The Present...
Most onlookers would call them raven’s wings. They were iridescent black, sized to be of neo-angelic proportions, a comparison that would have generated nothing but ire from their owner.
Ire was driving him now, as his wings performed like those of an owl, and he glided down into the camp of the Warpband below.
Whether Warped beast-men mutants or soul-selling fanatics, they were all humans to him. Even though they also presaged the end of civilization, these Warped were still abominations, filth upon the purity of the land, fit only to be cleansed away, along with their puppet master gods.
He pulled a short spear from his back, face momentarily twisting.
Spears do double damage on a charge. Swords do not.
Such an irritating Hagchild. He was remembering her comments in passing even now.
The sentry took his spear in the neck, incidentally silencing any cries he might make. Noir Rabe, the Erlking of the Sidhete, lifted him off the ground, dropped him just as quickly, and flit his wings once, proceeding on to the next guard.
The Warped seemed to have little actual needs in the way of baggage and supplies. They had no train of food and water trailing behind them, the few wagons they had carrying more in the way of weapon and armor repair, some plunder, and some trophies of war.
Not that they passed up eating. He had seen them heartily consume whatever fell to them. Animal, humanoid, monstrous beast; they cared not, and roasted and ate them all.
They were also perfectly happy to eat one another if someone showed weakness and the urge overtook them. They showed no restraints in their habits, taking pleasure in rape, torture, or brutal fights for status and weapons.
As a Fey, he saw nothing wrong with such actions, merely another way of living true to the spirit of Chaos. These insane fellows were certainly emblems of Chaos and free will, refusing to acknowledge the rights and laws set down by others beyond their writ.
...save that they truly had no will, being slaves to the gods of the Warp. Instead of being representative of Chaos, they were merely pawns to greater beings, with no true choice left to them at all.
False Chaos, giving up their wills for power, puppets to be reaved and slain.
And they had brought this False Chaos here, to the Forest of the Fey, the Sidhete.
Another sentry died in silence, his corrupted body thrown to the grasses. Noir Rabe winged his way to the next.
He marveled at the changes in his thoughts brought by the Crown he now wore, focusing his ire and rage in a different direction than he had known all his existence. The corruption borne by these... things below him was as revolting as he’d once found the advance of human cities and farms.
Perhaps they were the same, representing influence and spheres of power, of the Divine and the Mortal, to be resisted as long as possible by the Fey.
Whether the Gods of the Warp were truly Divine or not, they were outsiders, and they brought with them an end to the Dream of the Fey.
With a grunt, another stinking, tentacle-armed sentry fell, covered by the night wind between the trees.
He gained altitude, flicking off the blood and gore from the razor-sharp wooden length of his spear, stowing it in the Quiver made by his Queen and pulling out his Bow.
The Warped brought few tents. Only their commanders deigned to use them for their matters and personal amusements... and their spellcasters, of course.
They were naturally the most suitable recipients of his wrath. His arms rose, and the forest writhed.
Roots exploded in size, while bushes and creepers flowed like serpents everywhere, sprouting thorns and nettles. Weeds intertwined, branches closed overhead like a looming net, saplings ruptured out of the soil and stabbed for the closed sky overhead.
The cries were just starting to rise as the entire force of Warped, everything within three hundred paces of him, found themselves caught in the center of a choking, overgrown landscape of rampant vegetation.
One, two, three of the trees below rumbled to life, and began to swing at everything moving around them, crushing the half-pinned Warped to pulp with mighty blows.
Another gesture, and Old Weathered, the spirit of his faithful treant retainer, materialized below among the ruptured tents, and another two trees nearby instantly came to life at the treant’s command.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
He pointed, and the senior shaman of these invading things looked up, feeling the dark magic swelling, and had just enough time to recognize the spots of gold up there in the night as eyes when the Word came to his ears. The finger pointed, and Death clenched the shaman’s heart in a black fist and squeezed it tight.
He fell with a final gasp, heart’s blood spewing from his mouth.
At Noir Rabe’s call, four mighty Earth Elementals rose up from the stone and dirt of the forest floor, liberally girt in vines and creepers, their roughly Jotunish forms moving through the plants without disturbing a one. Anything moving on the earth was an infallible target for them, and the grinding, coarse rumble of their movements was a cry in Geoic of war and delight, for the Elementals could feel the corruption upon these creatures as clearly as any mage.
Still, there were a lot of them to kill.
From the side he had removed the sentries from came a flitting horde of wee Fey with bows drawn. Pixies, whose bows brought sleep...
Following them was another wave of the wee Fey: brownies, sprites, grigs, and others, moving through the overgrown areas with ease. They had only blades in their hands.
The forest rustled, and the centaurs and satyrs arrived, and with them the tall and coldly beautiful profiles of the Sidhe. As the Warped thrashed and cut their way out of the vegetation, they found themselves facing ready bows and implacable spears, which began to cut them down silently in the night.
---
Up above, Noir Rabe watched the lethal, invisible wave of the gossamer-winged pixies bring sleep, and their wee cousins slit the throats of the fallen behind them. Distracted by the massive presences and rumbling crashes of trees and Elementals pounding the center of the camp into mush, the Warped didn’t feel the wave of death stealing through their formations, merely slapping at the arrows as if they were stinging insects... until they dropped and did not get up.
His fingers twitched. He could see gaps that could be exploited, a way to get the Warped to move this way and that, and that was just below him. In the other areas out of his sight, covered by overgrown forest, he could only listen and judge by horn and the whispers of the plants and animals around him.
It was nothing like watching two thousand warriors moving as one in heart and mind, trusting in a commander they could not see, who was nowhere near the battlefield and yet still driving them to victory.
He was a warlord... but not a Warlord. The difference was chillingly clear to him.
Still, he had his own job to do.
His Bow was firing nonstop, the Skull mounted on it burning with a black light edged with all sorts of unclean colors, Bane against the Warped. His arrows hissed down with unstinting accuracy, one or two sufficient to take down most of the Warped, and he icily shot down the heavily armored champion in his grandiose magical Armor with nearly a dozen of them, ignoring the fool’s cries to come down and do battle.
Soon enough, he ran out of arrows, and it was indeed time to fight.
He removed the Baneskull from its place on his Bow and affixed it to the pommel of his Sword. He knew it would not change the balance of his Blade, as he had tested it before. Unafraid of the injuries he might receive, knowing they would be healed away, he swept down upon the elites that were still alive and not fighting.
He grit his teeth, because he knew it would take more than one or two blows to kill them, unless he got lucky. But that did not matter for now; he would kill, and be happy in the moment, even if he was not the equal in slaughter of that Hagchild Sage Sama Rantha...
------
They arrived in the morning, the mark of the Warp upon them. There were hundreds of them, thousands, come down from the North, heeding the call of the Warp behind them.
Unseelie of the Winter Court, the darkest of the Fey. Cold killers formed most of their population, easy to hook and lure with the promise of blood and slaughter. Redcaps, spriggans, springheel jacks, wendigos, fellgoblins, the most twisted of satyrs and centaurs, the cold Sidhe of the high ice... even a few grimm, lured from their deep mountain caves, and Fomor, leading gaggles of subservient hill giants, trolls, and ogres drawn to the promise of fresh meat.
The mark of the Warp was upon all of these things already. Arms replaced by tentacles or pincers; extra limbs, including heads; tails of scorpions, snakes, spiked, barbed, and worse; bulging eyes, misshaped skulls, massive swollen body parts, blisters leaking pus, fur of manifold colors, horns and spikes erupting here and there...
It was all on display, and a Fey force that was normally garishly colorful proved it could get even more freakish and mutated very quickly.
They had felt someone was going to be here to greet them, and this odd clearing in the forest felt like that place.
There was blood in the air and definite signs of carnage, but no one was there to greet them to the service of their new masters, leaving them confused.
The forest shivered around them, and these renegades of the Fey and the forest looked around suddenly, feeling the eyes of the Land settling upon them.
The trees rippled, and from out of the green stepped the army of the Queen of the Sidhete.
Four-meter forest giants, lean and bold, stared at their corrupted cousins in loathing. The centaurs, satyrs, and Sidhe looked on their cousins in contempt, never liking the Winter Court before now, and seeing what was made of them only made things worse.
There was a rumble as a dozen trees stepped forwards, and which were Treelords and which were not was hard to tell. Around them, dryads in their barked forms grasped eight-foot thorns, ready to fight.
The ground shuddered, and a great green-skinned figure in gleaming bronze plate stepped forth, the forest giants barely coming to his waist, a great Spear over thirty feet long in his hand. Lightning crackled between his eyes and over his hands and armor in snapping arcs.
Two figures came together at the center of the army. One was the Erlking of the forest, clad in his wooden mail, Bow in hand. The other was a slender woman of inhuman beauty, clad in a dress of summer flowers and autumn leaves, also bearing a Bow. Both of them were wearing wooden, flowering crowns.
Behind them stepped up a great six-legged, elephant-sized blue-furred catlike monster, with eyes like lamps and spikes all over it, staring at the fallen Fey there hungrily. They balked to see it behind the two monarchs.
The sky began to darken, clouds roiling up out of nowhere, and even as the first lightning bolt came crashing down, the Storm Jotun lifted his Spear, stepped forwards to hurl it with a bellow louder than any hunting horn, and the purging of the Fey traitors was on.