I'd be lying if I said I don't adore the roster of outlandish aliens here (fungoids and invertebrates hit some of my soft spots), and the thought-out political and occult background is certainly a plus. I'll be keeping an eye or a few on this.
Description: Those few who have had the misfortune of beholding Ghural with conscious eyes have struggled to believe that he may once have been human at all. Decades of replacing rotting parts of his body with fresh ones, gradually accruing bulk and horrid enhancements to his frame, have left him a misshapen colossus as large as two men, with crooked asymmetrical limbs, jagged shards of bone protruding from his flesh, and a featureless skin-mask of a face surmounted by mummified eyes sunken in sepulchral sockets.
Background: The truth of who or what Ghural might have been in life is all but lost to time, its only echoes persisting in hushed rumours with no clear source. The most widespread of these tales hold that he once was an undertaker and cemetery warden who, come the night, would exhume freshly interred bodies – not to despoil them of their final adornments, as a less monstrous grave-robber would have, but to barbarously eat their flesh for his own pleasure. The rumours also hint that in time he himself met a gruesome end, though what that was no one seems to recall.
Be that as it may, it is known that the infamy of the Harvester arose during Eagoth’s conquest. Then, he scoured ruins and battlefields with his ghoulish underlings, sorting mangled and collapsed bodies in accordance with how they may best serve the necromancer’s designs and piling them high on charnel wagons drawn by repugnant abominations. Such is the fame that persists of him to this day.
Wards: Ghural and his acolytes dwell in a great ruined city southwest of Necron, named Comiriom, and hold dominion over its countryside. There, they collect bodies which for one reason or another are in no condition to rise into undeath, be they the crop of ancient necropoles or the remains of ghouls decayed beyond use and salvage by local meatworkers. Day and night, grim caravans march in and out from the crumbling gates, carrying their pestilential load like rotten blood flowing to a sickly heart.
Within crypt-like halls, the denizens of Comiriom keep the tally of their often shapeless goods, and, as they did in the times of the war, part the corn from the chaff. The remains they judge worthy of further use are sent to the Meatworks, while the rest are funneled into dubious experiments and amalgamations. It is thus little wonder that Ghural’s retinue includes numerous skilled meatworkers, though their awareness of anything beyond their craft tends to be lacking, and is known to employ hordes of strangely mutilated ghouls and bizarre unnatural creations for menial drudgery.
Description: Those few who have had the misfortune of beholding Ghural with conscious eyes have struggled to believe that he may once have been human at all. Decades of replacing rotting parts of his body with fresh ones, gradually accruing bulk and horrid enhancements to his frame, have left him a misshapen colossus as large as two men, with crooked asymmetrical limbs, jagged shards of bone protruding from his flesh, and a featureless skin-mask of a face surmounted by mummified eyes sunken in sepulchral sockets.
Background: The truth of who or what Ghural might have been in life is all but lost to time, its only echoes persisting in hushed rumours with no clear source. The most widespread of these tales hold that he once was an undertaker and cemetery warden who, come the night, would exhume freshly interred bodies – not to despoil them of their final adornments, as a less monstrous grave-robber would have, but to barbarously eat their flesh for his own pleasure. The rumours also hint that in time he himself met a gruesome end, though what that was no one seems to recall.
Be that as it may, it is known that the infamy of the Harvester arose during Eagoth’s conquest. Then, he scoured ruins and battlefields with his ghoulish underlings, sorting mangled and collapsed bodies in accordance with how they may best serve the necromancer’s designs and piling them high on charnel wagons drawn by repugnant abominations. Such is the fame that persists of him to this day.
Wards: Ghural and his acolytes dwell in a great ruined city southwest of Necron, named Comiriom, and hold dominion over its countryside. There, they collect bodies which for one reason or another are in no condition to rise into undeath, be they the crop of ancient necropoles or the remains of ghouls decayed beyond use and salvage by local meatworkers. Day and night, grim caravans march in and out from the crumbling gates, carrying their pestilential load like rotten blood flowing to a sickly heart.
Within crypt-like halls, the denizens of Comiriom keep the tally of their often shapeless goods, and, as they did in the times of the war, part the corn from the chaff. The remains they judge worthy of further use are sent to the Meatworks, while the rest are funneled into dubious experiments and amalgamations. It is thus little wonder that Ghural’s retinue includes numerous skilled meatworkers, though their awareness of anything beyond their craft tends to be lacking, and is known to employ hordes of strangely mutilated ghouls and bizarre unnatural creations for menial drudgery.
Necron sounds intriguing, I'd be interested in hearing more about meatworking and what it can do. Is it a sort of ghoulish surgery, binding corpses into a shape that can be reanimated, or can it also achieve more outlandish crafts such as Frankenstein-esque body constructs?
Dropping in, I'm one of the people Cyclone mentioned, and I'm indeed interested in this.
As format goes, I'm not opposed to factional play, though I agree with the idea of a faction hinging on one or several key characters as players prefer. That said, I think that the majority of the undead being mindless lends itself well to this kind of scheme - it's more natural to leave them as a background factor while focusing on the main viewpoint figure(s) personality-wise.
On the Rifts between Worlds or, the Mechanics of Crossing Over
Contact between the three worlds occurs via individual points where the terrain of one sphere is connected, by way of spatial anomaly, to that of one (or in some cases both) of the others, and superimposed with it. Those standing outside such a point of overlap will find themselves able to see into another world, specifically into the space that lies beyond the overlap zone on its own surface. Attempting to reach this other world, however, will result in entering the overlap zone proper, which from outside appears as a mere continuation of the land where one stands. While in this zone, a traveller will perceive the world from which they set out as if under normal circumstances, that is to say without sight of any alien landscapes. However, upon reaching the opposite end of the overlap zone, they abruptly find themselves stepping into the foreign world which they originally glimpsed, and, if they look back, will be able to see the point from which they set out in their world of origin. Traversing the overlap zone in the opposite direction will result in an inverse experience, with the world of origin disappearing out of sight until attained and the overlap appearing as part of the second, foreign landscape.
Schematised: green and purple can see each other and the landscapes they are respectively standing in; each sees the red zone as a continuation of their own location. A traveller crossing over along the vector of the black arrow will not be able to see the blue landscape, and will perceive the red zone as an extension of the black one. Vice versa for the blue arrow.
In overlap zones where all three worlds converge, the strain of conflicting orders of being results in highly unstable terrain, wracked by anomalous manifestations and aberrant functioning of the laws of existence. Such areas are thus highly hazardous and risky to traverse, though access to and egress from them is performed normally, and permanence is not necessarily immediately deadly.
Once, centuries ago, Vneth was a resplendent jewel in the astral crown of Ysheggai, where it stood in the empyreal spaces alongside six other spheres of being, warm and populous with life. Formed, or perhaps ordained, in aeons immemorial, the worlds in the circle of Ysheggai were well-suited to be the habitation of various terrene beings in many shapes and forms. Manifold were their origins; some filtered down from the astral and took on material form, others sprang to life from earth and rock, others yet emerged from the churning primeval oceans. These entities were of primal and inchoate spirit, all but incapable of thought, and though it happened at length that some of them grew more crafty, it was through chance that any of them at last became more than beasts. After a brush with the veined green nolakh, the Ague-stone of wondrous properties found in certain caverns, a breed of ape-like beings was imbued with alchymical mutation, and found in itself the skill to learn to walk upright, to bind wood and bone into tools, to utter speech and live in accord.
The sons of flesh and earth grew and thrived, and the crafts of civilization blossomed from their minds. Vneth was a fertile ground for their endeavours, suffused by day with sunless light from the heavens, rich with strong and precious earths from the depths of mines and quarries, teeming with plants, beasts and other things to be harvested, hunted or tamed. Many were the perils of the primordial world, but the cunning of the novphes, the people of the green nolakh, overcame the hunger, fangs and venoms of the wilds as well as the furious storms and quakes of the elements. Towns grew, then mighty cities, with spires, temples and palaces that defied the clouds and mountains. Roads of paved stone stretched across the land, trodden at all hours of day by caravans laden with goods from far realms. Realms, kingdoms and empires rose and fell, some standing for generations, others for mere days. Their armies were like fields where stalks were spears and forests where leaves were swords, with hordes of beast-riders whose steps shook the earth and sages who brewed plagues of alchymy to smite their foes. Their kings sat on thrones of ivory and pale gold, of nolakh and gemstone.
It was so that the seven worlds of the crown of Ysheggai were bound with ethereal paths, so that by certain means occult and arcane one could travel from one to the other, though there was no bodily bridge one could cross. The wisemen of Vneth were not the first to discover the craft, but learned it from wanderers of yonder spheres. Turmoil followed, for a time, and war and conquest. The tide shifted many times, but no one held the upper hand, for the peoples of Ysheggai were alike in strength and craft, and as wars are wont to do at length it faded, only stirring now and again across the decades. Through struggle, trade and learning of far places, the crown of the seven worlds became much akin to one great sphere, the astral roads its highways, the skies the boundaries of its many kingdoms. For a long time it prospered and shone, fulcrum of legends and secret lore across the empyreal, repository of riches innumerable, pride and envy of countless peoples.
Yet all things have their end, and doom comes ineluctable for the humble and the proud alike. Drawn by the haughty light that radiated from Ysheggai and driven to ravenous hunger by its opulent warmth, a terrible being of the abyss emerged from the depths of the starless cosmos. So vast was it as to be almost divine in might. What became of the crown of Ysheggai in its clutches is unknown, but Vneth was seized and hurled away, into the sightless void beyond.
Severed from the astral ways of the spheres and beset on all sides by the consuming absence, Vneth grew cold and withered. Its skies lost their lustre, and became eternally grey, heavy and overcast. Its oceans stagnated, and became slow and dark as lead, save in rare places wracked by everlasting storms. Mountains of dead ice now drift over its waves, bearing within them waking entities from ages forgotten. The forests shrivelled, and became thin and spectral, haunted by forlornly howling and chittering things. The fields drained away, and became wastes of grey dust, silent and untrodden. The many beasts and living things of Vneth either became bone and rot or hid away in secluded places. Some withdrew under the earth, and there, touched by the nolakh and other stones of alchemical puissance, they met strange fates, such that no one dares venture after them.
What was worst, things that were not of Vneth seeped down from the folds of the dark void and spread over its carcass like flies. Now the voices of horrid sky-shriekers resound from cliffs and towers, the claws of dusk dwellers rend bark and tapestries, and valleys writhe under the tide of uncountable monstrosities.
The novphes, once uncontested masters of the sphere, are but a ghost of their former selves. Their empires are graveyards, fields and roads littered with the bones of those who tilled, travelled and fought over them in the thousands. Their great cities stand crumbling and deserted, empty and haunted by memory or desecrated by the lairs of unnameable creatures. Slowly and stubbornly, but with no hope, they have withdrawn into lost valleys and mountainous refuges, to lonely islands and expanses of cooling ash. Of their kingdoms, only one still stands, in a land once too hot and scathing to settle, but now the last to hold an ephemeral warmth. Yet even that is a reign of ruins, held in a ring of encroaching death. Its lords, who recklessly consume the last of the nolakh in great quantities to prolong their lives, have been tainted by an excess of the Ague-stone, and though ancient and wise in forgotten arts are sickly and disfigured. The tales of grandeur from the past are all but forgotten myths, and though some beings from other worlds of Ysheggai still live among the people of ash, few of them could say where their forebears once came from.
Vneth is a world of death and oblivion, and desolation and decay hold illimitable dominion over all.
The only indigenous sapients of the world are the novphes, hairy ape-like beings that distantly resemble upright baboons with grey-greenish fur, albeit with shorter, more compact and less prehensile hind legs, no tails and developed facial muscles allowing for a range of visible expression and vocal articulation. They are, however, all but incapable of producing velar, palatal and most alveolar sounds. Fur hue and thickness may slightly vary depending on geographical, and by extension ethnic, origin. As a whole, novphes have difficulty learning to swim, and are instinctively afraid of large bodies of water.
Novphes are hermaphrodites, barring rare anomalous cases, and reproduce through the consumption of a subcutaneous inseminating organ extracted from another individual. While historically this led to the development of cannibalistic traditional practices, later developments in surgery allowing for relatively painless extraction of the organ have spread almost worldwide, and are now the most stubbornly guarded vestige of old world knowledge.
The novphe peoples were born from the nolakh stone, which can grant longevity at the cost of health. As they age, they take on the hungering nature of the green Ague-stone that exchanges life for affliction, and become capable of feeding on the vitality of living creatures by consuming their blood and flesh. The victim will be stricken with enervation and weakness disproportionate to the wounds, while the ape-folk are reinforced and even rejuvenated if they devour enough. The novphes can also, through an arduous process, alchymically refine nolakh into a concoction that renders their kind all but immortal, but also sickly and deformed.
Sapient beings from other worlds of Ysheggai remain on Vneth, but are extremely rare, and mostly dying out faster than the locals.
Most void creatures do not possess any observable higher intellect. Those that appear to invariably ignore all attempts to communicate with them, although some mad ritualists claim to be able to temporarily appease them with offerings and other artifices.
Magical practice is presently nonexistent in Vneth. The aethereal framework for manipulations of space allowing for intermundane translocation has been lost to the void, and the knowledge to work it is forgotten. The closest to continuing magical practices is the ancestral science of alchymy, which uses rare mineral substances to achieve sometimes preternatural effects. Those may include curing or inducing diseases, aiding the healing of wounds, reinforcing other materials, causing mutation and transformations in living beings, lighting inextinguishable fires and more, though much lore has been lost since the golden age of Ysheggai.
Around him, the breeze stirred the defiled earth, wrought loose by the steps of steel leviathans and the blasts of tremendous weapons. The crumbled remains of flesh and metal moved lazily upon it, burned by unnatural flame, tortured by blades and monstrous claws, consumed by alchymical poisons that no cognizant hand would willingly have wielded. Man and xeno, beast and machine lay in a gruesome mosaic of carnage that stretched to the visible ends of the field. Already decay was setting in, hurried on by viral corruption, and its sweet, cloying notes came to join the chorus of filth and violence that hung heavy over the murky soil.
Like a pack of ghouls, his warriors prowled among the mire of corpses. Few of his kin understood the significance of the time after battles - or between them, as it was now. Not gathering, counting their wounds and arraying themselves for the next clash; that was a matter of course. Not mourning the fallen; that was a habit of weak mortality, unworthy of Astartes. No, the hours and minutes after the roar of gunfire had died down, and when friend and foe alike lay wheezing in pools of their own blood and foulness, were like vespertine meditation after a day of labour, a time of closure and rebirth alike. That which was fallen was cut down and cast away, to be forgotten. That which lay crippled was like the crops at harvest, inert but ready to be taken and given new purpose.
Lone figures, their armour decorated with the symbol of a skeletal hand in flames, trudged where greenskin bodies littered the ground most thickly. They pushed the carcasses together, without wasting time to pile them in mounds, then aimed their heavy, dark tubular weapons and spat sweeping gouts of irradiated balefire onto the masses of dead flesh, like underhive sanitizers dispatching particularly troublesome concentrations of refuse. The duty of the Hecatombion was not an enviable one. In battle, they were called to wither the enemy while it still lived, and victory earned them not well-deserved rest, but the new duty of eradicating all trace of the fallen, which in the case of Orks had a more than symbolic importance. All the while, the contamination of their weapons spelled a slow death for them, seeping through their respirators, rotting their bodies from within. Yet no word of lamentation came from them, not now, nor ever before. As it should be. There is no I. Only duty.
Elsewhere, where fungal green turned to the blue of power armour and the grey of organic carapace, scavengers of a different sort were at work. Fleshweavers, bristling with servo-limbs, dug through the mangled bodies of their brethren. Those who were intact enough to merit the gamble of an augmentic graft for their survival were hauled up, their wounds injected with malodorous coagulants, and dragged off by impassible attendants. Those who did not fell brutally prey to the narthecium, the only final grace accorded them being the painless embrace of the carnifex. They had served their due and earned a peaceful road to blessed oblivion; no reason to waste anything more than that on them. Their armaments and ammunition, where still functional, were more valuable than the lifeless hulks they enclosed now.
He would have the Hecatombion burn them along with the dead Infestus when the salvagers were finished, he thought. With the Lord of Mankind so close, it was best to reduce them to the same cinders as the Orks. The triumph of his liege should not be marred with the traces of the transgressions which had been necessary to pave the way to it.
His shadowed gaze followed as the remaining packs of wretches were herded by their Mancipes towards the next advancing frontline. Those who lingered hungrily over one corpse or another were punished by crackling jolts. They had to remain ravenous. The battle was not yet over.
Sarghaul raised his eyes to the horizon beyond the newly mustering ranks of his legionaries. The rising wind had collected a shroud of dirty black clouds over the sky, polluted rain mingled with smoke belched by the horrors that passed for orkish factories, and he could look into the distance without squinting in the daylight. The survivors of the first horde had withdrawn that way, presumably to regroup. On its own, that was not a matter of concern. The greenskins’ reluctance to stop fighting had ensured that a precious few had scampered away from the field alive once their bulk was broken. However, the xenos’ tendency to cluster together suggested that the next major wave would advance from that direction, and so the Lurkers’ battle-lines had begun to turn, preparing to meet the foe in frontal combat. Detachments had splintered off from the main force, setting themselves in position for encircling movements, but given the magnitude and disorganized chaos of the Orks’ formations, catching a flank was a matter of luck as much as anything.
And already, they came. Far ahead, a lower, thinner cloud moved beneath the overcast heavens, the storm of dust and debris raised by a horde on the move. Large, much too large. The approaching force must have been greater than the one the Lurkers had first engaged by orders of magnitude. Barbaric as they might have been, the Orks were clearly not unprepared for a planetary assault.
The gargantuan Primarch turned from the menacing plume and stalked over to where his gene-sons had assembled a rudimentary field command, directly adjacent to where their supporting Truthlayers had claimed their own ground to arrange their numbers. It was not something any seasoned Imperial Army commander would have dignified as worthy of that name: half a dozen towering charybdes stood in a semicircle, idly grazing on the plentiful bodies that weighed upon the earth. On their backs were not cannons, bolter nests or missile racks manned by crystalline-eyed servitors, but tangles of transmitter antennae, auger array visors and power cables, jutting into the sky like the spires of small alien cities. Their feeding conduits disappeared beneath the beasts’ underbellies, lost in the wilderness of the fastenings that bound the structures - precariously, as it seemed - to their clamped-on armour. A troop of Expergefactors busied themselves about the machinery, their liturgic droning less an invocation to the hive of spirits than a continued exchange with them.
“What do you see?” the telluric rumbling of Sarghaul’s voice broke through the toneless litanies, drawing several scores of mechanical eyes to him. The elder Techmarine, distinguished by the profusion of cogs and skulls on his livery as well as his privileged position atop the central invertebrate monstrosity, inclined his head before replying in a reverberating thrum.
“Machines, Lord Progenitor. The inhumans move a host of their foul soulless husks against us. Aberrant things, bereft of true spiritual essence, but numerous.” The cyborg flexed a segmented steel claw and a spark of azure current rattled through it, the only properly perceptible way for him to display his scorn. A waft of ozone briefly blew through the air. “A large presence is with them, no doubt one of those walking scrapyards the beasts call ‘Stompas’. These necromancers of metal” he spat out the word as violently as his vocaliser would allow, “must have mobilised their whole assembly line.”
The Primarch raised a hand to stop any more disgusted rattling and ruminated the report for a moment. A Stompa so close to the frontline was both good and ill tidings. On one hand, the core of the Orks’ crude facilities must have been close, which confirmed the pre-insertion auspex scans. If the Lurkers struck at those focal points, the whole enemy force on Quartus would have been all but certainly pinned to the planet. On the other hand, the monstrous machine now stood directly in the way of that plan.
“Can we cripple them from orbit?” He motioned to the group tending to the transmitters.
“The fleet has done what it could,” one of the Expergefactors at the vox controls replied, raising a set of eyes, but not the rest of its head, from its work. “Enemy numbers will have decreased by sixteen to thirty percent by the time they engage our vanguard, but the chances of decommissioning their abominable titanic simulacrum before then are extremely low.” It paused as it observed something on a visor, rotating its photoreceptors, then added, “Barring sustained bombardment at risk of collateral damage to our positions.”
“Unnecessary.” The Tartarean churned beneath his helmet. “Let them cease and prepare for the next targeted strikes. What is their status?”
“Nominal.” Some turning and tapping. “Imbrifex Rimnal requests permission to take the Fourth’s reserve forces to assist Imperial operations in the outer system.”
“Granted.” While half a Tempest was far from insignificant, its absence would not detract much from the orbital presence of the Lurker fleet’s bulk. No doubt they could make themselves more useful in supporting offensives on the rest of Ullanor’s worlds than they would have been here. “Relay to all groundside troops. Assume sparse formations. Prime artillery and fire as soon as the xenos are close enough.” He glanced upwards for a moment before scraping his talons together. “Prepare the ancients for Titanomachia. And tell Akhron to make sure Opis and Clymene have eaten their fill.” A spectre of something that could have been mistaken for warmth momentarily passed through the Primarch’s voice.
“Their legs will be the ones that carry us to victory today.”
***
The green tide came. Through the ground-shaking blasts rained down by the fleet overhead, through the towering clouds of plague and flesh-eating venom that burst from the missiles as they erupted, the Orks trudged ahead, fueled by sheer stubbornness and bloodlust. Warriors stumbled and fell dead in their tracks as the foul barrage overwhelmed even their inhuman vigour. The clattering limbs of roaring Deff Dreads rusted in a blink, devoured by rad-shrapnel and chemical corrosion. Grots choked and collapsed at their posts, falling into the gears and furnaces they were tending. But nothing so much as slowed the horde. With snarls and curses, guffaws and jeers of “wotta panzy git!”, they marched, intent on giving the ‘ard umiez the scrap of their lives.
Like a walking tower, the Stompa loomed over even the most imposing war machines, its steps sending out quakes to rival the impacts of the bombardment. The colossal mechanical effigy of fungoid gods bristled with all manner of weaponry - cannons, rockets, gatler-guns, everything that could possibly be fastened to its bulk, and some things that straddled the limits of both decency and physics, had been bolted on and covered in the greenest paint to be found on the planet. A ragged banner topped by the skull of a massive squig surmounted its head, and at its foot the master of the scrapworks bellowed out orders to his army, rabid froth flying from his rusted cybork tusks as he raged in anticipation.
What doubtlessly angered the Ork even more was that none of his commands seemed to have any effect. It was only when the first volleys of artillery fire from the Astartes’ groundside forces began to pummel his vanguard that he realised he had been speaking without an amplifier the entire while. When it finally occurred to him to retrieve the improvised beaten metal cone that served that function, he was fast to make up for the lost time.
“DREADS GO A’EAD, YA ZOGBRAINZ! DREADS GO A’E- WHADD’I SAY? DAT BLUE IDJIT OVVA DERE, GET OUTTA DA TRUKKS’ WAY! WOT? I DUN’ GIVE A ZOG IF ‘E’Z-”
A stray Whirlwind missile crashed into the force field surrounding the gargantuan vehicle, drowning out the next words in a fiery blast. The shimmering aura of greenish energy gave a pulse and faded away with a fizzle. Something creaked in the Stompa’s underbelly.
However, it was a poor Ork that was daunted by explosions, and the shouting resumed almost immediately.
“KUSTOM FIELD’Z GONE? WOTCHA YA TELLIN’ ME FOR, I CAN SEE DAT MESELF! OI, YA DOWN DERE, DUN’ FINK I DON’T SEEZ YA! LOOTIN’ COMES AFTER DA SCRAP, UNDERSTOOD? MARSCH! AND GIT DA FIELD UP AGAIN, OR I’Z COMIN’ DOWN TO SORT YA OUT!”
More rockets rained down among the Orkish ranks, scattering the brutes in howling masses and engulfing their leaking vehicles in infernos of flame. More toxic clouds bloomed across the earth, and the noxious fires of phosphex sprang up here and there like the growths of an infesting weed. Rad-missiles tainted the soil and air where they fell. Vengeance warheads scattered mangled limbs and vaporised blood on the wind.
For the greenskins, the fun part was only just starting.
“OI, YA RUNTY UMIEZ!” the manic roars of the Stompa’s master thundered over the clamour of weaponry, lashing over the Lurkers’ ranks like the sound of an approaching cataract, “YA FINK YA’Z TOUGH CUZ YA KRUMPED DAT GIT RAZTUSK? WELL YA AIN’T! ‘E WUZ A DUMB SQUIG’EAD WHO SAID ‘IZ DUMB CHOPPA WUZ KILLIER THAN ME SUPA-GATLERS! WOT?”
Some dissension seemed to have arisen on the command platform, because a pause punctuated by inarticulate sounds followed.
“WHY ‘E’Z A DUMB SQUIG’EAD? CUZ I SAYZ SO! ANYWUYZ, WOZ’I SAYIN’? YAH, I’Z NOT SOME IDJIT SLUGGA BOY! YER WRANGLIN’ WITH BIG MEK ZAPGOB NOW, AND I’Z GOT DA MOST DAKKA DERE IS ON DIS STINKIN’ ROCKBALL! ARRA’! LET ‘EM HAVE IT!”
The Stompa’s forest of weaponry whirred to life with a ringing and clattering that made most nearby Orks wince and cover their ears, and then, in a single flash of stupendous violence, it let loose. A storm of steel and flame surged from the mechanical titan, a veritable compact wall of howling death. Shells of all sizes, etched with obscene taunts, scratched and rusted, flaming before they left their barrels sliced through the air alongside rumbling rockets steered by screaming grots, heedless of how many pieces they might end up in as long as they got to make a proper blast. Around the skull-mounted banner, shokk guns buzzed and spluttered, firing out a barrage of crackling energy, scrap and haphazardly teleported gretchins.
The echoes of the cooling guns had not yet faded when an even louder rumble picked them up. All around, Orks shouted and cheered as they fired everything at hand in the general direction they saw the enemy to be. Shoota volleys darkened the sky, and under their shadow crimson speed freaks rode ahead on smoking warbikes, all regard for where they steered their engines lost as they finally closed in on their foes. The lavine of trukks, Dreads, Kans and innumerable boyz followed, guns discarded in favour of blades and mauls and snapping power klaws. The battle was joined.
Arrayed against them, the Imperium’s warriors did not stand waiting for the screaming tide to cover them. Scattered wedges of blue-armoured Lurkers marched forth under the cover of their Aestus shields, fending aside the whirlwind of bullets before colliding with the charging mobs, like thorns seeking weak points in the enemy’s body to batter through. Many were caught by the Stompa’s gargantuan barrage, single massive slugs sending dismembered Astartes bodies flying on impact. More yet were sundered and thrown to ground in a rain of shrapnel by bursting rokkits. But most of the Orkish fire went wide, wildly raining into the ground between the dispersed Gales, and the decisive struggle was fought at close quarters.
The Infestus were first into the fray. Shock-whipped into a frenzy by their handlers, the hybrid aberrations leapt into the greenskins’ thick with ravenous fury, and in places even the savage Orks staggered under their feral onslaught. Serrated claws tore through skin and flesh, many-rowed teeth bit through bone and metal alike, chem-enhanced muscles tossed swarming gretchin like twigs. Maddened by the taste of blood, the monsters converged where they found the most to feast, ripping through battle-squigs and lightly armoured grunts. Yet, as often as not, they met the acrid metal of war machines, and Dread pilots cackled madly as they beat the gibbering abhumans aside.
In those foci of resistance where the first wave of fang and chitin broke against steel, the space marines descended to do battle with the hardiest adversaries. Some, held aloft by their jetpacks, dropped onto the shoulders of walkers and roofs of trukks before slicing them open with power claws. Others traded blows with the rugged constructs on foot, with sword and chainfist, bolter and talon. Armour cracked under the superhuman might of both sides. Among the chaos, charybdes stood out like creeping bastions. The autocannons on their backs spat out death in salvoes, and their augmented pincers scythed down Ork and vehicle alike. They fell, crumpling under the Stompa’s blasts or under clambering mobs of xenos, but more and more kept crawling ahead, as if the gateway of the abyss had been opened.
The Truthlayers had not failed to present themselves in this exchange, supporting and aiding the lines from the rear, laying down their own variable wall of intense bolter fire from above the shoulders of their battling cousins. Wherever the Stompa had laid enough fire to weaken the frontlines, they presented their own blades, and ran to the fore, fighting side-by-side along their equally silent allies, all the whilst vocally overwhelmed by both the chatter and blasts of Ork screeches and weaponry. In direct contrast to the Orks’ brutish ilk, the battlelines of the Space Marines were as brutal as they were thorough, the Truthlayers’ support directed from a single individual gifted the authority of leadership by Sarghaul’s own brother.
But whilst their presence allowed their blue-plated cousins reprieve from the infinite onslaught of the green tide, with their cannon fire, and their Terminator Veterans spraying fire and fury through both Reaper autocannons and Cyclone-pattern missile racks, for every foe slaughtered mercilessly, five filled in the abhorrent mockery of what the Orks may consider as ranks. All the while the Stompa, whilst now unshielded, continued to put down its hurt upon the Imperium’s most resolute warriors. From the foes perspective, undoubtedly it seemed like the tides were about to turn, and the immense wave of the Abyssal Lurkers would eventually be swayed.
Needless to say, from the frontline command site of the combined offensive, things were hardly so nefarious as to deem the assault a failure; far from it. They were simply waiting, and with the solemn reminder of their grey-green allies’ commander, Praetor Sextus, and his seerdom, the cogs would soon shift in the Lurkers’ favour once again.
“Lord Tartareus,” he spoke, shifting his blind eyes and many-eyed, visorless helm from the fore and towards the towering goliath at his side, surrounded by both the command staff of Truthlayers’ sixth chapter as well as the Lord of the Deep’s own gene-sons, “they come.”
“Then it is time we end this.” The giant motioned to the cluster of vox-operators behind him, and their encoded litanies rose to a feverish pitch. Without sparing them another glance, he strode ahead, raising a claw in summons, and the Orcus Lictors, who had encircled their position as motionless sentinels, sprang into motion in his wake. Larger shapes yet stirred ahead of them, as the hulking forms of venerand Dreadnoughts reared themselves on their segmented limbs. They were many, full two dozen held in reserve until the battle reached its apex. As they stirred from their lifeless sleep, their fragmented modulated voices rose in a chilling discordant chorus of nightmare-warped battlecries.
“SILENCE BE MADE IN AETERNUM! VOID AND ANGUISH!”
“NO VOICE, NO SOUND, NO SUN TO SHINE ON THEIR BONES!”
“OBLIVION TAKE ALL IN ITS BLACK MAW!”
“TO BATTLE I ARISE! LIFE MY PRISON, SLAUGHTER MY FREEDOM!”
“DEATH, SHOW YOUR MERCIFUL FACE!”
“IN DAMNATIO VITAE! AD ABSOLUTIONEM VACUI!”
Unprepared for the cataclysmic violence of the Ninth’s most exalted warriors, the nearest Orks well-nigh ceased to exist under their sudden assault. The Lictors’ talons and corrosive bolts rent flesh before the ancients’ immense cannons and pincers devastated armour as if it were porcelain. In their midst, Sarghaul trampled ahead like a juggernaut of war, uncaring of the shells and blades that rained onto him, and every step sent a sickening crackle of bones and agonized howls to the sky. Burning through the greenskins like a thunderfist through molten plascrete, the cuneus forged its way to the Stompa, where the Orks’ leader was straining his throat to extremes only made possible by cybernetics as he directed his troops.
The titan began to raise one of the crushing platforms that passed for its feet in order to make good on its name and stomp the approaching enemies into the ground, but the combat forelimbs of the head Flegias Dreadnought clamped onto it before it had been pulled up too far. Machine struggled with machine for a moment, the crude yet stupendously potent engineering of the Orks fighting the immemorial craft of mankind’s long-lost apogeum, before another ancient warsuit sank its claws into the foot, and another. The titan was pinned in place.
“YA WANTZ A REAL FIGHT? I’LL KRUMP YA TO PIECES!” The Stompa’s left arm, little more than an immense chainblade, swung down as if intending to slice the entire world in half. It caught a Drednought directly, even its unbreakable body proving little obstacle to the enormous weapon nearly cut it in twain. Yet, even in his final throes and the haze of a long-overdue demise claiming him, the elder held true to his duty. The sarcophagus’ arms snapped upwards, punching through the surface of the blade and crutched onto it like grim death. The choppa’s teeth whirred furiously and its supporting arm pulled and twisted, but in vain - it was caught.
As the great walker continued to rage and blindly spew its firepower, the Tartarean and his sons latched onto its base like the stubborn oceanic predators they resembled. Ponderous Asphodels sank their power claws into the rim of its armour, dragging it down with their bulk. Terminators ripped their way through the wall of steel, emerging into the depths of the machine to the surprised bellowing of Mekboys and fearful chittering of grots. The Primarch himself plunged his talons into the mechanical beast’s hide, and ripples of lightning force wracked it, tearing off joints and guns in fiery short-circuit blasts. Sextus not far behind, delivering with one swift swing two willful Boyz seeking to claim a price far out of their own reach. His movements as rapid as the electricity which cloaked Sarghaul’s claws, hastened by the mental machinations of the his own ephemeral will, culminating in what could only be described as a blur as he and his entourage took to the perimeter of the metallic beast, allowing the Lurkers to delve ever deeper into its cruel heart and dislodge it.
All of a sudden, a loud grinding sound rang out from behind the Astartes lines. Overshadowing the rows of transmitter spires and swarming sternguard reinforcements, two imposing silhouettes rose into the ash-choked sky, metal and chitin blended in a fearsome vision to rival the revelations of the Immaterium. Opis and Clymene, favoured daughters of Carcinus’ depths, had finally arrived upon the battlefield, and their sight made even the most dimly fearless greenskin gape for a moment. So vast were the creatures that it seemed patently impossible they should have an origin in any way natural. Their gnarly, segmented legs spanned the breadth of a cathedral, and it seemed that whole palaces could have found their place on their ridged, carapace-bound backs. Their pincers could have torn down century-old reefs.
But it was what they bore on imposing harnesses bound to their bodies that raised the most cries of alarm mixed with admiration from among the xenos. Though the shape of the engines marked them as Medusa siege cannons, their size far exceeded the usual emplacements found of the Imperium’s combat vehicles. Those were no mere implements of disruption and field bombardment. They were tools wrought to bring low the most titanic of foes.
For an instant, all sound disappeared and the planet was plunged into the ancestral silence of its cosmic infancy as the two monstrous guns fired in unison. Their aim, adjusted by the superhuman eyes and minds of servitors over precious minutes bought at the cost of Astartes lives, was true. Without its shield to weaken the brunt of the impact, its arms and feet pinned in place, the Stompa was all but defenceless before them. One warhead shredded through its head, shattering its flag-bearing command platform and silencing Big Mek Zapgob once and for all. The other blasted apart its right shoulder, and the deadly supa-gatler fell to the ground as an inert heap of scrap. As the colossus still staggered, the next two shots struck together into its chest, and its upper half exploded in a hurricane of torn metal. When the smoke and shrapnel cleared, the Stompa had lost about half its height, and the victorious forms of Space Marines stood where once had been the core of its consuming furnace.
From then on, the outcome of the battle was assured. The Orks still fought with reckless courage, but without a leader to direct their attack they stumbled and trampled over each other as often as they struck the enemy, and without the mighty fire support of the titan the horde had lost much of its destructive power. For their own part, the Astartes pressed their advantage wherever confusion arose, scattering the xenos and felling their contraptions. Continued fire from Clymene and Opis tore apart greenskins by the hundred. Sarghaul was once again at the head of his sons, and no Deff Dread was so sturdy as to withstand his blows. Soon, the Ork army was crumbling, broken into warbands that were grimly stamped out one by one.
The numbers of the green tide were never truly exhausted, and its strongholds and fortified scrapyards still lay ahead, but upon that world its back had at last been broken. The fate of Ullanor Quartus was sealed.
Calign pulled its tongue back into its mouth. For a moment it had stood there, squatting by the edge of the river, the tip of its tongue peeking from its lips an inch away from the side of its scum-covered hand, but there was no lick-mark there. Its nose was sensitive enough.
”Go back,” it murmured. The water shuffled. “You have travelled far enough, gergaji.” A pulse, stronger than the river’s natural flow, and the tip of a blade emerging from the water. “And thank you.” The blade shuffled and disappeared, the tip of the sawfish’s dorsal fin following a slow, restful path back down with the water.
It smelled the scum again.
The horned suchus nuzzled it, and it held its hand out to the beast’s mouth, where it was licked clean. It was just murk, after all. Murk and scum from the bottom of a river. Upriver murk.
Murk, upriver.
What kind of river was dark at its birth, and washed clean at its languid final hour?
Calign let its hand fall. The pine and cedar flexed their bundled fingers above. The world it had left behind, the world of sowing and fishing, praising and building and taming, that was alien. New forces worked on new creatures of the latter gods. Fire, prolific, speech, abundant. The beast called Man wrought the world around it with deliberate power. Akkylonia had nothing of the natural silence of Calign’s wood.
And this place, too, was alien.
Calign sang a high trill from its throat. There was a second of lizardly scrabbling before its companion arrived in a surreal leap, catching the air and gliding like a dart from the canopy on the webbing between its limbs.
“Grow swiftly,” whispered Calign. “We have far to go, and these are no woods for the naive.”
Indeed, the spirit had found signs that this thickening forest was not for unwary feet to tread within the first day. The ashen circle of a dead fire spread its acrid smell amid a sparse little copse overgrown with leathery fungi, though the proudly standing undergrowth and the wide domains of fat, lazy brown spiders stood to show that it had been some time since flames had danced among the looming trees. Yet the mound of charred bones was still there in plain view, untouched by such beasts as walked on four legs, and the skull propped upon a sharpened stick, in menace, ritual or idle jest, clearly had been split open not by tooth, but by stone.
No, it would not have been well for one not hardened to peril to venture ahead as it did; but perhaps it would have been easier upon the mind. By night and by day, whether under the inattentive eye of the sun distantly seeping through the treetops or by the ghostly light of the moon, which made the gnarly firs and ancient oaks come alive with illusory shadows, things more lively stirred and watched all around. One less wise to the ways of the wild might not have noticed them, but to Calign’s senses they came almost deliberately, as if to flaunt how strange their nature was to it. Those winged feathery things up high, with sharp black beaks or great staring eyes, cried and sang in harmonies unusual for something that flew, and the grunting brown shapes that shuffled through brush and dead leaves were much too large for beasts clothed in fur.
And all of them watched, whether quietly staring until it was out of sight or just throwing a dim-eyed glance from afar before disappearing who knew where. The woods knew strangers when they saw them.
It was Buaya that took the greatest advantage of this. Repulsed by nothing and fearing little, the great horny beast tore up thickets, broke roots, ripped into mounds and tussocks to drag up snarling jaw-worms to chew on. Where the creeping things scattered from its feet, it rasped its crocodile hiss to make them scatter faster. Calign came to rest an arm on its horn when some shadow of a shadow of a living thing peered at them, calming its own heart with the dumb boldness of a beast among beasts.
Strangely, those very waters that had seemed most odd to it at first were where life took on more familiar shapes. The rivers of the forest became darker and grimier the further it went, and more and more often they twisted into painful dead ends where they grew rank and choked by weeds. Their denizens were slimy, bony things, snapping pikes and bloated carps and sleepy long-whiskered catfish, not all of which were bad for eating. But a breath of a more familiar world lingered on their muddy banks or among the green scum that carpeted their surface. Squat little creatures that belonged neither to land nor to water puffed their wart-speckled throats when the suchus trod within sight.
They spoke to the spirit. Come on, they croaked in their simple little tongue, come on, and then crawled away, while far ahead more of them picked up the song.
Calign picked up a toad out of habit.
It was the toads that, after days of shuffling through the woods without meeting anything but those outlandish beasts, marked a certain spot along one of those small, dark branching streams. It split in two after a bend, one side losing itself behind Calign’s back, another burying itself in a quiet marsh. That was already strange enough, for the toads did not sing there as they had been wont to every time until then. Instead, they called - come on, come on - from somewhere beyond the approaching bend, hidden behind a wall of coarse grey trunks.
No, not approaching. Beyond the bend, the murky water flowed, thick and sluggish, but flowed still - upstream.
Come on, come on.
Sorcery.
Buaya went to lap from the water and Calign stopped it. They were deep in the realm of foreign powers, dredged from the days of alien gods. The lizard had fallen behind to forage in safer trees. “Tell them,” said the pale witch to the toad in its hands, “that we are coming. Tell them that I suffer no foes.” It threw the toad to the mud and watched it go. Its compatriots stayed there beside it, saying come on, come on.
Silence, croaked Calign deep in the back of its throat, and there was silence.
One after another, the toads slid into the unnaturally flowing river, and let themselves be carried away towards its hidden source. Just as the last of them disappeared, the stream stood still, as if frozen by a winter that had brought all of its chill to bear in a single moment, before stirring again, just as suddenly. Now, however, it ran as it is meet for streams to do, out from the heart of the forest, past the bend and towards the mire.
Something else followed it.
A long shape walked out from behind the arm of tangled trees that obscured the river’s further origin, very tall and very old. A woman, but not such as the spirit had seen before. Her hair was dire and tangled, of the colour of a birch tree felled by wintry winds, and her skin was like the silt at the bottom of a volcanic lake, dark and rugose. Though she was clothed, like the inhabitants of Akkylonia, her brown robe was rougher and coarser than even what the humble labourers of that land had worn. There was a slight limp to her step, but she did not lean on the gnarly staff she carried.
Rustles and cracking steps among the trees. She was not alone.
“Well, well,” the great hag’s wide nostrils swelled, and she spoke in a voice raspy like the call of a big toad, “what do I smell? Spirit of the under-wood, of ferns and moss. Who is here?” She squinted through the rays of dusty sunlight. “Will I cook you and eat you in my pot?”
Calign thought hard about this.
“That’s not very likely.” The little spirit sent its gaze across the stream and sought the eyes that lay beneath that broad and wrinkled brow, and matched them, its ears high, the flowers of its antlers folded, listening. “You know who you’re talking to. You’ve said it aloud. Its name will wait on yours.” Its hand rested on the back of the now-still suchus.
“Heh! Come into my house and ask for things like that?” the crone chuckled, rubbing her jutting chin with her staff and briefly revealing a mouth full of long, yellow teeth. “But if I got yours that easy, it’s only fair I don’t make it hard to get mine. I’m Kulgha, and I’ve been for a long time. You are my guest, here,” she waved a hand at wood and stream, scattering old crumbs and crusts from her sleeve.
From that gesture, she passed smoothly into rummaging in a leather satchel at her side, from which she produced a dead flower. Though wilted and missing several petals, it was of a kind with those that rested on Calign’s antlers.
“And maybe you knew to act like one, after all, if you’re the one who sent that little gift to our feast.”
“Perhaps,” said the foreign spirit. “I am Calign. Magos. Where’s my bird?”
“Your bird?” Kulgha prodded at her upper lip with her jaw, thinking, “I’ve seen a lot of birds, but none as said it was yours, mag. But that gift that came to us, it flew like a bird and smelled like your swamp-ox.” She nodded at Buaya, or maybe pointed that way with her nose. The animal shuffled. “It didn’t taste like a real one. Is that what you call a bird?”
“It had feathers.” It waved the matter away with one hand. “You ate my bird. So be it. You are Kulgha, elder of the twisted thorn and toad. You know… of things that I do not.”
“Maybe I do, though I thought everyone knew what you do with a bird.” The hag shook her head, as if recalling things long gone by. “So you’ve come for that, to ask of me? Many used to, once, but the people here lost the habit when they’d heard all I would tell them, and outsiders…” she flicked her fingers, vexed or maybe disappointed, “I’ll just say you’re the first who’s sought me out in a very long time. But I’m not like any other crone, I don’t forget, hah! If you want to ask and hear, there’s a lot I can tell you, if you’ll break bread and share a drink.”
Calign, who had seen bones, did not doubt her. “I’m sure you will say more if I bring food. Have you a city, like the builders to the south?”
“They have a city now?” Kulgha picked at a hairy wart on her cheek with a pensive look, “It’s really been too long. I’ve never needed one - I said this’s my home, and so it is. People here have their huts, their houses, many together, sometimes. But that’s not a city, is it? No, must be this just isn’t a place for cities.” She glanced over her shoulder. “I do have a fire, though, and a pot - not for you, don’t worry. You’re my guest, so come and sit. I’ll get a dry throat if I talk much more without a sip.”
“You know how to live,” said Calign. “I’ll weary you no longer. Tell the tribe about you that they need not hunt long today.” The spirit turned its body, still facing the crone across the river. “We will sit when the moon is high.”
“My old bones will be like dust by then if I have to wait that long, but we’ll have it your way. When the moon is high,” cackled the witch, and dipped her hand into her pouch again. The wilted flower vanished, and instead of it there came out a thick ball of coiled woolen thread and what looked like dried-out sinew, wound around a polished shard of bone. With an almost nonchalant swipe of the wrist, she tossed it to the spirit over the stream in a leisurely arc. “You’re quick on your feet, so if you’re too far by then this will lead you straight back to me.”
Calign caught the talisman without breaking his gaze, and nodded.
A strange forest it was, where water ran uphill. No stranger that than the way the woods only woke up after dark. Not even the trees seemed to rustle as they did when the sun was out.
Night had brought strength upon the owl, the rat, and the razorback boar. It had brought strength to Calign, also. When its bare feet touched the moss beyond the canopy-hall of the Beast Hag, its hands were clean, but only because it had washed them.
Its footsteps out in the forest beyond were sparse and widely scattered. These woods were weird but they were woods, the stalemate of ancient trees and the home of all things that creepeth upon the earth, not the brickish never-alive machinations of the men of the river, and indeed of the huts. The time it had taken to hunt had taught it much, though it bore no map of the forest, not even in its brain; such things were the tools of men who thought like men and not like wizards. Such men did not study the shape-language of boughs, nor see its delicate fractal patterns of growth and death for anything but chaos. Calign wondered what would happen if it brought its new knowledge against she who was born fluent.
With some examination, it set Kulgha’s token of bone and thread down on a bed of old leaves, where it began to twitch. Calign watched as the ball of yarn awoke, recalling life and animation to which it no longer had any right, and roll with feverish vigour back through the trees towards its master, leaving a still thread for the spirit to follow.
Buaya had carried little of the burden of hunting and so was enlisted as packhorse. The sticks laden across her enormous shoulders were strung with young sturgeon and fat lizards, and upon her back, tied together by the neck, lay a bounty of partridges and wood-ducks. Missing was much of the more common and perhaps better fare of the woods, the doe and boar and queer standing-hare, and in their stead was a thorn-bush heavy laden with impaled scorpions and crays, and snakes of unusual size.
When the last strand of yarn and sinew was unwound, its now lifeless end pointed to the shore of a river bend that had changed little since the first time Calign had seen it. Even the impossible flow of the dark waters, now silvery and shimmering in the pale moonlight like the flank of one great fish, was once more turned towards its birth where the rocky strand parted it, or had perhaps stayed like that all along. In the liveliness brought by dusk, the crystalline rush of opposite waves was all the more clear. At times, it seemed to take on a new meaning, maybe a voice of fear and warning, maybe a lament for far shores it could not reach.
A familiar call broke through the bound waters’ murmuring. Come on, said the toads, come on.
The magos guided Buaya into the bewitched waters and beyond them. Kulgha was waiting, a huge, shaggy shadow that only stood out from the looming trees because it shifted and moved against the breeze. She smelled differently from before, not of hoary age, dusty pelts and dried blood, but of pungent ash, freshly butchered meat and a myriad of herbs, fruits and berries that even now were difficult to trace. Her eyes, twice-sunken beneath her brow and the drape of night, could not be seen, but their gaze lay heavy on the spirit and its retinue as soon as they came into sight.
A gnarly hand rose against the moon, greeting or beckoning. Her staff was nowhere to be seen.
Calign barked, once, a short harsh advertisement of its presence and its nature. It presented its silhouette against Kulgha’s own, bearing the scent of fresh game and magnolia into the light of the gibbous moon.
The hand waved it over in reply before sinking, and the great shade turned around and started shuffling back around the wooded outcropping, creaking over dry leaves.
“Come on over,” like the first time, the hag’s raucous voice echoed that of her familiars. In the dark, the similarity was even more uncanny, as if the nightly air had given the words a reverb like that of a rubbery throat. “The pot’s on the fire, the meat is crisp and the brew is hot. Wouldn’t want it to burn out.”
“Show me how you dine,” said the spirit, approaching and following with its bloody haul. “I will join you.”
As soon as they turned past the old leaning trunk that hung closest to the water, the shadows were lit up with the fiery glow of stoked embers. Two beds of crackling wood and fizzling cinders, one long and one short, were spread over the sandy banks, loosely ringed with large stones so that the flames would not run rampant through the nearby forest. On the smaller circle there rested a low, round-bellied cauldron, steaming with a thick, aromatic green brew. The larger roasting-fire, wide and stretched enough to resemble a burial mound, was a clutter of skewers, frying-plates and simple warming stones, all smoking and sizzling with woodland game - if indeed it was only that - and shallow-river fish.
The witch dipped a wooden cup into the cauldron as she shuffled past it, without so much as flinching when her fingers briefly touched the heating liquid, and came to crouch by the ashen bed. With a frothing sip, she downed the cup’s contents, then snatched and bit from a shin-bone directly out of the fire and motioned for Calign to sit without interrupting her chewing.
“Phut uph your bitsh an’ have them roasht,” between her full mouth and her jutting teeth, her speech was harder to make out than ever, “E’ll be ready by when we’re done with mine.”
Calign saw to the business of skewering a gutted lizard. As the reptile’s fatty tail began to drip and sizzle onto a copper pan, it busied itself roughly stripping some remaining unplucked birds and adding them, with the fish, to the cauldron. The scorpions it ate raw.
“Strange herbs in your greatpot,” said Calign, the warmth of the fire soaking into it, softening its face into something almost human. “Things that I can’t name. Where are your people?”
The hag swallowed a grotesquely large mouthful before answering. “Out afield. In the woods, under the mountains, over the hills. Up here, everyone’s my people, ‘least when they feel like it. I’d have my hands full if I looked after them all, but I’m not their babka, not really.” She took another loud crunching bite. “You mean the ones you heard last time, they always got something to do when the moon’s an eye. Better! Means more of the table for us, eh?”
Her long, jagged nails flashed like pools of refractive water for a moment as she flicked them through a rising tongue of flame, scattering it into sparks and smoke. When it cleared, a wooden cup akin to hers sat on a flat rock within Calign’s reach - if indeed it had not been there all along.
“Brew’s the best of the season,” the clawlike nails pointed at the fuming cauldron, “Some of it you won’t find outside some places only I can go. Boil and drink, the meat’s dry on its own.”
“...Something to do when the moon’s an eye,” murmured Calign, taking the cup and stroking its wooden surface with its fingertips. Even under Kulgha’s advice, it spent some time picking meat off the lizard before it finally filled its bowl. “You’re the one the brooks fear when they turn their course away. What grows where the rivers run in circles?” It stared down at the meaty, herbal broth. It smelled of small lives stolen for their vigour. Its surface was dark, brown and green, infused with the woods and leaves, like the streams.
Calign met the shaded eyes of its senior and drank.
“There’s things, in the the places where the water goes like a heart that’s breathing, slow and sick,” the ancient’s gaze was hidden in the sunken hollows of her face, wrinkled but not sagging, like an owl staring out from the cavity of an old tree, “Things that are old, older than me, sometimes. Many of them can’t be spoken about because they don’t have names. What do you call the grass that hares cut when the fog comes down? A bird that’s never seen the inside of an egg? Something that can jump taller than the forest? Things like them, you can’t just hear, you have to see. It’s not easy. Nobody else than me knows how to walk there and come back. But sometimes,” she idly picked a half-chewed chunk from between her teeth, “I can bring some of these things out and show them. It’s always a good time when people meet something from the deep places. You’re never sure how they’re going to feel it.”
The light of the embers glinted off the bottom of the sunken eye-hollows. Calign could see now that the look in them was intent, curious. Expectant.
Calign drained its cup and cracked the bones, then filled it again. It took the snakes and lizards and stripped their bubbling white flesh with its teeth, drinking bowl after bowl of Kulgha’s sup. Errant feathers floated in the broth, nudged by the rising of crays and fish that bobbed, dead and yet swimming in the flickering twilight.
And the shadows grew longer.
Kulgha stoked the fires and Calign feasted and its beast slept a sleep that gave no rest. Bones piled around it, some picked, some charred, some still laden with shreds of flesh cooked and raw. Scorpions twitched on their impaling thorns. Scorpions twitched in the fire. Scorpions twitched on the earth.
Magnolias scattered over the dirt like snow. The coals did not shine long enough to obscure the whiteness of the moon in their petals. The feast continued. The fire died. The world became too cold and dark to speak. A mat of filthy hair obscured its face.
A wooden canopy creaked above Calign, rooted in no tree. Buaya grimaced and shuddered in its nightmares. Living wood clashed with dead as cold winds drove the branches of Kulgha’s world against the blades and claws of the imposter that stretched its fingers into the sky.
Bloated was the spirit when it stood, heaving, shuddering under the terrible weight of ten dozen dozen antlers that pierced the woods above, dripping with the shreds of skin and flesh they had torn away with them. There was a crack of knees against earth as it collapsed forwards into the hell of bone and blossoms and the bile that fell from its open mouth.
It seized its clothes, and the sound of tearing fabric could not hide the greater rip of skin.
Father, what cries out in the night?
Its voice is like the bear.
Father, what tree quakes there, in the grove of the hag?
It cries out in pain, Father.
Can’t you see it shaking in the light of the pale moon?
Quiet, son. There are witches about.
I’m scared, Father.
Father, it is walking...
Gentle sunlight warmed Calign’s pale face, casting filtered patterns through its hair, clean and soft as lush moss. It set Buaya’s smooth white skull down upon the ashes and bones of the fire.
A spire of lichen cast a queer shadow across the canopy, barely visible from below, sprouting from a nest of wet growth in the broken boughs of an enormous quillwort, itself rising from the shattered corpse of a clubmoss planted in a fern. A magnolia so crushed as to be almost a shrub was the bed of the broken stack of dying primitives, where the rest of Buaya’s bones lay at rest, the white plates of her armour still nestled in the familiar shape of her squat reptilian body.
It was a chilly morning.
Nearby, long, irregular rasps of nails on metal rang out, like sharp rocks in the flow of the awakening birdsong. Kulgha was scraping the last, caked residue of broth from the bottom of the cauldron. She pulled her long fingers out of the pot, passed them between hoary, arid lips, plunged them in again, another screech. A frown hovered over her brow. Eyes that had watched and waited through the whole night squinted in the cold rays of dawn.
“Dreams are something strange,” she said, still intent on the pot, “They’re like the wind. You can’t touch them, but you can call them and make them come, if you know the way. Many can find them if they want, few can make others dream. No one can make the world dream. Only in some of the old places, it can happen. That’s the way it is.” She did not look up. “You’re not of the living folk, are you? You’re like those places, old and strong.” Her mouth broke into a crooked grin. “Didn’t know they could feast as good as me.”
“Only here.” Calign sifted white ash through its fingers. “Only with you. I am ill with this place, it rots me. If I stay here any longer I will rip it off my skin with my teeth and keep ripping. Two bullfrogs cannot share a hole.” It lifted its hands and the ash fell away, revealing a blossom. Its eyes turned aside and locked with Kulgha’s over the rim of her great cauldron. “But you know that. Which came first: you, or your dens in the dark?”
“That’s the hardest question,” the hag gave a rasping chuckle as she set the now wholly empty pot aside. “Once, they were there, and I wasn’t. They were there when I was young, long ago. Then I became old, as old as them. I took some of what they are into myself, and the count of their winters became mine. That’s why I can make the rivers run to their birth, and my days crawl backwards, so that I won’t ever die. Like them, everything I take, I can make mine. That’s what you must be feeling, the hunger of the woods.” She lifted a charred bone from the crumbled embers, snapped it over her finger like a twig, smelled the inside. “You weren’t born with it, nor are you prey. This is why you must go.” A pensive glance down the undisturbed flow of the stream. “South away, the forest is ancient and sated. Perhaps it speaks in a way you can answer.”
The silence that followed was punctuated by a wet, weak thud as some bough of the alien tree broke under its own weight and fell into the leaves and worms of an older forest. Somewhere a blackbird was croaking.
“I’m missing a beast,” said Calign. “It won’t slow me down much. My footprints will be mud before moonrise.” It stood and then hovered, the force of the gentle motion pushing it a few inches away from the ground. Its eyes were bright and still. “May the roots of our trees never tangle again,” it said, its claws digging into the bark of the oak with which it pulled itself forward. “I can offer no other blessing.”
“May the wind bring your dream to far lands,” the crone croaked, and scattered dust of crushed bone into the rising breeze, “And may the road wear out your feet no more than thrice.”
And then the spirit was gone.
Calign found its lizard hunting at the riverside, its neck having grown so long now as to browse the shallow waters like a stork, the tip of its snout likewise razor-sharp. It shuffled when Calign trilled, yet did not raise its gaze from the mud. Curious, Calign stood beside it.
Oh. Of course.
The lizard startled like a skittish cat and leapt up to glide away on the skin between its toes and lengthening arms, leaving Cal alone to meet eyes with the amphibian. It was fat, black and warty, probably a giant of its kind. The poison in its meat was its only defense before Calign, but the toad showed no sign of startling.
After all, it too was a predator.
Calign enters Kulgha’s woods. Sensing danger, it sends its lizard(?) away. We see the forest and its creatures in some detail. Kulgha guides Calign into the forest and greets it with some of the local people that follow her. They briefly discuss the matter of the crunched dino bird. She proposes a feast for the two to talk more that night, and offers Calign a magical device to find her then. The feast begins but Kulgha’s local entourage is missing. The two discuss magic and the woods before Kulgha’s soup kicks in. Some magic happens. The next morning Calign interrogates her a little more, and they part ways. Buaya is no longer with Calign. The lizard is no longer very lizardy.
Lord Zee
Cyclone
