Grande Finale
With doom they came.
The throng of massive spined bodies, each large enough to crush three selka in a blow, surged across the sloping plain, trampling the tall grass into a dirty mulch. Their crimson eyes burned with soulless malice, ready to feast themselves on the sight of slaughter. The blood-drinkers of the Hooflands grew fat and strong in battle, and this pack had clearly rampaged through more than one tribe on its way towards the shore.
Despite the monsters’ size, the thought only made Split’s rage mount within her as she watched them approach.
Behind her, the hill crest had been stacked with large rocks, a crude palisade of sharpened sticks bridging the wide gaps between the awkwardly spaced boulders. It could scarcely be called a barricade, but there was only so much two score of selka could do in less than a week. The villages this far down the coast were still few and scarce, and Split’s own warning had been the first this one had heard of the blood-drinkers being on the warpath. It was fortunate she had reached them first at all, for, though she travelled alone, the cruel purpose that seemed to have come into the beasts drove them to a tenacity they had lacked before.
Plump grey shapes shuffled apprehensively behind the makeshift wall. Like most southerners, the Wottja had known little bloodshed in their secluded lives - the fish were plentiful off the shore, and the tribes too few and small to compete with each other over anything. Though they had seen blood-drinkers before, it had never been such large ones, nor so many at once, nor, worst of all, ones so driven to assail them overtly rather than ambushing lone huntsmen. What spears and knives they wielded were fit more for skewering bush-rats and fish than for piercing the hide of those things, and the party assembled for the defense of their homes was all too keenly aware of that.
This was why Split had left them in that relative safety while she stood on the slope alone, her axe over her back, three jagged stone knives in her hands.
Anon, she stood no longer, but ran, now on two legs, now on three, to meet the onrushing horde.
The packleader reared up, claws outsplayed to cut her down without breaking its stride. Its monstrous size turned against itself as she dodged under the swipe of its paws and jabbed a blade into its gut. With lightning-fast movements, she stabbed and pulled as one climbing a glacier, grappling her way up the creature’s bulk as it thrashed and roared, the ones behind it ramming into each other as rank after rank slowed down in hesitation. The rough stone edges tore gaping wounds in the earthen-red underbelly as they were dragged out, and black blood poured in streams.
With a vault, Split brought herself over the beast’s horned head. She struck at its upper eyes, and its roars rose to an agonized pitch; even as she did, her knives passed from her upper hands to the lower ones, and the free clutches unslung the axe from its harness. The vicious curved blade thirsted after a drought of many days, almost vibrating in anticipation, and, clenching her jaws, the kostral let herself be overtaken by its fury.
She leapt, scrambled, almost danced over the heads and backs of the blood-drinkers, every bound drawing forth gouts of foul life, every twist breaking off horns and maiming limbs. She stepped on knives and rolled over her axe, and when those did not suffice, her claws and teeth joined the fray, ripping eyes from their sockets and biting off talons. The mass beneath her heaved as a single immense horror, screaming and bellowing in a host of voices, reaching for her with dozens of limbs, lunging with a forest of horns. The brown blood of the Pit-dweller mingled with the black ichor of the soulless. And still she did not let up, not even slow, as battle-rage drove her and her arms fell without guidance into motions practised many a time. Her eyes were glazed over, scarce even seeing the carnage, and the brand on her shoulder pulsated with a light as of buried embers.
Their erstwhile prey forgotten, the blood-drinkers had clustered to seize this darting gnat. They smelled the smouldering force within her, and hungered as they never had before for something so small. A wrath of their own clouded their senses, and when they struck, it was most often another of their number who bled. One after another, they fell, blinded, mutilated, haemorrhaging from cuts and gashes all over their bulk. Split did not stop to count her triumphs, but struck and hacked still, until her hide was once more as dark as it had been in her long-gone youth.
Even when the last of the monsters collapsed with a rasping groan, she did not let her arms stop twitching, did not let the fire inside her die out. She knew the battle was not over yet.
On the opposing hill, a tall shadow that could have been a tree began to move. It strode down slowly, deliberately, aiming its steps to crush as much of the surviving grass as could fit under its wide foot. The single, lidless red eye amid its cyclopic head looked with cold disgust on the failure of its herd, but it did not speak as it advanced, stony fingers grinding into readiness.
Split felt her body lurch ahead, despite herself, eager to leap upon this new foe, but held back with all the strength she could muster. In an effort that far surpassed the entire massacre of the blood-drinkers, she forced herself to move back by one step, then another, then another. Every foot a battle against her own flesh, she backed up, away from the seeping mound of still warm carcasses, up towards the barricade. The colossus of dark stone, emboldened by her apparent retreat, took a longer stride. With a grunt, she loosened her fingers, enough for her axe and knives to drop to the ground.
That was the signal. Pushed by grey hands, the trunk of a young tree, cut down and smoothed, rolled over the boulders and fell to the ground beside her. Almost before it struck down, the kostral had seized upon it, digging her claws into the wood. Though the trunk was half again as long as her, it rose high, stabbing into the clear sky. As it began to arc down towards the earth again, she leapt. The stone giant was just where she had expected it to be, and though its faceless glare did not betray it, surprise must have flashed through its mind as it saw the enormous club descend onto it.
It struck with all its weight, in a crash of splinters and pebbles. The colossus staggered and almost toppled to the side, its left arm now an uneven outcropping on its shoulder. Before it could raise its massive frame upright again, another thundering blow chipped off half its leg, bringing it down with an impact that shook the ground. It tried to prop itself up with its one remaining arm, but the remains of the trunk arced down again, straight upon its eye. With a final crunch, the body fell still, and the stones forming it fell apart as the preternatural force holding them together faded.
Only then did Split allow herself to breathe out fully. The splintered trunk in her hands dropped down, and she soon followed suit, wheezing as the exhaustion of that brief whirlwind of death caught up to her. She lay, amid blood and crushed stone, two eyes closed and the others looking up at the sky. It was so clear, so calm. She could hear the sounds of the grasslands again, and the buzzing of the first curious flies that descended on the site of the massacre. A rush of elation filled her at the sight of the spotless blue above her, and she wanted to stand up and stretch out her arms, but weariness weighed her down, and it quickly passed.
Something prodded her under her flank, pushing up. Split glanced aside and found herself looking into a concerned whiskered face. She narrowed one eye and weakly mimicked a half-smile with the edge of her mouth, but did not have the strength for any other gesture of reassurance. The face drew back, and she was lifted to her hind limbs, robust rubbery shoulders catching her under the first pair of arms. She let herself be carried up the hill, head almost dangling if not for lack of a neck, her gaze still contentedly lost in the azure void yonder. The day was warm and still.
***
Darkness had crept down, quiet and sly like a thief, and the many eyes of night winked from the ever-cloudless pitch sky. The far, far glimmers of the storied heavenly fires looked like sparks from the great festive flames the Wottja had built up in the burnished space between their holes and coarse huts, the fragments of Split’s giant club feeding the heat of revelry in what a contemplative watcher may have appreciated as a curious symbol of the world’s ways. Yet the minds of those gathered around the bonfire were a simpler sort, and the burning effigy of vicissitude was used to cook pieces of fish and meat on rough skewers. The selka had revelled and danced away the day in celebration of their saviour, and now were almost all as tired as her, sprawling placidly in a rolling tide that could have been mistaken as an extension of the nearby whispering sea.
Split, who had recouped a little from the morning’s struggle after a half-slumbering rest, crouched in the place of honour, axe at her side, traces of quiet exhilaration still in her eyes. The bonfire’s shifting light flickered over her weathered body. Even to one who had never seen a kostral before, it was clear that she was old. Her skin had long faded to ashen gray, drained by age and discoloured by the sun; its scabby carapace was cracked and scarred in countless places, the latest seeping scratched having joined an intricate web that spanned her entire body, deep and shallow; her claws were yellowed, and, behind the moment’s beatitude, her gaze was weary. But flesh still rippled with tremendous strength under her hide with her every movement, and her teeth, though cleft as they had ever been, did not quiver as they bit and gnawed through the crude feast. While most of the selka were a good deal fatter than her, none had eaten as much that evening.
“So, what happened then?” Nophoe, a wizened and round-bellied matron, shifted her gaze from the fire and onto Split. “How’d you get split off the wood people?”
The kostral leaned back on her mid-arms, front eyes drifting down from the sky and onto the faces of her audience. Her story had kept growing as she travelled, and tribe after tribe had been itching to hear where such a strange being had come from. The Wottja were no exception, though the urgency of their preparations had never yet left her enough time to complete her tale. Now, however, there was nothing more to hound them, and she could finish.
“Was after I’d run into the girl, Arya again.” Arya. What had become of her since then? Where had she gone off to? Good thing that last time she’d looked like she was more than able to look out for herself, though really that was not all there was to life. Wherever she might have been, Split wished she was having a good time of it.
She gave a shake of her shoulders and resumed. “Right, after that, yeah. Got on along some more, then them things started coming out. Them blood-drinkers, stone people. Was a lot of them at the start. Not like today, this much more.” She stretched apart four hands to show just how many more. “So we went beating on them together. They was gutted good in a fight, you won’t believe. Lot of them, and wood’s wood.”
The selka gave a chorus of nods and hums of assent, and one snickered “Yeah, you’ve shown us that all right.”
“Then,” she continued, “them packs started breaking up and going all ways, like you seen ‘em. So we figured we’d better do too. Wasn’t need for us to fight ‘em all together, and if we went two ways we’d keep them off more places. ‘Least, I figured, but he must’ve too. Was another time for us both. Me, I’d found people, and he’d no time to judge. Maybe he’s found some again now.”
“Yeah,” Nophoe bobbed her head, “hope he has. Sounded like he was good at it, and gods know folks need that sometimes.”
“Right on that,” Split pried another fish clean with a couple of swipes through her mouth, “Doubt he’ll be losing the touch soon. So he went west, and I south -” she dislodged a stuck fishbone from her bifurcated tooth with a finger, “- and after a bunch of scars, I’m here. Keeps you busy, all the chopping.”
“I dunno what the other people said,” a younger tribesman spoke up, “but we’ll have you know you didn’t take them scars for nothing. You’re one of us now, and I’ll dare any to say not!”
A cheer went up from the gathered selka, and Split let herself slide back, eyes to the winking stars, as flipper-like hands smacked her on the back and shoulders. Say what you will about being alone growing on you, she thought as she whistled in contented exhaustion, it was good to be among friends.
***
When she awoke, it was dark. She stretched out a hand to feel the tent’s rough hide before her eyes, but found herself grasping at the void. An inexplicable chill coursing through her bones, she pushed herself up, traces of sleep quickly fading from her head. No, she was not simply reaching for the far end. There truly was nothing where heavy folds should have hung from the rough wooden poles of the simple roof’s backbone.
Yet there were no lights above, only a distant, sickly pale gleam where nothing like that should have been.
Split’s contemplation of the darkness, so deep that even her subterranean-bred eyes struggled to pierce it, was broken by a sound somewhere off to the side. Something dragged over the ground, something distantly rumbling, whispering, and heavy. It faded as it should have come ahead of her, then began again, further back behind, a damp, creeping sound heralding an impalpable, malign presence. Spinning around, Split reached for her axe, but found nothing where it ought to have lain. Instead, as the sounds vanished, her fingers closed around something small, hard and jagged. She lifted it to her face, and stared at the fragment of clean bone, broken off where its smoothness was marred by the signs of vicious teeth.
She looked around again with eyes now accustomed to the inky emptiness, and saw a world unlike the one she had left when waking. The village was nowhere to be seen, nor was the sea. Tall trees of a kind she had never seen before rose all around, silvery in the dim glow from up above. They parted about where she stood, leaving place for a small clearing. No grass sprouted there, no undergrowth, however thin. The soil under her hands was grainy and yielding, as grey as the towering stems - ash, she realised as she smelled the bone still held up near her face. More pieces like it lay all about, half-sunken into the dusty ground, several larger, but diminutive nonetheless. She spied skulls like those of apes, and ribs of cages no larger than her palm scattered around, all bearing the marks of ghoulish gnawing. Tracks like those of hooves dotted the bleak surface of the ground around them.
Just as the shock of her new surroundings’ impossibility began to set in, the sound came again. It was still behind her, but closer than it had been, much too close. She could guess at the shape of the viscid mass dragging itself on the acrid earth among the trees from its churning and scraping, and she loathed it as much as it struck her with a new chill of fear. It spoke now, its gibbering whispers forming themselves into the distorted outlines of words.
”West,” it hissed, in what may have been either a command or a decree of inevitability, ”Go west. Go west.”
Its writhing drew closer, and Split felt it looming over her, its mockery of speech all she could hear, all she could imagine hearing. The fury of being cornered surged up in her, and, clenching her fists and teeth, she spun around to face the presence.
She could not have imagined. Vast as it has seemed, as she had thought it to be from the weight of its movements, it had been nothing compared to what she saw. The thing filled her sight, sweeping aside the trees like so many insignificant twigs and swallowing the sky with a single undulation of its amorphous bulk. It was a single festering sore, a wound in the world itself, that awned with a mouth of innumerable sharp teeth like mountains. It opened and closed as it spoke, and yet grew neither smaller no larger - ever it was all.
”Go west,” it howled again, ”find me, and he will fall.”
Then it gnashed its uncountable teeth, and in a start and a flash of darkness Split woke up.
***
She slunk away, silently, in the deep of night. It bothered her to leave the selka so, without a farewell, but the echoes of the voice in the dream had taken root in old, buried memories, and would not let her be still. Somehow, whatever had spoken to her that way knew - it had not just been a blind guess, she was certain. It had known what she would listen to, more than anything else, and loath as she was to admit it, it had known right. The ancient oath came floating up from the years, decades, centuries of half-remembrance that had accumulated over it, and with it, its entire foundation, every memory of pain and death in the accursed underworld. And, above all, the hatred around those four burning eyes that overlooked everything.
Thus she had gone, leaving but a parting gift in the guise of the most elaborate of her stone knives. Past the barricade she went, past the slaughtered bodies of the blood-drinkers, the shattered remains of the stone giant. She climbed over the hill the monsters had descended that morning, finding footholds in the gouges left by their talons. The sea was soon out of sight, and then out of earshot, as he passed a thicket that had miraculously stood untouched by the beasts, a grassy field, another hill-crest. And there, on a rock standing jarringly in a faint depression among the ridges, he awaited.
The first sign she noticed was the smell. Even from afar, putrid wafts akin to those in the night-vision, but much more intense now, told her that she was approaching her destination. It was fouler than rot, which for a moment made her think of how the selka would dispose of the blood-drinkers’ bodies before their decay started to spread illness, harsher than rust, viler than infected blood, yet akin to all those together.
A sharp whistle flew past her head, and she brought her front eyes to face the being. Though nowhere as large as he had made himself appear, he was still massive, almost as tall as her and a good deal bulkier. Foul grimy metal was his skin, unequal clawed gauntlets his hands, and a score of grinning maws his face. The sign of the clenched fist on his chest told her all she needed.
“You’re from him?” she growled, settling down in a crouch to mirror his, but visibly leaning an arm on her axe.
”Yeah, but also no,” the being gargled, ”I’m him, but not from him, and also not really him. Gut it, I’ve had it with this spit,” and spit he did something sharp into the ground, ”All you need to know, I’m Vrog and I’m not with him. That good?”
Split shrugged her foremost shoulders. “Guess it’ll have to do. That mark you got, though?”
”What?” Vrog shrugged in turn, ”You got one too.”
“Fair. So that’s why you said it? You’re in the same spot too?”
”Almost right on the spit,” he held up a finger that looked well-suited for carving out eyeballs, ”Except I got the better deal, ‘course I do, heh. I got the way out, for me, for you, for every scrapper down there.”
Three of Split’s eyes half-closed skeptically. “I’d think that a sharp gutface like you woulda taken it already.”
”That’s ‘cause I want to help, ya slagbrain!” The finger pointed at her accusingly. ”I swear, every time I try not to gut everybody straight up, I keep getting tooth. Told ‘em, the problem ain’t me, it’s the world. Good thing I don’t got much of this spit left to go, so ya listen close.”
“What’d ya mean, not much left? What kinda way out’s that you found?” she cocked her head aside, curiosity mixing with skepticism, “You’re not talking of giving the gut up?”
”’Course not, who’d you take me for,” Vrog cackled, ”Thing is, I found a place outta here, straight up. Dream thing or whatever, don’t really give a spit ‘bout them specifics, but there’s got to be drink and parties all the time, it’s gonna be wild. Dunno if my ticket there’ll take more than one, so don’t ask ‘bout that.”
“Wasn’t gonna to,” Split shook her shoulders, mouth snapping in negation, “I got enough dream spit to last a life, no thanks to ya.”
”Good. Now anyway, I’m not gonna need this old heap of scrap,” Vrog tapped his stomach with a dull clatter, ”up there, and since I got to be feeling good to get in, I figured I’d leave it to some scrapper as needs it. Like ya. Took me a slagged bit to find you, too, so if you say no I’ll do me better by eating ya.”
“Look, not giving ya tooth here, but,” she scratched her head, “what the spit’d you think I’m gonna do with a lot of, eh, vrog?”
”’s fine,” he waved a hand, ”I ain’t just gonna gutted drop it on you like this. Thing is, I got scrap in here that he ain’t got no idea about. Add in the spark that keeps it running and a bit of slick, and I’ll bet you scrap to slag it’s gonna be enough to bring down a god. Maybe not straight a way, and maybe not one like him, but” he splayed his claws, ”you ain’t ever gonna get a better shot. That a deal?”
Split rotated her head sideways, one eye facing straight up, considering. She could not help but think Vrog was right - she certainly did not see herself having any better chances than the one he was offering now any time soon, likely ever. At the same time, striking a deal with a piece of Narzhak, and one who looked and smelled like this, made her hesitate.
“Sounds good enough,” she brought her eyes slightly more in line with the many mouths, “and what’s my part in it?”
”Nothing!” Vrog gave a gurgling laugh, ”Nothing you wouldn’t do anyway. Just take it and use it, I know you’re dying to. Not as literal as me, but ya get it.”
“Deal, then,” she extended a hand and shook the sickeningly incrusted claw that came in response. When she withdrew it, she found herself holding a coarse leathery scrap. “The spit is this?”
”That’s for getting in close like the slagger won’t notice. ‘Fore you get to him, you’ll stop by some of my people, give ‘em this and they’ll know what to do. Don’t worry ‘bout reaching them, got it all set up for ya, you’ll see. Either way,” he jabbed out a probing tongue, smelling the air about him, ”that’s it for me, I’m’a get out of here now. Gut ya all, ya spithole!”
He raised a fist to the heavens, thumb sticking out between the uppermost two fingers, then smoothly transitioned into pointing at the far green luminescent gash in the night sky. As Split was distracted by the odd gestures, his tongue suddenly darted out, coiling around her axe and drawing back into the suddenly impossible width of a maw before it even struck her what was happening. She did not even think of starting after it, but sat watching as the mouth found its original shape again, then joined the others in an expression which must have been the closest it could muster to a beatific smile. A somewhat forced one, which soon broke.
”The gut’s up with it? It ain’t working,” Vrog grumbled, hands falling to scratch his head as a tongue shot up to point at the celestial light. Abruptly, he snapped his fingers with a metallic screech. ”Right, peace of mind. Gotta get that on.”
Another snap, and suddenly he was holding an upright brass cylinder. Threads of vapour coiled skywards over its wide brim, and several mouths stretched out of the face holding them to greedily inhale them. After some steady pulls, contented grins spread over them, this time in earnest.
”Gotta hand it, though,” Vrog chuckled, ”I had a good run of it. Heh.” His right claw rose, pointing at Split one last time.
”Just do what comes natural.”
And, as suddenly as that, it fell limp. The living pestilence that had been Vrog was well and truly gone from Galbar.
Lost in contemplation of the sudden change that had come over him in his last moments, Split only faintly noticed how his bulk began to drip and liquefy, flowing down the stone first in rivulets, then in streams, and how the molten slag he had once been and had now returned to pooled and twisted into strange shapes. Only when it was still did she look down.
At the foot of the stone lay an axe, not unlike hers, but larger and far fouler. Rust and grime coated its heft and blade, caked black ichor filled the gaps along its jagged edges, and crusts of dark ash stuck to it by unnameable fluids spread over it in splotches. It was warm to the touch, and heavy even for her when she tried to lift it. Even keeping her hands at good distance from the blade, she could feel that was where Vrog’s foulness had gone - malevolence curled around it like invisible ink in water, and the vile deathly intent radiating from it could almost be smelled.
But then, Narzhak deserved no better.
The question of what exactly Vrog had meant in telling her not to worrying about the way there began to rise again, but it was overtaken by an abrupt realisation of how weary she was. Half a night of nightmares had not been nearly enough after the morning’s battle. Pushing aside all thoughts of revenge, wonder and caution, Split let herself drop to the ground near the axe and drifted into familiar, dreamless sleep.
***
She woke up to great eyes of flame gazing at her from an iron face.
As if stung, she leapt up, axe in hand, holding the blade towards the presence. Fragment of thoughts flitted through the fear and surprise in her mind - was this what he had meant? That the fight would start as soon as she woke up? Much as she had been expecting this very moment for most of her life, Split realised now how woefully unprepared she was to face the god. It was all she could do not to break into running that very moment, thoughts of revenge and justice forgotten amid devouring terror.
The eyes did not move, and she wondered why he had not struck yet. Or, for that matter, while she was asleep. The question grew into a calming doubt, and then she noticed that the eyes were only two.
The being crouching over her was not Narzhak. It was akin to him in its immensity, armoured skin and fiery gaze, but that was where the similarities ended. Its body was serpentine and lean, bony, even, and its arms were vast folded wings. There was something of the kostral in its shape, but it was diluted in a myriad of bestial traits.
Its stare remained fixed on her, and she thought she saw impatience in the dancing flames within its hollow eye-sockets. No, she felt it inside her own head, like that one time so long ago, but weaker. It was a command all the same, yet without the weight of supreme dominion behind it, and it had no true power over her. Still, she felt it all the same. Get on, the eyes said, and so she did, axe slung over her back, clambering over the ridges of iron ribs and clinging to the crest upon the winding spine.
The great wings unfurled, beat once, twice, and for the first time in her life Split-Tooth was flying.
It could not have been all that bad. Arya did it all the time, after all - had been doing it even back when she had been a scared hatchling. True, it was not something that came as easily to her, but if she held on strongly enough, it would go just as smoothly. But, no matter how many times she told herself that, her eyes and teeth stayed clenched so tight she thought her head might burst. Calm down, the colossal beast’s annoyed thoughts washed over her now and again in regular waves, but she felt them less keenly than the irony. No true power over her it had, indeed, not even when, she was forced to admit, it would not have been a bad thing.
The flight lasted longer than she could say. The rare few times she dared open an eye by a crack, the sky was sometimes clear, sometimes dark, though she could not say whether it was due to day and night chasing each other or the path of their voyage traversing the banks of storms. Wind and rain lashed over and around her, but through her thick hide she felt it no more keenly than down on land. The only way for her to mark the passage of time was the beating of the monster’s wings, and she had lost track of it almost as soon as she had started keeping it.
At long last, the movements of the spine around her grew less and less even, and when she pried an eye open she was no longer surrounded by blue emptiness or billowing clouds. A thick red fog, snaring the light of day, whirled all about, stirred by the beast’s flight. As it washed upon her, she felt the tang of blood in her mouth. Unbidden, it roused memories. Who else could make the sky itself bleed?
Her own veins suddenly felt swollen and heavy, and she felt herself lurching downwards through the air. They had arrived.
A heavy blow somewhere below her, and everything came to a halt. Get off, the monster spoke to her inner ear, and so she did, sliding down the cline of its skeletal side made slick by the charnel fog. Almost as soon as she alighted on the hard ruddy earth, the wings snapped again overhead and took flight once more, the wind raised by them knocking her down despite her best efforts to dig her fingers into the soil. Grumbling, she pushed herself back up, sparing half a glance from a back eye at the leviathan shape disappearing into the sky, grey and red like a bloodied blade, and looked ahead.
She was standing over the ridge of a low hill, the ground sloping smoothly from her hands in a cline dotted with spiny grey shrubs that evened out into a wide smooth plain. There, by the sight of it, a great battle had just been fought. Dozens of squat, rounded bodies, covered to various degrees in filthy rags and scrappy armour, littered the expanse, their porcine faces twisted into mortal countenances of rage and pain. Crude weapons, most of them notched and splattered with red, lay scattered among them, along with the larger bulks of felled boars, backs bound by rough saddles and metal plates and snouts a mess of froth and gore.
Stalking among the carnage, scavengers of various kinds were already at work. At the far edges of the field, huge apelike brutes picked through the corpses, tearing out chunks of flesh or snapping off the largest pieces of cuirass and trying them onto themselves. Winged beings that - she grit her teeth in distaste at the sight - looked like mongrels of kostral and the giant that had brought her there, forearms warped into membranous limbs and skin marred by sickly growths, swooped down on isolated bodies, gnawing on them like vulturous beasts.
But most numerous were that same kind of swine-faced imps, either the remaining victors of the struggle or marauders following in their wake. Much like the kin she had known in the Pit, they seemed perfectly at ease as they carved their own fallen kind to pieces with knives and hatchets, roasting them over improvised fires and squabbling over looted armaments.
Her eyes fell over a group larger than most. They struggled, shoved, pushed and dragged each other in a living roil, trying to be among the first to reach the center. In the middle of it all, a small, but well-armed group of paunchy guards held them at bay, while their even fatter, but unarmoured leader dug into a sheaf of large sacks slung over the back of an irritated boar. Something passed between his hands and those of the crowd, and as it did those who had claimed their prize hurried back to their campfires.
As Split’s eyes drifted over the grisly spectacle, inwardly cursing Vrog for not telling her properly where to go next, she noticed that a goblin from one of the circles appeared to have seen her. Her gaze lingered there - she could not be quite sure, but that group looked unusually odd. There were but three of them, but two a good deal larger than any other on the field barring their other comrade, who was simply enormous in comparison. The sharp-eyed beast-fiend elbowed the goliath, and it turned its massive head towards what could only have been her. It gave a wave with a stubby hand, and, having no better recourse, she trotted down the hillside and through the field towards the campfire, no one paying much heed to her as she went.
When she reached the trio and crouched by the crackling flames, she was greeted with a series of grunts, and the giant pig-thing addressed her in a broken, but surprisingly good approximation of Pit-speech.
“Ugly gargoyle as ain’t got no wings, checks out. Big-mouth the one that sent you?”
Split snarled, but before she could answer another unusually large imp trotted over from the swarming crowd, triumphantly waving a pouch made with something’s desiccated stomach in one hand, and dropped into a slouch beside her.
“Got a deal on this one! Mix of salt and shred-weed from up north in the Pan. Ain’t tasted this kind here before, rutting curious to try.”
“Deal? How much’s that mean?” the giant, evidently the leader of the small group, asked skeptically.
“Just two scraps. Ya shoulda seen everyone's faces around when I got it this cheap, but they knows not to mess with us Keepers!”
With these words, the latecomer dipped two stocky fingers into its pouch and drew out a pinch of fine white powder mixed with dried pieces of pink-veined leaves. It artfully spread its bounty over the pieces of meat sizzling over the fire, and a pungent smell went up from them. It was so sharp that Split almost spat, but from how the creatures around her drooled it must have been extremely appetizing for them.
“Anyways,” the towering leader turned back to Split, “I get that right?”
“Yeah,” she finally was able to growl in response, “he did, and if you wants to keep your fat head you’re gonna watch who you calls ugly gargoyle.” The axe’s head demonstratively slammed into the ground by her foremost fingers.
“A’ight, a’ight, what’s yer being so touchy,” the boar-beast snorted, “We’re all friends here, ain’t we. I’m Oruff, by the ways.”
“Nahf,” rejoindered the one who had first spotted her.
“Kniff,” added the one who had brought the spice.
“Hruf,” finished the last one, “we’re Keepers, rutting best of piggutkind. And if you ain’t an ugly gargoyle, what’re you?”
“I’m Split. Split-Tooth,” she bared her jagged maw as if the display was needed to confirm the truth of her name, “Of the Pit-folk. Beats me where them gargoyles’s from, but if you mean them things,” she pointed at one of the far-off winged shapes, “I’ll give they’re kinda like us.”
“The more ye know,” Oruff shrugged, “Ain’t for us to bother about. We’ve got meat on the fire, so let’s get to it. Any of ye remember what’s we supposed to do with this one?”
“Watch’s supposed to know,” answered Hruf, and produced a thick metallic disk hanging from a fine chain. A pink finger flipped it open, revealing a small, snarling mouth eerily akin to Vrog’s within. It stayed stubbornly closed, even after Split waved her leathery scrap before it under the pigguts’ blank stares.
“Needs its share first,” Kniff explained, cutting off a morsel from a piece of roasting meat with a dagger and carefully holding it before the miniature maw. The pointed teeth seized on it hungrily, thrusting it inwards in an impossible ingestion, then did the same to Vrog’s token. Nahf passed it over to Oruff, who raised it to a drooping ear and tensed it to catch the sudden stream of chattering.
“Right, the skin!” the huge piggut snapped the disk closed and swung it around like a flail, “You mudsnouts didn’t lose it, right?”
“I’d rutted well rather, thing’s a bother to carry around,” Nahf grunted as he laid out one of the folded hides he had been sitting on, revealing it to be the remarkably intact scabby shell of one of the gargoyles. He unceremoniously passed it over to Split, who held it somewhat awkwardly in two hands.
“Now what?”
“Says to pull it on when you get there, where’er that is,” Oruff shrugged again as she tucked away the disk, “Ain’t no rutting business of ours either.”
“How about getting there, that too?” Split rumbled, tapping the soil with her axe.
“An’ that!” Oruff shoved Nahf with a hooved foot, “Go show ‘en how.”
“You don’t leave me nothing when I get back, ye’re dead,” the smaller piggut huffed, but lazily rose to his legs all the same. “‘Ere, Split, let’s make it quick.”
Amid the same general indifference she had met as she had come, Split followed Nahf up the very slope she had descended before passing the top and going down the other way. She had not cast even a glance there on her arrival, and indeed there was not much to see except empty red plains, steely brushes and black rocks. The only thing that truly stood out was an imposing grey hill, overgrown with a bright grey grass that glimmered slightly in the faint daylight.
Nahf let out a sudden loud, animalistic squeal, almost making her jump, and the hill stirred. Legs like pillars unfolded from its sides, what had appeared to be grass bristled and heaved, and a massive head rolled over to stare at them with a groggy bloodshot eye. The gigantic wild boar huffed like a howling breeze, and the warm air almost flattened her against the ground.
“Look at that, never seen him get up when you call ‘im before,” Nahf marvelled, “You got the right way a’right. It keeps working, you just get up there and he’ll bring ye where ye need. Me, I’m getting back ‘fore them rutters eat everything.” And, with that, he trotted back over the hill and out of view.
Split crept closer to the enormous boar, not without some caution. It was even more outlandish to her than the winged behemoth had been, a thing of the world above more than the Pit. Still, there was no domineering will radiating from it, just the warmth and sounds of a living thing, and so it was with greater confidence that she hauled herself up its hide, wary of the hairs’ sharp tips. It was nowhere as comfortable as a jackalope, for sure, but no worse than the fleshless beast either.
With a grunt, the boar arose and began, with neither hurry nor haste, to walk away from the battlefield and towards the distant dark horizon.
***
They stopped at the very edge, where the sanguine clay of the steppes withered away to arid, scorched black across a jagged line. The great boar did not cross into the dead land, but stopped just beyond its frayed edge, letting Split drop to the ground along its flank, then turned back and trotted away with just a shake of its head and a huff of acknowledgement.
The Scar had not changed. Ever as it had haunted her memories for years, decades, centuries, it was as stark and cruel in the sharpness of its jutting rocks and the desolation of its stony soil as it had been the first time she had seen the daylight over its dismal face. The shards that had not fallen from their unnatural midair stasis since time began still hovered higher than her eyes, and the cracks and chasms below them still gaped with a hunger that the lifetime of an entire world could not sate. Over all that time, a single faint breath of life had swept over the afflicted land, and that was a poisonous exhalation from the nether - the ghastly shapes of malformed gargoyles circled overhead, casting flittering shadows across the uneven ground. She grit her teeth in distaste. Almost there. She was almost at the source, and then the time of monstrosities like these would be over.
The weight of the hide she had received from the pigguts in her foremost hands reminded her of both these past and future. She had had plenty of time to examine it on the way through the steppes, feel the recesses of its plagued crust, look into its empty gouged eyes. Even flayed and hollowed-out like that, the gargoyle looked sickeningly similar to what she had seen, day after day, reflected in every pool of clear water she had come across. She did not need to be told whose doing it was; he was evidently not satisfied with shackling the minds of her kind, but had felt the need to warp their bodies as well. Bodies to which he himself had given shape, a shape he discarded when it suited him, as if their flesh was even less than a tool for him. Her middle hand gripped the axe tighter. Almost there.
Holding her breath, she gripped the edges of the gargoyle skin with three hands and pulled it over her back, letting its head fall over hers like a hood. The feeling of weight over her body was there for but a moment, then nothing. Reflexively, she rolled her shoulders, trying to tug at something over them. Instead, she felt something around her elbows drag across the dry earth with a rasp. She looked down, touched the membranes spreading from her forelimbs in disbelief, scratched at the pulsing cysts on her flank, ran a finger along her now smooth face. Whatever he might have been otherwise, Vrog had been sure to be thorough in this. All the same, she was glad she could not see herself now.
Quick. More a feeling than a voice. It will not last forever.
Split breathed in, clutched the axe against her body, then drew her wings together and dove into a large chasm.
Darkness met her, then heat, flame and clamour, and suddenly she was flying. Not daring to budge her wings or look anywhere beyond directly in front of her, she tensed her limbs and veered off, towards the reassuring shadow of a stone outcropping. She clung to it, miraculously keeping her grip on her weapon, hauled herself up over its ledge, and finally looked out upon her long-lost home.
As it had been above, so it was below. The Pit itself had not changed at all; for a moment she had a hard time believing that this was not another of the many moments when she had closed her eyes and called back the sights of her old life. The crackling flames from below and the molten orbs from above had not dimmed a bit, nor had the splintered forms of black rock worn away under their glare. If even some had crumbled and others risen in their place, it was impossible to tell, nor would it really have made a difference - one spire more, one crag less, in the end it was all the same.
Yet here as well as over the Scar, where dead stone had stood unchanged, life had swelled, and she was surprised to see just how much. Far below her, the ground was teeming. Kostral, in numbers many times greater than she had words for, crawled, marched, scurried over the ground. There were more of them than she had ever imagined there could be living things, here or in the world above. The ground looked alive, writhing as they walked past each other, formed into ranks, scattered and regrouped.
And they had changed. Split dimly remembered the first of the iron-bound she had seen just before her exile had begun, and the likes of them had grown in number as well. Now, she could fully appreciate the gruesomeness of the spikes jutting out of eye sockets, of the shards piercing through skin, the blades than replaced fingers, and a sickening rage mounted inside her greater even than the one she felt on seeing the gargoyles that, more numerous than ever, swarmed above the gathering. But those wretches were far from the only ones to bear metal now. Every body below was bound in jagged gleaming plates, everyone had from but one hand to a full four gripping great cleaver, axes, mauls, other vicious things she could not name. The largest among them had hafts of bone and wood affixed to their backs, with black and red banners draped over them; she could see them snarling at their lessers, shoving them about, pummeling them if they tarried. His taskmasters. Almost there.
Then she looked further up, and she saw him.
Only now did she remember than she had never seen him fully, not even on that fatal day, and for a moment she was struck dumb and still with sheer awed terror. Narzhak was immense, larger than anything had any right to be, above or below. He was almost a part of the Pit itself, as dizzyingly vast as its walls that never ended. Her head spun from the mere effort of conceiving how he must have been up close, and she had to look away.
Split closed her eyes and clenched her jaws. She thought of the pestilential gargoyles and the living bodies mangled with iron. Of the overseers trampling their own kind. Of how she had lived knowing nothing but fighting, breeding and eating, all one and the same. Of the brand on her shoulder.
She hardened her every muscle and looked up again.
The Iron God was far away, almost beyond the distant curve of the immeasurable vault, but so colossal was he that she could see his posture clearly. He sat in a gigantic alcove carved in the live rock, leaning back in a crude throne. His right hand leaned on a metal spire taller than the ocean must have been deep - no, not a spire, a weapon; a maul so great that with one blow it could have carved a way from the Pit up to the surface. On his left shoulder there crouched a vast abomination whose shape she could not distinguish, and not just because of the distance. Its veined grey flesh seemed to shift and pool like a fountain of melting stone, in tune with the flickering of her master’s fiery eyes.
A tremor ran through her perch, and she saw that the impossible titan was slowly rising from his seat. It reminded her that she had little time. Drowning her fear in the much greater dread and hatred of her adversary, she pushed herself off the ledge and took wing. This time, the motions of flight came to her from somewhere outside her head, as if the stolen skin were guiding her through them; she pushed down the thought of what that might mean and forged ahead. Through the teeming flocks of gargoyles, between the flaming spheres and the tentacled prowlers that lurked among them, she flanked the cyclopean wall of the Pit at a speed that would have seemed incredible if she had not been doing her best not to pay attention to it. In what could not have been more than a moment, she was over the iron head of the tyrant god, greater than any hill she had ever stood on. It did not even twitch when she landed, which would have been like an earthquake, so insignificant was she upon its crown. The dried-out hide dropped off her as she clung to the irregularities of the divine armour, having served its purpose.
The axe in her middle hands imperiously tugged to the left. With a side-eye, she saw a rift between plates not too far, for all distance meant on that living mountain. For the Giant, it was so minuscule as to be wholly below notice, but for her it was enough to pass through many times over. Carefully, biting down with each clambering step, she made her way across the warm iron expanse, gripping pits and spikes invisible to something as huge as the entity that breathed beneath her. Carrion stench came from the rift in the hot wafts of a heap of corpses after a battle. Fitting.
Split perched over the ragged lip of the gap. “I said I’d come back,” she breathed out in a hiss, “And now I’m here. It’s the end.”
And she vaulted in, axe held high.
***
Narzhak towered, immense, over his assembled legions. Every kostral in the Pit, every tamed boar and dread-beast, every twisted skestral and ironbound was at his feet, summoned by a command as binding as prophecy, awaiting his orders. The Scourge on his shoulder growled ravenously. It was awakening. He hefted the maul Worldbreaker, into which he had forged over the ages the strength to crush any divine in a single blow, and spoke in a voice that shook the earth.
"When time began," he thundered, and the innumerable host stood heeding, "the Elder One who gave us the world set us a task. We had to make his cosmos great, breathe life into it, build it into wonders. Whip it into flourishing. This was the only command of the one to whom we owe everything. Was it too much?"
The brutes scarcely understood the breadth of the notions of his speech, but even so they stamped and cheered as one. No, it was not too much.
"It was just right, and so I went to it! I gave this world everything. I have given it my toil, my flesh, my blood. I have given it my own son, and all of you, who are wrought from my very life. He has done me proud, as have you, those who are loyal and ready to labour and sacrifice for the one true cause that is the soul of Galbar. Under the hands of all my blood-kin, it has swelled, grown rich, as it was meant to. And yet, what?"
A rhetor’s ideal attendants, the kostral bellowed out in prompting response.
"And yet, from the beginning to this very moment, my efforts have been hampered by the chaff that would call themselves my equals in godhood. Wretched excuses for deities they are, rags of filth soaked in weakness. Even with the Elder One’s hand holding theirs, they have failed in the only purpose set before them, one which they were given every conceivable tool and power to abet. For aeons, I could only watch as my work was stunted because this scum couldn’t be arsed to do their part! They huddled on their own scraps of land, miserly counting the skulls of their favourite slaves, while Galbar languished. They locked life in stagnant little cycles, like vermin digging their stinking petty lairs in what was to be a grand universal design! And when they tired of that, they deserted! Abandoned the posts given to them and fled into their dens, into death or mortality! They thought they were safe from my eyes when they slunk away, but I have seen them all, felt every last drop of their ingratitude towards the One whose toil they usurped and threw away. It has grown inside me like a pool of rage waiting to ignite, and now - NO MORE!"
He raised his maul high and roared, and countless voices roared alongside him.
"For the Elder One has tired of their folly, their sloth and childish insolence, and now he comes! He will fulfil the purpose he gave upon us long ago, and the just among us will rejoice even as the unworthy despair. We will clear the way for him, rise to the surface and lay waste to all the monuments of failure the wretch gods take pride in. The blood of their living baubles will run in rivers, their bones shall pile up in mountains, and with my maul I will batter down the doors to their measly retreats and rip them out, piece by piece. They will know centuries of suffering for every instant they have wasted in the universe of spheres, for I am Narzhak, and I toll the hour of their death!"
Somewhere high above, beneath his skin of iron, a cursed axe struck with the hatred of two eternal lifetimes.
Narzhak paused, one eye flickering curiously upwards at the faint tingling he thought he had felt at the back of his head. A mere impression, no doubt, and indeed it was gone in a blink. But then it returned, a little deeper, and then a little more again. He shook his head with a growl, but it persisted, writhing like a minuscule maggot buried somewhere in his yielding flesh - a minuscule itch he could not quite pinpoint. Twisting, growing into a bitter taste, one he had found so repugnant once he had spat it out; yet there was nothing he could spit it from. And sparks of spite, of anger at the arrogance of this gnat of a presence that dared - for it had a will, he felt it - latch onto him in the hour of his triumph. Sparks that flew wild, close, too close to the pyre he had been building in all the time he had prepared for battle -
A light sting was all it took to ignite it. This miserable nameless thing had the audacity to touch him, the greatest and mightiest of all gods! He bellowed out his fury, and his legions shrank in terror at the sudden outburst. The Scourge coiled in surprise, and then leapt away as the Fell Colossus clawed at his own head in mounting rage. The same armour that made him impervious to all forces mortal and immortal stopped his prying talons from finding and squashing the nuisance that so aggravated him. He stomped once, twice, then with a deafening roar upon which hundreds fell dead on the spot trampled forward, blinded by sheer wrath. The great pedestal that led to the upper world crumbled under his titanic steps, but he was beyond awareness now. He thundered and howled, grasping at the void, carving gouges into the stone walls with his visored head, swinging his great maul in berserk abandon.
At long last, it grew too much and with this pinnacle came a flash of mad focus. The shade of irritation deserved nothing short of utter, absolute annihilation, to be shattered to such nothingness that put the time before Galbar to shame. And he, the Bloodied Fist, lord of all strife, was the only one strong enough to deliver it.
And thus Narzhak raised the great maul Worldbreaker, which alone could slay any divine, and he uttered a mortal command:
In cinders lie
Beneath no sky
So you all shall
Beneath no sky
So you all shall
D I E
And he brought down the most lethal weapon ever wrought upon the noisome trespasser - and, as it so happened, himself.
The maul shattered through the divine carapace, sending shards of metal and chunks of vile flesh and gouts of black blood and sparks of vital flame scattering to all sides. There it stayed lodged, in the shattered skull of its maker and only wielder, even as his colossal body turned still like an impossible eikon, to stand vigil for eternity.
Yet even his own strength was not enough to truly slay the great god of bloodshed. Acrid black smoke rose from the ruins of his head in a spectral cloud, and four flaming eyes broke through it, alight with bottomless wrath and spite, with unbreakable will and renewed clarity. It touched the creeping Scourge with a long tendril, and the formless terror howled as it never had before.
With that sound, all shackles fell from the minds of the assembled kostral; yet, alas, it was not as Split-Tooth had imagined that moment. Without order to hold them, naught was left for the Pit-dwellers but the primeval rage they had known upon their very birth. Already thrown into disarray by their master’s agonizing throes, they turned on each other, plying all the skill they had amassed and all the weight of arms they had crafted for the sole purpose of blind slaughter. The banners of the overseers became rallying points and eyes in the storm of violence; and so the greatest army the world would ever know fractured into feuding bands, and was no more.
But the umbral god cared no more for them. His fires blazed bright, and though the gate to Galbar from his domain had been shattered by his own ire, he would not be deterred in bringing his final task to an end. The cloud became a roaring pillar of smouldering force, and it struck the sightless ceiling of the vault like a spear. Through stone and soil it pierced, searing and corroding all in its path, until it burst to the light of day with a blow that shook the land for miles to all sides as the World Scar, twice-struck, erupted into a blast of detritus and an awning pit that stretched down to sightless regions below.
And so, like he had once come down to Galbar, Narzhak departed the world as a black wraith, rising up ever higher into the sky, towards the descending mass of the lunar palace.
Whither did he go?
The Architect only knew.
