[Brother Vindici] Orc, Male, Priest Location: A Temple, at the Heart of a City Square
“Rejoice. Brothers, sisters, we live in the age of heavenly sculptors,” preaches the man, holding his arms outward before himself. “We live in the age in which the unblemished canvas of our world is being painted and formally filled with colors the likes of which our eyes can’t begin to see.” The crowd lowers their heads, hanging them in prayer. “Do you notice, my kin, that since our praying has begun, the brush of the gods has laid silent?” he asks, looking out over them as they go through a sermon he has held a few times before over the past weeks. “The gods have heard our reverence and spared us from their reassessment.”
He slams his fists onto the altar next to him, a loud crash ringing through the hall, scaring those newcomers who are not used to the ritual. It makes them easy for him to identify in the large crowd, and he goes out of his way to maintain eye-contact with them in particular as he preaches, so that they feel seen and come back later.
“Pray. Sing. Dance beneath the open sky and lavish the heavens with your praise,” he commands. “Teach your children, teach your elders and the infirm, and have them speak the unknown names of the divine in whatever tongue they please to form,” he says. “Heavens bless us! Hallow!”
“Hallow,” repeat a hundred voices, the call spreading out through their numbers to others who repeat the word over and over a thousand times and then a thousand more, their cries ringing out through the city and drifting upwards towards the never-ending sky.
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[Watchman Arcanul] Human, Female, Archer Location: The Frontier Wild-lands
What the fuck?!
Arcanul stumbles, her vision shaking. The woman catches herself on a tree and keeps running, the dry, yellow ground shaking beneath her boots as she sprints as fast as can, her violently striking heartbeat creating sensations that are inseparable from the shaking in her armor and bones, which pulse into her body from the quaking topsoil.
A stench fills the air, worse than any plague rot or corpse that she’s ever smelled. It’s almost dizzying in its strength, mixing in with the sweltering heat of the daytime. The woman, tears, blood, and snot running down her dirty face, yells indiscernibly as she runs, looking over her shoulder for a moment as she stares back at the growing dust storm on the horizon, filled with endless gnashing teeth, bristles, and tusks.
She breaks out of the forest, looking ahead over the meadows ahead of herself, together with the lone watch tower and the village behind it.
“RUN!” screams Arcanul, moving as fast as she can towards the village. She bashes on the door of the old watch tower. She hammers against it.
Slowly, the door opens, and a yawning man looks out.
“Arcanul?” he asks, rubbing his tired eyes. “Why are you here? You’re down by the river wit- Hey!” he calls after her.
She’s already started running again, heading towards the village.
What the fuck?!
Arcanul stumbles again. She’s been running since back by the river as fast as she could. That was an hour ago.
A time later, the woman falls down, flopping over and rolling onto her back. She tries to get back up. But for some reason, her body isn’t doing what she tells it to. Her legs are shaking, full of blood, and enough strength, despite her animal exhaustion, to keep running longer. If only she could actually get back up to her feet.
But she can’t.
Arcanul crawls backwards, her boots kicking stones away from herself as she watches the dust-cloud tear through the forest that she had come through a moment before.
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— Metal clamours in her ears, ringing oddly out of place, like the striking of a bell, although she can’t quite identify what the source is, or even think about why it would be ringing at a time like this.
This remains the case until the shining armor walks forward past her.
She reaches out, grabbing the woman’s cloak. “Stop. You have to run,” she says, not able to follow her own advice.
The orcish woman, standing there in noble regalia, with a cape that flutters in the wind, turns back to look at her as the tower on the horizon collapses into itself as hundreds of thousands of consuming, pressing, violent bodies simply overpower the structure with their weight.
Her eyes meet with the strangers, finding an oddity in the fact that they aren’t shaking like hers are, or perhaps that’s just her vision doing so. Instead, they look quietly calm, if not a little uncertain, but reasonably so.
Instead, the orc turns back forward, metal clicking as her hand finds the hilt of her sheathed sword, as the two of them look out at the meadow, over which a line of death as expansive as a great tsunami claims the lands, consuming, gorging, and destroying everything that it runs over.
“No,” replies the orc, as her sword moves an inch out of its sheath, the lustrous metal catching the light of the sun's rays that manage to press through the smothering dust cloud ahead of the horde that comes to cover them both. “They do. Close your eyes.”
“Huh?”
“Close your eyes,” repeats the orc.
She pulls out the sword, cutting it through the air.
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[Gottlieb]
“Light them the fuck up, Kai,” says Gottlieb.
“Papa!” complains the ooze, turning her head around to look at him angrily.
Gottlieb blinks and lets go of the gun’s control. “Oh, right. Sorry,” he says. “I get carried away, you know?” He grabs her hand. The ooze is sitting on his lap and kicking her legs excitedly. He holds her grip over the control stick. Pressing his finger down onto hers, he helps her pull the trigger. He promised it was her turn after all.
She looks up at the blue light. “The fuck-up-Kai!”
“That’s my girl,” says Gottlieb proudly as the station begins to hum, the gun singing right into his ears.
[Remark]
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- This entire situation is morally dubious at best. Military psychological staff would have a field day writing the corresponding assessment.
Gottlieb rolls his eyes. “Don’t be a buzzkill, nerd.”
“Nerd!” says Blauhausen, flopping a saggy glove against the camera.
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[Azimuth]
The sword cuts through the shaking air, leaving a trail of clarity behind itself as it slices through the cloud of dust and debris, the ground, and the air, the energy of life itself shaking the metal of the blade with a vibration that runs down its length, channeling through the metal and into the frame of her body, which has become hardened and trained after all of the rigorous guidance she’s undergone at the castle.
And as that single strand of emptiness in the mist comes to a stop, her sword reaching its final arc, she knows already that it is done.
Azimuth closes her eyes, lowering her head.
In a sense, it is a pragmatic move to protect her face from what she knows is to come.
But she can’t help but think that, at the same time, this pragmatism is the tool the gods are forcing over her in order to lower her head to them and their ways.
The air sings, an unidentifiable cry filling the charged air as if a wayward angel were plummeting down to the world with his lance held firmly in grasp, beneath a flying banner of war. Her cape billows violently behind her, together with the strands of her jet-black hair, as a great heat forms, pressing against her armor — proof of the presence of some greater mass, as if it were an incomprehensibly large body, pressed against her own.
She isn’t a pious woman.
She never was.
She just wanted to be a chicken farmer, like her mother before her. She was never an educated woman, like her father had wanted her to become by hoping to send her off to the great cities of the world. In those days, she was happy with who she was and where she was. She resented the idea of anything else and her parents for trying to make her live a life she couldn’t see for herself.
That was until life itself had decided it was time for her to go somewhere else.
— And if she had listened to herself back then, if she had followed her heart’s desires to stay a chicken farmer forever, she would not have this ability to provide for her family in the way she has.
This here is the cruelty of the gods, to which she now bows her head. For she knows that all of the wishes in her old life weren’t real in comparison to the one she has made now. But, back then, like a child lost in something that their parents tell them is just a phase, she was unable to see past it, believing nobody but herself.
Now, with her head bowed and her heart open, she can see what she really wants in life.
Azimuth opens her eyes, lifting her head, and stares into the incredible, endless whiteness that hammers down into the lands before her, deafening her senses entirely, hoping to see God inside the blast.
If but only for a second.
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[Auxilary Gunner Grunheide]
Grunheide whistles as the explosive streak moves down along the surface of the world, cutting through a great chunk of the continent as tens of thousands of boars are killed in one, magnified blast that likely will have consequences for the world in the future to come.
That’s not including the great quakes that are likely currently rocking the world, creating grand tsunamis and disruptions.
The power of a god.
She sits back, staring in awe at the world that is forever altered, as if someone had just taken a pen and written an entirely new chapter on its surface.
The dust of the explosion would linger for weeks to come in the air, traveling around the world in the atmosphere and creating a pseudo-darkness, as if the sun had vanished once again. Ash rains down like snowfall.
However, this time, rather than being an unexplainable act of nature that had plunged the world into darkness, it is simply the grace of the heavens, covering them in a burial veil that might signify the end of the old era and the rebirth of something new to come.