Year 221. Drõm - Tahrir
THEOVANIS ALDEN RASIDAIOS
“Remind me again why I agreed to this stupid mission?” Goscelin asked over the crackles of the campfire.
Alden looked up from his journal, half filled with legible writing and half with chicken scratch. His shoulders slumped as he realized another rant from his friend was due to erupt. His gaze trailed back to the parchment as he dipped his quill in the ink well set cautiously on the edge of his bed roll. The light of the fire in what had practically been built up as a makeshift fort rather than a temporary camp made it easier to scribble down his thoughts without straining his eyes.
“I don’t want to engage in this, Gos,” he muttered as he wrote down the details of the previous day of travel, which had seen Reses and Rodas Peral maim a crew of bandits. Debate among the guild ran rampant as to how Tahrir, of all places, could house such criminals, though a quick search of their settlement a half-mile or so away from their death site showed that they had come in off the western coast, seeking to use the rebellion and peaceful nature of the realm to their advantage.
“I mean, why?” Goscelin grumbled. “We have been traveling for months and have yet to find our goal. If the people we’re looking to save are still alive, there is zero chance that they haven’t continued with their own mission. This seems foolhardy. A waste of resources and energy. I don’t understand why the Hell we’re here.”
“You have been asking that question since we left the Bastion,” Alden noted with a sigh. “The answer will never change. We can’t deny the request of His Holy Bishop. To do so would be to invite the chance of a censure, which half of this guild has already suffered.”
“The Lords of the Bastion almost denied him. Had us down there in the depths for an inordinate amount of time to argue with the bears, and for what? A stupid room, from all I could tell. Another waste of time and resources.”
“What do you think we should be doing?” Alden asked, knowing the man would finish his rant sooner if he simply engaged with him. He set his journal aside to let the ink dry.
Goscelin crossed his arms and stared at the fire. “We’ve already killed the Runemaster, arguably the threat of this whole war. Without him, the Druyan front is going to be shattered and fragmented. We all know that the man had more flocking to him rather than his mother. With him gone, we should be striking at them.”
“With what numbers? We have enough to hold the Dioúksis’s lands but not enough to invade the Vasileús’s. Belanore is still holding their own battles at the Druyan borders, the Vasileú is hungrier than ever to land a decisive blow, and we both know what is really at stake here.”
“Exactly my point. If not with an army, we should send in a special team. Assassins. The Curators, perhaps.”
“Won’t work, and you know if. The Vasileús will have even more protection around him with the Runemaster dead. And with—” he dropped his voice low. “With what Gíla and the others discovered, getting anywhere near him will be impossible.”
Goscelin threw his arms into the air. “Ah yes, what Gíla and the others discovered. You mean traveling to a supposed other plane of existence, encountering a strange man in a coat who told them that everything was pre-ordained by some mystical bullshit our leaders have concocted in allegiance to God, who isn’t actually God, all in the effort of becoming supreme beings and resurrecting all other Gods to...what? Serve them? Was that bit ever explained to them?”
Alden breathed through his nose in a silent laugh. “The ritual they seek to cast will create a symbiotic connection.”
Goscelin clapped his hands. “Ah, of course, how silly of me to forget that. I suppose it doesn’t matter regardless since that will apparently sunder reality. Why the fuck should I believe any of that? Why should we? I respect Gíla, Orlantha, and Jira—I do—but this is nonsense. Fantastical nonsense with no evidence to tell us that we should not believe that it wasn’t a joint manic episode.”
“How do you explain the flashes of light and episodes of barbarism, Gos?” Alden leaned forward and rested his arms on his crossed legs, using his right hand in minute motions for emphasis and flair. “How do you explain any of the unexplained events that have occurred during this time? The Star Bastion even existing? Our world’s size and ability to live in it. The insanity of this war? The Belanorians suddenly being okay with mystharin and not going to vicious blows over it? The Rune-The Runemaster alone. You ask me, what they saw makes a lot more sense than half the shit we’ve been through and makes that shit make a lot more sense when applied as context. We live in an impossible world filled with history beyond our books. You’ve heard enough from Gíla to know that. And I feel like it’s only a matter of time before this impossible world becomes...inconceivable.”
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Tahrir was a land of desert. Endless, discordant desert sprinkled with oases, forts, buried villages, tread cities, moisture farms, and - most importantly - forgotten or frequented holy sites. It was a land perhaps even more religious in their faith in God than Belanore. It was joyous to the company, then, when they came upon one such forgotten site, an obelisk inscribed with old scripture that His Holy Bishop, Crius Alexander Totallis, took great pains to study during the next few nights that they stayed there.
“From what I can make out of the script, it was made at least three hundred years ago,” Crius mused. “I wonder if it is... never mind. Perhaps it is a ward to keep travelers from harm.”
“Or perhaps offer them shelter from the blistering sun,” said one of the guildmen as he quickly doffed his armor. “God, how can the Tahririans deal with such heat?”
“They are built for it, like the Druyans,” another answered. “Just as we are built for more temperate climes. I will say, I miss those temperate climes.”
“I wonder what Veoris is like,” asked another.
“I hear it is cold and empty aside for some forests and grasslands here and there,” answered the first, now down to a simple shirt and pants. “What I would not give for such a climate now.”
Alden watched Crius ignore the conversation between his escort, his old hands running over each inscription. Jira had earlier taken up some effort to study the scripture with him but was more preoccupied with further reading the books she had taken along for the journey—namely, the ones she had been gifted by Gíla prior to their departure. Alden had also attempted to read some of these books, though he found a strange sensation that came from a particular one. Like it did not want to be read, each page brought a new feeling of nausea, neck pains, eye strain, and—at one point—a trickle of blood from his nose. The silver woman was careful not to let anyone else attempt to read it after that occurrence. According to her, she was capable of reading far more than he could before having to put it away.
“Perhaps a blessing from your re-forging in the Tower,” Alden suggested once over dinner as Crius continued to study the obelisk’s immense surface.
“Could be. In either case, I would now have considered asking Gíla to hand this text into more appropriate hands, perhaps a scholar set to go across the Jade into Aqella. I doubt she knew what this book did to normal folk.”
“The woman beat the Runemaster nearly to death with her bare hands. I doubt she could feel it if she knew.”
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For three days, the company elected to enjoy a reprieve from the scorching heat of Tahrir. They stayed at that obelisk for three days, basking in the shade it provided from the sun. On the third day, a caravan seeking momentary rest from their own journey appeared. Surprised though they were at the presence of Alsofidorians in their land, they concluded that asking questions was not good for their health this far from their cities.
Ten silver bought the company a goat to eat for their rest, and ten more silver replenished their water supplies. Eight gold from Jira procured journals, spare maps, and a personal canteen of Tahririan wine that tasted distinctly of strawberries, while five silver and two copper fashioned her a better cowl to hide her face from the sunlight. That night, the company rested, ate, and drank with the caravan at a short distance, and they felt a sense of safety in the shadow of the holy site, which seemed to invigorate and bring out the best in each of them.
On the fourth day, a mere hour after the caravan departed, Hell came for them.
The ground shook when Nara-ward asked: “Do you feel that? What is that?”
The ground shifted when Misandros Tateas said: “Something is moving under the sand.”
The ground was bursting when Loukas Tamasos said: “Take positions!”
The ground was gone when he finished.
What came from the sand was not a particularly tall thing, but it was monstrously large enough to defy the reason the company had grown up with over the years. Arachnid and black, its bulbous mass of eyes swollen with orange pus, its crooked lobster-like body ending with serrated claws and a stinger held high in the air. From the sands, it had erupted like a volcano, claiming one of the guildmen in a gory deluge of limbs and sinew. Euryk, Alden knew him as. Reduced to a stain under the sun. It screeched horrendously after the blood and cloud of sand settled.
Alden breathed hard as he immediately reasoned that this thing must have been one of the horrifically mutated things that screamed internally to God for salvation from its torment. A scorpion, so cursed to become this horror, defending what likely was its hunting ground.
“What the fuck is that thing!?” a guildman cried out.
“It got Euryk!”
“Crius was right!”
"Demons infest Tahrir!"
"Monsters of mystharin !"
“A demon!” the young man Nara-ward blubbered through snot and tears. “A demon! It blasphemes this holy place!”
“A mutant. An aberration!”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“None different from the fucking Druyans!” Loukas Tamasos boomed.
“Demon or not, we kill it!” Misandros Tateas proclaimed. “Send it back to Hell!”
Alden saw nothing but blurs as he pushed one of the guildmen out of the path of the creature’s stinger, grunting as the shockwave of the impact toppled his balance. He rolled just as it pierced down again, swinging his sword in a curving arc to bat it away from his body. The edge of the Goscelin-reinforced steel connected with a crack, orange slime spilling from between the splinters of its cracked shell. Jira scrambled to pick him up as a member of the Harbingers rushed past her with a battle cry and a flourish of his mace. The thing turned on his crooked legs and skewered him with its stinger, chunks of spine spilling from his back as he was lifted and then thrown onto the ground with a dulled thud. Several of the horses were taken as well. Crushed into the desert, devoured in the maw of teeth, or dismembered in tornadoes of viscera.
“Aim for its eyes!” she shouted to the company, motioning with her hand to the cluster of pus-oozing orbs in the center of his face. The scorpion-thing’s maw opened into a fanged bellow of noise as if angry that she had pointed out its most obvious weak spot.
Diadrom Malid lunged at it from the side, jabbing with his pontoon and skewering a single orb. Pus spurt from the wound as the thing back-clawed the Harbinger into the obelisk, his armor clattering from the impact. Another of the guild did the same - this one caught midair by the thing and shoved into its mouth. Screams gurgled into silence as the knight was chewed into a metallic pulp.
“Kill the devil!” Misandros Tateas screeched, leaping with side slashes and hacks at the scorpion-thing’s carapace with his mighty sword. Pieces of shell cracked free onto the sand, allowing Loukas to draw blood from its growing number of wounds as it focused on stopping Misandros.
More struck out at it, another one of the guild being severed in three by gnashing pincers and another being crushed into the ground by its flopping weight. Jira ducked a sideways swing of its left arm and smacked down at its cluster of eyes. One popped like a grape from the blow. Loukas jumped on top of it and stabbed into the bunch with his sword. Alden jumped as well, angling his leap to pull the Bulldog off the back of the scorpion-thing as its stinger ruptured where Loukas had been standing.
“Thank you,” he said breathlessly without a hint of a begrudging tone.
Alden offered a curt nod and rose, swinging her sword for legs, back, side, tail, and face. Anything that he could hit, he hit, thundering through its carapace with panicked fury. Diadrom Malid advanced again, shaking off the pain of colliding with the obelisk, jabbing his speartip into the open maw of the beast. The creature snapped the weapon like a twig and reared its pincer to cut for the knight.
Praxis the Brambleheart and Beles the Hamfist appeared from nowhere to pull the knight away into safety as the pincer severed air. It screeched in frustration and turned to Jira and Misandros. A backhanded claw sent Misandros flying back, and suddenly, the thing thrust its body forward into Jira’s. Jira dropped her sword from the impact of the hit and shot both her hands out as the scorpion-thing crawled for her, intent on devouring its first taste of God-forged mortal. Her hands gripped gnarled fangs as the beast reached her, pushing against it with force only adrenaline could grant. Screeches poured from the thing as much as its ichor did. The angle Jira stood was impossible for the thing to counter, unable to reach her with its pincers and lift her against the strength she pressed down against it.
Alden’s heart raced as the woman so openly showcased traits that should have been impossible for a mere human.
He wondered if anyone cared at the time.
“Kill it!” she commanded. “Kill the damned thing!”
It swung its body to the right with enough momentum to result in Jira pulling the thing’s fangs out of its mouth. Jira stumbled into Misandros, prompting him to shove her onto the sand as the thing approached, bleeding from two holes where fangs had been. Drooling slime and roaring in pain, it lunged.
And wrapped its left pincer around Misandros Tateas’s torso.
Time stood still at that moment, the percussions of fate booming in the background within the orchestra of the universe. Alden found his bearings and sprinted as fast as he could in this non-time, his body straining as speed was practically non-existent. He screamed in slow motion, rearing his sword to slice down into the cluster of pus-filled eyes, hoping such an action would get it to drop the man from its grasp.
“Kill it! Kill it now!” Misandros screamed, defiant and distorted, as the thing’s serrated pincer began to close, blood belching from his sides as time remained in mud-slowness.
He was an anomaly, his body moving faster than time was flowing, swinging, roaring a challenge at the thing’s face, slicing through the left of its eyes and stabbing into the messy remains. Elsewhere, Loukas Tamasos lunged through the air like a man possessed by divine might, leaping so high as to have produced invisible wings, descending similarly with his sword poised to pierce the thing's skull. Sodon the Unbreakable and Prokos Sidras, in an incredible performance of bravery for men who had suffered death, had lifted their swords and rushed forward opposite Alden, mouths bursting with slowed war prayers.
It closed its pincer, and Misandros Tateas, mouth agape in the apprehension of his sudden mortality, split in half at the waist as three attacks hit the beast. Blood, sinew, intestines, and ichor flowed freely on the sand.
“Misandros!” Loukas wept as time resumed.
“Tumathios Tateas!” the remaining guild echoed, rushing to the man’s bisected corpse.
Alden could not move as he stared at the ruin of monster and man, his thoughts running as quickly as the tears on the faces of those kneeling over Misandros Tateas’s broken corpse. Three days had been spent here in peace, granting the company a chance to converse, to be calm in a place—
The sky darkened with wings and the descending roar of a beast too unnatural to associate with any known creature. Alden turned his gaze up in time to see the smiling, gnarled humanoid face of a monster. A true monster.
He sliced his sword at it, cutting its trajectory just enough to curve it into the sand beside him. The impact was enough to blow him off his feet. Blades that had remained undrawn in the panic of the scorpion-thing were brought to bear. Bravery was steeled in the face of this new unknown.
“Ah, a Manticore,” Alden heard Crius mutter in amusement. “We must be close.”
The Manticore charged without hesitation for the guild, batting aside a dozen in seconds and devouring the heads, arms, and legs of a dozen more. Jira was upon the beast just as quickly, stabbing her sword into its hide with ease to no visible effect. The Manticore took flight, throwing Jira off its back as it hid in the sun's light.
“Crius! You were right!” Nara-ward screamed over the din of orders and shouts. “Manticores in Khirn!"
“I am always right, my dear boy!”
Alden rose to his feet as the beast landed again, perched atop the obelisk.
“Archers! Aim! Draw! Loose!” Loukas commanded. A flurry of arrows was loosed upon the monster, nearly half of them hitting some part of it. A low chortle rumbled from its horrific face, drawing feverish yelps from the guild.
“What is this? Your Excellency, what have you brought us to?”
“A problem that will continue to worsen if we don’t stop it here and now,” Crius explained as he took nonchalant steps away from the obelisk, Nara-ward in tow. Alden could not shake the comparison of an old wizard with his apprentice from his mind as the elderly Bishop curled his hands under his robe’s sleeves. “As I explained to you all. Nothing happening now was not told to you, the Dioúksis, or the Lords of the Bastion.”
The beast descended from the obelisk like a spider, sprinting on all fours across the sand toward the archers, who let loose another flurry of arrows. Loukas led the infantry to strike it from behind as the Manticore quickly began devouring its newest victims. Alden rushed after them, locking eyes with Beles the Hamfist and Ravenous Markos Perulis. He nodded to them and created a trident formation with the Hamfist in the center and Markos on the left. The Manticore spun around, swinging its barbed tail to knock the guildmen onto their back. The Hamfist swung his cestus’ at the beast’s face just as it took notice of the trident, cracking teeth and bone. Markos stabbed his sword into the Manticore’s neck. Alden swung down on the crown of its head.
The Manticore laughed amidst the current of blood pouring from its head and neck. “Nyukʼ chʼush, tʼu ye tej gib’ khi tʼu ye!” the Manticore uttered in a voice that could only be described as wet cobblestone.
“It speaks!” the Hamfist bellowed before the Manticore shot its head up high enough to take one of his arms into its open mouth. It clamped down and severed flesh. The Hamfist stood motionless in shock, his shock turning into fear as the beast took his leg next. Markos screamed and sliced the blade up the neck of the monster. Alden swung his sword down twice more on its crown.
“Tʼu tatsesi j’ape khu,” the Manticore laughed before taking flight, utterly unaffected by the wounds it had endured, taking their swords with it.
It landed seconds later near Loukas Tamasos. With burning hatred in his eyes, the Bulldog uttered the old words of Aslofidor and sent bolt after bolt of radiant fire upon the beast from his hands.
The Manticore screamed and stumbled. "Yʼu wa kʼujbi mamamheuli yii ya?"
In its harried state, the Manticore remained unaware of Jira rushing it again. She lept over its back, grabbing the hilt of her sword still stuck in its shoulder, and retrieved it with a simple tug. She sliced through its face with a dextrous dodge of its claws, ducked under the wild swipe of its tail to remove the very same ligament, and stabbed through its side so deeply that she must have pierced its heart. It fell to the ground with a mewling pain before kicking its legs and dying with a heave of breath. Jira exploded with a roar at the dead body and hacked at it until Prokos Sidras urged her to stop.
On the fourth night, the guild mourned their dead and worked to save their injured.
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Year 8540. Salol - Veirn
GÍLA SENGHU
“Now, of course, Crius couldn’t just allow Misandros to die like that,” Alden stated. He took a large gulp from his wooden mug of something known as root beer, a recent invention in the culinary world, and sighed in satisfaction at the strong roasted vanilla taste. “Or the Hamfist.”
“What did he do?” Thilas asked as he marked down notes for a recipe to reinvent the drink.
“He resurrected Misandros and regrew the Hamfist’s limbs,” Alden said with a crook of his brows.
Kuragis and Conalath frowned. “Just like that?” they asked in tandem.
Alden nodded. “Just like that. Some in the guild were taken aback by such a blatant display of mystharinic power, which none of us were expecting from the old man. It was mostly those who came from Jira’s Contemptors, but they kept their more visceral opinions quiet. The Harbingers wept and knew then that Crius truly was His Holy Bishop. Or so we proclaimed. I didn’t. Neither did Gos. We kept quiet with Jira, who looked frightened. Misandros rose, as did the Hamfist, and another two days were spent at that bloody obelisk for Crius to read it. He was satisfied in the end, and we moved on, walking for days on end. Weeks. Eventually, more months. The travel was filled with hymns, and I could see Jira growing more and more concerned.”
Alden looked to the barmaid and asked for a refill of his drink. She brought over a pitcher and poured it into his mug until the foam was nearly spilling over the edge.
“Did anything come of that concern?” Dracraes asked.
“So many things. None more impactful than the beginning of all that we endure now.”
“Eh?” Or’Demp grunted. “What?”
“Well, as Gíla said, Tahrir was where we saw the end of the rebellion. The end of that war. She was right, in a sense, because it was there that the rebellion became meaningless. It was where we lost the first battle of this whole fucking thing, and suddenly the borders of nations became so miniscule.”
“It was also where Silof turned out to be a fool,” Gíla added. “Though, weren’t we all?”
“Weren’t we all? Eventually, we came upon the very groups of people we were looking for, devoured by the Manticores, killed by each other, or simply empty camps with clear signs of desertion. As luck, or as one of my old companions would say, fate would have it, they possessed a number of notes on discoveries during their years in the sands. Crius was most interested in one set that spoke of a great cave system not far from a particularly gruesome sight of slaughter. Jira was also interested in that place. Once we found it, it was clear why.”