They pushed their stout barges hewn from flayed trunks with heavy poles tight in befouled grips. All the while under their breath muttering chants in the hopes that the tenuous ropes of dubiously sourced leather and beast hair will fail them not.

I sat amongst them, clad as much as the rest in that nocturnal, smothering cloak of tenebrous weave and starlight. Crooked teeth bared in a snarl at the waves, begging them silently to cease their piteous slapping against the thin hull, pleading with the sound not to carry.

Deep in that horde of embarked soldiers, the roiling mute mass of retching and shaking nervousness that is an army before battle lay I, Siam’Siak, the architect of this voyage most cruel and yet toothsome to my twisted imaginings. Prancing and contorting a twisted, bulbous and decaying form in ritualistic call to any above or below whose eyes fell on the coming slaughter, beseeching them to have allowed the king to have been as foolish as to place himself on the front.

I knew they would believe the crossing would happen at Bamdleton, that sight of great humiliation and watered with demonic tears and libations of sulfuric lifeblood. Its humble hearths and sturdy bridges of stone where they imagined I would send my jackbooted legions. Once more and again headfirst into the glittering fangs of pike and arrow. Fools to a man, a Loremaster remembers the mistakes of the past, he lusts over their intricacies and most importantly, learns from them.

When the first tainted, legionary boot penetrated the fertile silt banks of Io did the crusade begin in silent earnest. A motley crowd of lurching, mismanaged and matched soldiers lumbering their ponderous, waterlogged way up to the waning campfire lights of the marshal’s camp. Forked tongues darting out to moisten cracked lips in anticipation, the soldiers were rapacious in their lust for some bloodletting, no more would they be denied.

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We crouched just below the crest of the knoll on which they had sprouted their infection of tents and pungent filth. The men waited impatiently for the command. A demon is no good in an organised battle line, a primitive being of instinct, corded muscle and calcified bone is he, ill-suited to the well drilled lines of spear that is a field battle. When unleashed however those instruments of violence and genetic hate are a marvel to behold. Unleash them I did.

With a pained, hoarse and ululating cry, a funerary wail of mourning and death, a pained keen to the heavens and the earth did I command the charge, with that did I let slip the dogs of war.

The time which followed was ugly, short and disjointed. I hobbled throughout the camp spitting fire and globules of sizzling, crackling lightning at the hastily dressed and profusely terrified men, the horror on the faces drawn in long shadows by the waning penumbra of firelight.

To my left and below lay a man, prostrate in his agony, legs trailing behind him in a ruined parade of blood and cracked bone, on his back scalping its still living prey sat an imp, all warts and malting plates of red skin, laughing with cruel mirth at the suffering of Io.

Further toward the centre of the camp I spied a boy, pungent with the smell of smoke and flowers emerging from his tent. He is dressed in an armour of ruffles and aristocratic finery and armed with naught more than a quill and parchment. He turned and beat a cowardly retreat, A hasty and missed bolt of lightning fired at his back did little more than cook hair and melt skin and ear as he fled crying into the night.

All throughout the camp I journeyed with an ever-falling expression. All throughout the night I saw scenes of wanton violence and cruelty, torn throats and shattered limbs, bludgeoned skulls and wild, bloodshot eyes. All throughout the night was my nose tormented by the progressive stink of rapine amusement and despair which oozed its way into the before crisp summer night air. And yet for all that destruction there was no purple, no light glittering kaleidoscopically of the gaudy royal diadem. The king was not there.

I fell to my knees in the centre of the camp. The prisoners will be crucified in the morning, maybe with increased sacrifice will the gods see fit to bring him to me. Maybe. Hopefully.