Year 219. Acocaea - Khirn

THE RUNEMASTER

The Runemaster grimaced as the bolts of fire blasted against his chest plate, bounding off in any way to collide with his own men or those of the Harbingers who now assailed him from all directions. This Loukas Tamasos proved the most dangerous, though his apparent commander—a young man in gilded armor wielding twin swords—proved almost as equal a threat. Many of the Harbingers were dashed aside in moments. Erik had rent their bodies apart with a horrific strength that surged his body to life once again as it already had before in his bouts with the Great Blade, who herself was now engaged in brutal combat with the remainder of his Druyan host.

Erik deflected a powerful upward cut from Tamasos and kicked the man's leg from under him. Tamasos' commander guarded him with dual, short-armed swings. Erik blocked them with his spear and a shield, which he had recovered from the ground.

"Keep pushing!" Loukas Tamasos shouted to his Harbingers. "Kill him now!"

Erik roared in defiance, dancing through blade and armor with impossible agility. His armor's wards were spent, yet very few blows could land on him. The Runemaster barely registered those that did.

"You are an abomination," Loukas Tamasos growled. He swung for the Runemaster's head.

Erik deflected and shot his spear for the Harbinger's face. "And you are a hypocrite, Aslofidorian. Using the 'Devil's magic' for your own gain."

Tamasos batted the spear aside, grunting as the shaft of the weapon still refused to snap or splinter. "We use the Most Noble's power for the survival of our people. For the survival of Good."

Erik cackled, ducked twin swipes from Tamasos' commander, and cracked his shield across the face of another Harbinger. "Good? You fight to save Good? What fairy tale is this, Aslofidorian? There is no Good to save. Only your own people!"

Tamasos and Erik traded blow after blow, briefly separating to clash with new foes. Erik focused on Tamasos' commander in these moments, grunting and howling as the man displayed sharp accuracy for the Runemaster's weak points.

"You Druyans sided with the Devil," Tamasos said as the two re-engaged once more. "The Vasiles you fight for has accepted powers of darkness, manipulated an aged man into the servitude of oblivion, and sent her son to die in the wilds of this vast land."

The Runemaster sent a hard kick into Tamasos chest, splitting steel and cracking ribs. "I give no shits about the Vasile, her husband, or her pissant son. I fight for myself and my people! I am Maprapeyni!"

The world was a haze of colors as the blade raced for Tamasos' neck. On his left were shades of reds and blues and yellows and oranges. On his right were greens, blacks, and browns. They went in beam-formations, their mere movements by the inch producing a horrendously piercing noise that screeched and screeched and wailed. He was caught in the middle of these formations, each strand of light blasting by and into him, shredding apart body and soul until he was collapsing to his knees or what nubs remained of them. He screamed with blood welling his throat and spewing from his mouth and nostrils and eyes, and the scream became shrill and fearful and one with the light.

Like an arrow careening for his face, the obsidian sphere appeared. It was a blink away, a snap-cut appearance complete with the dying of the beams of light. The air around him was heavy and cold, like a casket in the ground. His organs were mulched, his limbs shorn at perfect angles or chewed into stumps that bled constantly. His face was missing its right cheek and half of his lower jaw. Yet, he remained alive. Body reduced to cattle feed, yet he remained alive. He felt his heart, the one piece of him that remained unassailed, pump hot, wet blood through his veins. His eyes, barely able to register that the world around him had turned grey with the sphere nestled before him, closed in slow acceptance of his evident demise.

"Stubborn child," he heard a voice say, as ancient as the first speck of dirt. "One who refuses to die. One who wants to fight. One who disagrees with odds and risks."

Pained, agonized, Runemaster looked up from the soot beneath him and saw a creature as tall as the tallest spire in Heracla kneeling before him. Words could not be used to describe the creature he saw, only that it was immense and reptilian and looked down at him with the infinite weight of decay.

"Erik Apa. Druyan. Runemaster. I see you."

"And who are you then?" Erik asked without difficulty. His voice had not come from his ruined mouth. It had come from the air encasing him.

The giant mused on the answer before it said: "Hope. For the Druyans. For you."

A sense of familiarity and nostalgia burned what remained of Erik Apa's blood. A breathless sigh escaped him. "Is that so? And how might that be?"

Infinity crushed the air around him as the giant knelt deeper to gaze into his eyes directly. He felt no fear. He felt no horror. Even as the thing's face, if it could even be called a face, drew only feet from him, he remained calm. "An offer. Right the wrongs of the past."

"In what sense?"

He was so infinitesimal when the giant deemed him worthy to remold back to his old self. Undamanged, unblemished. A perfect killer. A perfect warrior. Yet, when the remolding was done, and all limbs were resewn, all tendons glued, all muscles corded, he was weaponless and armorless—cascaded in mind, body, and soul from his past to his future across the levels of a vast and terrible tower that was older than the oldest mind to be born on his world.

He stood clad only in the cloths he would wear beneath the plate armor, his fists his only armaments. His beard was wet with blood, and his hair glistened with sweat and oils from the ground. He blinked, and he saw the interior of his eyes glowing with the script he knew from memory yet to be formed in a tale that would be forever undone from what had been fated.

It was a command and an oath.

"Kill them all."

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Year Null. Rotting Wastes - Unknown

GÍLA SENGHU

The flash had erupted without warning. The sky had turned black and starless without warning. The blood rain began to fall without warning. The screams of Jira ne'Jiral's contingent force echoed without warning, shrilling together so rapidly that it became nothing more than a continuous ringing in the ears. Then, it was all gone. Gíla Senghu stood alone in a great wasteland of soot and smog. Terrible worm-like things with the skinless heads of horses and the limbs of canines and humans shambled and slithered through the wasteland. Gíla's stomach churned at the sight, and vomit filled her throat when the putrid stench of the landscape she stood in finally hit her.

Decay.

"Jira!" she cried out. "Prokos!"

Gíla took steps toward what felt like the north. A tremendous howling wind chilled her as she did so. Her feet squished with the movement. She looked down at the soot beneath her feet. It was rotting. The ground beneath her feet was rotting. The vomit in her throat erupted from her mouth and nose, and she fell to her knees. One of the worm-like things rushed over to her, sniffing at her with its fleshless nose. It consumed her sick from the rotting ground before vanishing into the distance again.

"You were drugged," Gíla told herself as she stood upright. "You were drugged, or you are suffering an ocular migraine, and this is all imagined in your eyes. You are blind, and your brain is just forming images from stories you have read. That is what this is."

She continued forward and marched alone for hours. If hours indeed passed, she could not tell. The sun in the smog-laden sky never moved. She saw limbed snakes protrude from the rotting sand and coil around the worm-like things. They were devoured whole, screaming in human voices. Gíla told herself it was an imaginary vision. Something conjured up by a shattered mind and a barely remembered or wrongfully remembered story. She moved on and on.

Gíla soon came upon the corpses of some men and women from Jira's contingent. They had killed each other; swords stabbed through their hearts and throats. "What happened?" she asked one of the corpses.

"We saw him," one of the corpses responded.

Gíla fell to her backside at the sound and sight, screaming and shuddering. Only when her ears stopped ringing and when her heart stopped thumping did she realize that it wasn't a corpse at all. Barely living but alive, the man Sodon Sana lay in the muck of death. Gíla crawled to him and checked his wounds. He was armorless. A dagger to the chest rather than a sword, close to his heart but cutting nothing vital, at least not openly. With immediate care, he could live. But what care could be provided here?

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"What happened?" she asked him again, rummaging through the corpses' packs and pouches for anything that could help.

"We saw him," Sodon Sana said once more. "We saw him."

"What?" she asked, finding what appeared to be emergency supplies in the form of gauze, needles, thread, mending powder, and a vial of alcohol. "Who are you talking about?"

Sodon swallowed hard as Gíla thought about removing the blade, shook her head, and instead applied the powder and slowly began wrapping the gauze around him, lifting him from the ground to complete the process. "We were walking through this place for weeks...found villages. Found people. Dedications to dead gods. Forgotten pantheons. So many eons. So many epochs. Burned people walking around like they were alive. They were lamenting to us. We tried to help them. Dardan was the first to die. They swallowed him in pieces. We ran and found an obelisk. An obelisk that-that told us to go to Tahrir. To the oldest piece of Khirn. The first piece of Khirn. We followed its instructions, but we ran into a shadow. Him. The Most Noble. It must have been. He was ten stories tall and perfect in every way, and he smote Phonoes and Hekos. Turned them into burned people. They killed Aknon. We killed them and ran when the shadow came for us next. He turned Xan and Thios into...the ground. Turned them into the ground. We found ourselves here after. Evedon and Ado turned on the rest of us. Just snapped. We were judged by the Most Noble to be sinful...and he damned us."

Gíla stared at the man as she finished applying the gauze. Her eyes were wide, and her expression was one of the purest shock. "Okay," she said after minutes of silence. "Okay. Then, let us get up and find Jira. We're going to get out of here, alright?"

"Alright," he murmured.

Effortlessly, Gíla cradled Sodon in her arms and marched into the smog.

"Are we going to die, Gíla?" Sodon asked. "I'm not ready to die, to be honest."

"We're not going to die," she said with a forced smile. "We're going to figure out what's going on, and we're going to get out of here. Okay?"

"Okay...I trust you."

"Good. Did you see Jira at all on your journey? Or Prokos? Or even Svend?"

"No."

"I did," a voice rumbled from the shrouding smog around them. "They're a bit up the ways in the tower. You can't miss it."

Gíla spun around in search of the voice. "Who's there?" she called out. "Show yourself!"

The voice chuckled. "Ah, why would I do that? Have you seen yourself, big lady? You're a bear. Standing on two feet. You're a scary one, to be sure."

"Of all things in this wasteland, I highly doubt I am the scary one here."

"Oho, you're right about that. Definitely right. This place sure does have a lot of scary stuff. Sooner than later, that big ol' winged monster is gonna find you out here. It likes to munch on outsiders like yourself. The fish likes to make sure the only ones who live are the ones inside the tower. Gives him a nice audience in the waning days of worship." His voice had a distinct drawl, not unlike that of the Iron Halflings in Aqella.

"Can you guide us? Since you're already being so forthcoming with this information?"

The voice was silent for a moment before responding. "Why should I? What do I get out of this?"

Gíla began to panic and shift her stance. Sodon was starting to weigh on her. "I have nothing at the moment to offer you aside from what I am wearing. Help us escape, and I can promise you great things. Knowledge."

The voice laughed. "Knowledge. Knowledge. You're the first one in a long while to offer that, big lady. Everyone always goes to the coin or the items or the threats. I'm good with knowledge. I could learn a thing or two. Hell's ringing bells, I need to learn a thing or two. Yeah."

"I will teach you whatever you wish to know, sir. Please...help us."

Slowly, a figure began to take shape in what Gíla assumed was the north. A man wearing a pristine white and black coat with armored shoulders and a cowl, a white ruffled shirt, and black boots. His hair was long and snow-white, as was his beard, which was braided. His upper lip was bare of a mustache. His skin was beyond pale, almost translucent, and was taut over his bones. He was as human as he needed to be until the inhumanity of him set in and froze those looking at him. Gíla was frozen. "Right then. Follow ol' Silof. I'll get you where you need to be."

Gíla chased after him. He was fast, his walking speed swifter than her running speed. Each step brought them seemingly closer to nothing. No tower came into view. Sodon grew heavier in her arms. As time passed, the ground grew more rotted, and Gíla felt her feet sinking into it. The smell was unbearable. "How much longer?" she called out to this Silof. A howl from something in the air blasted the smog clear. Gíla looked up at the sky and saw a great winged thing in the furthest distance. It was rushing toward them, draconic and terrible.

"Just a bit, big lady. Don't worry about the beast there. He won't reach us."

"I hope not. I would like to live."

Silof turned his direction, causing Gíla to skid to a stop and scramble to follow him. "Live to write this down, eh? Tell it to some people later on?"

"If possible, yes."

Silof hooted and pointed to the nearing winged thing. "Piss off! Despise that thing. Could use someone to tell the masses about my story."

Gíla hoisted her arms up, cradling Sodon as best she could without risking pressing the dagger deeper into his chest or, worse, dislodging it. "Your story?"

He spun around and ran backward at the same pace. His face was alight with adrenaline, and his eyes burned red like rubies. "Of course. My story. I got a good story, and even if I didn't, might as well tell it! Have you seen the state of this place? It used to be so much better—a lot better. Lots of beautiful women. Lots of beautiful men. Oh! The things they could do for you. The things you could do for them. This was paradise until...well, that's for later."

"What are you talking about!?" Gíla roared, overwhelmed by the insanity.

"Lots of things you'll learn about, big lady."

Gíla blinked at the tension in her neck and turned her face away to set her gaze on the appearance of a looming tower of brass. It was infinite in height and almost as wide as the walls of Amphe. "This is the tower?" she asked against another howl of the winged thing.

Silof clapped his hands and jumped to sit on the wall next to the doors like a spider. "Yup! Right in there. Look for Svend first. He'll help you out. Got to know him over the few months he was here."

"Months?" Gíla nearly screamed. "I've only been here for hours."

Silof snorted. "Oh, yeah. Time works not the same here. It's every year concurrently, all the time, never the same time. It hurts the brain. Get inside, find Svend, and get that man of yours healed up, yeah?"

Gíla, sweating for the first time in her species' history, ran inside the tower as the winged thing was mere paces away. The doors closed as Silof lunged from the wall and sent his fist into its face.

Sodon was murmuring weakly in her arms. "The...Dev..."

Through a dim passage of metal and gears, much like those of an Orc city, Gíla carried Sodon in search of Svend. She passed many a grotesque display of machinery, organic remnants, and ancient lore she could spare no time to study. Scripture of alien languages, murals of dead history, and paintings dedicated to ancient pantheons decorated every tunnel, hallway, and staircase she took and climbed. No amount of walking, however, brought her or Sodon closer to finding Svend. Before long, she stopped at a landing after climbing the hundredth staircase and called out for the man. No reply came to her. Behind her was a window that peered out into the wasteland. The winged thing was nowhere to be seen, but hundreds of the limbed snakes and worm-like things wandered unthinkingly and devoured each other.

"I'm going to die here," Sodon grunted. "I'm going to die in this hellish place."

"If you die, so am I," Gíla said with grim mirth. "Might as well, right?"

"You'll live once I'm not holding you back," Sodon said. "Your armor is very cold."

"I'm sorry. I don't have time to remove it. And don't say that. We'll figure this out. We just...we just need to figure this out."

Sodon's wheezing increased. "Prokos...Prokos said to me once what you told him. About the other gods that used to live in the world. Other pantheons. He was scared that ours is just a survivor. A holdover. What if he's right?"

Gíla laughed mirthlessly. "If he is, then we have bigger issues than a rebellion, don't we? Much bigger."

"I suppose so," he giggled. He was pale and ice-cold through her gauntlets. A thin yellow liquid was running down the corners of his mouth. "I can't think of an issue bigger than our god being nothing more than someone else's god. I mean...that's likely what he is, given what I saw. Survived beyond his betters. Would explain some things, no? I always believed in Him. Papa raised me like a good Aslofidorian. Mama too. We went to church and said the praises. But I always wondered why He was—"

Sodon died in Gíla's arms without warning.

"Sodon?" Gíla softly shook her arms. The man didn't respond.

Gíla let the tears run free. Why? She asked herself this many times as she climbed more stairs and walked through more halls carrying his body. Why did he have to die? Why did any of them have to die? Was it fair? Was this part of a plan? She repeatedly asked these questions until her legs finally gave out. She fell onto her face, dropping Sodon's body onto the ground.

"Why?" she asked audibly. Her armor creaked with movement.

The floor was slick and covered in oil. Footsteps slapping in that oil alerted her, but the weakness in her body and the heaviness of her armor kept her from reacting.

"Gíla?" she heard a distinctly accentless voice ask. "Is that you?"

Gíla craned her head as much as she could. Svend stood over her, his armor and features impeccable. He appeared in better health than he had back at the River Nyxos. "Oh..."

Svend knelt and placed his hand on Gíla's head. "You were outside the tower. I can see the flecks of ash in your fur. Did you meet Silof?"

"I did. He told me to find you. Said you could save Sodon."

Svend turned to face the dead man and sighed. "I can. But it won't be pretty."

"Is anything here?"

"No. Take your time getting up. It's only going to get worse."