"He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command."

Nicolo Machiavelli

-Grindlefecht, Boss Skegga's stronghold-

He watched the Kobolds groveling beneath his feet, slathered in the blood of their fallen comrades.

Slowly, he began to understand the words they were yammering at him. These little beasties were even dumber than tadpoles, always bumping and jumping and shouting about something.

He leaned forward, allowing the rolls of his fat, slathered in slime and mucus, to loll over the throne of crushed rats and dwarf they had built for him.

"You are telling me you let those rats beat you?"

The Kobold survivors looked at eachother, fear overcoming their tiny frames.

"Where is Gith?" he asked.

"He – he died-died, Boss," one of them barely squeaks.

He sat back and wiped his greasy, webbed fingers over his moist face.

He nodded at the guards around his throne.

"Take them to the pit of stilled-jumps," he said. "May they

"N-no Skegga! No, please, I-"

"What is our name?" he asked.

The timid Kobold who had spoken out nods frantically.

"Sk-Sk-Skeg-"

"MY FIRST NAME!" he bellows, his jowls shaking with the force of his voice.

"Boss!" the little creatures yip in unison. "B-Boss Skegga!"

"Hmpf!" he snorted. "Your commander died because he did not teach you proper respect. Let the pit be your teacher!"

"N-no!" they yelped as his honor-guard started to drag them away by force. "It was not our fault!"

"Take them from me," he said with a weary wave of his flipper.

"We have information, Boss!" a desparate Kobold pleaded as he was dragged away by both his flailing arms.

"You cannot tell us anything that we do not already know," Skegga replied, rubbing his slimy forehead. Honestly! These cretins could tire even the oldest bullfrog.

"They – they had a humie with them!"

Hold on…

"Stop," he called out to his subordinate guards. "Let this wretched one speak."

The Kobold was thrown down at the foot of his throne while his compatriots were trundled off to die. He didn't spare a look back at them.

"I – we – we saw him, Boss Skegga! He show them how to become big metal column! How to wear shields like hats! He – he reason they lives!"

Skegga rubbed his feathered chin. A human…

"Make yourself useful, wretch," he snarled. "Tell us where the rats of Skeever-Steelclaw were going."

The little demon jumped at the chance. "K-Knifegut!" he squeaked, remembering Boss Gith's speculations. "They – they must be going to Knifegut, Boss! It is small fort behind Gulch. Small, weak-weak. Will crumble if we hits it good, yes-yes!"

"Hmpf," Skegga replied, moderately amused by the little thing's audacity. "What is your name, mongrel?"

The wretch pelted it out like he was singing for the surface Gods, "Klega, my Boss! I is Klega!"

"Well, little slime," he said. "You have indeed brought us some most interesting tidbits. You will lead a detachment of our forces to Knifegut and secure this human. He is pivotal to our ascension."

"Y…yes-yes holy one!" Klega chirped like a songbird. "It will be done! Rat-rats die-die! Human die-die!"

"NO!" Skegga roared, puffing out his great larynx and shaking the very foundations of the ancient stone stronghold. "Bring this human to me – ALIVE."

"Y-yes…"

"Yes – WHAT?"

"Yes, Boss Skegga! Yes-yes most holy of holies Boss, yes –"

"Give him a detachment of three Skags and remove him from our sight. He shall ride out immediately."

The command was given to a thinly veiled figure that stood to attention beside Boss Skegga. A figure who could have blended into any shadow, even that cast by the great horned toad as he lorded over his kobold subjects.

"It will be done, Sire."

Skegga slammed a slime-coated fist down on his armrest. "How many times have we told you to refer to our glorious form as 'Boss'?"

The creature bathed in shadow bowed his hooded head, the dark crimson of his eyes gleaming in the dark.

"Apologies, Boss Skegga," he said. "Old habits are being hard to kill."

Skegga wiped spittle from his mouth and commanded his throne to rise, displaying his rolls of lumpy fat and gut to all the kobolds around him.

"What a thing it is to control," he said to his confidant as his throne levitated above them all. "How gratifying it is to be a God. Silas, do you not know what this means? The appearance of a human amongst your former brethern?"

From the darkness of his throne room, Skegga heard the twitching of whiskers and a silent acknowledgement.

"You are thinking it is the Shai-Alud, Boss Skegga?"

"WHO ELSE!?" the great toad thundered, laughter spilling out of his bulging throat. "If the time of prophecy has come, then it can only mean that our cause is a righteous one!"

"If you are saying so, Boss Skegga."

He ignored the chittering of his advisor and let his great arms fly out to encompass all of his realm – a world of ancient stone plundered from the dwarves, where their arsenal of cannons and powdered weapons would prove sufficient to finish his extermination campaign – wiping the Under-Kingdom clean of filth and ushering in the era of the Horned One – of Boss Skegga.

But first, he would make this human kneel before him. If he truly was the Shai Alud, then Skegga would have his secrets. He would hoard them like a dragon's golden lair. They would be his ticket to dominating the surface, once all this was over.

Then his 'benefactors' would know his vengeance. Those damned snake-fiends who thought they could control the world! His world!

The Great horny toad spun back to face his guards, and opened his massive maw – showing them the jaws that would swallow the entire world, in time.

"Ready our forces!" he called out from his flying throne. "The time of the Kleansing has come!"

***

Even as he trudged through a grim, dank tunnel with a squad of fetid rats, Marcus was in his element.

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He wasn't a hard man to please by any means. Give him a pen and paper and he'd commit himself to it with more gumption than a moth to a naked flame. It is true what they say of humans – they can and will make the best of any situation if they put their minds to it.

Marcus was currently scribbling away his observations under the dim light of Deekius' Glow-Glob, a low-level spell he had conjured up as they passed through the tunnel sections leading from the Black Gulch to Knifegut fortress. Although, as Marcus had soon realized, the word 'spell' didn't quite sit right with the priest. He had taken offense when Marcus had applied the label to a miracle of the Ratman's God. The more appropriate term was something Deekius referred to as 'Gloomraav'. Loosely translated, the word was more akin to 'Incantation' or 'chant' than spell. It also denoted the Ratman's priest-caste – the Gloomraava - who were led by this 'Prime Putrefact' – a rat who served as a kind of Bishop for each different clan.

Marcus had scribbled down all these details as they made their way towards their destination, stopping only at a few points to feast on their captives or collect more secretions from the tunnel walls. His parchments had become his coping mechanism for the things around him which could have easily got even the bravest of stomachs churning.

Marcus was no stranger to horror. His profession demanded that he come to terms with the great slaughters and barbaric sacrifices of the past – from those committed in the golden halls of Tenochtitlan to the occult inner workings of the Ancient Rome's Haruspex – his mind was lined with examples of wanton, obscene destruction that resulted from both warfare and religious necessity. However, to see them firsthand would have given him pause if he did not have Deekius' papers – those notes had become his real shield.

The journey through the tunnels had been quiet – mostly. The chitterings of the rats might have been considered speech, but Marcus had no chance in understanding the finer nuances of their language. Come to think of it, he was surprised that he was able to understand them at all, let alone the cryings of their Kobold enemies.

"The Shai-Alud is said to speak with a voice that commands respect," Deekius had told him when he asked about it. He assumed that meant that he was simply able to parse their speech and communicate automatically – like his words were being instantly translated.

But if that were true, was he simply hearing their speech in English or, from their perspective, could they hear him speaking Rat?

He decided such a trivial detail didn't matter in the long-term, and decided instead to devote himself to questions. This was a whole new world, and he was now convinced that it was his duty to document its denizens – no point being a part of history if you're too ignorant to make sense of it.

So he prodded Deekius and Skeever with queries throughout their tunnel journey, questions about what the world of the Under-Kingdom looked like, politically, culturally, and socially. Some of these questions took some rephrasing, and some of their answers required parsing, but overall, he was surprised to find a degree of sophistication in the structures that dominated their lives.

Aside from He-Who-Festers, who's faith dominated Ratman religious worship, the Four great kings of each Clan ruled in their section of the underground – known colloquially as the 'Warrens'. Each Clan occupied a different, and often contested, territory: Clan Glumrot held the South, Clan Nightstalker had the East, Clan Marrow the West and Clan Red-Eye the North. It was the Northern tunnels that they were currently trudging through, and these same tunnels, Skeever explained, that were currently receiving the brunt of the Kobold's hostilities.

"They are being tiny," Skeever told him. "But they breed in thousands. One male to every female."

The rats shuddered at that thought.

"I…um…isn't that normal?" Marcus asked, quill in hand.

"'Normal'?" Skeever scoffed. "Perhaps it is being so where you come from, Marcus, but not for we rats."

With some trepidation, and more than a few challenging looks from Deekius that Marcus couldn't help but notice, Skeever then went on to explain the beginnings of the ratman life cycle: from the swollen bellies of their Queens a litter of at least one hundred rats would be born from every conception. Approximately 20% would be lost to disease – the so-called 'weak ones' whom He-Who-Festers had not blessed with immunity – and another 35% were killed by their brethren, so that only the strongest rats survived in a litter. Their breeding problem was exacerbated by the fact that the birth of a female was something so rare that it was barely considered a possibility: in five centuries, there had only ever been five females in the entire Ratman kingdom.

Four female Queens, servicing four Clans.

A new female meant not only the birth of a new life, but the birth of a whole new nation itself – one which would be sired by the King of each clan and him alone.

Of course, this posed an obvious question: why not expand the list of acceptable partners for each queen? The way Skeever put it, a Queen enjoyed a strictly monogamous relationship with the King of her Clan, and no others were permitted entry to her chambers. If lack of manpower in this war was an issue (and from the looks of this tiny, beleaguered force, Marcus assumed it was) then wouldn't a polyamorous compromise not make more sense to prolong the bloodline of each clan, not to mention sustain their war effort?

Just as he was about to pose such a question to Skeever, the armored Rat stopped him with a single raised fist.

The whole force immediately stood to attention, those at the rearguard quickly silencing their Kobold prisoners.

Marcus crouched low with them and saw a series of long, lithe shadows play across the tunnel intersection that lay ahead of them.

"Movement," Skeever whispered.

Marcus kicked himself as he felt his heart lurch. His questions would have to wait. He'd just been thrust back into the real world for what it was.