels following a massive, twisting, endless gold vein into the bowels of Galbar. But they dig too deep! Food supplies run low and eventually they get horribly lost in the tunnels, until a forgotten beast encounters King Urist and steals some of his gold.
They corner the wretched thief and it tosses them some sort of sweet fruit to bargain for its life, offering to show them how to find more. Entranced by this new culinary treasure, for the dwarves had not had fruit before, King Urist agrees, but it turns out that this forgotten beast was none other than the wily Baboon, and he leads them into a trap. They tunnel upward and emerge right into the middle of the Indias, breaching the marble floor of a palace full of rakshasas!
That great ape-demon progenitor called the Rakshasaraja is long dead by now, his massive bones being the supports of this palace. Preserver and Perfection rule as the eldest now (with their younger sibling Rage as their bodyguard and champion), and King Urist the Kneeler’s folk find themselves forever yoked to these new rakshasa overlords as the dwarves of India.
By the power and virtue of Cyclone, some dwarves are conveyed to India, and since the immediately preceding post by Oraculum, the rakshasa have advanced with a timeskip and built a big fancy palace.
When Reaper returned with his band, hauling an avian beast of rather tremendous size, it was with no small degree of confusion that he and his band of six (and accompanied by the strider, Elutil) surveyed the place. They had left a bustling camp at morn, and now returned to… nothing at all. The six men gathered around Reaper, each wearing deep frowns. No matter in what direction they looked across the empty wastes, they could see no sign of them. “They’ve just…disappeared.” Fishlancer said. Beside him, Netter and Donkeywhacker murmured in agreement, while Galloper stood to the side and fiddled with his rope. “Not so much as a shadow of them as far as the eye can see.” Horsebreaker confirmed. Claymender was crouched low, looking for any trail or sign hinting at where they may have disappeared to. But there was nothing. “They’re gone.” He said with finality.
Reaper leaned on his spear, jaw tight and brows furrowed. They were gone. Galloper, still fiddling nervously with his rope, glanced at Reaper. “Do you think… the goddess again? Could she have?” He asked. Reaper released a deep breath and shook his head, as mystified as any of them. “I couldn’t tell you Galloper. The way things have been of late…” his gaze swept across the far horizons, “it could have well been anything.” They stood there a long time, confused and at a loss.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The stormclouds had come as if from nowhere. One moment there was the hot barren wastes, scorched beneath Itzala’s baleful gaze as he began to surveil them for another day, and then in the next there was an encroaching wall of darkness upon the horizon. It raced towards the encampment faster than any of the monsters. The horizon faded into blackness in the shadow of the stormfront, and as the clouds neared they grew to blanket more and more of the sky, until they blocked out even rising Itzala.
“Have you ever seen something like that?” one Soilturner stammered, eyes wide open.
The closest thing he got to a retort was a grunt, followed by Goatwrestler the goatherd thrusting one of the bleating goats in his direction to keep hold of. They were not prepared for a rainstorm; the desert hardly offered more than a sparing drizzle, and even those that still remembered Renev clearly could not claim to have ever seen such darkened skies.
Panic and bewilderment animated the camp as the first strong breezes heralded the coming rain. Without the sun, the colors all around were suddenly very bleak and the air quite crisp. The distant booms of thunder rolled across the flat and filled their camp. There was no time to try and find Reaper and the men who had gone out on the morning’s hunt, but then, any idiot would see such a terrible storm brewing! All that there was to do was hunker down to weather it out, and hope that the others did the same wherever they were.
The herd of goats was rounded up and brought inside some of the largest of the tents before they could all flee in a panic, and then everything else of value–few as their possessions were–was brought together and sheltered under the tents, for what little protection they might offer from the deluge and the gales. The people then all huddled together in what little space remained within the tents. Not ten heartbeats after Soilturner crawled in, being the last of those who had been outside, they heard the sound of the oncoming rain striking the ground: this din was like the pounding of so many hooves, like a stampede of animals. And then it was upon them.
Howling winds threw open the tent flaps and hurled rain inside. The raindrops were especially large and came with such force that their strike was painful, almost like little stones striking the skin. The wind was so great that several tents were at once overturned! It was only their having buried some parts and packed others beneath the weight of various goods that spared the leather tents from being lifted and flung beyond the horizon right away. The mighty gales roared, and though the sound of the storm was such that one could hardly hear the shouts of a person right beside him, and though it was as dark as a starless night save for the brief flashes of lightning that illuminated the scene for one of every fifth or sixth breaths, Goatwrestler leapt out of the tent’s flap.
A reaching hand shot out to seize him by the waist and try to drag him back to safety, but the goatherd wrestled free of it; one of his terrified goats had gone out there and he had to bring it back! Already, the once-parched desert sands had become a quagmire. The water came up to his ankles, but then Goatwrestler felt the itch and sting and burn of wet sand on his neck, and his beard was drenched, for the wind had flung him down. The great booming thunder seemed oddly distant, rhythmic, like a heartbeat. Or like the terrible laughter of some callous god, some force of nature…the rain itself seemed to have hands, for it grasped at him as it fell, and pulled him along as it swept across the ground. Now he was rolling through the floodwater and sand, coughing and struggling, reaching out for anything to grip as he was flung about–crack! His head struck something, and the last things that he remembered perceiving were a bright flash of light, the thunder’s murmuring, and the taste of blood in his mouth.
Lifedancer hovered above him when he opened his eyes. “There he is. A nasty bump on the head, but it’ll heal,” she was speaking to somebody. Justroastit was immediately above. “Oh you silly man!” The riverwife said, clearly resisting an impulse to whack him. “My heart nearly gave out when you went prancing out like that!” He groaned and sat up slowly, fighting the dizziness. “Goats…” he muttered. “Oh goats goats goats, is that all you ever think of.” Justroastit snapped at him. He looked at her blankly, and her stern gaze melted into a laugh. “Stupid of me to have asked!” She sat by him and looked at Lifedancer.
The herbalist was gazing away forlornly, her eyes on the verdant earth that lay where not so long before there had been hard rock and sand. “I,” she turned back to Justroastit, “will leave you two to it. If he complains of anything, have him lie back down so he can rest. He’ll be back to his normal self in no time,” she smiled reassuringly at the concerned Justroastit, and left them. The world that now greeted her was a far cry from all she had known over the last however many years.
Goatwrestler groaned. His face lay on its side, his eyes parallel with the green ground. Green. That was a funny color. Like bile, or entrails. He couldn’t think of much else that was green in the wastes. Once upon a time, in a village called Renev, he remembered green hills and trees.
He rubbed his head, tried sitting up, found himself too dazed and collapsed again. There had been rain, of course. He remembered now. Had it made the nigh-lifeless wastes bloom? Was the rain a blessing?
Slower now, he rose against the objections of whoever stood over him, and then he looked the other way and saw the wreckage. Bits and pieces of the torn tents were littered all across the landscape, random goat-prods and tools strewn everywhere, and over there, he thought he saw a dead goat, unmoving even as some of the others stood over it with the butchering hooks and knives… at least that meant a good supper.
But then he squinted again, for in the distance, upon the horizon, he thought he saw a great spiraling mountain, like a stony finger thrust up to point accusingly at the place in the sky where that tempest had erupted so violently and suddenly from! “What is that–” he mumbled to anyone who would listen.
He turned, trying to see who was there. Familiar faces, he saw all around. But then, in another direction, a great verdant wall. “Huh?” he sputtered. He blinked. Surely this was an illusion. The wastes could play tricks on the eyes. But he rubbed them, and still that great and imposing wall of trees was over there, where the green grasslands suddenly gave way to some dense jungle. Clearly bemused, if not outright concerned, by his confusion, Justroastit pushed him back down and would brook no dissent this time. He may have been the unbeatable wrestler of goats that he was, but he stood little chance of victory against his wife. Still, as if to assuage her own astonishment at what had befallen them, she leaned close and whispered, conspiratorially, as though it was a secret, “there are… monkeys here. Monkeys, Wrestler. I’ve not seen monkeys since the harvest of our wedding, when that mad monk visited the village with his monkey troupe for the festivities!” She paused for a few moments, “but they seemed quite odd for monkeys. Something in their eyes, I can’t place it.”
“Wha–?” Her words didn’t make any sense to a still-dazed man, wrestler as he may have been. “Monkeys? Where?”
But then he pushed her aside–he was quite the wrestler!--and struggled to stand up. He made it only halfway before she had him back down again, curse her, and then he heard a most strange sound–something between a squeak and a cry. Craning his neck even as he lay upon his back, he contorted to look backward, and there he beheld a small brook, too small for the whisper of its running water to fill the air, but large enough for a grove of trees to have sprung up beside the water. And in one of those trees, there was a white rhesus macaque pointing a finger right at him! Had it heard his wife’s whispering? It pointed at him though, and was smiling, and squeaking with an enthusiasm that seemed like it could hold nothing but joy. And it clambered down from its tree and began to approach.
Justroastit scrambled behind him and watched the approaching monkey wide-eyed. His wife she may have been, and love him dearly did she, but perhaps not so greatly as to stand between him and some accursed monkey. Observing the monkey with the caution of a famed goat wrestler, he determined (whatever his determination was worth, what did he know of monkey business!) that there appeared to be little - if any - hostile intent in the little beast. Confident that steadiness had returned to his feet, he finally arose, and he took two confident steps forward and looked at the monkey. Justroastit fretted fitfully behind him, and her chatter drew the attention of other clansmen who gathered around to see the monkey.
And the monkey strode ever closer, walking not upon all fours as the monkeys of their memory had been wont to do, but only just its two feet–its paws were clean and immaculate. And once it came just ten paces from Goatwrestler, it sat down in some strange way with its legs crossed and one foot atop the other, and it seemed to gesture for the newly arisen man to get right back down again, and then it patiently and expectantly stared at him. Goatwrestler stared down at the odd monkey for a few long seconds, and then a clansman shouted out, “I think it wants you to sit, Wrestler!” He looked over and saw that it was Treesbane who spoke. “It’s a monkey,” Goatwrestler said, “I’ve no idea what a monkey might want.”
Treesbane shook his head, and around him the other clansman repeated what he had said before. “Go on Wrestler, sit with the monkey.” Puffing, he sat with the monkey and leaned towards it curiously. Perhaps from that very moment he was Goatwrestler no more. His clansmen would know him only as Monkeywhisperer. “Happy, little monkey?” He asked with a quizzically raised brow.
The monkey’s placid look lit up once it saw the strange and clumsy creature imitate his action. Perhaps these beings could be taught after all, the beast might have thought. Or maybe this monkey had already encountered similar beings before and so earned its patience through time, for these Renevits were not the first tribe of men to have found their way into the Indias. But the wise sage Stambh had taught this rhesus macaque guru (or at least, its predecessors) well, for it did not let that air of smug superiority leak out beyond the deepest depths of its mind, and even there it quickly banished such hubris. With a start, the monkey saw that something was wrong: the strange creature, even as it sat, had not fully adopted the correct posture. So the monkey made a deal of crossing and uncrossing its legs until the other one–slow as it was–seemed to understand. And then, the monkey closed its eyes and began to deeply inhale. It paused a long time, and then it exhaled, rhythmically. Over and over, a cycle like the seasons. Monkeywhisperer looked at it, lips pursed, and then glanced back at the others. Most of them were smiling broadly, barely containing their laughter.
“Pah! Well I hope you’re satisfied!” He shouted at them, getting to his feet once more. “Why don’t you sit with the monkey. Well, there you have it. Now I’ve goats to finds and…” he looked around at the little green paradise they were in, “and, well, I guess this is a good development all things considered.” And with that he went off grumbling about stupid monkeys.
And at his rising and turning about, the monkey’s eyes suddenly snapped open and it cried out with great dismay and disappointment–where was its pupil going now?! It clapped–even though such raucous actions and the resulting din was probably beneath it–and gestured back at the place where ‘Monkeywhisperer’ had sat. The display was received with great excitement from the remaining Renevits, who likewise clapped. Some of the gathered children ran up to the monkey and jumped up and down in imitation. Barring one, who approached calmly with a great smile on her face, and placed a hand on the monkey’s head. “Aren’t you pretty,” she intonated melodically, her eyes bright, “and you smell so flowery.” She murmured. Seeing her touching it, the other children quickly gathered around and started patting and grabbing the monkey. “Let me pat its head Rockpetter, let me,” one was now saying, even as others examined its tail or arms or rubbed its back curiously. The same overly bold girl, whom they had called Rockpetter, placed a single finger on its nose, and stared wide-eyed at the monkey. The monkey did not seem overly fond of the gesture, but the child’s joyful ways did appeal to its kind spirit, and so it responded in kind by tapping her nose. Then she caught a better whiff of its scent; there was a strong aroma of sweet and earthy juniper that clung to it, a very clean and pure sort of smell. And its white fur was cleaner even than the girl’s own body!
The rhesus macaque overlooked the filthiness of her body and gestured for her to sit. She excitedly shooed the other children, still trying to grab or pat the monkey, away and very readily sat in front of it. Unlike Monkeywhisperer before, she appeared to have no qualms whatsoever about being seen to be up to monkey business. The other children formed a quick circle around the duo and observed them - not quietly by any means, for now they shouted for Rockpetter to touch its mouth or open its hand or rub its belly or to pull its long wispy beard. She ignored them for the most part (though she did stroke its beard curiously) and focused on sitting as much like the monkey as she could. It seemed greatly pleased by her efforts, amicably tolerating her grasping at its beard, and eventually closed its eyes (though one might have been just a crack open, for nervousness of being surrounded by so many of the strange creatures) and then began to repeat its strange breathing exercise, much as it had done for Monkeywhisperer, only this time it found a much more ready, willing, and curious pupil. When she emulated him, even one such as she began to find a sort of peace. This meditation was made harder by the din of the children all around, but already that seemed to be an increasingly distant thing.
It was not until the monkey itself tapped her shoulder that Rockpetter startled from that trance and opened her eyes again, surprised. Now it gestured for her to follow it toward those trees by the brook, where it had been perched in observance of their tribe not so long ago. As she moved to follow, one of the other children, a slightly older boy, grabbed her by the hand. “Don’t go off on your own Rockpetter!” She looked at him, eyebrows furrowed, “but why, Sandskipper? Look, the monkey wants us to follow.” She insisted. “Yeah, but we don’t know what’s going on exactly so it’s best to sit tight and not do anything reckless.” He told her firmly. She patted him reassuringly and smiled. “Don’t worry about me! And anyway you can all come too.” And slipping from his grasp, she made quickly after the monkey and was followed by a small troop of children, against Sandskipper’s protestations. Seeing that his reprimands and commands were doing no good, he at last relented and followed them with a staff in hand.
Bundled together in the shade of the tree, the monkey had stowed away a small heap of juniper berries and various flowers. He seized it up now and showed it to them, letting the children look at the amalgamation and smell the pungent, woody aroma. And then he took a small bit of it and laid it upon one rock, and then he grabbed another rock and used it to begin mashing the mess into a pulp. Seeing this, Rockpetter grabbed a nearby rock and joined the monkey in smashing. The two rocks fell into a steady rhythm and harmony, descending one after the other, and Rockpetter shook her head from side to side alongside the monotone drumming, humming melodiously as she did. About them the remaining children stood, rocks in hand and watching carefully. Behind them all was Sandskipper with his staff, staring suspiciously at the monkey and keeping a careful watch all around.
Soon the product of their rock-smashing was an ointment of sorts that smelled very much like that herbal odor clinging to the monkey. The rhesus macaque laid down its rock, then rolled a finger through the paste and sniffed. Then, satisfied, it plodded to the brook and started washing itself, occasionally rubbing the ointment into its fur. Intrigued, the children all gathered more closely around the paste and, not waiting for Rockpetter to cease rolling her hands in it, got to wipe it onto one another’s faces and hair and noses. They yelped and cried and wrestled around the rock, those with paste on their fingers chasing those without. Only Rockpetter, who remained absent-mindedly preoccupied with what residues of the paste remained on the rock, did not participate in their chaotic play, and Sandskipper who remained upright and watchful. Eventually, Rockpetter wandered on after the monkey and observed it. She picked at her nose inattentively, watching to see if the monkey would do anything new, and then squatted down and stroked its tail.
The monkey stopped its bathing for a moment, staring at her. Rockpetter thought she saw something mischievous in its eyes, but in reality, it was merely frustrated that its (smelly) pupil chose now of all times to cease imitating its actions, and now the macaque was contemplating how best to get through to her. In the end he figured that a good start would be smearing the ointment on her, so he reached out and rubbed a palm, still coated in some of the watered-down ointment, into her clothes.
Seeming to understand what it sought, the girl got to scrubbing the monkey's head roughly with the existent ointment. Satisfied with that, she rubbed at its nose and then - with equal parts fear and curiosity - stuck both her hands into the monkeys mouth and made a poor attempt at scrubbing its teeth and tongue with the ointment, though she got no further than smearing her unfortunate companion’s mouth with the stuff. It frowned and snorted, wiping the stuff off its own face to then petulantly smear it onto hers. She shrank back, face scrunched up, and then wiped what she could away with her sleeves. “Bad monkey!” She declared, grabbing at its cheek, thinking she’d pinch it and yank the mean creature to and fro–but when her hand darted out, the monkey’s face twisted to the side. Again. Again. Again! It evaded her grasping hands each time, backing a bit further into the brook’s water as she stepped after it, again and again, until the water was about up to her knees. Then with one final lunge that missed, Rockpetter fell forward and was soaked, much to the monkey’s delight. The monkey, ever helpful, moved forward to help her scrub through those clothes while she bathed.
Frowning sullenly, the girl accepted the monkey’s scrubbing and got to lazily flicking water. At first she just generally flicked. Then the water happened to splatter the monkey’s arm. Then she curiously flicked at his torso, watching the droplets land against its hairy body and join the flow of other droplets back down into the brook. Then she flicked a little harder so that the droplets did not land on its chest, but rather sprayed its nose and face, and landed on its brows and flowed down the corners of its eyes.
By now, most of the other children were tramping about in the brook too, giggling and calling out and splashing one another. Their earlier game of smearing the mashed juniper and herbs all over one another made their play almost as good as an actual bath, even if they didn’t scrub! Sandskipper, still sour, had his patience worn to wit’s end and finally started yelling harshly and demanding they all get out and dry off. Most obeyed the younger boy, though Rockpetter wanted to stay with the monkey. Eventually, however, the white-furred creature seemed to grow tired of having water flicked at its eyes, and so he flashed her one last amicable grin before clambering out of the water and into some tree. Rockpetter was quick to follow, dragging herself out of the break and making after the monkey, but a firm hand caught her by the wrist and pulled her resolutely - though not ungently - away. “Come on, you’ve done enough monkey business for today,” Sandskipper grumbled.
Throwing her head back, she glanced into the trees until she caught sight of her newfound friend. “Bye-bye!” She called out to that sagacious monkey, who watched from a perch atop a tree. It might have waved at her in response. It was hard to tell if it was doing that or just flicking drops of water down at her eyes.
Reaper’s band of Renevits is split once more. As Reaper went out on a morning expedition, leaving most of their band behind in the camp, he returns to find them all mysteriously vanished without a trace.
From the other perspective, we see the camp-dwellers beset by a massive rainstorm that seemingly comes out of nowhere! In the desert, no less! Their stuff gets blown all over the place, there’s a witch flying through the air on a bicycle, and before anybody knows it they’re waking up in Oz the Indias!
They’re in a relatively nice grassland by a stream, in the tepid India, but the mountain-spires of the Cold India and the jungle-borders of the Hot India are both near. For now though, they just stay put, and have an encounter with one of the wise and amicable rhesus macaques, the monkeys previously enlightened by Stambh in the last India post.
By the power and virtue of Cyclone, some few dozen Renevits are swept into India by a mighty storm for 0MP!
Wrinkles were cut into Stambh’s visage; if that was not how he had been carved from the chisel of the Rakshasaraja’s mind, then that was how the warmth of distant Itzala in the sky had made him. The sun had also touched the guru over the rest of his body; he was tanned and like the color of sandalwood. And on the topic of sandals, he wore none! No shoes of any kind spared his gnarled feet from the ground’s toll, but it was warm enough in this part of the Indias, so his toes were not afflicted overmuch by cold, even during the cool nights. His heels and the bottom of his toes were like leather, and so he did not mind the small stones and sticks that he had to trod upon as he wandered down the riverbanks and through the forests, over the hills and under the mountains, all across this strange world.
He had done much contemplation already in these early days; while his body wandered alone, his mind strayed so as to keep itself busy. And as he was so clearly crowned with wisdom, clean and always with washed hair and a magnificent beard even as he wore only a modest loincloth, there were many who stopped him as he walked and asked him for his sagely counsel or his thoughts, and he was always glad to speak with another. The path to enlightenment came from enlightening others, after all.
So Stambh looked over at his day’s current student, and his wrinkled brow furrowed. “But look at the brawn of your arms, the richness and thickness of your hair,” he began, “You are built like mine own father! It is a mighty and noble body that you could have. But where he was regal, you are unkempt and filthy here; your smell is not altogether foul, but that dirt does your beauty no justice. Come down here by the river, for your body is unclean and should be washed. That will bring you closer to Purity.”
And as this was a good and eager student, not some undisciplined and rebellious fool like so many of the youths of today, he obeyed the wise guru Stambh and entered the river even though the water was cold and the current was swift. The dirt was at once loosened, and thinking it all swept away, the pupil made to swim back to the bank after only a few moments.
“No,” corrected Stambh, “you must scrub!”
And though the student was cold, he diligently obeyed and began to rid itself of the dirt which clung strongest to it, and of the dirt that was beneath its nails and behind its ears. Meanwhile, the guru had seized a cluster of juniper berries and two rocks, and was mashing a paste.
“Here,” called out Stambh from the bank, “cleanse yourself with the fragrance of this wash.”
And his apprentice came to the riverbank and took up the mashed juniper, but then licked at it and made as if to rub the stuff under his tail.
“No,” instructed Stambh. “like this!”
And so the sage showed the little white-furred rhesus macaque where to apply it, how to produce the fragrance, and how to lather the scent over the rest of its body. But merely possessing pleasant aroma and a clean, well-groomed body did not make for an enlightened being, so there was more work to be done.
The monkey fidgeted, now conscious of the filth that resided in the dirt and the insects all around, where before he had never minded such things. So the rhesus macaque developed a tic in the side of its lip, looking around at the sorrowful state of the tepid Indian wilds all around (for it would be a long time before this land, this mildest of the Three Indias, was cultivated and made into the seats of the greatest of mortal rajas) and think also of its less fortunate brethren, who still frolicked in the great piles of elephant dung for having never been taught better.
That neuroticism was not becoming of an enlightened one, the sage realized. So he looked down at his twitched student and his brow furrowed once more. “Now your body is Pure, but there remains another sort of Impurity about you. It is in your mind. See how you are bound to yourself, how to sway to fro without the shove of the wind, dancing these meaningless and sharp motions? Do you feel the cloudiness of your mind? Those wild thoughts that send you to and fro are like the film of dust that settles atop a stagnant pool, obscuring the clarity of the pristine waters below.”
The monkey stared at Stambh puzzledly, chewing on its thumbnail as it tried to make sense of those words. The sage only shook his head. This was not something easily explained; he whose mind had only ever known turmoil could hardly be expected to understand–let alone cultivate–inner tranquility.
So Stambh seated himself in the lotus position, and gestured for the rhesus macaque to do the same. The monkey expressed some dismay at the prospect of getting down into the dirt now that it was so clean, but the brave and obedient pupil trusted in his mentor, and so overcame his squeamishness and did as was bidded of him. Once the two were seated in that pose beneath the shade of a sandalwood tree, facing one another, Stambh gave his next instructions, “Now close your eyes. And now release your breath…”
Their days of meditation were not easily counted. Though they sought a spiritual awakening, they were as of yet tethered to the physical world, and so in the waking hours of the day they took some breaks to answer the call of nature, drink of the sweet spring water, and to feed upon the abundant fruits and berries of the woodland which were sweeter still. In time, macaque found himself unburdened by thoughts of pain or pleasure. Eventually, the monkey found itself no longer suffering from even the desire to taste sweetness, and so without having been told, it began to feed upon the nuts that were strewn all over the ground; it had no time to climb trees to find the ripest fruits or to mill through the forest looking for what berries had not already been claimed by the yet-unawakened creatures of India.
Yes, the unawakened creatures. They were different from him, the monkey knew, for he was now awake. And with his enlightenment had come a sort of noble calling, a yearning to open the eyes of others that they could see the right path. So he bowed long before his master Stambh, and thanked him in his monkey way, and then took his leave to do just that. It was with pride that Stambh saw his first student gather up the other rhesus macaques of the wild and take the mantle of a disciple, bestowing unto others what was unto him.
Sometimes Stambh would come to the macaque congregation too, to help his disciple Purify them in body and mind. The sage, strange as he looked to those creatures with his human stature, served as a sort of inspiration.
This first monkey-disciple of the sage, through his following the path set by Stambh and through his teaching of others, eventually reached full mastery of the way. When he came to the end of the path, he was fully awake, pure of body and mind and even of soul.
By then, the sage Stambh had wandered to other parts, but tribes of other humans had found their ways to the strange and fertile lands of this India. Seeing the tall men of slender frame and tan faces, the awakened macaques recognized the likeness of their mentor Stambh, and so they made themselves friendly acquaintances.
The humans were of course taken aback by these animals approaching them so boldly and amicably, and doubly so when they observed the strange behavior of the monkeys. But this was a bountiful land, filled with fruit and nuts, and so their curiosity overcame their base nature, and they did not harm the macaques even if the hunters would have been able to make easy quarry of the trusting and passive creatures. The rhesus macaques showed them which plants and nuts to eat, where the best drinking water and bathing spots were, even how to make the juniper wash and bathe.
Some human imitators even began to join in the rituals of these most sacred of animals (for how could such enlightened creatures be anything but holy?), and these went on to become the first yogis.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
After many days, Nawal found at last a mountain to his liking. The first one he had sought to climb had been wholly impassable at the foot; after pushing his way through the forest that surrounded it, relieving his hunger with the large and watery pale-brown mushrooms that grew there, he had found that the incline leapt up suddenly into a steep wall, with no path to be seen, nor even ledges he could have held onto had he been more vigorous of body. If even he had climbed it, he thought, the illuminations he would have found on such a mountain would have been arduous and forbidding, difficult to grasp and impossible to ever be taught, and so had turned away from it.
The second mountain had seemed more promising at first glance. The trees below it had been more sparse, with more yellow needles than green ones in their crowns, and where they ended it was not difficult to find the roots of an inclined ridge that led up around the great stone stalk. He climbed it for two days and two nights, finding along the way small caverns in the rocky face and wide round shelves where he could rest. At noontime on the third day, however, when he had ascended to half of the mountain’s height, he saw that the winding path broke off and rose no further, so that the summit could not be reached. This, he thought, was also a poor place to meditate, for he would come to the cusp of enlightenment and then never be able to take the final steps.
Thereafter, Nawal no longer let his mere intuition guide him in search of a perfect seat, but strained his eyes to see the shape of a mountain’s flanks before he tried to climb it. Before then, it had seemed to him that such base premeditation would mar his quest and defeat its point; if he had come here to perfect his spirit, should he not exercise it and let it grow rather than lean on the crutch of bodily senses? But then, he reasoned one day, as he sat cross-legged on a rock by a mountain stream, eating a hard and sour gourd-like fruit, perhaps he had been wrong to think so. If his spirit needed to be refined in the rarefied air of these mountains, then clearly it still had room to grow, and was uncertain in its abilities. The wise thing to do, then, was not to depend on it wholly, but let his experienced eyes and ears lead it about the world for a little time yet.
So it was that when he approached the third mountain, he knew that a path would lead him up as far as he could see from below. The footslopes were high and lenient, reaching beyond where, for most others, the sheer rock began, and the ledges spiralling upward from them were numerous and even, almost like so many paths climbing a less upright peak. The caverns in its side were plentiful, so that, as he made his way heavenward, he never had to sleep under the bare sky; and most were dry and spacious as well, like huts prepared for a traveller. In several places along the way, the ledges broadened considerably, and it seemed to him that entire villages could be built there, if their people could but find springs of water and grazing-grounds at hand. In three mere days he was at the top, though this summit was little shorter than the previous one he had attempted. It was a fine place, low enough that tufts of grass sprouted about it for comfortable seating, with a cavern close below if he had need of shelter.
Yet this mountain did not please him, for the very reason that it had been so easily mastered. The thoughts he would reach upon it would be smooth and pleasant enough, but pedestrian and certainly not wise, for no wisdom was gained without effort.
Thus Nawal looked down from his elevation, which, though it was not spiritual, served him well enough, because he plied his bodily senses alone. His eye found a new goal which appeared both approachable and worthy, though of course it was hard to judge of the latter before having tried of it. The way down was easier than the ascent, and in but eight days he had reached the fourth mountain.
Great was his surprise when he saw that it was not uninhabited like the others! About the foothills and on the forested slopes, huge shaggy forms moved among the trees, walking on the knuckles of their fists and sometimes even standing upright on their two legs. These were reclusive, solitary beings, as he soon discovered; though they towered greatly over him, the shaggy brown apes lumbered away into the woods when they heard him approach, and would not come near him even as he rested. Only after some days of walking did he begin to see curious snouts, long and ursine, following him from the brush as he went by, and by the time he had reached the mountain they were accustomed enough to his presence to stroll freely about or keep chewing their fruits even upon his passage.
The peaceful mountain-apes amused him, but he was troubled by their presence all the same. His fears were confirmed when he reached the mountain’s rocky wall, and saw large brown figures lumbering about its crags and climbing its slopes. A path that was trodden by too many, of course, could not lead to wisdom, for that would have been a common thing; and a seat as peopled as this could only be home to common revelations.
Nawal almost despaired then, for he could see no other suitable mountains around him, and he was feeling weary from the search. But then he sat on a flat stone to think, and another thought did come to him. The senses were not the body’s only faculty; there was also speech, which could perhaps avail him now that he was no longer quite alone in the woods and the foothills.
He went into the thick of the forest, where most of the apes dwelt, and looked and prodded about until he found a large and grizzled beast crouching alone under a tree, where it was plucking the nuts from a tree-cone.
“Hail to you,” he said, in a raspy voice for he had spoken little in his long journey, “You who look more travelled than I around these parts; is there a place, neither too smooth nor too steep, where one can sit and contemplate in peace?” But even if it was old and experienced, the ape was not learned in the ways of speech, and it continued to fiddle with its trove.
Then Nawal saw that he would have to show what he meant, which was a difficult proposition, for what he sought was not as simple as something to eat or to drink! Yet he sat down cross-legged, closed his eyes and began to sway his head. One could not meditate for an audience, but he tried to summon a mood of clarity, so he hummed and whistled a tune like the high mountain wind. When he opened his eyes, the ape was looking at him attentively with its small round eyes over its tapering nose; then it let drop the cone and rose up, slowly making away on its four limbs, and Nawal followed.
They walked through the trees for a time, the ape not stopping to wait for its short-legged companion, but not hurrying away from him either, and at length they came to the edge of the woods. It was already growing dark, the sun slinking away between the great towering pillars. The hairy guide stood up on its feet and looked intently into the distance, fixing its myopic eyes on one of the column-shaped peaks. Even without words, Nawal understood its meaning.
“Thank you,” he said to the old ape, and it appeared to nod in the dusk before shuffling back into the treeline. The traveller slept on a pile of dry evergreen needles, and on the next day he set off for the place he had been shown.
In a long time, or a short one, he reached its foot and climbed the lower slope; and then he saw that its upward crags were hard and steep. But as he looked closely, he began to spot little edges in the stone where a foot could stand safely, and then another further up if he searched hard enough, and so on further. It was not an easy way to climb, but soon his mind was lost in the task of blazing the trail for the body to follow, and so preoccupied was he with its efforts that it surprised him when, come the evening, he almost toppled over with sudden fatigue. The higher he went, the sparser the berries he had been subsisting on became, and his waterskin grew lighter. The pangs and dizziness of hunger went to join the fatigue, his waking hours becoming themselves something like a dream. But he kept his eyes fixed on the path, not allowing any of it to distract him.
So passed one day, and another, and more; but when at last he came to the summit, it seemed to him that they had gone by at a peculiar pace of their own.
Up on top, the ground was flat and rocky, made hot by the sun by day and cold by the wind by night, with but some scant and pale berry-bushes and a few depressions where pooled rainwater and melting snow. Even so, it was a quiet place, untroubled save for the whistle of altitude now and then. That sound disturbed the ear, but as he sat and listened, Nawal understood its purpose. Just as the mountain had been a laborious task to overcome, demanding all his focus, so would the meditation upon it be a struggle. And that was well, for a meaningful truth was not easily won, but neither was it beyond the grasp of one who put himself all into its quest. Only on a seat such as this one could it at last be found.
Thereafter, every day Nawal gave thanks to the old mountain-ape that had led him to the last step of his journey.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Now it had been a long time since Rakshasaraja had dreamt that strange Stambh into being, long enough for that guru to have wandered far and away. The rakshasa-children would have similarly wandered, for it had likewise been a long time since that ravenous sun had swallowed his slumbering form while it served as the seasoning atop his primordial lilypad, and a long time since the sun, with its scorching tongue, had finally released him in its death-burst, sending him down onto the land that would become the Indias.
Much happened while the Rakshasaraja was asleep, you see. Perhaps more happened to that noble Ear while he was asleep than happened to him while he was awake! But the Rakshasaraja might tell you that the current state of the cosmos was all some jape of a tragedy–at best!--so perhaps that state of affairs is for the better.
Anyway, there came a time when a curious primate crawled up the hairy, sweating hill that was the Rakshasaraja’s head. This was not one of those white-furred and solemn macaques within whom Stambh had seen so much potential: this was a filthy, black-coated baboon with a raucous sense of humor, a foul tongue, and a particular penchant for throwing excrement at other creatures.
Once it had at last completed the journey it had set out to do that morn, leaping from a jungle tree to grasp hold of the Rakshasaraja’s crown and slowly climb up its great arches and ridges where possible. Where climbing the crown’s contours was not so easily done, the cunning baboon seized the great dark vines that were in reality the hairs, erupting from the side of the great hillock which was in reality a head. And he would climb up the vine-hairs, up and up, until he could disembark upon some higher ridge of the arching crown to regain his strength, and once rested, continue ever upward. By that afternoon it had grown quite hot, but he had reached the forehead which was the summit of this hillock, and a most pleasant breeze was there to cool him. The various birds that had roosted up here all fled from his might and majesty–or so the baboon thought! Truly they probably fled more from his stink!--so the primate was there alone to enjoy his throne, standing atop the highest hill all around, looking down upon the tops of the many jungle-trees that carpeted the verdant distance. You see, of the Three Indias, this particular region was the hottest, and so it was largely a jungle.
But back to the baboon! He laughed at the little birds as they flew away. He laughed harder still at those other birds below him, looking down onto their nests in the highest boughs of those trees so far below. On many an occasion, the baboon had reached upward to grasp at the ripe and succulent fruits of a tree, only to be met with the disdainful refuse of some bird nestled higher still. Time to return the favor! The baboon climbed to the summit, a small hill atop the hill which was in reality the tip of a nose atop the face, and he began to conjure the ammunition that he would rain down upon those wretched birds–
But then the air around was all fire, for the Rakshasaraja had smelled something most foul and snorted, and his steamy hot breath had scorched the baboon’s rear! With a howl the baboon clutched its red bottom, whose cheeks would forevermore be scalded that bloody color.
“Flea? Is that you again?” the Rakshasaraja mumbled, his three bleary eyes coming into focus upon the strange creature jumping up and down upon his nose. And what a vile stench! The baboon was in a panic, having had its posterior burnt even as it was met with the revelation that this hillock had come alive as some great monster. As it danced wildly and tried to clamber down from the Rakshasaraja’s nose, the giant lifted its great arm from where it had been blanketed by all the jungle undergrowth that had grown up around his slumbering mass.
Two giant fingers seized up the fleeing baboon, nearly but not quite crushing him, as the First Rakshasaraja squinted at the strange creature that had disturbed his rest, itched his nose with its scurrying, and offended his stomach with its stink. “No, you are not that same bothersome flea, so I might spare you for this is the first time I have been made to suffer the offense of your presence.”
The baboon had rather involuntarily finished that bowel movement that he’d began not a whole minute earlier, and the dropping fell between the giant fingers that grasped his body, right down onto the nose of that giant face below him. The Rakshasaraja was predictably enraged. The baboon howled and tried to profess its sorrow and its innocence and its respect and good-meaning, for that had been an accident--a product of ignorance and fear–but there were no words that the mere beast could command that would be understood by that leviathan!
“Begone now, you filthy, spiteful, beast of low-cunning! You think to answer my mercy with this? Bah! Woe unto any who disturb my slumber and disrespect my majesty!” But his rage had been such that his fingers had trembled even as they had squeezed, and so he had simultaneously lost hold of the baboon even as he had meant to crush it. The sheer force and fury of his words had been as a mighty gale, and so his burning hot breath had blasted the bothersome primate away, sending it flying far over the emerald landscape and into the distance, safe from the irate giant’s clutches if not from the Galbar’s inevitable embrace!
Through the sky the yowling baboon hurtled, past startled birds that stared incredulously at this unwonted intruder. It was not the way of nature that simians should fly so, but the ground below did not hasten to reassert its claim upon the beast any more than the wind did in carrying it onward. The canopy below raced his flight, but just as its arc was descending, the trees lost ground, cutting off the animal’s desperate hope of snatching a branch at the last moment. The green gave way to yellow scrubland, split from it by a thin brown line of felled trunks. Near the edge of the jungle stood two wooden huts, with a fire-pit in the ground before them.
The baboon smashed into the ground in front of the huts, broke into pieces and died.
Corpse, who was lying in the sun nearby, for this was his habit, opened an eye.
“Come see this!” he called.
Then Song came out from one hut, humming, and Perfection and Preserver from the other. Rage, who lived in the first hut with Corpse and Song, did not answer, because he was away uprooting trees at the edge of the jungle.
“This one was whole, but has been broken up into many pieces,” observed Song, and then she broke up her chant into all its sounds and sang every one with a different mouth, to show how such a thing might be done, “Such things I have seen climbing on trees, though there was less red on them.”
“Show me how they were,” said Preserver, who had never gone far from the huts, because he was the one who closed the holes in them with wood from the trees that Rage uprooted.
Then Song showed him how a baboon was, humming louder and lower, and Preserver gathered up all the pieces and put them together, so that the baboon was whole again.
“It is not really whole, these pieces are still loose,” said Perfection, and picked up the spite, the filth and the low cunning that had flown into the baboon from the Rakshasaraja’s words. And since Preserver had already closed the baboon up, she put them into its mouth and nose.
As soon as she had done this, Baboon jumped up with a hoot and scurried off. The rakshasas did not run after him, because they were stunned by his foul smell and dirty fur now that Perfection had put filth into him. He loped towards the jungle, looking for a tree where he could pick some fruit. But when he came to the edge of the trees, he saw Rage gripping around a trunk with his arms, and stomping and pulling until he pulled it out of the earth.
Then Baboon cackled in his way, because he had had a thought, and he took a little stone that had a sharp point and threw it so that it landed next to Rage. When the rakshasa stomped his foot to push against the ground and tug at the tree, it came down on the stone and was prickled on its end. Rage glared and stamped and waved his fists, furious that someone would dare sting him so, and in so doing he let go of the tree, which teetered aside and fell down on his head. He sat down on his haunches and his eyes crossed; and by the time he got up to find the one who had played this trick, the mischievous Baboon had hidden himself in the canopy and cackled from above, and Rage did not catch him!
As wise men know, there exist three different Indias: one cold, one tepid, and one hot. And each is populated by a different sort of monkey! This post has one section for each.
Starting in the tepid India, the sage named Stambh encounters the rhesus macaques, and, seeing some latent potential in them, enlightens the creatures. He teaches them to purify their bodies, then their minds, and finally their souls. Some tribes of men then come to find this fertile land, and to their astonishment, the local macaques–though they do not speak–prove to be very benevolent and helpful friends.
In the cold India, another sage named Nawal wanders. It becomes apparent that his purpose in coming to this strange land of spiral mountains is to find an auspicious summit to meditate atop, that he might receive revelations he can bestow unto others. For this end he tries several mountains, but none are satisfactory. Eventually he stumbles across one populated with giant timid primates; these are ursine yeti-like creatures. One of them shows Nawal the way to a good mountain. It is an arduous climb, but at the top, Nawal meditates.
In the hot India, where the Rakshasaraja and his children first landed, there is a jungle inhabited by baboons. One such creature climbs atop the great bulk of the slumbering Rakshasaraja (think King Kong) and wakes him with its stench, only to be cursed and blown away. He explodes upon landing in the distance, but the other Rakshasas find him and reassemble his pieces, and the Rakshasaraja’s curses and insults metastasize into a malevolence that makes this a very special and mean baboon–the Baboon.
By the power and virtue of Cyclone, primates exist in India, rhesus macaques are enlightened, yeti-things are cool, and Baboon exists. All for 0MP!
Back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, I got started with writing online on the Spore forums. Man, those were the days. We're talking like 12 years ago!
I've been here on and off for almost as long, and have GM'd a bunch of different things to varying success.
Discord: VMS#8777
<div style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, I got started with writing online on the Spore forums. Man, those were the days. We're talking like 12 years ago!<br><br>I've been here on and off for almost as long, and have GM'd a bunch of different things to varying success.<br><br>Discord: VMS#8777</div>
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