Silenos’ newest grotesquery was more finely made than the others, so far as he’d been able to manage. There had been no true function to such a feature, but he had expended the effort to work it in such a way as a kind of artistic flourish. It was not often, after all, that one introduced a new kind of warfare to the world. Such occasions called for some drama.

It was an impressive thing, and he took pride in it. Standing affixed to the top of his creation’s scalp as it slithered up around the keep’s largest tower, almost buckling the stone structure beneath it with its fifty tonne weight and convulsive motions. From such height, Silenos could see the entire battlefield, and see it well.

There was no doubt how things were going, and he was not surprised by the fact. Orcs overwhelmed defences, innumerable and potent. Undead, too, intermixed with their numbers, but mostly orcs. It seemed those reanimates amongst Venka’s forces were near-entirely serving in an elite fashion, the bulk of his army were the creatures. Just as Silenos had thought.

“PEOPLE OF KALTAN!” Silenos called out, feeling the musculature of his throat and tissues of his lungs tense with force enough to rend apart normal flesh. His voice came out so powerfully that he had no doubt a man might have been deafened for life, hearing it from too close. It was an intriguing prospect for future weaponry, but for now served only to announce his glorious presence. Sure enough, the words cut out over the chaotic sounds of killing and dying, soon drawing eyes up to stare vacantly at him. “BEHOLD ME.”

He considered saying more, but decided against it. Why bother? What could words possibly do to convey any more than was seen by simply gazing upon him. Silenos felt a smile curl his lips.

He had been attacked, in this world. Savaged by mindless cavemen, beaten and wounded by grunting apes fighting him on a level he’d never before had to learn or master. Now, at last, he had turned the tables on them. Now, his vengeance was nigh.

“Exhale.” He ordered his creation, and felt the movement of its body beneath him as lungs worked to project the mists his carefully crafted organoids were so efficiently synthesising.

Breeding, perhaps, would have been a better word. Cultivating certainly would have found use, for the substance was little more than a sustaining home made to keep Silenos’ true creation from death. The virus he had worked so tirelessly to engineer, designed carefully around the alien orcish biology he’d been studying for days, moved like a breath from the grim reaper itself. It was heavier than air, its medium, and so came to settle down below in broiling clouds which further unfolded one way and the other where gusts of wind pulled at them. Washing out to engulf yet more orcs, and infect their bodies just as it had the first few rows.

They fell, convulsing, coughing, clutching and clawing at their primitive flesh just as the rest of their kind did. Bodies eaten from within by a work of destruction more deadly and invasive than anything natural selection was likely to produce. Silenos watched the blood oozing from orifices, heard the strained gasps for breath that wouldn’t come, and smiled again.

It was all good. All appropriate. All a serviceable step in his plans for the world.

Motion underfoot, and Silenos glanced down to see his grotesquery quivering. It was eager, he realised, hungry to kill. That had not been in its design, but he’d anticipated the effects. It had, after all, been fleshcrafted from the arcanically infused tissues of orcs, and he had expected some measure of their nature to move over. Their will, culture, dying thoughts. He would have to further experiment in removing them later. For now…

Well, for now he saw no reason not to indulge his creation. Silenos ordered the grotesquery on.

The grotesquery descended, body moving with a feline grace and lithe delicacy that left it seeming almost to glide above whatever surface it drew near. Silenos was quick in Fleshcrafting as he rode it to the battlefield, configuring his cannon promptly, then awaiting the chance to use it.

A Fomori gave him one soon enough, then fell as its head was torn almost from the neck where his shot hit. More were coming, Dullahan and other undead around them. Silenos decided to let his grotesquery play.

Barbed and thick with muscle, its tail came around like some aerial bombardment and clove an entire row of them in half with the same stroke. Before it had even halted its momentum, the grotesquery was opening its maw and exhaling an acrid streak of new gas. A single click rang out at the back of its throat, and the fluid ignited.

So help him, Silenos actually had to cover his eyes from the nitrous as it detonated. The overpressure would have killed him where he stood, even shielded by the shaped crest of his monster, had his body been of lesser composition. There was no barrier to protect the enemies.

Bodies ripped, burst, tore to shreds as the shockwave bellowed out to crack stone and clear square metres by the thousand from before Silenos where buildings were blown back and carcasses sent sprawling. Silenos examined the blast, and studied the damage to his grotesquery’s crest. It was less than he’d anticipated, no doubt due to the Vigour now reinforcing it, but apparently he’d been optimistic in constructing the stuff. A note for later.

A scream, a rush of air, and an imminent impact that Silenos just barely turned in time to intercept. His cannon ripped the orc’s arm off at the shoulder and converted its flight into a twisted, off-kilter fall that left it bouncing off the hard plates of his grotesquery. The creature tried to take hold, but perished beneath another shot, skull coming apart much as a normal creature’s might under musket fire.

So some of the orcs still lived, even this close to the grotesquery, inhaling such a potent concentration of Silenos’ virus. He felt the irritation gnaw deep. His work had been careful, and ingenious as ever, but time had not been an ally. Silenos had cut vital steps of his process to avoid the inconvenience of death. Now, it seemed, he was seeing the limits left by his decision.

Another glance around showed him other orcs still active and moving, now that he knew to look for them. Some seemed half-affected by the virus, others entirely immune. In total, however, they were but a small fraction of the full number of their kind. Silenos would have to satisfy himself with killing only eight or nine tenths of their masses.

With the virus, at least. Silenos’ grotesquery shifted again, preparing to destroy the remainder of Venka’s forces through more clumsy and traditional means.

***

It was not easy to notice the mist, at first. A subtle thing, insubstantial, barely even something Ensharia was aware of. That all changed when the deaths started .

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

They came on suddenly, almost instantly. As if coordinated, as if planned. As if God himself had reached a hand down from the heavens and started plucking out lives. Ensharia found herself smiling, first, as she saw Venka’s men fall and bleed. Then the mists washed over her own, and she realised no distinction was being made in which orcs dropped.

“Wh…What…?”

Ensharia might have been embarrassed to respond so stupidly and simply, in any other circumstance. Instead she felt her focus snatched by the moment, by the ruin spreading outwards. In minutes the clouds had covered everything, even herself. She hadn’t tried to run, hadn’t even thought to. How could one escape from an act of nature? How could one flee from mist?

She awaited her own death, and when it didn’t come her next thought was as natural as the breaths she felt so relieved to still experience. Ensharia began searching her men.

Her heart broke with each new carcass she moved past, orcs rolling around, coughing and gasping, hands clawing at nothing in particular as agony spun their bodies into sickening spasms. She had to keep from being grabbed in a blind frenzy by the men dying around her, had to bite back the shedding of her tears at the sight of it all.

Garutan. It was the only thought in Ensharia’s head, and a desperate one. She had to find Garutan. Sweet, kind, innocent Garutan. Garutan, who she’d forced into a fight, who might well be dying in the middle of a battlefield because of her. Ensharia’s panic, her terror, grew with each moment that passed without her finding him. He couldn’t be dead, not now, not like this. His last moments couldn’t be this.

“Ensh-a!”

She froze, then spun. Ensharia was not so used to speaking with orcs, but weeks and daily hours of familiarity had been enough for her to recognise the voices and words of her friends without the slightest chance of failure. It had been Garutan who spoke, and it was Garutan her eyes now fell upon.

Thank God, he was alive. Garutan was kneeling, though almost as tall as Ensharia even in spite of it. His body was stooped, miraculously unharmed- though that may have been more thanks to the Elite armour now encasing it- and folded with concern as he stared down at something. No, someone. Ensharia’s guts lurched as she realised his gaze was focused upon an orc.

Upon Shargon.

“Ensh-a…” Garutan croaked, looking up with her, face unhelmeted and eyes wet with tears. His lip trembled, throat tightened, body quivered with all the panicked, weeping fear of a little boy grasping for understanding.

Ensharia was down beside him within the instant, almost reluctant to turn her focus onto Shargon, even as her friend spasmed like the other orcs.

“Shargon, Shargon, do you hear me?” Ensharia reached out, touching the orc with only a moment’s hesitation- deciding quickly that if she hadn’t yet been plagued by whatever pestilence was taking him it was unlikely she’d suffer it through contact- and gently shaking him to try and capture his focus. It worked quickly, keen intellect peering back at her from behind a thick fog of agony.

“I…Hear.” He grunted, speaking in flawlessly polysyllabic Common even in spite of the agony clearly blossoming with every word. “What…Is…”

“I don’t know.” Ensharia cut in, answering hastily to spare him the exertions of speech. “Hold still, I’m going to see what I can do.”

Her hands warmed up as the divine magics flowed through them, seeping down into his skin, then past it. Sinking into muscular tissue, the wafer-thin fat deposits so rarely found in orcish flesh, even the bones and organs. Infusing every scrap of his biology until Ensharia felt as though she were holding his entire, living body all within the span of two hands.

It was a sensation she’d grown well used to, the feeling of flooding a body with God’s light. Of healing it. Usually, Ensharia felt a change near instantly, but this time she could tell within moments that something was wrong. Very wrong. Where there ought to have been a reversal of death’s inexorable touch, she instead felt only a slowing, a delay. As if she were merely digging her heels in and offering resistance to a cart as it slid downhill. Shargon’s groans lessened, fractionally, but his pain was still clear as day, and the slow decay of his body was something she could feel all the more keenly for her efforts.

Ensharia pushed herself, desperately willing the light into Shargon’s body with ever more intensity. She’d felt this before, or something similar. When the Toxicologist had left Arion Falls dying from his vicious blends, and her power had been stripped apart in the effort of repairing him. But there were differences. It felt alive, this new killer, somehow. Like an animated, breathing thing, or a swarm of maggots infesting the blood and tissues of her patient rather than merely some inert substance.

Like disease. It was impossible, ludicrous, but it was undeniable. Ensharia was feeling the miasma of adaptive, pestilent evil infesting the wounds and eating them from the inside out. The divine healing of a Paladin was not so great as to purge natural rots, and this decay was something beyond any she’d ever encountered. Almost malignant in its consumption of Shargon, it was to ordinary disease as an edge of sharpened steel was to a jagged strip of iron. Evolved, perfected. Terrible.

Tears were welling up again as exhaustion started to rear its head, and Ensharia tried to blink them back. It was a futile effort, she saw the recognition bloom in Shargon’s face almost as soon as her despair started. Always quicker than the other orcs, he was. Quicker even than most humans.

“Is…Okay.” He croaked, grunting, gasping. Blood built in the corner of his lips, then ran down his cheek in a thin streak as the movement of mouth and tongue left it slipping free. “Ensharia, it is okay.”

It wasn’t okay, and it was laughable to even say otherwise. Ensharia didn’t even answer him until Shargon’s voice rang out again.

“Ensharia, look at me, please.”

So help her, she almost failed to even do that much too.

Shargon looked worse than when Ensharia had started, and not by a small degree. His face was paler than its usual grey, skin clammy with sweat, eyes tight with agony. There was a resolve to them that hadn’t been there a minute earlier, and it shattered Ensharia’s last, dwindling sheet of hope.

That resolve was not found in living men, she knew. It was something she’d seen born before. Always in the last few moments of a brave man who’d finally realised he was dying. She’d yet to find it anywhere but in a person soon left a corpse.

“Listen, please.” He continued. “Keep healing me if you must, but listen. Garutan is alive, fine even. And I am dying slower than…Others.” He made to glance, at that, but seemed unable to quite manage it. Ensharia didn’t need to follow his attempted gaze. She could hear the other orcs around them, and more specifically she could hear where the dying groans just yards away had fallen silent long before. Shargon continued. “Vigour keeps us alive, I think. Other things too perhaps. Some of us may…May live.”

Some of them, Ensharia realised the meaning instantly and almost cursed herself as she looked up to Garutan.

“Leave.” She hissed. “You need to-”

“-Go with him.” Shargon gasped. “Please, Ensharia, leave me and go with him. Take care of him, he…He needs you.”

“I need you.” Garutan groaned, tears now falling openly. It seemed he’d realised what was happening, and like so many others the knowledge brought him nothing but heartbreak and misery.

“I cannot come, my friend.” Shargon replied, forcing a smile, then coughing as even that motion seemed to send a new wave of twitching pain down his body. “I am sorry, but I cannot. Now go, both of you…Please.”

Ensharia’s vision almost failed her, so clotted by tears had it become. She got to her feet, seized Garutan by the wrist, turned and then froze.

A monster was bearing down on the armies, tearing apart hordes of orcs that, as she could tell, still futilely obeyed Venka’s orders. It was a new thing, not one she’d seen before, but the philosophy behind its body was something she recognised well. Careful, scrutinous, perfectionist and aligned in ways far too flawless and delicate to be the product of nature or God. One of the Saviour’s grotesqueries.

She cleared her eyes, and looked back to see that Silenos Shaiagrazni himself rode the top. Orcs dangled in agony at the end of great spearing limbs as the thing fought, and from its mouth came a blasting cloud of mist.

The mist that was killing Shargon.

“STOP!” Ensharia roared, putting every ounce of her body’s might behind the cry, and watching with relief as the Saviour heard it. Her relief turned to horror as he failed to so much as pause.

The carnage continued, blood running in rivers and pools, all while Ensharia stood to watch in impotent powerlessness.