Gribble perched atop a massive stone, its surface jagged and blackened by the conflagration that had consumed the dwarf fortress. His clawed feet gripped the charred rock, bits of ash crumbling away. The Dark King surveyed his handiwork, lips skinning back from yellowed fangs in a death's-head grin.
Below him stretched a blasted hellscape of shattered walls and tumbled masonry, still smoldering in places. Thick black smoke stained the sky, blotting out sun and stars alike. The twisted wreckage of siege engines jutted from the rubble like the bones of long-dead leviathans. But where once the corpses of fallen dwarves had littered the ruins, now there was only the restless stirring of Gribble's Dark Legion.
The dwarven dead had risen, their broken bodies reknit by the necromancer's foul sorcery. Shattered bones had been made whole, rent flesh and sinew woven back together by tendrils of sorcerous shadow. Now they stood in silent ranks, skeletal warriors clad in rusted scraps of their own armor, bony hands gripping notched axes and shattered swords. The eye sockets of their skulls glowed with a spectral light, an eldritch radiance that matched the burning pits of Gribble's own gaze.
The Dark King breathed deep, nostrils flaring. The stench of death and dark sorcery hung heavy on the air, a cloying miasma that would have choked a mortal man. To Gribble it was more intoxicating than the finest incense. He savored it, tongue flicking out to taste the foul, sweet reek of undeath and dark magic.
This. This was the moment he lived for. When all the planning, all the rituals and sacrifices, bore their terrible fruit. When mighty bastions fell and whole peoples were subsumed into his deathless horde, their own fallen warriors turned against them. When all would know the true power of the necromancer-king, the devourer of souls, the shadow that gnawed at the heart of the world.
Gribble's gaze raked the assembled host of the dead, taking in their ranks and ragged phalanxes. Each skeletal soldier represented a victory, a life snuffed out and bent to his infernal purpose. The dwarves had resisted to the last, fighting with the grim determination of their kind. But even their stout axes and implacable wills had not been enough to stem the inexorable tide of the restless dead.
Now the children of the mountain marched beneath Gribble's dread banner, their stubborn valor suborned to his will. They would fight for him now, these fallen foes. Fight and die again, as many times as was needful, until all life was extinguished and only a dead world remained for the Dark King to rule over. Such was the power of his necromancy, to shackle even the dauntless spirits of the dwarves to his service.
A faint rattling drew Gribble's eye to the outskirts of the assembled horde. Through sheer force of will, a single dwarf skeleton was dragging itself up from the shattered earth. Clods of grave soil clung to its yellowing bones, falling away as it reached its feet with a final, jerky heave. A notched axe hung from one bony hand, edges gleaming dully in the guttering light of the burning keep.
The skeleton turned its fleshless skull to face Gribble, eye sockets flaring with the same eldritch light that suffused its breathren. For a moment it simply stared at the Dark King, as if some last vestige of dwarven stubbornness sought to resist the binding of its will. Then, with a rattling sigh like the wind whispering through a charnel house, it bent its spine in supplication, axe saluting its new master.
Gribble allowed himself a moment of dark amusement at the sight. Even in death, it seemed, the dwarves fought against their fate. But it was a futile struggle. All bowed to the Lord of Bones in the end. All became cogs in his great necromantic engine, the dread machine that would one day grind all life to ruin and dust.
The Dark King's thoughts turned to the next link in his plan's unfolding, to the reason he had brought his horde to this once-lofty keep amid the cold stone of the mountains. The Whispering Woods, that primeval tangle of sorcery and shadows that lay between him and his next conquest. Long had he brooded on how best to navigate that treacherous sea of leaves and boughs. No common sorcery would suffice to fend off its grasping roots and venomous spores, the subtle madness carried on its evanescing fog. Gribble would need to turn its own dark power against it, fight primordial shadow with deeper shades still.
And for that, he would need more than mere foot soldiers, more than the rank and file of his skeletal legion. He needed monsters, dark champions to batter down the palisades of dripping vines and thorn-strangled trees. Beasts of brawn and fang to rip and rend, to blaze the twisting trail for his deathless ranks to follow.
He had one such creature already, a nightmare made flesh to serve as the spearpoint of his advance. The Grey Fur Beast, that nemesis beast whelped from a shadow-veined egg coughed up by the blasted peaks beyond the dwarf-hold. Even now Gribble could feel its presence, a hulking silhouette crouched at the base of his stony aerie.
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The Dark King prodded the beast's mind with a psychic barb and it surged to its feet, muscles bunching and sliding beneath its shaggy pelt. Ember-red eyes flared in sunken sockets as the Grey Fur Beast swung its massive head to transfix its master with a sullen, smoldering gaze. Spittle dripped from its hooked beak, viscous strands of ichor webbing its needle-studded maw.
Suppressing a shudder that was equal parts revulsion and ecstasy, Gribble pressed his will upon the creature, bending it to his whim. The Grey Fur Beast fought him, feral instincts clashing with the necromancer's inexorable dominion. But it could not gainsay the black shackles of sorcery that bound it. With a shuddering growl, the beast lowered its eyes, acknowledging Gribble's supremacy once more.
Gribble caressed its mind with tendrils of thought, sibilant whispers slithering through the thing's benighted brain. "You will serve," the necromancer crooned without words or voice, his psychic touch an obscene invasion. "You will rend and despoil at my command, a hound at the hunt. And when the time comes, monster mine, you will blaze me a path through the whispering dark..."
The Grey Fur Beast twitched, a full body spasm rippling through its elephantine bulk. Whether in acquiescence or loathing, Gribble neither knew nor cared. The beast's fealty was assured, as inviolable as the sorcerous chains he had first lashed around its soul when it clawed its way out of the shadowstuff womb that bore it. It would serve unto death and beyond, just as his other minions did.
Gribble turned his mind from his nemesis beast to the grim work that lay ahead. The dwarves and their shattered fortress were only the beginning, a first foray into the lands he meant to make his own. The Whispering Woods and the beastmen who skulked beneath those ebon boughs awaited, ripe for the reaping.
Gribble would bring his Dark Legion down upon them like a scourge of old night, a tsunami of dessicated bone and necromantic fury. The beastmen would fall as the dwarves had fallen, their furry hides flayed from still-living bones, their spirits shackled to his ever-growing armies of the dead. And the Whispering Woods, that ancient haven of shadow and sorcery, would become an extension of his own dark will, its every twisted limb and gloaming glade suborned to his foul purposes.
Yes, the Whispering Woods would serve him well. A staging ground for future atrocities, a dank womb disgorging fresh horrors upon this benighted world. Under Gribble's malign influence it would become a haunt of walking nightmares, a place where the monstrous ran rampant and the dead knew no rest. The sighing of wind through sable leaves would be replaced by the clatter of skeletal feet, the groaning of stressed boughs would mingle with the agonized wails of tortured spirits.
And it would only be the beginning. With the Woods and the beastmen broken to his will, Gribble would turn his gaze to other lands, other realms ripe for conquering. The kingdoms of men, perhaps, with their gleaming cities and vaunted champions. The haughty enclaves of the elves, hidden behind wards of crystal and starlight. Even the bleak halls of the mountain dwellers, hewn into the bones of the world itself. All would fall beneath his grim tread, all would feed his burgeoning legions of the restless dead.
In the end, Gribble would be the last sovereign of a murdered world, the Dark King astride a blighted throne. And all the works and glories of the living would be naught but fading memory, their vaunted bastions and valiant heroes reduced to shuffling bones enlisted beneath his patchwork banners of flayed flesh and tattered skin.
The vision was a succor to him, a draught of gall and grave-niter to slake the thirst of his undead spirit. It thrummed in his desiccated veins like a drumbeat of the damned, a necrotic tattoo urging him on to the next charnel field, the next victory in his war of skins.
Gribble cast his gaze over his assembled host once more, taking in the thousands of dead eyes staring back at him in silent obedience. The dwarves had been a fine addition to his ranks, their sturdy frames and stubborn wills now suborned to his necromantic domination. They would serve as the backbone of his forces as he pushed on into the Whispering Woods, the thews and sinews to match the Grey Walker's monstrous fury.
But they were only a start, a single fount of gore and bone in a world yet brimming with warm life to be extinguished. Gribble would not rest, could not rest, until all that lived and breathed bowed down in death to his supremacy. Until his was the only will left animate in a universe of eternal sepulchral silence.
He lifted a withered hand, desiccated flesh stretched taut over bones yellow with grave-mold. As one, his deathless legions snapped to attention, a clattering staccato of arms and armor. The Grey Fur Beast lifted its shaggy head and howled, a savage ululation that set spectral echoes to shivering through the assembled host.
It was the cry of the hunt, the grim clarion of the pale death that rode out to slay the world. Gribble drank it in, savoring the shudder of fear and exultation it set twining through his ancient bones. Then, with a final gesture, he turned and began his descent from the blackened stone spire.
His skeletal minions parted before him like a sea of bone, closing in his wake with the smooth precision of marionettes guided by a single master's hand. The Grey Fur Beast loped at his side, its massive strides easily matching the Dark King's gliding progress.
Together they moved through the smoldering ruin of the dwarf-hold, a nightmare procession wending its way toward the twisted eaves of the Whispering Woods. Behind them, the army of the dead followed in eerie silence, an inexorable tide of horn and steel and yellowing bone.
And at its head strode Gribble, the Horned Necromancer, the Bane of the Living. His eyes burned with the cold fire of the abyss, his heart was a whetstone upon which he had long ago sharpened his will to an ebon edge.
There would be no mercy. No reprieve. Only the harvest of ruin, and the cold rictus grin of the Reaper who wielded the scythe of eternal night.
The world would drown in a tide of bones. And Gribble would be the one to drag it down into the darkest depths, until all was silent and still at last beneath his dead, dead gaze.