Fiction Herald Of The Old Ones

Robber Killer, Killer Robber - Part III: Blood on the Rocks

“It took not long to notice, they would never make an attempt to hide them. Wherever the Al-Zayiyr would make camp -permanent or temporary- they would construct their pagan altars. Rarely tall or ostentatious, only as decorated as the rest of the surrounding context, magnanimous when constructed atop a pyramid, chipped and bare when in a nameless oasis. Plinths and platforms of bare stone, wider and longer than they are tall, some so used as for them to be smoothed by touch or scored by failed strikes. But always marked and painted with the metallic oxide blood, dry or wet, glistening or crusty. Sacrificial altars for their pagan gods.

Early in my travels I encountered them as bad omens, the signs of recent use -or lack thereof- warnings for me and my men. By the time I had made contact and diplomacy with them, It became disturbingly predictable that they would always invite me to behold the deeds themselves. What disturbed me most, I found myself learning, was not the victims -often animals, almost as often things other than animals- or the raucous nature of the faithful reptiles, but the competence of their priesthood in their dozens of sacrificial “formats.” That, truly, gave a scope to the culture I was to ingratiate myself with.”

• The Roaring Ones, Autobiographical Memoirs Of Nasser Al-Fil.

Outskirts of Skeggi, Settler’s Cove, Isthmus of Lustria​

3rd of Kornskurðarmánuður, 2545 VR // 40.0.9.15.5 12 Chikchan 18 Chʼen​

“So, any actual details this time around?” Torfi asks as he walks. They are now far enough from Skeggi’s palisades that they have left behind the beaten paths created by outgoing and returning expeditions; they have even left behind the winding logging paths of Drenok and his fellow axemen. And none of Skeggi’s fur-trappers would ever share with him the routes that they had only confided onto his father after years working together, and of the few Torfi already knows by associations, none lead in the direction that his companion has demanded they travel in.

“Nothing more than the previous dreams.” Njal answers as they walk side by side -a rarity, considering that they are moving cross country- through a thankfully unclogged copse of trees. Njal looks up at the canopy while poking his tongue out and gliding it along his chipped canine, an old tick that the young witch has had ever since the damage occurred.

Torfi looks up as well, there are things in the branches, even if none of them give him pause. Like him, the tree-dwellers seem to just be happy to keep moving across the long and horizontal branches. The critters disappear among the fanning leaves that create so much shade that even he can barely tell that the morning sun is rising. The darkness and dampness is such that none of the usual understory trees and shrubs make their walking any harder, their books sinking into the rotting layers of leaf litter.

Torfi has heard them being called “Lustrian Bøks” but he’s sure that they probably have a dozen other names, the hunting is bad in them, but right now he’s just walking and for that they are perfect, few predators stalk in groves with so much visibility for the same reason he does. Still, he makes sure to constantly stir the leaf litter ahead of them with his spear’s butt. Maybe there are no lesser saurians stalking them, but he can think of an army of different things that could be happily hiding under their feet.

“So, what?” Torfi wonders outloud. “Literally the same as always?”

“Yeah, same stone entrance at the foot of a hill, same vault full of great shields of gold, same chorus of voices calling for me to release them.”

“Have you ever tried looking around instead of walking into the vault?” Torfi wonders as they catch up to Käck, the Sarlish hound happily accepting the scratches Torfi gives without breaking his stride. “I don’t know, maybe climbing a tree? See if there’s any landmarks we could track down? This is the seventh time we’ve done this since you told me and my dad about the dream.”

“That’s not how prophecies work, I can’t walk around them like my hut.”

“Well, the boat part doesn’t always happen, does it?” Torfi brings up. The “boat part” as he calls it is how Njal’s retellings of his repeating dream often end with the witch being drawn to one of the aforementioned grand discs of gold, only to be moved away to a completely different dream upon even grazing them. A dream consisting of a ship -Estalian galleon, they had figured out years ago by comparing drawings based on the dream to the ships arriving at Skeggi during raiding seasons- sinking under the waves of the Sea of Claws during a storm, the vessel’s captain clinging to one such shields as if it could float and save his life.

“Okay, sure, but that’s because it fucking sucks and I’ve stopped trying to grab the discs because of it. You try to sleep through a nightmare that makes you go through drowning in the freezing seas. I still remember puking saltwater the second time it happened.”

“Okay, fair.” Torfi shrugs, he certainly wouldn’t want to relive some of his latest dreams, that is for sure. “You still haven’t told me what made you pick this direction this time around, though.”

“Ahhh… Well~ I…” Njal’s tongue once more flicks out, the witch suddenly interested in some bird hopping its way through one of the trees.

‘I knew this would happen.’ Torfi sighs. “There wasn’t a dream this time around, was there? Who was it this time?”

“Hey!” Njal turns back to look at him, exaggerating his offended expression in a -failed- attempt to derail the conversation. “You dare delay a witch’s powers? The Gods will not take kindly to such an insult, dogboy!”

“I ‘m pretty sure that it's dogman now, Njal.” Torfi answers, readjusting the leather strap from which his supplies are wrapped inside of a notched cloth. “Now spill, witch.”

“I… may have overheard some imperials talking about a place their boss from a previous expedition had found, a bunch of gold, not a mine but underground. They wondered if it could be some kind of collapsed øglemann tomb.”

“Njal…”

“Oh come on!” The witch defends his lies. “You wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t told you about the dream, and I have a really good hunch about this one!”

Torfi stops walking, dragging his hand up his forehead and along his hair in frustration. “I have so much stuff to do, Njal.”

“Your mother can helm the ship for a week, just as she did when we were kids and your dad went hunting. Plus, we are going to be doing hunting on the way back!”

“It’s different now, Njal. Without my father… It’s…” Torfi tries to argue, even if in his insides he knows that his friend will not fail to drag him halfway into the peninsula.

“Is it?” Njal starts walking once more, leaving him behind and now being the one to catch up to the hounds. “Because I think that he’d beat you up, if you dared to abandon poor little Njal to the jungle.” And with that, the witch crests a hill, and starts disappearing from view.

For a second, Torfi considers whistling the hunting dogs back to his side and forcing the matter.

A few moments later, he’s jogging up the same hill at the grove’s edge, and shouting for Njal to wait up before the fool stumbles into something’s nest and gets eaten alive. That would really get him in trouble with the gods, and his mother, which would be even worse.

Port Reaver, Settlers’ Cove, Isthmus of Lustria​

17th of Erntezeit, 2538 IC // 40.0.9.15.5 12 Chikchan 18 Chʼen​

“Bah, I don’t have any need for you today.” The wizard had said, crooked over his desk full of tomes Stefan has no understanding of, not even looking at him as he had said the words. “The dear king and I are done with our business for now and the fields of his farmers are doing as well as I can ensure they will. Go and do whatever passes for child’s fun in a pirate freeport.”

That is what the wizard had said upon Stefan waking up as early as he always does, readying himself and bringing the ancient man’s breakfast -an infusion of herbs in boiled water and some bread- to the office at the top of the tower.

Which had left the young boy… Dumbfounded. Sure, he had then taken the luxury of eating his own breakfast slowly instead of shoving it into his own face-hole during his first messenger’s run of the day.

And then he had… Just… Waited around? An hour -by his own reckoning at least- spent in his own semicircular room on the lower half of the tower waiting around for Von Danling to spring some surprise task on him, some emergency run all the way from jungle’s edge to the Citadella. The idea of just having a day when little to no work would have been demanded of him?

Von Danling could have told him that he was to be minced into fertilizer for one of those plants creeping up the tower’s walls and he would have had an easier time really understanding what was being asked of him.

Leisurely time just isn’t a thing for a child that has grown up an orphan like himself. Every hour of his life until not too long ago had been spent scraping to survive, enjoying those scraps or just trying to rest. Sure, he knows games, but most of those games involved betting, be it based on luck or skills, he’s never played a game that didn’t involve whoever wins getting an extra ration or the slightly less-ratty shirt some other idiot had wagered. He’s never had more than an observer’s role in what he assumes are other children’s names, hell, that’s exactly what he is doing right now.

Because Stefan, in his inability to just spend his “day off” resting, had ended up wandering into the city anyways, only barely stopping himself from wandering down to the Felldowns and wondering whether his very short-termed previous employer had any extra work for him. But only barely, as he finds himself sunning his slowly growing body -the wondrous magic of multiple daily meals- while seated on top of a forgotten crate in a corner of Butcher Street.

His initial impetus for that had been that while wondering, he had come across a ring of other kids cheering on what had ended up being a fight between two stray dogs. He had climbed up the crate to be able to see better and cheer for the dog he had arbitrarily chosen to be a fan of -it just looked a tiny bit scrappier, that was all- and then had just remained there when the fight had ended.

‘Maybe I’ll spend all day here, yeah.’ He ponders to himself. ‘Just hang around for a bit, walk places, for once, instead of running… Maybe I could check up on Saint Sissy’s, or see what they are building at the Grails… Maybe… The Blushing Maiden?’

And, of course, it is then that whatever god he is supposed to worship -religion is something both Saint Sissy’s and the seaborn priesthood were very talkative about, which is why he’s avoided it for so long- decides that Stefan has offended him with his laziness, or with his indecision, or just for the fun of it.

Because it is then that his damnable ears pick something up, coming from the window above the crate he is resting on.

A few simple words, and suddenly he’s just hooked in like a dumb fish.

“Can’t wait to get a taste of that king’s flesh, you think royal pig’s meat tasted better than average swine?” The voice is low and grumbling, like a cauldron, but also like a cauldron, large and hard to miss.

An ogre's voice.

Pieter the Butcher’s voice.

“You won’t have to wait for long, boss.” Another voice, clearly human, responds. Most ogres who come and go from Port Reaver pay their respects to Pieter as the closest thing to a “tyrant” or paymaster that the city has, but only a few of them are directly under his employment. Most Butchers are humans, including the one who continues to speak. “He’s got this secret meeting planet with Sharp Kristoff in a couple days, something about getting shiny new pokeys for that guard of his. In Kristoff’s workshop, prime chance to shake up how things work around here.”

“I don’t buy it.” The ogre speaks once more. “I can count on one hand the people Bastjan will move his pompous ass for. Kristoff isn’t one of those, he’s just a blown-up guildmaster.”

“I have it in good standing, boss, the source is solid.”

“How solid?”

“One of his guards.”

“Now I really don’t believe you!” Laughs the ogre, a slapping sound cracking like thunder alongside it, it makes Stefan jump in pace, even as he scoots back towards the wall, to rest his ear on the windowsill. “One of his guards stabbing his back? What next, are we going to wake up tomorrow to a completed city wall?”

“Boss, I wouldn’t come here to you if I didn’t trust it with my life!” The man defends himself, panic in his voice

“Would you come here trusting it with your arm?” Pieter’s tone changes as his laughter suddenly dies. “Because that’s what I’m having for dinner, if you don’t have anything more solid.”

“I-I do boss! I can get you the snitch tonight at your mansion!”

“Good, invite him over for dinner, then, just in case I need seconds. Now!” The sound of an arm slamming into a table once more shakes Stefan. “If this is real… I’m not going to start planning my kingship of Port Reaver on an empty gut!”

The conversation then turns to topics much less surprising from a gang-leading ogre’s mouth. But Stefan is not there to hear them. He’s got places to run to.

Waldeswacht Fortress, Autonomous Imperial Colony of Sudburg, Settler’s Cove, Isthmus of Lustria​

17th of Erntezeit, 2538 IC // 40.0.9.15.5 12 Chikchan 18 Chʼen​

“Sir,” The guard knocks on the heavy door to the Governor-General’s private office without entering it. “ Herr Brocco has arrived for your meeting.”

The Governor-General in question looks up from -of all things- his daughter’s work, giving the author a tired look as the young woman sits across from him.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you sometimes, daughter.” He rubs his head, in his hand still holding the letter he’s just dictated to her. An old bite-wound from his service in the Imperial Armies against the slaves to darkness had not left his dominant hand unusable, but the finest movements -such as calligraphy- had become enough of a challenge in his age that he’s taken to trustring the inkwell and quill to Noémie. He begins to roll the piece of parchment up, trusting that the second half that he didn’t have the time to read would be as impeccable as the first. “Send him up!” He speaks up loudly enough for the soldier to pick it up.

“Want me to stay, father?” Noémie asks, a mischievous smile on her face.

“Name your price.” The veteran scoffs, knowing that his daughter wouldn’t help him deal with the usurer if she didn’t stand much to gain.

“Mmmmmh… How about permission to head-”

“Denied, name your reasonable price.”

“Mph!” She scoffs without losing her smile. “I heard that there’s a few Estalian ships on dock, one of them has a naturalist aboard, his work seems interesting, I want to meet him in private and exchange notes.”

“I’ll arrange for something.” He accepts easily enough. Years ago he might have refused the idea of allowing his daughter to privately meet with a man in such a brazen way. But at this point in his life, not only is he actively hoping to find someone for his daughter to be engaged with -hopefully back across the sea, if unlikely- but the very solid awareness he has of the fact that if there is such a thing as a “naturalist” involved, the last thing in his daughter’s mind will be a breach of decorum.

“Thank you!” She smiles and tilts her head in a way that reminds him of her mother.

“Can you get some wax melting?” He asks, gesturing to one of the office’s oil lamps, as it would be absurd to have constructed a fireplace into any kind of room in Lustria. “We still need to have this letter sealed.”

“Of course.”

It is as his daughter is using said lamp’s heat to melt some wax, and as he organizes his endless, desk-covering amount of to-dos, deal-with-laters and other headaches, that the office’s door opens. For a few moments, that causes the seabreeze to pick up, something that he is happy about, considering the onset of the dry season.

“Governor-general.” The financial attache greets him with a nod. “Lady Armbruster.” He greets the veteran’s daughter too. Justus Brocco may be a detached and curt man, but he isn’t one to forget the utility of good manners. “I have dire news to share with you.”

“I sincerely doubt that.” Noémie coughs into her fist as she brings the small ladle of hot wax to her father, coating the letter with heavy dollop as he presses the city’s into it, himself letting out a bare smile.

“I have been in talks with both some of our landowners and the representatives of their customers in the Old World, there is an issue at hand in need of swift solving.”

‘What is it this time, crop ruining plagues? Predators stealing cattle? Farmer’s wells being poisoned by native fun-’

“Sir, something simply must be done about the Estalian sugar exports!” The tone with which Justus says it, one would have usually reserved to news about an entire greenskin Waaagh! being launched against one’s personal residence.

“Excuse me?” The father asks.

“Sugar?” The daughter follows.

“Not any kind of sugar. Estalian sugarcane sugar!” Justus clarifies. “At this very moment, there are two ships full of it in our harbors, ready to be sent out to Bretonnian ports. They are practically robbing us in plain sight.”

“I believe you just said that the sugar comes from their farms?”

“Santa Magritta, correct?” Noémie brings up the Estalian “viceroyalty”’s capital.

“Indeed!” Their farms are preposterously large, and their island colony much more civilized than Settler’s Cove. This has greatly lowered their costs, and their much cheaper sugar sells much more easily than ours, especially with how we allow them the use of our ports as launch-off points for the trip to the orient.”

“I…” Siegsmund leans back. “I certainly am not against incentivizing more incoming settlers to pick up sugarcane plantations as their way of life, but this is hardly something to be solved over months, not a hurried conversation.”

“Sugarcane doesn’t grow that fast, Herr Justus.” His daughter jokingly points out.

“This absolutely is an issue which can be swiftly solved!” The man -for once- has some energy in his voice. “I propose an effectively immediate embargo of all Estalian goods sailing out of Sudburg!”

‘Oh no,’ Both father and daughter -somehow- think in unison. ‘It’s going to be one of those meetings.’

The kind that makes Noémie regret not having demanded more, and her father regret ever having set foot on that west-bound ship so many years ago to begin with.

Monument of the Sun, Coast of Squalls, Isthmus of Lustria​

62th Day of Despair, 238th Year of the Age of Vengance // 40.0.9.15.5 12 Chikchan 18 Chʼen​

The attack had fallen upon them with Chotec’s departure, predictably so. Grak-Graq had planned for it, but even from the first signs of trouble, the Spawn Leader had known that he would be mounting a defense to the last.

No help would have reached the Monument of the Sun fast enough, he had known. And now, as his obsinite blade disembowels yet another foe, he knows that to be a fact, and not merely a tempered estimation.

‘No matter,’ the saurus pulls his blade out of an entangled mesh of steaming entrails. ‘Such knowledge has changed nothing.’ His task continues, the spotted reptilian warrior raises his neck, surveying the battlefield. He derives a minuscule amount of satisfaction from what he beholds.

The Monument of the Sun is a glorious edifice, as befitting of the Old One it honors. But it is not a temple which is easy to defend. The temple takes the form of a massive causeway racing the sun’s own path across the firmament, framed by hundreds of pylons, archways and spires all the way to its end, where he stands.

The waves lap at the temple’s edge behind him, as it ends -just as the sun’s visible path does- below the waters of the Sea of Squalls. What a pity, then, to have been attacked by a fleet of warmblooded filth. The first attacks had actually come at the temple’s opposite edge, hours to the east, but Grak-Graq had not hesitated or committed his forces, as he knows well that the Itz’xa’khanx’ s misbegotten offshoots would never not make use of their vessels. And so, when the fleet had arrived to pelt them with bolts, arrows and many worse things, his force had still been fresh and plentiful.

But that had been some hours ago, and while the solar engines kept atop the temple’s sun-scorched shrines had turned landing parties into a deadly proposition for the thiefs, numbers and range had eaten away at his own forces.

The saurus twirls once more as the newest wave of assailants reach him atop the temple’s great altar, long-ago built to ensure that Chotec could spend his charge across the darkness drunk on blood and strengthened enough for the following morning to come.

The elves are not fully mud-brained, the force surrounding him has given up on trying to cut him down with swords or pelting him with their crossbows, no close combat so far has ended for them in anything other than being added to the last sacrifice Grak-Graq is to make, and the dozens of shafts sticking out of his chest have done little to stop him beyond rotting one of his lungs. Now, he finds himself surrounded by the pale-skinned invaders, of a kind who cower behind massive shields and spears too long to be held with any courage.

They are hoping to down him like an exhausted great grazer, to kill him by small cuts and stabs.

They have made a terrible mistake, for Grak-Graq still has one working lung, and it burns .

The saurus doesn’t need to do much to break the ring surrounding him, he simply chooses the direction in which he knows the lies are thickest, and slams himself into them, his Burning Blade melting and burning its way through whatever defense that jaws and claws can’t get through.

The Spawn Leader quite literally sears his way into the heart of the unit of dreadspears, turning their long weapons and heavy shields against them as every shove and kick of him catches and tears onto something and burning bodies flail their way into being convenient distractions.

So focused is the Saurus, that he doesn’t even notice as the last of the warriors protecting the temple fall in their following of his example, taking dozens more of the enemies with them.

So focused is he, in fact, that he lets little more than a grunt out as -finally- one shape among the dozens of warriors twirls its way under one of his punitive slashes. This one is more lightly armored, yet the equipment is of much better make. The same shape that his burning eyes had come across, when the fleet had arrived after realizing that their poor attempt at a ruse had failed.

A great dagger digs into his chest, just as the great macuahuitl that is the Burning Blade behead another spear-elf in its trajectory towards the enemy’s leader. Grak-Graq’s grip on the weapon doesn’t loosen, his body doesn’t collapse even as he begins to taste his own broth-like blood.

“May Chotec feast on mine and mine kin’s blood.” The Saurian growls out even as the foe steps back. “For before he starts sampling your kin’s own, this temple will already be reconsecrated. Count the days, filth, they will not stop.” His words, speaking in his own tongue, mean nothing to the female who has dealt the killing blow and who stares down on him as his body collapses.

And with that, Davara Coldhide finds herself victorious in the Battle of the Monument of the Sun, the first of her campaign. The maritime Drucchi’s skin itches, as if sunburnt, as her forces cheer and hail both her and the gods.

 

YES!

FINALLY!!

THE HotOO HIATUS HAS ENDED!!!

REJOICE DEAR READERS, FOR YOU ARE GOING TO ENJOY AN ONJECTIVELY IMPROVED CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY!!!!!

There's ways in which I could have made this end-of-hiatus chapter much more exciting, I suppose, but then again I did start the hiatus two chapters into a storyarc that was already going in a specific direction. Still, I think it's a good one to set things off with again!

I hope you enjoyed the story and I honestly appreciate all and any kudos or comments you may be gracious enough to gift me! And in case any of you are interested, here's the link to my Discord server, where I discuss my projects and all are welcome

It would be great if, if you enjoyed the story that is, you took a second of your time to go over to ao3 and left a kudo and a comment over there, since it is my main posting site.

 

“I once made a study of ley lines and their interaction with Ulthuan’s statues and circles. This place felt similar. The pillars, enormous gilded monuments carved into the form of serpents, pinned the Winds of Magic down just as a collector sticks an insect to a specimen board. And their eyes…They knew we were there.”

- Uriel Nightseer, Scholar of Saphery.

Waldeswacht Fortress, Autonomous Imperial Colony of Sudburg, Settler’s Cove, Isthmus of Lustria​

18th of Erntezeit, 2538 IC // 40.0.9.15.6 13 Kimi 18 Chʼen​

“Governor-General of the Autonomous Imperial Colony of Sudburg Siegmund Armbruster, Bearer of the Star of Sigmar; to Her Viceregal Authority of Nueva Estalia, Fileppa Verin de San Pedro Mendoza-Velasco Ferrer del Sur y Cueva; Greetings.” Siegmund takes a deep breath as he finishes the tirade,

“Wait,” Noémie interrupts as he finishes dictating the very first line of the letter that the colony’s investors have nagged him into writing. “Is… Father, is that her actual name?”

“Indeed it is, as far as locally available Estalians have told me, I have little reason to believe something as public as a royal authority’s name would be kept secret.”

“No, I mean… Father, her name is longer than her title.” His daughter points out, making him realize that not everyone has his experience with the people of the peninsula.

“Ah, yes. You’ll find that they are a breed fond of surnames, composite, many-worded and hyphenated. What Dogs of War I knew among them? One told me once that no true Estalian has less than eight memorized surnames. With someone of the Viceroy's status, it is customary to use as many as we ourselves know.”

“You are talking as if Estalians were alien to me, father.” Noémie rebuffs, as small as the discovery is, even this quirk of linguistics is a morsel to her. “There’s a whole quarter of them in this city, father, I’m personal friends with a good few.”

“They are used to dealing with us imperials, Noémie. They give you the first one only out of courtesy. The soldiers and sailors are of different minds, they compete to memorize the most, and take it with such seriousness that being caught lying or making up one’s ancestry can earn them death.”

“Father, you are joking .”

“Ask your friends this afternoon, then.” The man smirks, already seeing his daughter hitching to ditch the dictation for her studies on tongues. “Now, as I was so rudely interrupted… I pray this letter finds you well…” He indeed continues. “In communications from the mercantil guilds and pächters , dated as recently as the Eighteenth of Ernzeit, two thousand five hundred and thirty eighth year of the Imperial Calendar, that give account of the strife they face; and foreseeing-”

“ Strife , father, really?”

“Brocco wants me to convince this woman to somehow start farming less of her most profitable crop in exchange for nothing. Nothing I can do short of mustering an impossible invasion of blockade will coerce them. Laying it on thick, as they say, is the one tool I have.”

“Doesn’t that make us seem weak, then, father?”

“Likely, but as little as we can do to them, likewise are we untouchable. Half of Lustria’s length separates us. Neutering meddling foreigners is one of the few good things Lustria has given us, Noémie.”

“Fair enough, but don’t complain to me, when this bites us in the arse father.”

“Meh,” The general shrugs. “We could always sacrifice Brocco’s behind.”

His daughter smiles. “Paltry offerings make for offended gods, father.” She jests, drawing his own smile as he clears his throat and begins dictating once more.

“And foreseeing the danger that might arise should their fears be given credence, I have decided to communicate them onto you. Thus, lays the issue of the zuckerrohr , which you know as the cania de azucar . This productive stalk of Khuresh, your king’s and mine emperor’s subjects have found to grow readily under the Lustrian sun, enough so to make profit. So much so, that many in your and mine jurisdictions -I am told- have taken to exclusively growing it, disregarding both other crops of valuable export, and those that feed both ourselves and what livestock this godless land permits us. What is now inconvenience and imbalance could very well grow into the fat beast that is famine. Attached to this letter you will find the findings of those most vigilant to such manners in Sudburg, alongside their estimations and other assessments.” To that, his daughter palms a small stack of doctored papers and parchments, each and every one doctored from the fists of people with employment under the House of Sudburgian Investments as common denominator.

“Therefore, and with great worry for the wellbeing of both of our ventures-”

“I’d change venture, sounds too commercial for your worried old man act.”

“Mh,” Siegmund nods in agreement. “Open to suggestions.”

“Peoplehoods.”

“Peoplehoods, then…. Therefore, and with great worry for the wellbeing of both of our peoplehoods I make request that you make full and equal investigations, of which I hope you shall notify me, with your own opinion on the matter, so that we shall approach a solution most… Most…”

“Symmetrical?”

“No…”

“Oh, bipartisan!”

“Atta girl.” Siegmund laughs. “You have it all?”

“I think I may write a couple more copies tonight, a bit more clean. One for safekeeping and one for Santa Magritta.” His daughter assesses, resting her quill. “Now, I think we have more pressing matters to attend to, don’t we, father?”

“I hardly find preparing something like a Manannite festival demanding of my personal purview, Noémie.” He gets up with a groan, approaching the office’s window and looking out and down to the docks that surround the peninsula-built hill that is Sudburg. Indeed, the docks are much more gorged with activity than they should be any random day in Erntezeit.

“We are a port city, father. Like it or not we live from fish as much as we live from plantations, Net Casting Day is a very important festival. Besides, Seacurl would have your head if you decided to skirt it.”

“That salt-arsed seaman can try.” He boasts, eliciting another laugh out of her. “Besides, the only reason you care for it, is that you want me to escort you to the docks. Perhaps to locate some Estalian accents?”

“Sigmar!” She fakes a gasp of scandal. “I would never!”

“Then, you won’t mind me taking this tour with Jeroen, so that you may focus on your writings instead?”

“Father!”

Von Danling’s Tower, Outskirts of Port Reaver, Settler’s Cove, Isthmus of Lustria​

18th of Erntezeit, 2538 IC // 40.0.9.15.6 13 Kimi 18 Chʼen​

“Mmmmh…” The Hedge Wizard hums in a way that reminds Stefan of a tree’s creaking when shaken by the wind. It is not exactly the sound he had been hoping for. “A shame, really, that you couldn’t track them down.”

“I tracked them down pretty well,” The orphan argues. “He’s an ogre, they are not hard to miss.”

“Yet so very similar-looking.” Von Danling points out, much to Stefan’s confusion. “Very hard, telling them apart.”

“Uh… What?” The boy reacts. “No… No they are not? Especially not Pieter, he doesn’t even dress like the rest of them.”

“Oh, is that so? Mh, I suppose green-thumbs and green eyes do go together, never was I that good at remembering faces.”

“I-That doesn’t matter! He wants to kill the king!”

“Or so you say… It’d be an intriguing paradigm, indeed. Not so much the idea of an ogre in power, they are far from rare in piracy, moreso in that he’d be the first to be crowned without having served as a pirate captain, it'd represent an irreversible revolution for this thalassocracy, I wonder…”

“Thasa-thalas-Never mind!” Stefan tries to redirect the conversation. “Shouldn’t we be doing something?”

“Oh, but we are, my boy. You overheard, you relayed, and I suggested that you look into the matter further, to bring your allegations from hearsay to proven.”

“Yeah, and because of that I wasted a whole day trying to sneak into that ogre’s den in Butcher’s Street without getting eaten along the way!” The boy wouldn’t usually raise his voice so much, and so consistently, against the stump keeping him fed and sheltered, but his fear for what might happen were the king to die overrides that.

Without King Borġ, the wizard’s deal with the king would inherently be over. Furthermore, every single time he’s heard or been talked to about the end or beginnings of previous kings of Port Reaver, they always share a few features. The event is never bloodless, and those few who survive of the dead king’s clique, either don’t remain alive for long, or are last heard off racing to board a vessel heading dead-east.

That category of “king’s clique”, Stefan has recently realized, now includes himself .

“And claim you garnered nothing? Truly a shame…”

“I…” The boy tries to take a deep breath to calm himself. Having not slept all night, gnawing away at trying to sneak places where he’d be able to get within earshot of the Butcher without getting noticed and turned into stew…

‘Of all the conversations I overhear… And I fuck up with the one time I’m actually wanting to do it.’

“What do I -we- do now?”

“It seems, Stefan, that there’s one venue alone left for you.”

“Uh?” He perks up, realizing that he’s talking to a wizard of all people. Surely, if anyone could pull a trick from their sleeve, it’d be the man with arms so sticklike that a whole bundle of them would fit within said sleeve.

“You shall tell the king of your discovery.”

…

“UH? THAT’S WHAT I WANTED TO DO FROM THE START!” Stefan’s shrieks in a way that even makes his voice crack, surprising the birds that have taken to roosting on the conical roof of the tower and the small patch of jungle growing out of the tiles of it.

“I sent you out to get proof, to make sure going out there and bad-mouthing a man-eating monster wouldn’t get you eaten, boy.”

‘Yeah, you don’t have to worry about that, do you? Your meat -if you have any- probably tastes like sawdust. No ogre is going to want to eat you.’ The boy glowers. “Then what’s the point? I don’t have any more proof now than I did a day ago, just a lost night of sleep and a lost morning of work.”

“Is that so?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“And yet, you’ve convinced me.”

“You are a wizard, you can probably cast truth magic or something like that.”

“That’s witch’s business, boy, far from the vegetative. Now, tell me… Isn’t it queer?”

“What is queer?”

“That, as you yourself have said, Pieter the Butcher has spent almost a day-and-night far from prying eyes or attentive ears?”

“Uh?” Stefan’s eyebrow raises. “I…”

The boy racks his brains, and almost comes on empty, only figuring it out when the wizard offers him a reminder.

“What street did you say you’ve spent all night lurking in?”

“The Butcher’s… Street.”

…

“That…” Stefan mumbles. “That ogre has an entire street named after him and his gang… And they’ve spent all day holed up in some basement instead of… Of doing whatever they do to make coin?”

“Suspicious activity, with plenty-a-witness to boot. Yes, I think that the king will lend you an ear, at the very least.”

“Then… Should I tell the king?”

“You should, if you manage to get him to listen to you, he’s not exactly rich with time, right now.”

“Oh, yeah, Casting Nets and all that… Uh… What do I do if he still doesn’t believe me?”

“That, dear boy, is for this old tree you so love barking up at to account for.”

Castaway’s Lake, Jungles of Pahualaxa, Isthmus of Lustria​

5th of Kornskurðarmánuður, 2545 VR // 40.0.9.15.7 1 Manik’ 0 Yax​

“Eheh, the dogs don’t look so happy to be going on a trip anymore, do they?” Njal smirks so hard that Torfi can feel the face the witch is making despite being solely focused on the clump of aquatic vegetation in front of him, and the thigh-deep swampwater that he is wading through.

Indeed, Käck, Saga and Fenix are not enjoying the last leg of their day’s marching. Sarlish Elkhounds as they are, are somewhat accustomed to dealing with water as all Norscan breeds ought to be. But a breed accustomed to traveling in their owners’ longboats, or to running along frigid rivers and shore or across frozen lakes isn’t the same as a proper water dog breed. Torfi ought to know, he’s as close to a scholar on dogs as Skeggi gets.

As such, all three animals paint an image that even Torfi, as tired and encumbered as he is, finds funny. The dogs stand flank-to flank upon a large floating log, nervous and whining, yet standing at attention like drilled soldiers, unmoving in their hopes that the log won’t begin to roll, plunging them into the waters.

Still, not as if they could be of much help, as Torfi keeps hatcheting away at the pod with his short-axe, more of a tool than his javelins, specially in a place like the Castaway’s Lake.

It’s been a good -well, bad in all honestly- year since he last planted his feet into the swamps that lays inland from Skeggi a good few day’s westward travel. Currently, he and Njal find themselves at the membranous and ever changing area where -depending on weather and season- swamp gives way to lake. Indeed, being as it is the dry season, even if not the worst ends of it, the lake has taken longer to make itself apparent through the swamplands, and the vegetation that usually floats on it as massive pulses of vegetation -some so thick that Torfi knows them first hand to be walkable- instead are low-lying and often stuck to the muddy bottom by being caught onto logs or entangled with other water plants.

And that’s without mentioning the pods. Gods, what Torfi would give right now to come across the podders themselves.

But, instead he just is forced to keep hacking away at the cloud of water plants stopping him -and the cloud of mosquitoes that other insects that populates it and make the task so much harder- from simply continuing to move forward and towards the lake’s namesake.

“AHG!” With a final chop, the two halves of the mass start drifting away, but only fully once he pries them away like the waterlogged door to an inundated hut. As he does so, he does click his tongue in command, urging the dogs to actually get moving. They whine in apprehension, of course, but after a few moments of ineffectively nudging each other, one -Fenix- stumbles down with a splash. The tree trunk starts rolling due to the push, and the two other hounds are forced to leap into the water in quick succession.

Being fair, he’s understanding of the hounds’ fears. The lake -like every other Lustrian waterbody- is infested with dangers big and small. They wouldn’t be the first of his family’s dogs to be lost to some water-borne sickness, or stolen away by some formless beast into a froth of bloody foam. Still, at this point they are -in theory- within eyesight of the lake’s sole nexus and place of relative safety, so chances are the dogs will be as fine as the humans will be.

“Oh-! Hey!”

This has the added effect of soaking Njal in swampy lakewater, which to Torfi is more than enough compensation.

And so, before them and standing among a massive yet cavernous and labyrinth-like lake with edges that simply melt into more swampland like the one they’ve just spent hours traversing… The Cast Away makes itself visible.

Standing in the middle of the vast lake’s plant-logged surface, rests a makeswit harbour built around the tavern that is the Cast Away. The structure itself looks like what it is, a well-used structure of which is likely that not a single nail or plank from the original construction remains, fixed up by so many owners’ hands in so many different carpentry traditions that it is a chimera in and of itself. Some parts remind him of Skeggi, with entire rooms built upon stilts and connected to the main body by rope bridges, while others feel as if someone had taken a longhouse and tiled it into being taller and longer. Other parts are more alien to him in ways that he can only assume to be styles of southerly humans.

The most recent-looking modifications, however, denote the nature of the current owner, with timber-framed walls made up of triangles within rectangles, and some attempt at shoring up the whole structure’s base with rubblestone.

Torfi and Njal move forward and into the water as it deepens, stopping when the waterline kisses their waists, as they don’t want the belongings kept in their belts and pockets to become soggy. Torfi raises his arm to one of the many shapes milling about the circular harbour, and one -of long shaggy hair and unassuming clothing- soon responds by using a long staff to jump aboard a canoe.

It doesn’t take the “podder” long to reach them, as the long pole he pushes behind himself does much better at propelling the canoe through the vegetation-covered waters than oars ever would.

As the man reaches them, it becomes easier to realize that the canoe is not a wood-and-canvas construction, or a single piece carved out of a sufficiently large log, and certainly lacks the texture of a bark-canoe. Instead, it obviously is nothing more and nothing less than a massive and hollowed-out seed-pod, the kind produced by the massive aquatic vegetation around them.

“Hello there, friend!” The man greets, his norscan shoddy, but it’s not as if they are expecting deep conversation. On top of that, Torfi does recognize the ill-cleaned man from previous trips with his father. Beyond the dull pain of the reminded loss, he can at least be happy that he won’t have to haggle, as repeat business is good for older podders, and demanding more coin is not a good idea when the Cast Away’s harbor is never without competition. He doesn’t even know the podder’s name, his father never bothered with it, and he is not going to start now.

Tofi digs out a few bronze pfennigs, the things are little more than small unmarked discs. But valid coinage anywhere that Norscan is spoken, and that’s what matters. Satisfied, the man uses his pole to stick the pod-canoe in place, and first helps Torfi up, who then helps Njal in as the amused witch laughs. Neither podder nor witch deign to help him wrangle his dogs aboard, but do make sounds of complaint and amusement respectively as the hounds shake themselves dry. Soon enough, the deep and smooth canoe -an advantage, to be honest, that makes it hardest for beasts to shatter with their bites- is moving back towards the Cast Away, and they find themselves surrounded by the vessels which call it home.

There’s a good few dozen pod canoes, longsides at least as many other makes. But there are also much wider rafts and catamarans, the kind Torfi knows to be hired by larger and heavier expeditions seeking to use the rivers as their inland route.

And then there’s the massive demonic construction, the “riverboat” that has been there for as long as the inn, as far as Torfi knows. A monster that looks as if it’d belong much more comfortably in the sea than in any Lustrian brown water, a monster of wood outfitted with massive mills on each side, and columns of rusted metal sticking out of its top like the shafts of broken arrows.

The “steamboat” as his father had called it, only available to the highest payers, the vessel of a dwarf who he has never seen, for -again, according to his father- the diminutive man had made it clear long before even his own birth that no Norscans would be allowed aboard it, on pain on death.

“Oh! The steamboat is here! I always wanted to board that thing, you think we could…? On the way back…?”

“Depends on how much you want a dwarf to drive a hammer through your head while you sleep.”

“Eh, I’ve had worse hangovers.” Njal comments cheekily as they observe the moored shanty-town, for every vessel of every size is its owner’s home. Men cast out from Skeggi populate and pilot them, those on the run from captain, owner or employer, unskilled idiots who can at least survive off rowing crews across the lake.

Torfi doesn’t plan on making business with any of them, Njal and himself will be paying their way out in their direction of choice tomorrow, and that will be that.

And so, he keeps moving towards the Cast Away’s entrance, the set of doors clearly marked by the painted shield that hangs over them from two small lengths of rusty chain, each of different link-size and length.

The sign itself? Painted a light green, made darker by time and moss only sometimes scraped away to make visible the six pod canoes arranged like the spokes of a wheel within it.

Sign of the Cast Away Inn. ​

Njal rushes before him, opening the door widely and letting the outdoor’s light harshly braze the eyes of the patrons within. Half of them, as always, must likely be Old Worlders looking to rest while they find transportation. The other half -the ones drinking most heavily- are the ones soon to head in the opposite direction, those who’ve decided to head home, or at least seem focused on drinking enough that the memories of recent events will drown their way out of their minds.

A couple groan and make sounds of protest, but none raise their annoyance with Njal further when Torfi and his three hounds follow. He remembers hearing that keeping one’s animals by his side is not a common thing inside the inns of the Old World. That has always sounded stupid to him. There’s nowhere around an inn that his hounds will be safer than indoors by his side. Likewise, he’d never want to be caught dead around so many strangers without at least those three loyal muzzles full of teeth.

The five of them head directly for the shape behind the inn’s counter.

The proprietor, a “Wastelander” of almost-spherical shape, nicknamed by most as Fat Willsen. Once more, Torfi drinks from his father’s lessons, which mention not only that the inn-keeper allegedly has lived in Lustria for more than sixty years -a feat for all but Skeggialings- but also that, in his father’s own words…

‘A man doesn’t get to grow fat in Lustria unless he has a great many friends, or precious few enemies.’

“Oh! Torfi! Njal!” The man recognizes them, interrupting his conversation with a patron seated in a stool so precariously, and of such little meat, that Torfi can only assume him to be the starved survivor of one of hundreds of unaccounted-for parties.

Njal happily returns the greeting, while Torfi gives little more than a respectful nod as he clicks his tongue, making sure the hounds will behave themselves out of respect for the man who will feed and home them for the night.”

“I was wondering when the two of you would next grace me with your presence!” The unreasonably jolly innkeeper continues speaking. “And just in the rightest of times, my new friend here has just had an uncomfortable stay over at the home of those neighbors of yours. Dreadful luck, I’m afraid.”

Torfi, then, takes a closer look at the man, and instantly notices something other than the way in which he desperately eats and drinks aided by one hand, as the other, wrapped in foul-smelling bandages that herald what will soon be full amputation or death, lays limply on the table.

By the shape of it, the hand lacks the ring and pinky fingers. Not just the phalanxes, mind you, it is as if all the bones from fingertip to wrist corresponding to each finger have been cleaved away or snapped off like segments of a bamboo stalk, leaving the hand with a distinctly inhuman and four-fingered appearance.

Torfi recognizes the mutilation instantly, he’s seen it -and the others that often accompany it- in the bodies of dozens of Skeggialings and twice as many failed expeditionaries.

But it is the innkeeper and the witch beat him to vocalizing it.

“ Skinken ?” Njal whistles in half-honest conmiseración as the man looks up at them with bloodshot eyes, his half-open mouth swollen with saliva and chewed food. His stare makes it clear that whatever kind of man he might have been before, he’s but a remaining scrap. “This close to the Cast Away? That’s some rough luck.”

“Indeed,” Wilsen refills the man’s earthenware mug of ale. “It’s rare they will range this close to Skeggi, I wonder what could be pushing them so.”

“Ah, well, you better leave that wondering to me.” Njal winks. “Takes a wrong-in-the-head to know a wrong-in-the-head.”

“Be fair to yourself, boy.” Wilsen answers as he starts serving them both, alongside a bowl of reasonably clean water for the hounds. “I doubt your brain is scrambled enough to qualify as equal to that tribe of mutilated cannibals.”

“Oh Wilsen, ever the charmer, you.”

Torfi doesn’t join in on the jesting. After all, it’s going to be his job to deal with the aforementioned cultists, will it not?

The Watcher, Jungles of Pahualaxa, Isthmus of Lustria​

65th Day of Despair, 238th Year of the Age of Vengance // 40.0.9.15.8 2 Lamat 1 Yax​

If nothing else, the monolith makes for a good location for Davara to observe the ongoing post-battle ordeal. That fact that standing on top of the structure is also a straightforward way to avoid having it within her sightline is a perk, and nothing else.

The massive column described as “The Watcher” in her maps had not been a hard place to locate, even the most incompetent of her scouting ships could have spotted it. The almost-obelisk towers an impressive two hundred meters taller than the coastal jungle that surrounds it, with the greenery itself hiding both the structure’s base and the reptilian encampment set up in concentric rings around it.

At first sight, arriving in the death of night, the structure had looked cylindrical to her. Carved and embossed with the wealth currently being pried away by her slaves, but not much else. Then, she had started seeing the eyes, and the sunrise’s gleams had revealed the cylinder to be more accurately described as a many-sided structure.

Twenty-eight sides, as it had turned out, each a flat face the width of a double doorway. All of them carved in ways that had reminded her of the totem-poles carved out of wood by the human chaos-worshippers who whaled in the Broken Lands. Albeit, where those had been colorful and varied depictions of their daemonic patrons, these are geometric and mostly reptilian, each face of the structure topped with a literal face with eyes made of untarnished mirrors of gold.

They had made her…

Uncomfortable . The moonlight and streams of flame during her forces’ attack playing games with her mind, making the metal’s shine resemble tracking pupils of light. Even as she had joined the battle on the ground, entering the jungle, every single time she had looked up -alerted by noises which could very well have come from tree-stalking lizardmen- her eyes had landed on them.

Looking down on her.

Only now, literally on top of them, does that sensation fade enough that she can think clearly and bask in the glory of her victory.

Well, all except a suspiciously bare one, an entire face of the structure, completely bare and flat, without face or eyes. The very same one she had climbed, dulling the blades of some of her warriors by using them as climbing picks. They wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

The Watcher, being a much smaller settlement than the one-way circus that their previous target had been, had still had its own garrison. Who had fought to the last, now little more than bodies being loaded up onto shore ships to later be thrown into the frothing and reddish waters at her fleet’s center.

‘I’m pampering her.’ She wonders to herself. ‘Soon enough she’ll grow fat and lazy like father’s. And then she’ll be useless.’

Her mind then moves onto the distracting sound of the slaves pickaxing and prying at the golden embossments. They’ll work fast and hard in the knowledge that anything less will have them fated to being left behind. And yet, that only makes her wonder…

She won’t be able to replenish them, not in Lustria. Tales of the impossibility of putting the reptiles to work are as old as the first ever raid against the continent, millenia ago. No amount of lashing -or any other punishment, for that matter- will convince a lizardman of any kind to follow the slavemaster’s orders, the things will instead just plot endless insurrections, or waste away without moving or eating.

And then, there is the second thing that she cannot re-supply, not without risking her father’s agents finding her in whatever tower she sets sail for. She’s already had to cull too many for their disloyalty, going through the process a second time would only encumber them.

For, as glorious and decisive as her two victories so far have been, they have not been without toll.

She can hardly repeat them forever. lest she risk returning to Naggaroth with ships heavy in riches but light in bodies to keep the wealth where it belongs.

 

Since this story's hiatus started, my love for drawing heraldry has only increased, so expect images like the one I drew for the Cast Away Inn to keep appearing. If you are interested, I post all my Warhammer maps and heraldry over on DeviantArt!

I hope you enjoyed the story and I honestly appreciate all and any kudos or comments you may be gracious enough to gift me! And in case any of you are interested, here's the link to my Discord server, where I discuss my projects and all are welcome

It would be great if, if you enjoyed the story that is, you took a second of your time to go over to ao3 and left a kudo and a comment over there, since it is my main posting site.

 

Robber Killer, Killer Robber - Part V: Sound the Alarm

‘As the Lady Myrmidia did lie dying, poisoned by the lover’s lies, she ordered a most wondrous ship beest built, and, this is hath said, sailed west upon it, thence to returneth to h'r home amongst the pantheon, known anon, and f'rev'r aft'r, as a goddess of war.’

- Bellona Myrmidia, Book of Ottokar’s Folly.

Port Reaver Harbour, Port Reaver, Settler’s Coast, Isthmus of Lustria
20th of Erntezeit, 2538 IC // 40.0.9.15.8 2 Lamat 1 Yax ​

For once, Stefan’s gracile and svelte frame, a runner’s boon, betrays him. For in the current situation, the pubescent growth spurt that continues not to go through means that he’s just a light and short kid amidst the thrumming crowds that clog Port Reaver’s Harbour from streets to water’s edge, clogging even the wharfs as the sailors and captains of docked sail ships make a few extra coins by lending their riggings and platforms for even more onlookers.

The city has only become more overpopulated by transients as the dry season has advanced. And it does not help that right now almost everyone who would usually be spread across the city is concentrated in the proportionally small sliver of built-up port. And even then, the fact that the kingsguard won’t let the crowds spread themselves up and down Re Island only creates a denser host.

Years ago, Stefan would actually have been enthused by the prospect of Net Casting Day. The packed crowds, after all, would make premier hunting grounds for the spider-fingered orphans. And his fellows are certainly there in strength, testing the crowds like seabirds, darting in and out like cormorants diving into shoals of fish.

A day that he remembers fondly, as the holiday makes it much easier for street rats to actually earn themselves full meals.

‘Full meals like the kind I get three times a day.’ Stefan reminds himself, his eyes continuing to dart. ‘So better go in there, and make sure the king who pays for them stays in charge.’

And, so, when Stefan does find an opening as he would have been doing a year ago, he plunges into the sea-side crowd. Instantly, the boy becomes a rodent scampering through a great herd of smelly beasts. Smelly in the ways only sailors and port-dwellers can be. Sweaty in ways only Lustria can wring out a human being, stained by splotches that Stefan doesn’t want to know the origin of.

Everyone in the crowd vies, shoves and fights for a chance to actually see the events. Most aren’t lucky enough to have access to a port-facing window, the money to pay for a ship-view, or the diligence to rise early and find a place hugging the wooden posts of the piers and wharves.

And yet, like a legless lizard, Stefan continues to make his way, pinching here and there, stepping on the toes of a fool’s sandal over there, and tugging at belts to create distractions as he weaves in opposite ways.

It’s slow work, and the noise of the crowd -which strongly muffles the splashing of nets or the shouted auguries- only indicates that the ceremony is advancing as he himself slowly eels his way down the considerable length of the Shark’s spit.

A Map of Port Reaver Harbour: Found at the southern end of the artificial island that is Port Reaver’s urban center, the Harbor consists of a series of large earthwork wharfs that have their origins in the mud and soil dug up during the construction of the city’s moat. Many wooden piers augment and branch out of the eight wharfs, which are framed by two massive lighthouses. On the west, the Shark Lighthouse is built upon a massive artificial spit that acts as a ninth wharf, while on the right the Trident Lighthouse is built atop the seamount that is Re Island. The Sunken Cloister, the city’s premier maritime place of worship, has the entrance to its underwater chambers at the latter lighthouse’s base. Other sights include the Blushing Maiden (4), the city’s most renowned whorehouse; the Grails (7), a district of Bretonnian merchants; and the logistical linchpins that are the Bohos Warehouses (20). ​

Still, the spit does get thinner and thinner as the boy reaches its tip, and the looming shape of the aforementioned lighthouse becomes clear. To his left and right, Manannite priests are hailed or scored as their thrice-cast nets are pulled back and inspected.

They are queer nets, to begin with. Made with the ratty ropes of old ships, the clothing of sailors and the hairs of their wives. Stefan has heard that prayers are usually written onto the clothes, but it’s not as if he would be able to read them, even if he got close enough.

Like most things, Stefan has heard that Net Casting is done differently here than it is in the Old World. Back overseas, the Mannanites would take their magical nets out to sea, sailing until they could no longer see land, still casting their nets thrice after lengthy prayers, but inspecting them once per casting. Usually, he’s also heard, the holiday is mostly a concern of fishermen, with the abundance of the priests’ catch signalling the following year’s bounty.

Here, in Lustria? One would have to sail for days to exit the gulf that is the Setteler’s Cove. One would have to be a fool to brave the monster-infested waters for a ritual. So the nets are cast directly from the shore. They are also only inspected once, and while fish are of great importance -since, well, they feed them all- so are artifacts. Anything from a tarnished coin to a bone could herald anything from an expedition’s grand success to a new colony’s demise, with minutia beyond the boy’s concern.

The crowd is even louder on the harbor’s other side, Stefan sneaks a look between the legs of a sailor harrying a priest who is having great trouble pulling his net back up, as it seems to have snagged onto something. ‘That can’t be good.’ He guesses, even as his attention moves to the crowd that hollers for one specific net-caster across the water. The one who stands in a place of honor on a wooden platform built at the Trident’s base.

Even from such a distance, Stefan can distinguish the… attractive form of Sister Kelba Baħar. The woman does lead the Sunken Cloister, after all. So, even if Manannites don’t have anything resembling a hierarchy, she nonetheless draws the most attention out of the dozens of net-casters. In the eyes of most, her augury will be the one that will mark Port Reaver itself’s own fate.

The “Oooooh!” and “Uuuuuh!”-ing of the crowd doesn’t exactly make the boy the most confident.

But, still, he has a job to do. And as he squeezes his way through the last few packed bodies, he comes to stand in front of the closed gates to the Shark. Closed gates guarded by two kingsguard.

After all, as the tallest lighthouse, it’s the King’s privilege to enjoy the tower as his place to observe the celebrations from.

“Get lost, kid.” One of the guards pushes him away, not even bothering to threaten him with his spear. He’s likely not the first orphan to seemingly test the king’s mercy today.

“Hey, wait a minute.” The other guard says. “I recognize you from that nasty temple clear-up… You the druid’s fetchboy, ain’t you?”

“Yes!” Stefan jumps at the chance to get things cleared up quickly. For once, being noticed doesn’t lead to a beat up, and that's really cool. “I have to-”

“Just go in, kid.”

“Yeah, it stands to reason that that creepy tree-hugger wouldn’t want to get seaspray on his skin, he’s pickled enough already.” The other one cracks a joke even as he pulls a wrought iron ring of keys from his belt, opening the door for him.

Stefan mutters his thanks to both men, and rushes in. The tower is not small by any measures, and there’s thankfully not more than a couple other guards standing about it as he climbs the spiraling staircase two-by-two. Finally being able to run, he makes it up the square tower’s highest chamber in no time.

The room is dominated by open stone window sills with a massive oil lamp at its center, surrounded by a contraption of glass panes. But of course, what the boy focuses on are the two men who stand watch, both of whom turn, having easily heard his echoing footsteps as their conversation is interrupted.

King Bastjan Borġ. And by his side, the leader of his kingsguard, Colmazio the Pigbarter, both look down on him, curiosity in their grizzled faces.

“You… Von Danling’s boy… Estefano?” The king’s right-hand man asks.

“Stefan.” The king corrects, turning from the celebrations. The man doesn’t seem bothered by his observations being interrupted, and Stefan doesn’t exactly know how to feel about the Laughing Boar himself knowing his name.

“Uh… Yes, my king!” Stefan bows, having no idea how to bow or for how long.

“The wizard made it clear in our last meeting that his work on the plantations would keep him busy for a while, has this been interrupted?”

“Oh… No, my king, it all is going well.”

“Then why are you here, boy?”

“I… Uh…”

“Get. On. With. It.”

“AfewdaysagoIwastakinganapandoverheardtheButcherandhismentalkingaboutplanningtokillyouwhenyoumeetupwithSharpKristofftomorrowbecausesomeonetoldthemaboutthewhenandwherebecausethereisatraitorandthewizardtoldmetotellyoubecauseyoudiyingisareallybadthing!”

…

“Last time I heard someone talk so fast…” The kingsguard’s eyebrow raises. “You were threatening the speaker in question by cutting his tongue off.”

“Okay lad,” The king ignores, his stare growing serious. “Again, now remembering to breathe. No tongues are getting removed today. At least not yours .”

After a few gulps of breath and calming shudders, Stefan does indeed repeat himself, giving a more detailed account of the last few eclectic days.

The king’s face is unreadable. And as such, it’s his advisor who speaks up first.

“These are some troubling accusations boy, not the kind to be made lightly.”

‘Uh, what?’ The orphan reels back at the heavy skepticism that laces the man’s words. “But, I-I heard him say he wanted to eat the king!”

“Ogres want to eat everything.” The kingsguard argues. “Besides… Pieter? Taking over the city? Port Reaver is a pirate principality, everything here runs on Sartosan Codes. There’s no world in which a landlocked ogre could take over this city. While I find the idea of a traitor worrisome and meritorious of research. This sounds to me like typical Grumbarthi blubbering.”

“Mh.” The king nods slowly. “Return to the wizard, boy. Your message is delivered, I’ll be the one to find the veracity of it.”

“But-”

“Didn’t you hear, kid?” Pigbarter huffs. “Fuck off, before we decide to throw you off this tower, let the Manannites interpret your mangled body when you tangle their nets.”

Stefan does indeed get out of there as quickly as he can…

Of all the possible outcomes…

The idea that his warning could have been ignored had never once crossed his mind…

Somewhere in the Jungles of Pahualaxa, Isthmus of Lustria​

5th of Kornskurðarmánuður, 2545 VR // 40.0.9.15.8 2 Lamat 1 Yax​

“ ¡AYUDA! ¡POR FAVOR! ¡AYUDA! ¡NO QUIERO MORIR! ”

When the ragged screaming starts reaching their ears, Njal and Torfi’s first -and identical- reaction is to simply duck for the closest cover. In the case of the river they are traveling along the course of, that turns out to be the base of a tree half-trampled to death by a massive beast decades ago, having left the healed oldwood with a bulging base and a trunk.shaped like an īhwaz rune. A low and sharp whistle from Torfi brings his hounds to bear, as the animals scamper and leap over the trunk to meet them behind it.

“ ¡DIOSA! ¡PIEDAD! ¡ALGUIEN, LO RUEGO! ”

Within a few seconds, little more sticks out than two mops of hair lost among the moss growing from the trunk, and a few black wet noses that resemble beetles.

It is obvious, however, that the screaming’s source has not noticed them. Not only is it still not within view, it is also too loudly pleading and desperate to focus on something as hidden as they are, well covered from the bank.

“ ¡AYUDA! ¡AAAAAAAAH! ¡AYUDA! ”

As the river had fed into the Castaway’s Lake, the two Skeggialings had paid a podder to take them as far up-river as possible, which had saved them a considerable trek inland and northwards. Of course, eventually they had reached a point where the river’s current would have overpowered the podder’s modest sculling, and so they had made their payment and gotten off at one of a thousand collapsed and muddy riverbanks.

Soon, they had planned, they would have had to part ways with the guiding waterway. As the next section of their route would have been much safer by diverting towards the coast, than by cutting through the jungle.

“ ¡JODER! ¡JODER! ¡QUE ALGIEN ME AYUDE JODER! ” The foreign screaming devolves into sobbing, no less loud, merely even harder to understand.

In Torfi’s mind, the continued screaming only serves as the perfect excuse to divert early, to the shorelines that any Norscan would have felt safer by. And he goes as far as to open his mouth to propose his plan.

A moment later, there’s a patch of ripped up moss covering his face, dislodged by Njal’s boot as the witch side-leaps over the trunk.

“Come on! I wanna see what makes a man scream that much!”

‘Piranhas, if we are lucky, ‘A yucated crocodile, if we aren’t…’ Torfi thinks in frustration as his friend jogs towards the riverside, a raft floating down the river coming to view at the same time, janked this and that way by the current, jostled and sprayed. A roughly man-sized shape tied to it, continues to trash and scream to no avail.

Which gives him pause, and instinctively draws from his a tongue-click which puts his hounds at high alert.

No one hoping to kill a man in Lustria would do something like that. Any injured or insane would be killed quickly and abandoned even faster, to keep predators busy and distracted. Going through the effort of sacrificing an entire log raft -or building one for it- for the purpose of convoluted murder…

Sacrifice, it reeks of sacrifice .

“NJAL, STOP!”

Xho’za’khanx Favela, Pahuax, Isthmus of Lustria​

40.0.9.15.8 2 Lamat 1 Yax​

“You are one useless shack of bones, Barra.” The young woman, Elma Welser-Nakor, points out as she picks clean the tick-infested hair of one of the Swampy orphans.

“In my defense,” The drunkard shrugs as he sits by her, leaning his back on the uncomfortable adobe wall they are resting against. “Your brother didn’t exactly ask me if I had any transferable skills. It’s his fault that he assumed I’d have anything to teach these kids other than how to cheat explorers.”

“Thieves,” She corrects. “And I would have hoped, at the very least, that you’d be able to aid me in teaching them reading and writing.”

“I’m from Albion .” Barra points out, gesturing at his freckled face and reddish curls. When the young woman simply gives him some side eye as she crushes a lice between her teeth, he realizes that he’s not talking with the sibling who speaks a dozen languages and whose job is using them to be mean to humans. “There’s no written Albionese.”

“That feels insultingly impractical? How do your people record their history, then? Or keep tallies? Send messages?”

“Old people. Smart people. People who are good at running and have a good brain for memorization.”

“What happens if any of those people die?”

“We got new people. Unlike you guys, most humans tend to produce their own offspring quite often.”

“Find me a human man with the good manners of a Kroxigor and I’ll consider it.”

“Those are some high standards.” Barra laughs. “As he does, he side-eyes the “swampies” as they are taught a lizardman game by the older “xhos.” So far he’s gleaned that the main rule is that one isn’t allowed to touch the ball with feet or hands, and that the winners seem to be the ones to keep it the longest in the air. Thankfully, the version of it the kids are playing is a lot softer than the version their cold-blooded overlords enjoy, with its stone courts and punitive rubber balls. Instead, the kids -all but good old Skewer and Fingerless- play in a field of the city’s never-ending ash with the blown-up bladder of some recent meal. “I do know how to read maps, and how to cheat idiots.”

“Any of these children could traverse the jungle more easily than you, would make for a less attractive meal, too… As for cheating idiots… We keep those in pens, I don’t think they have much you can swindle out of them.”

“A pity…”

“Say that for yourself. I need to find a utility out of you sooner rather than later.”

“Or else?”

“Or else one of the patrol leaders will ask me if they can use you as target practice, and I won’t have any reasons not to say no.” She ruffles the cleaned-up orphan’s hair, slowly saying something to it in saurian, which even Barra is slowly learning scattered words of. Whatever the full phrase is, the child quickly goes off into the game, tagging out another of their fellows for their own inspection for parasites or sores.

That, however, is all interrupted when a great flapping of wings results in the children’s game being stalled. Barra looks up, and finds that the simple hoop of braided sticks being used in the game is now strained under the weight of a massive carrion bird of blue-and-white feathers and a naked head fancier than that of the most expensive chicken in Neuland.

“Seems like your brother is coming over for lunch.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Mh?”

“Look at him , Barra.” The woman points. Indeed, the tall and half-naked frame of the Herald of Pahuax thunders into the ashen plaza at the favela’s center, and while the other young humans quickly start orbiting him…

Well… He is being followed by his usual cadre of saurus and skinks. And that’s never good.

Elma and himself get up soon enough. Meeting him halfway as the siblings exchange a short few words in guttural saurian. Barra catches the words “clothes” and “fast” and already starts filling in the holes himself.

Roland takes not a second to greet them. “Barra, have you ever had contact with the Huetzqui Itz’xa’khanx ?”

“The what?”

“The Fallen Ocean-Ringers… Druchii, dark elves?”

“Fuck me… Uh, no, and what I’ve heard makes me feel lucky for it.” He shudders in remembrance of the horrifying stories heard in his youth, of the horrifying results of the occasional landing of cutters and ravenships on Albion’s western shore.

“I would agree.” Roland nods. “You’ll be useless, then. Remain at my sister’s aid.”

“Uh… Okay…?” Barra accepts, confused and glad in equal parts, as he moves to the side for the Herald to enter one of the cubical houses. A second later, he is ducking, as the oversized vulture flaps its way a hair’s width over him, perching itself on the building’s flat corner-roof.

“Can you at least tell me what is going on?”

“Messengers have started arriving from the Coast of Squalls!” Roland disappears into the darkness. “The Dark Ones are raiding en-force, I am being sent forward alongside Pahuax’s armies to put a stop to them.”

“Damned be the gods…” Barra grimaces. “Good luck, then!” He shouts out as he is left standing there with nothing to do.

“You are going to need it, you mad slave…”.

Somewhere in the Jungles of Pahualaxa, Isthmus of Lustria​

5th of Kornskurðarmánuður, 2545 VR // 40.0.9.15.8 2 Lamat 1 Yax​

Things explode quickly between the two of them. By the time Torfi catches up to the riverside, the ever-crafty witch has already started enacting a breakneck plan. For all of Lustria’s vegetative dangers, lianas do come in extremely handy -as long as you don’t end up grabbing a vipervine or a grasping creeper, that is- when one is in dire need of a ready-made rope. As such, Torfi is not surprised to find Njal having pulled one such thick vine from a tree’s branches, having stabbed one if their daggers through it, halfway through doing the motion of swinging it towards the raft, likely hoping that the blade would snag on something well enough to tug.

“Njal! Stop! It could be a-!”

Torfi’s hounds behind to bark as they dig their claws into the soil around him, they are not barking at him, they never would. They are barking at something around them. Some things .

Trap.

The figures that emerge from the treeline don’t rush them, as their cover is broken just soon enough, and three snarling sarlish hounds don’t present the most open of fronts, not with the Skeggialing commanding them brandishing his own spear at them.

Their own, for there are four attackers, are much more crudely made. Torfi’s is a proper steel-tipped weapon, and so are the javelins hanging in a bundle from his back. Two of them seem to have used some kind of sap-soaked twine to affix sharpened stones to their almost-straight sticks, the other two have done the same, but with knives.

Their skin is much more naturally tan than his own, the language in which they threaten him the same as the rafted one’s. They are Estalians of some kind. Marooned Estalians, their clothes are ragged and half-fixed or replaced with random components, one is without footwear, the other three’s is rotted or hole-riddled. Their faces are not gaunt, but there’s not a lick of extra fat on them either.

They threaten him, gesturing at Njal, in their own language. His father had known some Estalian, he doesn’t know a lick of it beyond recognizing the fast-spoken language and its accent. He doesn’t relax a muscle.

“Yes! I got him!” Njal excitedly cheers behind him. “Did you see that, Torfi?”

…

“Torfi? Hey I know you are better but you have to recognize that was some good ai- Oh, Hound’s balls, who are you people? What did I miss?”

“Release my hijo .” The oldest-looking one growls in the imperial language. “You dare interrupt his faithful sacrifice! You offend la Guerrera !” The man threatens, moving forward until Fenix puts a stop to that foolishness with a testing snap of his jaws.

“ ¡TIRA! ¡TIRA DE LA PUTA CUERDA CABRON! ¡SACAME DE ESTE CONDENADO RÍO! ”

“I wouldn’t say that sounds particularly faithfull.” Njal points out, much to Torfi’s worry.

“Njal,” He speaks again in Norscan. “Let go of the rope, I’ll get you a new knife, just-”

“Illusions!” The man spouts, Torfi raíces his spear once more. “Illusions cast by demonios to test our faith and prevent our purification!”

“Daemons, that’s your business, Njal.” Torfi once more switches to New World Norscan. “Don’t test these people, let that one go.”

“Uhhh… About that…” The witch mutters in between huffs of exertion.

The shouting and screaming from behind them subsides as the sound of wooden logs squelching against the mud of the riverbank.

“Oh you bitch…”

“Takes an expert to notice one, uh?” Njal laughs, only to then turn to the man of the hour, leaning over his body as Torfi and his hounds continue to block the agitated “locals.”

“ ¡Hola mi amiguo! ” Najl says in broken Estalian. “ Tuyo padre dice wue tu quieres tragar agua ¿Demonios te hacen fingir? ”

“ S-si! ”

…

“Njal, what is he saying?”

“Uhhh… Sorry for the shitshow. Yeah, guy looks all onboard.” The witch analyses, staring down at the -still tied to the raft- guy. A pretty unimpressive specimen beyond his bloodshot and crazed eyes, his manic smile, and the bleeding sun-shaped carving that covers most of his forehead. Yeah, nothing unusual about that.

“I think these guys are from the Myrmidian Mission, they come to town every once in a while to trade, the Jarlvakt usually beat the shit out of them if they get too preachy.” Njal says as he begins nudging the raft back towards the water, as he does, he observes with fascination as the nameless sacrifice’s eyes roll back into his head, and his desperate pleading begins as whispers, and then transition to throat-shearing cries that are only later deafened by the current pulling him away.

“Why have I never heard about them before?”

“I don’t know, Torfi, maybe because you only leave your kennel when I or your mom literally force you to?”

“Okay… Makes sense.” He accepts, slowly relaxing as the cultists back off, with the “Father” tsk-ing his fellows to follow along the river, staying behind and warily eying the hounds now eager to surround and kill him.

“Now,” Njal claps his hands, switching to reikspiel one final time. “Is your Mission nearby? Would love to hear more about the kind of God that is enough of a big deal to make daemons test his followers like that.” Njal rests his hand on Torfi’s shoulder, gently coaxing him to lower his spear.

And he does, because the glint he sees in the man’s eyes tells him that he is no longer considering a deadly confrontation. No, something much worse is about to happen.

‘We are about to be preached to. Fuck.’

 

Things are finally moving on the Coldhide-Pahuax Front, and both Stefan and Torfi/Njal find quite the notable hurdles along their respective missions, hope ya'll are excited, because we've just reached the halfway marker of Robber Killer, Killer Robber

Translations:

• “¡AYUDA! ¡POR FAVOR! ¡AYUDA! ¡NO QUIERO MORIR!” -> “HELP! PLEASE! HELP! I DON’T WANT TO DIE!”
• “¡DIOSA! ¡PIEDAD! ¡ALGUIEN, LO RUEGO!” -> “GODDESS! MERCY! SOMEONE, I BEG OF YOU!”
• “¡AYUDA! ¡AAAAAAAAH! ¡AYUDA!” -> “HELP! AAAAAAAAH! HELP!”
• “¡JODER! ¡JODER! ¡QUE ALGIEN ME AYUDE JODER!” -> “FUCK! FUCK! SOMEONE HELP FOR FUCK’S SAKE!”
• “¡TIRA! ¡TIRA DE LA PUTA CUERDA CABRON! ¡SACAME DE ESTE CONDENADO RÍO!” -> “PULL! PULL THE FUCKING ROPE YOU CUCKHOLD! GET ME OUT OF THIS DAMNED RIVER!”
• “¡Hola mi amiguo!” (...) “Tuyo padre dice wue tu quieres tragar agua. ¿Demonios te hacen fingir?” -> “Hello mine friend!” (...) “Your father say you want shallow water. Daemons make you fake?”

I hope you enjoyed the story and I honestly appreciate all and any kudos or comments you may be gracious enough to gift me! And in case any of you are interested, here's the link to my Discord server, where I discuss my projects and all are welcome

It would be great if, if you enjoyed the story that is, you took a second of your time to go over to ao3 and left a kudo and a comment over there, since it is my main posting site.

 

Very good reading again. But again, a dreadful lack of lizards

 

W

Worry not, you'll get a lot more lizards in upcoming chapters!

 

Robber Killer, Killer Robber - Part VI: The Sun Boils Blood And Water Both

“It should not be a surprise to readers that celebrations and worship of Söll -be it in e literal sense, by way of personifications, or of gods whose aspects include the fiery sphere- are widespread among the races and cultures of Mallus. Often, but not exclusively, these coincide with the astronomical events that the sun dominates, be they solstices or equinoxes, with events such as eclipses taking on a much less welcome theological nature.

And yet, these “solar cults” are far from uniform. In my own homeland and in the wider southern realms, clashes are common between Myrmidians and Solkanites over whose sun-connected deity is the true torchbearer of the solar flame. Both religions have the misfortune of overlapping in where they are found, and in their far-from-meek natures.

In the Mannesreik, of course, a solar cult can also be found. By no coincidence, it is in the land known as Auld Solland, where a solar god of vengeance is said to once have cleaned off his foes’ blood in the river that now shares its name. This local cult is also not without grating conflict, as ire is easily drawn by any who dare compare the local’s faith to that of -once again- Solkanites.

One can find places where the sun is even more so places as a First among gods. Both Ptra and Asuryan are the chief and supreme father-gods of their respective and terribly ancient pantheons. In frigid Kislev, too, a god of sun and fire known as Dazh is only second to Ursun -and outright premier among the Ungol minority- due to his domain’s inherent opposition to the most deadly aspects of life in the harsh north.

And one could go further beyond, and make mention of the Nipponese, who name their own home islands after the Queen Goddess of the Rising Sun. Or the Lizardmen, who -accounting for their cold-blooded nature- offer great deference to Chotec, a god of fiery energy said to have carried Söll to Mallus between his enormous jaws.”

- The Holiest Days, by Border Prince Scholar Bari of Nicolas.​

The Myrmidian Mission, Somewhere in the Jungles of Pahualaxa, Isthmus of Lustria​

6th of Kornskurðarmánuður, 2545 VR // 40.0.9.15.9 3 Muluk 1 Yax​

Torfi and Njal both stand out in the “white”-walled mission’s kitchen, but if any of the permanent residents are particularly bothered by the presence of the two Norscans, none have vocalized such concerns. The children, at the very least, seem happy enough to play with Torfi’s hounds in the Mission’s inner courtyard while the late-arrivals eat a hearty stew made -in part- with what Torfi recognizes to be the result of the modest vegetable patch that takes up most of that very same courtyard.

“Most of the children look too young, and they looked like they had never seen a dog before when we arrived” He mumbles to Njal as the witch loudly slurps his second bowl of stew. “They had them while already here, and I think we know what must have happened to the teenagers that we should have seen.” He obviously speaks in his native Skeggialing Creole, the Estalians around him don’t really care for it, as they’ve been seeing the two of them use it to maintain privacy ever since they were invited to the mission after agreeing not to interfere in their sacrifice.

“Well,” Njal says as he wipes his lips with the back of his thumb. “If you are going to sacrifice, young blood always has more of a kick. And, come to think of it, I don’t see any of the mutts that arrive at Skeggi aboard the longships last as long as yours do.”

“Thanks.” Torfi smiles, to which Njal wiggles his eyebrows. Still, the houndmaster continues his observations. The “mission” is certainly of a deeply alien build to one as used to longhouses as him. The structure is made mostly of lime-coated stone, and empty of rooms that lead directly into each other with one of the form’s sides being mostly taken up by a Myrmidian Temple. The entirety of it has seen better days. In many places the white lime has cracked away, replaced by sun-baked clay, in others, the stone structure has clearly begun to sink into the soil, shored up by logs. Above himself, in the kitchen’s ceiling, Torfi can tell some of that wood would also be wisely used in replacing very deteriorated rafters.

Quickly enough, however, as the Father -in both senses of the word, as the river-bound sacrifice’s father seems to also be one of the small group’s two priests- starts talking with Njal, Torfi’s mind goes back to the temple.

The structure had clearly been the first and most carefully built one, but even it had gone through damage, and the emptied inside had made him guess that either the “Children of the Setting Sun” had failed to outfit it before the realities of Lustria had set in… Or they had repurposed them after the assertion of said reality.

Only one decoration had remained in the massive back wall of it. A gold-colored spear hanging from the wall behind the stone altar, in front of it a shield too large to be anything but ceremonial, its chipped paint nonetheless showing a red sky and sun setting into the green land.

Icon of the Myrmidian Mission.​

Observations like that one, or the fact that so many of the mission’s inhabitants seemed to have their skins either visibly sun-burnt or peeling as the result of a recent sunburn, had really kept him sane during the afternoon-long sermon he and Njal had been subjected to right after their arrival.

‘If I have to hear another word of a Goddess who fucked off into the Sunset Lands, or how it’s her children’s duty to show all the light of her majesty, I’ll just lather myself with tallow and feed myself to the hounds.’ He recollects with a shudder, the comedic mental image of one of the sunburnt and malnourished cultists trying to convert a Dark Elf Reaver or a Vestri-Fimir not being enough to fully make up for the mental exhaustion. At the very least, they all seemed happy enough to host travelers as long as ears were lent, Njal and Torfi aren’t even the sole non-Estalians currently using one of the many empty rooms in the mission.

Still, the children’s laughing brings his eyes back to the window into the courtyard. The boys and girls have climbed up some kind of well with a metal armature built into it, to avoid his hound’s fang-less chasing. The rows of garden soil that make up the rest of the modest space… The plants growing -and failing to grow on them- are all alien to him. Certainly none of the maize or gourds that often get sold to Skeggi by other settlements, no syrup-bearing canes or the unassuming tuber-producers. Instead, all the plants he sees look foreign to him, their leaves and fruits of shapes and colors he doesn’t have names for.

They are Old World crops.

That, if the deteriorating mission or the filicidal cult hadn’t been enough, clues Torfi into the Mission’s numbered days. No wonder the stew he’s eating is mostly mean and traded beans. ‘The only reason the Children of the Setting Sun haven’t starved yet is probably that trade with Skeggi Njal mentioned.’

And, of course, there’s also…

“Hey, Njal?” He whispers into the witch’s ear.

“Mh?” Njal answers, not taking his eyes away from the -now vigorously preaching- Father.

“The Daemon they spoke of, have you been able to contact it?”

“Oh, that? There’s not a lick of besvärjelse between these walls, just sun-baked brains.”

…

“They…”

“All made up in their heads, their sun-baked heads. Can’t wait to see what they start coming up with by next year’s dry season.”

“We have to get out of here, tonight.”

“Yup.” Njal’s answer comes with an enlarged grin, as the witch continues to be snared by the Father’s feverish storytelling. The man -or the rest of those eating- hasn’t even noticed that he’s slipped into rapid Estalian, and that the young Skeggialings literally don’t know what he’s talking about.

Forge of Sharp Kristoff, Port Reaver, Settler’s Coast, Isthmus of Lustria​

21th of Erntezeit, 2538 IC // 40.0.9.15.9 3 Muluk 1 Yax​

Sharp Kristoff isn’t a man Pirate King Bastjan Borġ has had much time or need to interact with since he took the throne of the Citadella. Unlike his too-long and argumentative record with Master Shipwright Azzarello, fate seems to have dictated no eventualities -such as the construction and destruction of entire quarters of the city, or the reclamation of saurian ruins- for himself and the Skraeling to clash over. For being one of the few ports into Lustria, and one surrounded by jungle, manpower and access to lumber really has strangled almost all his projects, hasn’t it? But that’s just what Lustria is.

Kristoff, being the master of Port Reaver’s oldest and largest forge, had initially been the best option back when Bastjan had been in need of outfitting his old ships’ crews in ways more sensible to land-locked city-guards, and the man had delivered both blades and what armor had been affordable and on time.

“Man-catchers, your majesty?” The norscan in question asks out loud as he uses a pair of his black-iron tongs to root around the bed of coals under his main forge. The workshop is empty beyond the two of them and the couple of guards posted outside of it.

“I’ve seen in use in some ports of Tilea and the Empire, polearms with a two-pronged head. In some places the prongs would have hooks or levers with a spring, so that it could open when pushed, but not when pulled.” He explains.

Sharp Kristoff takes some time to mull his words over. Some would claim that his name is owed to the quality of the blacksmith’s blades. Others that it is a derogatory reference to a dull mind. The length of time that the answer requires could very well fit either, as throughout the process the man does not stop tracking the weapons he is forging.

“To… Of course, to catch men, pin them…”

“And to pull them off horses, albeit I do not think that’ll be of much use here.”

“Maybe in Skeggi, my king, but not here, no… But… Spears would be faster and cheaper to make, and I know nothing about making springs.”

“The city will only grow more cramped if I can’t get those outer walls finished, I need something my men can handle crowds with that won’t leave the streets strewn with corpses. As for the springs… Just give the prongs hooks like one would a harpoon.”

“And that won’t create corpses?”

“It’ll teach people not to risk getting caught, that’s as good for controlling crowds as making galley-men out of those my men arrest.”

“Well, it’s you paying for them, so you’ll have what you pay for. I’ll have a couple of my apprentices start playing with the idea, will send something for you to give approval for, your majesty.” The man nods in deference. Strangely, Bastjan has come to learn that respect and deference for the “Boar King” seems to much more easily come to people like the tribal Norscans or his subjects from Bretonnia or the Empire, and not his fellow Borderlands or the Tileans and Sartosans.

‘Comes easier for them to live under a monarch, I suppose…’ He thinks to himself.

His shoulders tense as he picks up a sound, that of something heavy thudding down the dirt road that melts into the open-walled forge. The sound is certainly followed by a further commotion.

‘Talking of loyal subjects…’

Bastjan turns around, and has an easy time locating the interruptor. The forge is far from dark, by way of all its fires, and its open plan means that both moonlight and the oil-lamps that dot Port Reaver’s streets -one of his few visible accomplishments- make the burnished metal of Pieter’s gutplate impossible to miss.

“Ah, Maneater Pieter, to what do we owe you your late-night visit?”

“I’m not in the mood for sharpening another one of your chipped cleavers, butcher.”

“I think you know what I’m here for, little piggy.” The ogre walks further into the forge, his filthy and long mustache hanging like a dead octopus’ tentacles.

“I’d rather you state it plainly, ogre.”

“I’m here to eat you, King Borg. Before sunrise, I’ll be having a Tyrant’s banquet in your little castle. Sadly, my men have failed to find an apple to stuff your mouth with.”

“You’d challenge Port Reaver’s Pirate King? You are many things, Pieter, but a captain is not one of them. No man without a fleet can command the Council Rock.”

“I don’t care about your rock, your larder of a city will be enough. And I’m sure your council will be happy to hear that, when I tell them I’d rather get payment in kind than in coin.”

“You don’t want to do this, ogre. You have all you want in your corner of the city. My men don’t bother you, and not out of fear.” He side eyes two such King’s Guards, who slowly back off from the gathering crowd of dozens of human Butchers, and no less than six of Pieter’s oversized fellows. “Leave us to our business now, and all will be forgotten tomorrow.”

Making no effort to hide himself, the king walks towards one of the barrels Kristoff -who busies himself by inspecting one of his yellow-hot blades- uses to hold many of his tongs, hooks and other forger’s tools. He grabs hold of a hefty-looking rod, undecorated, its utility obscure by the barrel itself.

“No, I don’t think I will.” The ogre walks closer, brandishing an ogre-sized version of a butcher’s cleaver. It is, indeed, chipped.

“Then, at least answer me one last question. Seems only fair, if you are getting a kingdom and a meal out of me.”

“Ask away, little pig.”

“Colmazio?”

“He sold you for a promise to keep your ships to himself.”

“Disappointing.”

And with that, and the ogre’s next step, Bastjan pulls the metal bar out of the barrel.

The Hog Rod’s snarling and tusked mouth stares up at Pieter’s face. The ogre doesn’t do much other than smirk as he raises his cleaver, clearly assuming the weapon to be some ceremonial baton or sentimentally maintained spear’s pole.

It is neither.

Hog Rod is the result of the adventures of a young adventuring pirate long replaced by a half-failed statesman. A memento from an age in which the idea of robbing a dwarven engineer’s workshop had sounded like a great idea to a pirate king who had neither earned his own ship or nickname yet.

The prototype that he had come across while ranshaking the workshop had obviously piqued his interest. A modified short spear, it’s usually bladed tip replaced by a simple mechanism like those of most firearms. Just one that -instead of having a trigger- was meant to have its black powder ignited with a mechanism of compression.

Bastjan rushes forward and attacks with a well-practiced thrust. Height difference means that the beautifully cast boar’s head impacts the ogre’s body just where his lowest ribs meet the upper edge of if gutplate.

Click comes the satisfying noise.

And, suddenly, Pieter the Butcher’s upper body is engulfed by a flash of explosive flame and a localized cloud of gunsmoke.

All hell breaks loose afterwards.

The doors to the forge’s quarters and storage rooms explode open, dozens of men roaring out at their captain’s very obvious signal, a couple more groups, even if smaller, explode out of other surrounding buildings. They are not dressed in the -some would call gaudy- red and white uniforms of the guard they’ve supposedly become, and brandish none of the weapons the guard are meant to. In their hands are held cutlasses and daggers, axes and flintlock pistols. Dirty weapons, pirates’ weapons, his crew’s weapons.

The perfect weapons for a close quarters ambush.

Pieter’s own butchers don’t sit idly, either, with the forge and its surroundings instantly becoming a messy battlefield. As it all happens, Bastjan also manages to pick up the telltale smell of burning flesh, a glance of him catching the sight of a writing and smoking shape by Kristoff’s feet, the forgemaster's tongs still in hand, one of the heating blades in his hearth suspiciously absent.

Still, he doesn’t lose focus, looking back at the stumbling and dazzled tyrant. Being an ogre, shooting him in the chest is far from a fatal trick, seeing as to how all valuable organs can be found much lower on the man-eater’s belly, but the ogre is discombobulated nonetheless.

And he stays as such for long enough for Bastjan to retrieve the hatchet hanging from his belt-sash. With a brutal cut, Pieter’s cleaver-holding hand is suddenly much less safely attached to his arm.

“WHO’S THE LITTLE SQUEALING PIGLET NOW, UH?!” The Boar King bellows.

And from a nearby roof, the lithe messenger watches it all, like the spying sparrow he is.

The Xlaxgor Pools, Coast of Squalls, Isthmus of Lustria
67th Day of Despair, 238th Year of the Age of Vengance // 40.0.9.15.10 4 Ok 3 Yax​

Davara sits upon the tree stump, her healthy arm grabbing onto its rot-softened bark with enough force to carve half moons into it with her nails.

Her face remains looking forward, emotionless, unflinching. One may assume that Davara Coldhide merely observing her enslaved labourers as they remove every last piece of available gold and other fineries from the corpses of the enemy host’s slain, the massive blue-scaled corpses, many half-submerged in the pools, creating an eerie landscape amongst the collage of hundreds of brackish ponds.

Meanwhile, all she can feel coming from the left right side of her body -from the tip of her arm to her hip- is a cold numbness. Cold One’s slime. Her own forces include no riders of such creatures -as useful as they’d be in Lustria- but the reptile’s slime still has its uses. After all, its original use may have been that of camouflaging a knight’s scent from their carnivorous mounts, but prolonged use had also revealed it to be a powerful numbing agent.

The kind strong enough to -when used as a balm- make it possible for her to stay steady and coherent despite her almost cercenated arm.

The Saurus, one much larger than any she’s previously slain, had almost left her a cripple, its dark-glass lizardman sword cutting cleanly and deeply enough to leave her humerus bone notched.

A wound that deep would have usually entailed unavoidable death in Lustrias infection-carrying air, or even merely by way of the usual shock and blood loss, considering its severity. But she’s Davara Coldhide, and she has access to resources none of her subordinates do. Resources such as the human slave currently stitching the wound closed. A chirurgeon hailing from Araby, an old gift from her father. Davara’s teeth grow clenched, and not because of any pain.

At least, she observes, the strike had landed against the back of her arm as she had been trying to disappear into her guards’ shieldwall. Had it been frontal, it would have severed every last vein and artery in the limb.

Usually, she’d not be relying on the slave so publicly, and instead would call upon her fleet’s beastmaster.

But said beastmaster had not come to do battle, having instead fallen back in his failed attempt to goad Coldhide into marching upon the field she’s now taken without it.

Still, it does her good to remain in view as her gruesome wound is cleaned and sutured. It shows her to be of calm nerve, and fearless of any wannabe usurpers who may interpret her physical impairment as weakness.

Something she currently, sorely, needs to make clear.

The battle had been slogging and harsh, much more than upon the sun-worshiping temple or the great column. Her scouts had reported a loose grouping of Saurus gathered a good few miles inland.

Instinct had told her that such creatures wouldn’t simply patrol the jungles for no reason, not in the way their diminutive serviles would.

She had been… Wrong.

Expecting a temple full of riches, or a settlement ready to be ransacked for enough supplies to extend her raids a few weeks more…

Something -a toad, nothing more- jumps out from a pond nearby, scaring one of the dredging slaves and making one of her soldiers punish the thin human with a powerful kick of his sabaton.

Brackish ponds, empty beyond the fact that a few had been ringed with hewn stone into pools. Nothing more, nothing beyond the dozens of scarred and oversized saurians using them the way she would her porcelain bath.

The beasts had met her forces with furiously and asymmetric mettle, but most damningly? For the first time in her expedition, they had retreated when sheer numbers had started wearing them down with casualties. In the end, her losses much greater, the creatures had undeniably won.

And in exchange?

Water that isn’t even safe to drink from, brackish before, full of Druchii and saurus bodies after.

The chirurgeon mutters something as he bows his head and rubs the sutured cut with a bandage daubed in clear liquid, alcohol that would sting monstrously if her arm were capable of anything more than tingles and shudders.

“Captain Rures.” She speaks up, her second-in-command approaches with a respectful bow as she tsks the human healer away like the nuisance he is. “Have Beastmaster Zoram summoned to my tent as soon as he reaches camp.”

The very fact that she’s indirectly ordering that an encampment be prepared does not get lost in the Captain’s ears. An indirect admission that her forces are too bruised and tired to make the trek back to the much safer fleet before nightfall.

“And.” She looks down on her unarmored and bandaged arm, sports of blood already visible in the wrappings. “Send out all remaining scouts. Recruit more if need be. Whichever one reports the best target will be personally rewarded by me, have the word be spread.

One last battle, one that needs be a resounding and chest-bloating one, for her own life’s shake, if not for her bruised pride. Because if she tries to return to Naggaroth in her current state…?

Her father’s wrath will be the least of her concerns, and that’s if she reaches the Witch Gate before one of her subordinates garrotes her in her sleep.

“As you command, Admiral Coldhide.” The captain answers. Seeing as to how he is not an imbecile, he makes no mention of the fact that none of her original and replacement batches of explorers and scouts survive.

“Have one of the scouts report to the fleet, too. No more food for her.”

Somewhere in the western Jungles of Pahualaxa, Isthmus of Lustria​

40.0.9.15.10 4 Ok 3 Yax​

Sometimes, Roland feels that he’d be practically blind without Tlahui. In fact, he’s quite sure that he’s gotten too used to having the rylok constantly and actively be tracing wide circles above him in the skies, coming down to warn him of anything relevant. Warn him in annoying and ear-nipping ways, but warning nonetheless.

Case in point, had it not been for the carrion bird's warning, the marching column’s stop would have caught him off guard, and despite his nature as Herald of the Mage-Lord of Pahuax, he would have been unable to greet the warband responsible for the stoppage.

As is, and aided by a considerable amount of hissing on the vulture’s part, the Xho’za’khanx has been able to skirt his way around the landscape-dredging path of Pahuax’s army.

The force is not incredibly larger than the one he and Xohpe-Xlte had organized against Swamp Town, but it is certainly more structured and varied in the cohorts that make it up, accounting for the much more clear nature of their efforts.

An army fast enough to intercept the Huetzqui Itz’xa’khanx fleet before they leave for their frigid homeland, yet powerful enough to bite and not let go. Which, for some reason and at the insistence of High Priest Xukto'er, has included him. It’s a surprise, to be sure, as there are no negotiations or diplomatic overtures to be played with the tainted creatures. But it’s not one that has nagged at him beyond one of his skink friends’ theorizing that perhaps their leaders desire for him to look for prospective Xho’za’khanx -perhaps a replacement for Barra- among the slaves the elves are known to always carry around.

But such musings are, again, a waste of time, one that Roland should know to quell as he stands by the haunches of his superior’s mount. For this mission, the emerald-scaled Old Blood Moiak has been chosen, and as the massive spear-wielding Saurus waits -silent, patient and almost sluggish even in his blinks- the contrast against the newcomers could not be greater.

The cohort of saurus warriors scorches its way in a straight line towards the head of the Pahauaxi force, hissing and roaring as the high sun makes their bronze weapons gleam like flame-less fires. If their orange-type scales didn’t give the saurus’ allegiance away, then their jaguar-patterned paints and decorations, or the solar glyphs that decopated their copper implements and armors, easily complete the task.

Cohort of the Copper Sun.
​

“Greetings,” Roland roars out, as is his task for any commander he is made useful to. “Warriors of the Cohort of the Copper Sun!”

“You!” The Spawn Leader at the host’s front roars out, the cuprine decorations branded onto his head crest so wide that they obscure the huffing reptilian’s eyes. “We have heard of you, warriors of the City of Ash! You march for the cravens who defiled Father Chotec’s halls.”

Roland managed not to gasp in surprise as the words leave the saurus’ maw accompanied by the visual distortions usually only seen in the arid landscapes of the western deserts.

It is no wonder, however, as the massive warrior is closely followed by a standard bearer carrying a massive relic of impossibly smooth bronzen metal, gleaming with such perfect reflections that Roland is forced to avert his gaze when the light blinds him. In reverence, many of the host bow towards it.

It is not everyday that one comes to stand before a relic as ancient as the Sun Standard of Chotec. Roland feels well and glad that the cohort’s absent nature during their home temple’s raid means that the relic can be used in razing justice out of the Druchii sails.

“Indeed we do. We march for The Watcher. To muster and set for the defense of the Great Shrine of Sotek, where we expect the foe to strike next.”

The blue-and-orange-scaled cohort do little more than roar and hiss in agreement. With but a few words, Old Blood Moiak has garnered the boons and aid of a Blessed Spawning.

And yet, before the copper-clad force can stand aside and melt -perhaps too literally- into the army’s main body, something else arrives. For once, Tlahui isn’t there to tell Roland in advance. But to be fair, the arrival does fly faster than any vulture ever could.

The terradon rider -both skink and flying reptile painted with the fiery and ashen colors of Pahuax- land carelessly upon an outstretched branch of one of the trees that outline the road they have created with their marching. The wood bends and cracks under their weight, but ultimately does not collapse.

“Huetzqui Itz’xa’khanx ships spotted near the Xlaxgor Pools, heading west!” The scout doesn’t waste a second on introductions or context. His sharp words say all that needs to be said.

‘The Xlaxgor Pools? Do they have mud for brains?’ Roland thinks to himself, remembering the place to be one of pilgrimage for the champions and commanders of the different warbands that patrol the Coast of Squalls. Of all the places to strike when one’s goals are theft, few could be worse than baptismal pools only visited by the best of the best of the warrior caste, a place lacking in formal temples or skink communities.

The troops -both behind and before Roland- below, hiss and rage at the news that the foe may seek to scrap at nothing other than The Spear.

But not all of them.

The massive viridescent frame of Old Blood Moiak does nothing but turn a perfect ninety degrees, and starts marching dead north, pushing the Terradon-holding tree aside as the host’s new marching orders are wordlessly given.

Roland doesn’t instantly follow, however, instinct to fulfill his duties even in the face of hopeless corruption tugging at him.

“You, rider.” The points with his polearm at the aforementioned skink and its squawking mount. “Can you carry one of my weight?”

“Depends on how resistant your pauldrons are.” The Skink jokes in a way that hides professional assurance.

“Take me to the fleet.”

Moments later, Tlahui is -with great offense- dislodged from his shoulder-shaped perch, a terradon’s massive talons digging into the leather strap that usually keeps Roland’s shoulder’s from its talons.

The human barely has a chance to wince, as with a sudden tugging rush, he finds himself flying above the treeline, dead-north. Behind him, an ashen army mechanically reroutes itself in perfect coordination.

 

Looks like this is why you were asking about the pools. Glad to see my suggestion helped you out here!

 

(Warning: This chapter, specifically, contains multiple and heavily descriptive instances of gore.)

Robber Killer, Killer Robber - Part VII: Bleeding Corpses

By the authority conferred upon me by his Imperial Majesty Gerhardt Meister, I hereby give authority and command to Admiral von der Goltz, so that he may dispose of the twelve Wolfships hereby presented to him at the Reiksport, may he mount an expedition that shall thwart and combat any and all efforts by the condemned wastelander separatist Eicher Darien to establish his illegal colony upon the shores of the New World.

To this goal, Admiral von der Goltz is also awarded a letter of marque and reprisal with jurisdiction to 100 miles east of the recognized Lustrian Shores, and full authority to judge and adjudicate the punishment of all found abetting the Darienite efforts.

- Copy of the 1st Lustrian Punitive Order, Rubricated by Sea Lord Alfred von Hopfberg of the Erster Reiksflottenverband, originally published in 1698 IC. ​

Darien’s Folly, Settler’s Coast, Isthmus of Lustria​

9th of Kornskurðarmánuður, 2545 VR // 40.0.9.15.12 6 Eb’ 5 Yax ​

“Well, these ones seem to have done a better job at building their settlement than the last ones… But I still don’t get the weird obsession with ground-level stone. What’s wrong with wooden stilts.” Njal talks in whispers, the side of his face squished against Torfi’s. “I kinda want to ask them why-”

“Shut. Up.” Torfi, being proactive and learning from past mistakes, repositions to only prop himself by one arm, using the other to cover the witch’s mouth. “I thought you said your vision was about some vault-ruins in the middle of the jungle. Not an abandoned settlement.”

“Hmmf yum mthink itf mmabandoned, vhy mmare we being sho mm-quiet?”

“I’ve heard about this place fro… From my father before. People wanting him to guide them here. It’s… It’s not abandoned in the conventional sense of the word.”

“Ohhh, Oh! Is it that place your pa would spook us wi-!”

Torfi’s hand once more clamps around the witch’s mouth, even if his eyes remain trained on the collection of greenery-choked and overgrown buildings.

“Yeah… The… The things here keep the ruins untouched, they know all the old stuff attracts us and the southerners.”

“So the whole ruins are a trap?”

“They all are. Gods, you make it sound as if you’ve never set foot outside of Skeggi before.”

“In my defence, I used to do this with the two of you… Oh fuck… Uhm… Sorry, Torfi.” The witch cuts himself as he realizes what he’s implying about his father.

‘With him around, we didn’t even need to worry about these things. Now we do, because I’m less of a tracker than he was. And I always will be.’ Torfi uncomfortably twists in place to start getting up without betraying their location, on the strange and sprawling edges of the dozens of buildings. “Let's get out of here, alright? the more ground between us and this place we cover before nightfall the better, and that ruin of your dreams can’t be that far, not with how you have been describing it.”

“Ohhh… Uh… Yeah… Let’s, let's find that place, maybe that way I’ll get to learn what’s in those shields, and what it’ll give me for breaking them out.” A strange, uncomfortable look crosses Njal’s face, and is gone moments later. Maybe it’s embarrassment over yet another blind search, or about the callous mention of Torfi’s murdered father, or maybe it’s something else entirely. Torfi doesn’t pry, he’s got his own itches to scratch.

“Brains, I hope, yours seem to have all dribbled out of your ears.” Torfi huffs, gesturing for his hounds to start retreating, he wants to give the Folly -that’s what his father called it, at least- as wide a berth as he can. The very fact that they’ve stumbled across it already dents his morale enough.

“Oh, yeah? Well this brainless idiot is the one of us with gods-gifted visions. And all it cost me was a couple lumps of useless meat.”

“You cut your tits off because you were tired of people calling you a girl, I’m not fully sure burning them on the sacrificial pyre wasn’t an afterthought.”

“Keep talking like that, and next time you have a really embarrassing dream I’ll enter it and record it all.”

“How? You don’t know how to write.”

“Details.” Njal smiles as Torfi offers his hand to help his friend get up, both happy to forget about their respective and recent flounderings. And it’s in that moment, as they both awkwardly look at eachother, their faces barely moving closer to each other…

A glop of something dribbles down onto Njal’s head, freezing them both. It cowlicks his hair down and oozes down his forehead until it makes the witch’s eye twitch and close. The way it bridges down Njal’s eyebrow to his check shows the substance to be runny and watery, only slightly sticky. It is transparent, but not in the same way that water is, with globs of diminutive bubbles and reddish tinges.

It’s…

It is drool .

Both Skeggialings look up at the same time.

The thing registers as some kind of sickly hairless monkey at first in Torfi’s brain, he’s seen plenty injured or diseased amongst the troops he’s hunted. But the limbs are not long enough -even if they are held out and taunt in the way they hold the creature up like a drying skin- but it lacks both a tail or the flat nose of a monkey, its eyes completely swollen and black like a deep sea fish. Its head is too big and…

Humanoid.

The gaunt, pale and hairless thing is a humanoid.

It is what the Folly’s “inhabitants” have become, after hundreds of years of starvation. Missing fingers, toes and the faint scars of bitemarks betray it beyond what is obvious. And so do bones so obvious outlines by papery skin that any mortal man would have succumbed to starvation months ago, let alone centuries.

A draugr.

Neither norscan say a thing even as Torfi’s hounds begin to drool and the ghoul’s joints behind to pop and strain.

They just run.

Somewhere near the Spear of the Gods, Coast of Squalls, Isthmus of Lustria
72th Day of Despair, 238th Year of the Age of Vengance // 40.0.9.15.13 7 Bʼen 6 Yax ​

In a certain way… It reminds Davara of home. Well, home land would be a more indicative word, but the emotion remains nonetheless. So far Lustria has been challenging, perhaps challenging beyond what had been expected. Her fleet has lost mariners to supposedly edible bush meats, infections and fevers have made sure of the deaths of any injured warrior or punished slaves, flora and fauna alike have snagged, snatched and seized at the edges and backs of marching columns. And combat’s toil, the most obvious of all, has pushed her logistics to the point of having had to abandon some of her ships due to a lack of usefulness.

But what hangs before her, dripping into a pool of its own gorish making…

Intent . It shows intent. It is a message. Unmistakably so. And there is only one source that such a message could ever have, in this flesh-rotting continent.

“Slaves reported on it mere minutes ago while seeking lumber for the pit fires. The trail… It wasn’t here when our explorers found the trunk.” Speaks Captain Rures behind her. While her sight remains craned upwards to the grotesquerie, her second-in-command focuses on the small gap between the trees that it very clearly points at, a cleared gap in the choking greenery, as dark as a cave’s entrance.

“I hope they speak the truth, for their own sakes. I would have their heads otherwise, I don’t have much need for explorers anymore.” She declares.

Indeed, a boon of Mathlann himself, clearly impressed by the boldness with which she had struck at the reptiles of the Coast of Squalls, had carried the sails of her few remaining truly limber ships into a sight so bizarre she would have thought the returning messengers insane.

A Spear.

A spear so large that it jutted up the horizon as if the landscape were a slain beast, much taller than her largest ship’s main mast, taller than any seaside cliffs encountered in the region, it’s shaft of petrified wood so thin and sharply angled that it gave the impression that it’d snap and collapse at any moment as it failed just short of scrapping the faint clouds above. A feeling that had only receded when she had seen the hull-sized spear-tip half-buried into the jungle floor, a piece made of a colossal piece of black glass crimped with tons of gold, itself with thousands of jewels embedded into it.

Material the remainder of her slaves are currently focused on peeling and prying away, as they have grown experienced at.

The Spear, as it had simply been named in her father’s nautical charts, has stood out as much as the symbolic sea-monsters that had marked the southern continent’s most dangerous waters. She is far from the first to find it, visible as far as a dozen nautical miles away with a Druchii's eyes.

But she, Davara Coldhide, will be the first to plunder its worth. The first of her kind to ever set foot in what may be the last of Lustria’s virginal coastal monuments. At the very least, the first one to break such a record in centuries.

That is… If she deals appropriately with the message left for her.

“They left most of his armor in, have you located his company?” She speaks up once more.

“I have, he was part of the darkshard contingent aboard the Hollow Claw . Preliminary interrogations are consistent but not finalized, he commandeered one of the female slaves and dragged her off to the forestry an hour ago.”

“That’s above his rank to do.”

“Indeed, although… I’ll take the liberty to assume that punishment is not within our purview anymore, Admiral.”

“Indeed.” She takes a step back as another chunk of gore -a few meters of intestine, droops off the mutilated corpse.

It’s held up by vines, the thick lianas clearly pulled and tied in a position that makes the corpse seem as if it were inviting them to enter the aforementioned trail with open arms. Beyond that… The torso seems to have simply been pried open and rummaged through, shredding and pulling organs out in search for something, while the limbs and back seem to be untouched, if inevitably splattered with blood and pulled taunt enough to remind her of the dull pain she herself feels as her arm slowly -too slowly for her tastes, too fast for the prying eyes of her captains- recovers its connection to the rest of her nerves.

A stump is where the head should be, with native carrion birds already perched on the shoulder and pecking at it. The lack of blood trails coming down the edge of it implies a post-mortem beheading, but the slight smell of cooked flesh and the charcoal that blackens the birds’ beaks points at some unexplainable cauterization. The corpse sways from the canopy, with the occasional gusset of wind or fluttering of wings making it swing enough for some part of the minced torso to fall off.

“Gather my guard. It seems clear that the locals wish to negotiate their ransom.” She speaks plainly, not stating the obvious fact that nothing is to be done about the corpse. What to her is an invitation will be a warning to the reminder of her forces. A reminder to follow her orders and laws. A reminder not to foolishly stray into the jungles.

The Blushing Maiden, Port Reaver, Settler’s Cove, Isthmus of Lustria​

24rd of Erntezeit, 2538 IC // 40.0.9.15.13 7 Bʼen 6 Yax​

If one’s definition of “best” is synonymous with “most popular”, then one could make the case that the Blushing Maiden may very well be Port Reaver’s worst brothel. Case in point, tonight is a night where the ever-clogged city’s whorehouses are as full as they can be, and as hundreds of pirates and mercenaries let go of their already-lose inhibitions against the bodies of the kinds of women and girls -and a not insignificant amount of men and boys- who would be willing to sell their tired bodies beyond the edge of human civilization. And yet, the Blushing Maiden’s bedrooms are as empty as grave-pits, their oil-lamps unused, Martha the Maiden’s usual girls having been sent off with half-a-pay to either ply their trade on their own or enjoy the rare full night of sleep.

Of course, there’s the other definition, the one under which “best” means “highest quality” in which case the Blushing Maiden does wholly meet the definition, but creates even more questions as to why the highest quality brothel in Port Reaver would have its doors and windows shuttered, and why its ground-level tavern would be as dark as it is, home to little more than a dozen men sat around a candle-lit roundtable, entertained by not a single woman fitting of their tastes, no cards or dice -or bets tied to either- between them, just a few earthenware mugs filled with grog.

The men have been silent for a few minutes now, since Martha the Maiden gave them the drinks and privacy their “leader” had paid for, thanking her with removed captain’s hats as one ought to do in the presence of a madame like her.

The one who breaks the silence, however, does not do so in a voluntary way, the old man lets out a sharp cough that ends with the noise of a splatter of phlegm hitting the inside of his dentures, forcing him to turn to the side and noisily and fully spit into the nearest spittoon producing a bell-like noise.

“Tomorrow, then?” Another one of the captains in their meager version of a Council Rock speaks up.

“The audience with the king has already been arranged for, yes.” The man at the table’s head -a metaphorical head, for its an obviously circular piece of furniture- responds, one newly re-elected Captain-in-Chief Philipp Billings answers.

All in all, their session has been rather short, as they all tend to be. Tonight, it has only concerned two votes. The first being Billings’ reelection as Captain-in-Chief of Port Reaver’s formally nameless guild of pirate captains, informally referent to -by those with little hopes on it- as the Lesser Council.

It had been a foregone conclusion, even in their pirate democracy, that Philipp would be unanimously reelected. After all, he’s the father of the very idea, and has for a decade been the only man stupid or brave enough to publicly make himself a candidate, and hence also a target to the city’s actual pirate lords. Around him, eleven nameless men have voted in representation of themselves and those either currently at sea or unwilling to even dare join them in the flesh. Fear is made further obvious by how none of them have referred to any others by name, surname or nickname, a thin veneer of deniability.

A total of forty three votes spread across all twelve of them, all in favour of himself or blank abstentions. Forty three ships, everyone under a different captain’s command, easily crushed by any lord intending to do so.

As to the second vote…?

Phillip looks down to the piece of paper held in his hands, upon which he has tallied the votes on his proposal to formally contest the Pirate King’s raised quotas. As would have been the case aboard a ship, the decision had only needed a simple majority to be approved. He’s spent Manann-knows how much time and coin convincing and bribing his way to assuring a winning vote.

Twenty two ayes, nineteen nays, two abstentions. A razor-thin margin.

“I have formally sent word that I request parlay with the king at his majesty’s shorterst notice.” He nods to himself, the tradition of allowing audience to any Pirate Captain wanting to meet with the king is an old one, one of the few that no Pirate Kings seem to ever have broken in Port Reaver’s history, even if he’s amongst the very few who ever made use of it. After all, most captains would rather carry their affairs out amongst equals than involve the city’s master. “Our demands for fair tithing will be pressed, and so will the consequences of refusal to negotiate based on th-” He continues speaking, but not for much longer before an offended voice makes itself heard.

“Don’t use that word, tithing, that’s a tenth, he’ll claim that-!” One of the representative pirates speaks up, being interrupted by another, who complains over the statement of the obvious. “He’s a boar, not a snake. He knows we demand he steal less from us!”

Before an argument can start -one of the few affairs that the captains are actually keen to raise words about- Phillip intervenes.

“Peace, peace!” He slams his saber’s pommel into the table’s underside, rattling it. “Our specific and clear demands before King Borġ will be placed, and so will the consequences of them not being met.”

The captains grow silent yet again, at his mention of the reason why they are as scared as children. Why the vote has been so challenging. The fact that there could be consequences. Usually, they would be glad to let him run his mouth and risk his neck dealing with the lords and king. But in this case, if the king doesn’t agree to their demands, it will mean at best a boycott that will likely see half of them breaking ranks and the other half abandoning Port Reaver, and at worst will mean throwing in their lot with the coup currently being organized by Favieres and his ilk.

Pirates, by nature, are not actual risk takers. They live their lives and accumulate their wealth mainly thanks to an ability to find soft targets and look more threatening than any given vessel actually is.

“On those consequences…” Another “nameless” captain speaks up. “I have heard rumours, the shipless… They speak of a contact among the king’s guard, a man willing to break ranks with the King’s witless measures.”

“Have you viable contact with this man?” Philipp questions. “It would be good to establish it as soon as possible, the fuse is being lit tomorrow, after all.”

“I will have one of my men arrange for us to meet him in the next election.”

Phillipp can’t help but feel curious, as to the kind of man who would be willing to betray Bastjan, especially considering how disproportionately well the man treats his ship-ridden crews.

Port Reaver Harbour, Settler’s Cove, Isthmus of Lustria​

25rd of Erntezeit, 2538 IC // 40.0.9.15.14 8 Ix 5 Yax​

The King of Port Reaver doesn’t look away or wince as the shredded corpse of one Colmazio the Pigbarter is pulled up from its third and final round of keelhauling by way of the ship’s rigging. The sailor pulling at the roping doesn’t stop doing so until the corpse -gushing both blood and saltwater- is left hanging halfway up the main mast of the Sea Swine for all of Port Reaver Harbour to see.

It’s not often that Bastjan gets to walk the boards that make up his flagship’s deck, and today isn’t precisely the kind of day that remits celebration, not even the ship’s crew -doubled today, due to the amount of kingsguard hoping to get a close look at the traitor’s demise- and their victorious uproar can aid his mood.

And the men personally loyal to him -a category whose numbers he is not so sure about anymore- are far from the sole onlookers. Port Reaver, thanks to his heavy reliance on prisoners as a source of income, doesn’t see as many executions as it had during his predecessors’ rule, still plenty of murder and mortally-ending street brawls, but only the rare sanctioned death. As such, the harbours are choking with his subjects, satisfied with the amount of entertainment his hangmen have given them.

Some, he grimly suspects, may be bothered that he’s chosen to execute the traitor he once called his quartermaster. As brutal as keelhauling is, doing it in the middle of the harbour has deprived them from the chance at a close look at what a body torn by barnacles and scraped against a hull’s underside looks like, at the reddened water and the sharp-toothed fish which now prowl the water, frustrated by the denial to bite into the fast-moving body.

Colmazio has been dead since the first underwater trip around the Sea Swine. Judging by the corpse, his skull had been cracked open by keel. Bastjan… He doesn’t know what to think, or feel about it. Is he glad and alleviated that his oldest friend had only suffered for a few seconds? Or is he frustrated and angered by that same friend’s seemingly illogical yet emotionless betrayal?

The Sea Swine returns him to dry ground soon enough. The body, after all, must be reunited with the rest as decoration for the bridge connecting Re Island with the rest of those it had thrown its lot in with. The very same who had served as the eye-grabbing spectacle he had surprised the city with.

Twenty hanged men, twice as many flogged -well, being flogged, considering that he had judged forty upon each of the Butcher’s non-headsmen, eighty for each of four ogres- in the distance of the cleared-out plaza of the Grails. The men had been spared only corporal punishment because they had merely been following orders. The ogres, much more proactive in their loyalty to Pieter, had been spared out of pragmatism. Port Reaver’s ogres, after all, are the closest thing his city has to beasts of burden, each one is invaluable, and all those unconnected to the wannabe-tyrant would have readily rebelled against the precedent of being sentenced to death under human laws.

If he focuses, he can hear the screaming of whichever man’s turn is currently ongoing, not fully drowned out by the cheering crowd that parts around himself. Off in the distance, he can see the swaying bodies that hang over the aforementioned bridge, and the much larger one of his failed devourer.

His original plan had been to hang Pieter too, but logistics had made that impossible. The first rope had snapped at the ogre’s weight. On a second attempt, it had been the wooden framing that had failed them, and ten of his men had been forced to wrestle the ogre down. The next attempt -from the Citadella’s gatehouse- had been carried out using a rope commandeered from a ship’s rigging instead, much thicker and sturdier. But the ogre’s neck had turned out to be thick enough that the drop hadn’t snapped it, and that the noose’s tightness had been defeated by the rolls of fat shielding the windpipe from slow and painful asphyxiation.

In the end, he merely redesigned himself to order that the ogre’s plateless gut be speared by the guards at the gatehouse until the body stopped squirming. That, with the method having the unexpected -but not unwelcome- effect of cowing the rest of the ogrish population by way of publicly killing an ogre through their infamous weak point.

All in all…

A tiring, frustrating and messy affair he would have much rather delegated on the hands of his second in command. A second in command whose tattered body is being paraded down the harbour’s length.

“Um, sire?” One of his guards approaches with a short nod. His accent is Bretonnian. Bretonnian men are always a queer bunch when it comes to piracy. Either they rend themselves of their old societal norms and submission, or never fully come to understand peerage or deck-democracy. This one -whose name fails to come to the King’s mental surface- is more on the second group. “The… High… The Abbess, she wants to meet with you. And so does one of the captains.”

“Which one of them?”

“Sir Billings, sire.”

“Invite the Sister to dine with me tonight. The captain can come whenever the wind suits him, as is tradition, but imply I’d much rather his company on the morrow.” He answers, intrigued enough by the usage of such a rusty custom that the idea distracts him from the metallic and salty smell that won’t leave his robes.

“Yes sire.” The guard leaves quickly, and Bastjan ends up once more an untouchable island surrounded by a bloodthirsty current.

Alone. The most alone he’s ever been.

 

Apologies for the delay on today's update, recent irl events threw me for a loop.

The arc's big confrontation is coming soon! And yet, our two main opponents are only going to meet for the first time come next chapter! This was a risky decision on my part, but I feel its also one that makes this plotline quite unique!

I hope you enjoyed the story and I honestly appreciate all and any kudos or comments you may be gracious enough to gift me! And in case any of you are interested, here's the link to my Discord server, where I discuss my projects and all are welcome

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