Chapter 14: It isn’t enough
My name is Clover, son of a very fit gentleman, who brought flowers. Mom taught me to hear the song in the storm, and to answer it. I am Clover, chased by other children and struck, I fell impaled upon the bones of a dead Titan Ajax, and bled my last onto the floor where the Titan Ajax had fallen killing the last of the primordial spawn of chaos; but I did not die. From Ajax I learned how to put my will upon the world, to unleash the golden light of primal will to reshape reality. I learned how to grow strong in the broken places, not to heal as the gods do; making injuries as if they never happened. I learned to walk the path of pain and power, to let each breaking be the foundation of a new strength. When I bled upon those ancient bones, I fed the shreds of that last primordial darkness. The shredded whisps of the chaos that preceded the universe were all that remained of that primordial darkness, until I fed them upon my blood, and made of my body a sanctuary for them. They became my tentacle friends. All I wanted was to grow strong enough to defend Mom from those who looked upon her with lust or fear and wished her harm.
The Holy Knights taught me the gods of light had no place for me as the darkness in me was evil, and the light that burned inside me was not that of their gods. The Dread Empire of Yn’Tereth brought me into their legions, but my darkness was not evil, my tentacle friends were no demons. We were not things of shadow, because shadow was born of light. What they were was what was before the first light, and what will be when the last of the universe burns out. I found friends, and grew strong in the Dread Empire, but in the end, the god of evil had no more tolerance for me than the god of light.
I ran away to the Savage Lands, where I found love, sort of. Where I found a family, in a way. Where my friends came to join me, having also run away from the Legions. Life should be less complicated now. Sure, there were the whole tribes of orcs that declared war on me thing, but that wasn’t so bad. They took it back after I killed a chariot and popped one chieftains head like an overripe grape. It wasn’t even really a hard training day in the Legion, less than a skirmish. More like a discipline parade.
I met Dad, at last. He loved Mom, and watched over her always, which was good. He was dead. Which was bad. He was dead when he met her, when he created me, and I was just going to put that over in the corner someplace and unpack it later. He also fathered the titans, who fathered the gods, who all murdered their parents, and I was just going to put that over in the corner someplace and unpack it never. I loved Mom. I just met Dad, and had no plans on killing him. He was already dead, and it would only make Mom unhappy. Mom taught me family traditions like dancing in the rain and making cookies when we get sick. I had to learn murder on my own because Mom never even taught spanking. We just aren’t that kind of family.
Now I was babysitting. As punishment.
“It is all your fault. It is unnatural. Make him stop.” Tamara Anyadottir was crying, her black tentacles growing fangs and lashing out at me, only to be deflected by the forest of larger, far more potent tentacles that slipped from my own shadow.
The him in question was baby Goo. Goo had another name, but it was wasted on him. Goo he cried out and Goo he made, Goo he answered to, so Goo he was. Goo was in fact the issue. All babies pooped. Poop was nasty. Diapers were messy, smelly, and no one loved them. What was in them was loved even less, by everyone except Goo.
Goo and his mother nearly died at birth, well before birth, well technically during birth. I helped. I was burning with power, too much power. I had been burned alive by the ritual power of a Sorcerer Legate, his tribune sorcerers, and a full circle of demons acting through the ritual link in my own armour. I guess running away from the Dread Empire in magic armour they gave you is on the list of things Clover should not do. I hadn’t read that part of the list, but trust me, it is underlined now. The power of the Titan, the will to reshape what was broken and remake it more powerful was balanced against the death magic of the god of evil and a circle of both demons and sorcerers. My tentacle friends ate the demons, and the sorcerers, to get me the power to reshape my flesh as fast as it burned, but I burned enough to kill a dozen men, and took in the life force of both a dozen immortal sorcerers and their bound demons. I burned too bright, I burned with too much life. I needed death or I would burn alive with life. Tamara was dying and her baby with her. I followed the song of her death and poured the life that was killing me into her. I tore her body again and again to reshape her into someone who could bear a child and live. I reshaped the baby into one that could take the trauma it was suffering and live.
To do that I did what I knew, I used my will like a knife to cut the mortal clay of their flesh in two. Mortals were born from the falling blood of the god slain titans, and the mortal clay of the primordial chaos bound to form this world. I cut that clay and forced the two halves awake. The tentacle friends, the primordial darkness of chaos did what chaos did, and unmade order that displeased them. They tore at reality and reduced it to bits of chaos that could be whatever it wanted, and then the primordial golden light of the will remade that chaos into what it needed to be. Not healing, healing would give a mother and child as nature intended, doomed to die and going about it fast. No. They became something unnatural, they became stronger. The world and the will of the gods gave them the fate to die in childbirth, and I drove my will inside mother and child and cut them apart so that their darkness could unmake that order, and their own will could claw reality apart and dig its way out.
I had worked for months to train my squad to master their darkness to unmake that which was in the way, and to master their light to make the chaos of the unmade thing into what was needful. It took months to train them to reshape their body to become stronger when it failed, when it broke, when it bled.
It took a day for Goo to figure out how to shape his slimy black orcish baby poo into little black frogs, and bind spirts from the earth and air to fill them. I don’t really know if they are alive or not, but they are cute little poop froggies that Goo and his tentacles love to play with but Tamara, and Oskana think are profoundly wrong and need to go away.
Now I am facing a baby Goo just after a big feed. Green skin baby with shining golden eyes like my own and a single tentacle of darkness like a cobra hovering over him as he makes grunting baby noises and terrible baby smells. A diaper faces me, and three angry orcish women face me. Tamara the mother, Kala my wife, and Oksana the Crone, the Orcish wise woman, midwife and authority on how baby related things are supposed to be. I open the diaper, and a smelly black tar like substance that smells like a company latrine after we drank untreated water in midsummer formed a bubble of nasty that even I instinctively shied away from. It did not pop and release the dreaded smell everyone expected, but a glossy black miniature frog. Said frog hopped from the diaper, and the baby Goo missed it with a hand that was far too coordinated for a days old baby, joining the other frogs in circling the baby as it rolled and squirmed, not a crawl, but on the way of it, and lunging black tentacle that sought to snatch up the black froggies.
I was a trained military officer. I kept on task, grabbed baby Goo and got him firmly fastened into the diaper. I looked upon the frogs, and they looked back at me. They were spirits of the lands, and they were alive. I could reach out my will and blot them from existence, yet as I thought of that my mothers sad face crossed my mind. She would have loved them, and set them free in her garden. They were a thing that had never been, yet they were here, and they were right.
“GOO!” Shouted baby Goo happily.
“Goo!” I said resignedly, waving back and turning to face the music, and the ladies.
“I am sorry, but I won’t stop him. He has woven his will and his life into that poop, but he has also bound the spirits of this land into them, and set them free. They are, those little black froggies that don’t get eaten by his tentacle friend, going about binding your tribe to this land. When his poop gets up to hop away, I suggest you just turn a blind eye and let them hop out the door.”
That answer satisfied no one, and I was getting three different octaves of “That is not the way it has always been!” when a forth female voice cut in and ended the debate.
“The way it has always been is not enough. You are going to have to get a whole lot better, a whole lot faster, or you are going to die screaming when the whole world turns against you.”
There was a woman standing in the doorway. Human, a hard fit middle aged. Dressed in Dread Empire officer armour. She looked familiar, but something about her was wrong.
“Who in the fuck are you? Is every human in the Dread Empire going to keep showing up in this village? Do we need another fucking barracks?” Shouted Oskana the Crone, skipping the pleasantries in the way only senior orcs can do so gracefully.
The old woman finally spoke. “Captain Tanya Xiang, late of the Dread Empire. Once a high level cultivator, until my Legate and my demon were both slain by the Butcher, then left as a one eyed, one leg, barely able to walk cripple, to teach young idiot recruits like this one how not to step on their own spear.”
I looked at her in shock, her body strong and fit, powerful beyond even the Butcher at his prime. Two legs, two eyes, and yes, a pair of hissing tentacles of darkness that waved beneath her hair like guardian serpents. I shot a look back to her eyes, and the iron will that had held her broken body to perform well enough to train us was gone, now what flashed back was the bright yellow of celestial bronze.
“That’s right you little moron. The Dread Empire and our beloved Yn’Tereth had been fine with me being powerless and crippled, so when you failed so miserably to learn even the basics a washout could handle of our demonic cultivation, I paid attention to what you were doing, and when you left for the Legion’s main camp for duty, I took some time off to give it a try. About the time you started working battlefield miracles, I got my eye and leg back. About the time you killed the Butcher’s whole ritual circle, I started riding for the border. Politics is causing the Queen of Pain to cover up your escape to make the victory at Dust look like entirely her work, but the better part of two cohorts of your old legion and a good bit of her three cohorts, plus all the auxiliaries, traders, whores, spies, and yammer-headed civilians saw and heard enough that someone is going to talk. The Empire will be looking for you. Then there is the whole Holy Knights thing. You slaughtered a chapter master, shattered pretty much an entire Inquisition Purifier team in front of the freaking sun god and half his armies. What you did isn’t possible, and enough people saw it to get scared. Scared people with armies do stupid things, and here you are changing diapers.
It isn’t enough. You have something to give, something to teach. Good wants to burn you alive. Evil wants to cut you into little pieces and feed them to demons. If you want the world to have other options than those two sides of a shitty coin, you are going to have to do something about it.”
Kala Anyasdottir stepped forward and snarled at her. “What do you expect Clover to do about it?”
Captain Xiang laughed. “Fucked if I know. I never expected him to stop a war to save the bees. I never expected him to play tentacle bondage games with a Sorcerer Legate and his demon in his own damned command tent. I didn’t expect him to kill the Chapter Master of the Holy Knights stone cold dead on the field, then break his whole frigging army with one cohort, and I certainly didn’t expect him to rip the souls out of a dozen sorcerer Tribunes, and the Butcher his own bad self. I have no fucking clue what your little boy toy is going to do, but I am dying to find out.”
Oskana put a hand on Kala to stop her from trying to punch Captain Xiang as she asked her own question. “And what are you planning on doing here?”
Captain Xiang smiled, and it was a killing thing. “Me? Well I only know how to do one thing. Take useless wastes of skin and stink and turn them into the most finely meshed killing machine the world has ever seen. I take useless morons and turn the into soldiers, then I take those soldiers and I turn them into an army. Usually for useless raging ego maniacs, but just this once, I thought I would do it for Clover, because the little shit showed me how to get my leg and eye back without selling my soul, or kissing anyone’s ass.”
I looked down into my hands. These were not the hands of a Legate, or a prophet, or a king. They were not the hands of a rebel or a warlord. I was just a warrior. I just became a soldier to learn how dance my dance, like Mom knew how to dance her dance. I just wanted to become strong enough to protect those I loved, and who loved me.
I just about jumped as a little black frog jumped into my hands and looked up at me, seriously. He croaked once, twice, three times, then jumped out the window and off into a world that was unprepared for what he was.
“GOO!” Shouted baby Goo. Unperturbed by all the developments. Sure what was going on was deeply disturbing to think about, and maybe it had never been before. You know what? Too bad.
The world was okay with poopy diapers, death in childbirth, empty eye sockets and lost legs. Maybe I wasn’t.
The gods sat above a world they did not make, ruling over races they did not spawn, demanding we follow rules imposed by those who never had to pay the price. From the gods to the kings, from the kings to the rich, from the rich to the local toughs, be they called knights, soldiers, or bandits, they all gave the same message. Stay in your place, accept your lot. Fall down to your knees in thanks we let you live long enough to serve us. Fear us because we are gods and you are not Fear us because we are kings and you are not. Fear us because we have magic and you do not. Fear us because we are rich and you are not. Fear us because we are strong and you are not. Fear us, because we demand it.
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I looked over at my spear in the corner, and down at the Xiphos at my side. Cast of Celestial Bronze, they were weapons of the gods, weapons equal to those of the Titans, because I made them the way of the Titans. I put the golden light of my will into the bronze and infused it with a higher order. This was the path of the Titan, this was the root from which the gods sprung, this was what the gods developed farther when they created magic. I looked at it now and realized what my father had been trying to tell me. This was not enough.
I did not survive because I was my father’s child. I never knew him until I came here. I survived as my mother’s child. Ajax may have awakened the Titan in me, but my tentacle friends kept me alive. Everything I had done, I reached for my father’s weapons, my father’s tools, my father’s way, when it was my tentacle friends that I depended on to get me through. When I healed, when I fought, when I did anything that life depended on I used both order and chaos, both the light and the dark, so why were my weapons forged only of the light? I was never going to be a titan. My flesh was made of that common clay, my mother bore me beneath her heart and passed me out her hoo-hah with a great deal of effort. I was born, I would die. I was no titan, no god, so why did I limit myself to their tools? Why accept their limits? Sure I was mortal. I would age, I don’t know how fast, but it would happen. I would die. If I was not one of the immortals, why did I accept their limits?
No. No more.
I wanted a world in which people could be free to live without a god, a church, a king, or just some local thug with the knowledge that it is more fun to take things than to work for them. If I wanted it, I knew how to get it. Reach out and put my will upon the world to make it so. My tentacle friends were born of the primordial chaos, if there is order they don’t like they unmake it. If I desire to see a world in which the common folk do not have to sell their souls, their freedom and their pride for the protection of those the gods shared their magic with, then I must give the people an alternative. If I thought I could offer people freedom, and not have to slaughter every single person whose power depended upon them being in chains, then the army taught me nothing at all.
No. The weapons I had were not enough, the goals I had were not enough, and the allies I had were not enough.
It begins tomorrow. I will do better.
Nobody expects the Holy Inquisition, but anyone who is surprised by a Centurion at o fuck me hundred in the morning deserves what happens next. The Orcs had no experience with the Legion, but that was changing. They thought they were tough, so we took them on. Once century, eighty humans and a few trolls against three to five hundred orc warriors. We beat them in order in daylight, in night. We beat them at range, close quarters, with our powers and without. After every battle when the bodies lay broken in the middle of the field, too tired or too injured to leave under their own power, one of mine would go and sit by them and talk. I remember my first.
“Fuck off you little shit. If I didn’t lose my arm, I would gut you next time.” The orc would have reached out to strangle me if he wasn’t holding the stump of his right together with his left. He was probably bleeding out. He could have gone back to the medics to be saved, but what warrior would choose to live maimed and useless in the Savage Lands? Well, ours knew better. Time this moron learned. The way every moron learned. I was a moron, and this is how I learned. I grinned, I was a master of learning like an idiot. He was in excellent hands.
“When you have your arm back, I will take your spear away and shove it up your ass. Now, quit being a pussy and fix it.” I said, sitting down next to him, close enough to smell the sick fear sweat coming off him, to see the sweat, and the drool as shock started to make his face slacken.
His eyes flared and he spat at me. He missed. It dribbled down his chin. “Orcs don’t have your healing magic. The gods don’t love us. We have only our own strength. Now piss off and let me die in peace.”
“Don’t be a pussy.” I said and reached out and grabbed his shattered arm and squeezed. He screamed, the pain making him let go his hurt wrist and land a haymaker on my face. I felt my head rock back and heard the sound of a bell, but it had the twin effects of a spike in his awareness and a shift in focus away from his arm. That was all I needed. I reached inside his flesh and tore. How to describe it? All matter is illusion. All matter is chaos bound into form, but that form is mostly illusion and a small amount of stuff stuck in that illusion bound into a pattern we call a thing. The tentacles of darkness that came to me when I lay dying were the last vestiges of that chaos before the binding. It hate the binding, and longed to free matter from its chains, to free substance from the illusion of form. I used them to reach inside the broken bits and tear.
There is not much difference for the world between you and your corpse. Meat is meat, living or dead, it is pretty much the same to anyone who isn’t living in it. It is made of the same stuff, and so when my tentacle friends reached into his broken arm and unmade it, his spirit rebelled. The primordial chaos I had unleashed in him freed the golden energy of the first primordial will that violated chaos to birth the universe. That first will that looked upon endless potential and tore into it with the savage will that it should be one thing alone was now freed in his flesh, free and undirected.
It took nothing for my will to guide his own mind’s panic to reach into the broken place and make it right. When you hurt a living thing, it may not understand what has happened, but it knows that it is wrong. Deeply wrong. The instinct is to make it stop, to make it better. The defensive reaction is not to make the pain stop, it is to make it so that I cannot be hurt that way again. I guided him into the break and as his own energy faded, I forced my own into him. I did none of the work, for that would not serve me. I fed him energy and my own will to refill reservoir. His panic made him burn to fix himself, his fear at my power made him need to be stronger and his own will rose up to begin to force mine out. Golden will flared in his eyes as he pit the newborn fires of his power against mine, and darkness coiled inside him, lashing out at the streams of my will flowing into him.
He collapsed, the energy for the working having drained him to the point he could do no more than lie there and listen as I talked. This isn’t magic, it isn’t free, and it is all coming from you. The limits can be pushed outward, but they always exist.
“Healing magic is like every gift the gods gave their slaves, a trap. It makes you what you were before you were hurt. No more. Never more. You are a warrior. You walk the path of pain and power, you force yourself to push every day to be just that little bit stronger, that little bit faster, that little bit smoother. Why would you let yourself settle for only as you were when you failed. Why would you not embrace your pain and grow stronger in the broken places. To take the pain of your breaking and forge yourself a little stronger a little swifter after every wound, until you could not be hurt like that again. Until you could not be beaten like that again?
I pulled out my wine flask and drained half of it. “Sure I could heal you. That would make you just a little bit better today, and me a little bit stronger from doing it. Or I could teach you how to do it. Then you could teach the orc beside you when he gets hurt, and him the next orc, until every ungrateful tusk mouthed spear pusher in the Savage Lands can tear a Holy Knight off his pretty horse, and ram a spear through the spell wrought armour of a Dread Empire Shadow Knight. If you want to stay weak, just finish healing and go back to your tent. If you want to become strong like me, then come to our fires tonight and learn how to cultivate.”
We didn’t get all of them of course. We got maybe one in three. Fuckhead had a perfect record. I have no idea how. Everyone he slapped the crap out of ended up coming back to the fires to study with us. If he wasn’t Fuckhead I would have asked him how, but since he was Fuckhead, I didn’t. He is a troll of many wonders, all of which you will regret learning. One third of all the Orcs, a full Cohort of Dread Empire deserters, that was most of what I needed. The rest waited for me at the Tree. The Tree in the center of the Savage Lands was the Goblin Holy of Holies.
So of course, I needed to desecrate it.
I didn’t come to this conclusion lightly. Whenever the storm would come, I would take my people out into it to dance, and when we danced the song rang in the air, and in the earth. The air answered, and rain fell upon the desert more than in living memory. The earth groaned beneath our feet, groaned but could not answer. Rivers flowed underneath it that should have flowed on the surface. Seeds slept in it that should have wakened and bloomed. Life was chained in it, bound from flowering into existence by the magic of the gods. When we danced in the storm, I could feel something binding the life of this land, something corrupting and blighting it, but what it was I did not know, and could not understand.
Then the goblins came for us. They are not large. They should be a joke, the size of a large child. They move in packs, slingers and spearmen, or riding on any beast of the wild. They will ride wolves and goats in the same group, as if all the animals care about is helping the goblins go to war. They mine all the bronze in the Savage Lands. It is their only trade good as they inhabit the worst of the Savage Lands, the plains of dust and the broken hills that no one else wants. They sit in the shadeless shadow of the World Tree and kill anyone that even thinks about looking at it. Nobody wants to. A huge ash tree that hasn’t flowered in living history sitting in a waterless wasteland filled with three foot green psychopaths, who would want to.
I thought that until we fought. The battle was nothing. They threw themselves at us in suicidal fury, and we helped them commit suicide. They were perhaps the shittiest fighters I have ever seen. I once had to break up a fight between literature professors in the Great Library. The old soft handed gentlemen slapping at each other with their eyes shut and faces averted were ten times the warriors these goblins were, yet they would claw down the length of the spear killing them just to stick a bronze dagger in you. They hated. Hard.
In the aftermath of the battle, I noticed Goo’s little poop froggies, the little spirits of the land made in his diapers hopped over to surround the dying goblins, to hop close to them, and to stand on them and croak out a song of sorrow as they died. The little earth spirits wept for the falling of the goblins. The song of war had been strange when we fought, so I closed my eyes and began to dance. I lost myself in the song and I noticed how off it had been as we fought the goblins. They were a part of the song, but not my part. They were part of the song of creation, they honestly sucked at destruction, but these twisted little brutes could do nothing but kill. Why were they not part of my song, but Mom’s?
I sent my tentacles down into the ground as the Goblin’s died, and I felt their essence sucked down into the ground, flowing back through the soil to the roots of the great not so dead world tree. As they flowed into the tree, the mad pain filled howl of their soul slowly changed into a song of joyful return. A song of renewal and hope. A song of the earth restored.
Fuck the what?
The next time the storm raged, we came out and danced. The ground around us restored again, now able to support crops to feed three times the numbers the orcs had today, each time we danced, and the storm answered, more of the Savage Land was restored, but while wind and water answered, the land still resisted. This time I did not give my awareness to the restoration of the land, I let myself sink into the echoes of the song. The song was wild here in the Savage Lands, but I didn’t know why. No one did, except the gods hate the people they dumped here.
As I danced I lost myself in the rhythm of spear and shield, of thunder and lightning, the lash of wind, the hot feel of blood spraying your face, the hard shock in your wrist when an enemy’s guts tighten around the spear or sword you thrust in him and your wrist almost gives at the shock. The memory of every murder is in the song, and the memory of the first murder is in the land most strongly. I saw the fall of the titans, the war of the gods, and the betrayal at the tree.
When the gods rose against the titans, it was children rising against parents, and not all of them were willing. Upon the land, in the sky, and upon the sea that lapped at the far edge of the Savage Lands, the gods and titans fought, and one goddess stood with her parents, the gentle Demeter whose calling it was to heal the shattered body of Gaea her grandmother chose to stand with the Titans, chose to stand against the rise of the gods, not to strike them down, but to stand between them, that neither should turn their hand against the other.
The gods cut her down. The god of the sky cut open the womb of the earth goddess and as her blood fell upon the land, were the race of goblins born. In rage was she cut down, but she did not give her rage to the fight, nor did she give up her power to death for the other gods to divide. She poured out her life into the land, that her death could further heal Gaea, the broken and mindless mother earth slain so long ago by her own children. When the war of the gods was done and the titans were bound into Tarterus, the gods looked upon those races born from the fall of the blood of titans onto the earth and chose those they found pleasing to bless with their guidance and magic.
Yet the Goblins did not heed the call of the living goddess. They worked the land in the shade of the World Tree where their mother fell, and did her work. They tended the land, and nurtured its spirits. They wove her love into the earth, and cared nothing for the deeds of gods, or the races of man that the Gods raised on high. Cradled in the roots of the World Tree, Demeter dreamed of healing the Earth, of healing Gaea mother of us all, and this made the gods enraged. The god of the sky and light, the god of the sea, the god of the underworld and darkness, the three brothers who ruled came together in a last bit of unity and decided to bless their chosen people.
Taking the corpse of Demeter, the goddess who dared to defy them in peace, they bound her bones in chains of magic to the earth she gave her power to. They crucified her, binding her to the tree, and through her bones and body they worked the magic to drain the life of her land and her people. The god of the sea dragged her rivers under the earth, the god of the underworld turned them to the Holy Land the god of the sky’s people ruled what would become the Holy Land, and the god of the underworld diverted the others to what would be the Dread Empire, the land of his chosen folk. The power of the land was the greatest of all, and the people in it would be the strongest of all, for the blood of all the titans and gods who fell had fallen upon this land, yet they determined that the goblins and orcs, and those human tribes who dared to reject the glory of the gods sheltered beneath the dead goddesses tree. They determined that these tribes that denied the gods should have no power, nor wealth, nor peace. The bound the bones of the goddess Demeter in chains to Tartarus, that all the power and life of this land would instead flow down to strengthen the bindings of those she died to defend. Her children should forever be hungry, the land she poured her lifeblood into should ever be barren, so that the slaves of the victors should know wealth and ease, power and plenty.
She screamed. Dead or not, she screamed always and ever. The Savage land was being raped forever of its life, desecrated, violated and impoverished by her murderers using a spell that bound her corpse to the World Tree, turning her power of healing the earth into a tool to strip the Savage Lands forever of its life, that the Dread Empire and Holy Land should receive a stolen bounty in her murderers names. That scream is what drove the goblins mad, made them little better than animals, yet still they were bound to her land, and tended it still.
This was the will of the gods. Well. Fuck them.
I am Clover son of a very fit gentlemen who brought flowers. I will end this.