The mirebeasts were unending, surfacing again and again from the congealing slime that had overrun the city. More were shambling and wading through the muck towards the intruders. And the pack had barely made it two dozen yards beyond the Wall.
Alone, they’d be going no futher.
* * *
Roddick had long ago given up cursing the Saints for his circumstances. Living in a state of near constant terror amongst the werekynd, the human captive's senses had become dulled and his emotions brutalised. He was soaking and hungry, freezing and tired. He no longer thought of the grisly fate that awaited him should one of the man-beast he accompanied snap, nor even of the altogether more summary death should he fall back into the hands of the Protectorate. Only one thing was clear to him now - this was not what he’d expected when he’d first made that run for the edge of the Tanglewild.
He’d abandoned any thoughts of running now. Like all those he accompanied, he knew that one way or another his situation would soon be resolved. The werekynd and the Protectorate were preparing to attack Bilbalo, and it seemed Roddick would be expected to go with them. A battle to the death was the last thing he desired, and yet where else was he to go? The sight of the capital in abject ruin had stunned him into silence, as it had even many of the werekynd. How did he know a similar fate hadn’t already befallen the places he might flee to? Whatever evil lay at the heart of all this, its darkness had covered the land, blotting out the sun and seemingly rendering all hopes of resistance futile. Roddick felt hopeless, but one relief still prevailed.
He was glad the werekynd were still with him, and not against him.
He’d almost panicked when he’d seen Ulthric’s pack depart, alone, towards the Wall. He was certain that if he were left behind the other werekynd of the Great Pack would slaughter him. Thankfully it had quickly emerged that the seer, Venneck, and Thomas were to remain with him. The normally garrulous youth had been silent as death since the sudden appearance of his younger sister. Roddick had posted a few questions about her on their march south, but Thomas had said nothing in reply. His eyes were distant, his mouth set. Roddick had swiftly realised that it was unwise to probe.
Ulthric and the rest of the pack had disappeared over the Wall minutes earlier. Humans and werekynd alike watched the slope of rubble they had ascended, tense, waiting for any sign of their return. Waiting for any hint as to what awaited them all beyond the broken edifice.
Venneck, next to Roddick, went suddenly tense. The red painted seer emitted a low, dog-like whine, and screwed his eyes tight shut. Roddick began to back away, staring at the transfixed seer.
“Keep back,” Thomas said quietly, the first words he’d spoken all day. “He’s having a vision.”
Whilst in Bilbalo Ulthric’s pack died.
Thread's End
“Back!” Ulthric barked, swiping aside another filthy limb. Around him the pack obeyed, dragging muddy and bloody bodies through the sludge towards the rubble of the Wall. The mirebeasts followed, the dirt that was their flesh running and oozing. Ulthric beat them off as he went, always angling his body to keep the things in his frontal arc. They were slugging and yielding, but he dared not let them surround him. Two members of his pack, Thork and Vulfin, had already made that mistake. Vanniken had to bring his mighty war axe to the rescue of the latter, the brutal weapon cleaving mirebeasts apart with each strike. For Thork though the pack was too late – he was caught on the trailing edge of the retreat, a festering wooden splinter driven deep into his thigh by one of the creatures. Ulthric had lunged to his rescue, but the mirebeasts had closed around him, blocking his rout to his stricken pack kin. Thork had fought on, but lame and loosing blood, he’d been overwhelmed by two of the sludge beasts and hauled down, thrashing, into the muck. He hadn’t risen up again.
Ulthric knew they would all die here if they didn’t get out of the city, and fast. The place was a trap, overrun completely by the decaying creatures conjured by the Miremancer’s sorceries. With an army they may be able to make some headway, but a lone pack was doomed.
“Keep going!” he urged his kin. His limbs were burning with exhaustion, strained at having to battle through – and against – the clogging ooze which had choked Bilbalo. It was like moving in slow motion, and the mirebeast’s sluggishness was as nothing to the length of time it was taking the pack to reach the relative safety of the Wall’s rubble.
A swiping talon of moss-encrusted stones raked Ulthric’s arm. The werekynd growled with pain and reciprocated with an axe blade through the trunk of the marsh thing attacking him. The blades of his twin weapons were so clogged with filth by now that they were little better than blunt clubs. The werekynd were having to rely on their specie’s infamous brute strength alone to batter aside their assailants. Ulthric could tell they the rest of the pack was flagging as much as their leader. He could feel his heart hammering fit to burst, and his breath was rasping in his throat. The beast within was confused and angry. The Wall seemed barely any closer than when they had begun their retreat.
They were all going to die here.
Ulthric had learned many lessons over his nine years of pack leadership. One of the most important was that fast decisions saved lives. So now, without pausing to consider the implications of his change of plan, he acted.
“Rally!” he barked. “On me! All of you!”
As Ulthric had learned to think fast, so his pack had learned to obey their leader without question. In one rapid heartbeat their backward motion was checked, and they forged through the mud to cluster about the Pup. Those mirebeasts caught in their path were destroyed, trampled back into the muck. The rest completed their encirclement, trapping the huddled pack at the centre of the ruined street.
Ulthric knew they weren’t going to escape anymore. So they’d do what werekynd did best. They’d fight.
“Shift,” the pack leader ordered.
* * *
Hrothgar had come for Venneck. The aging seer forced his way into the mind of his apprentice with undignified haste. Venneck gasped with pain as the vision trance took him, more suddenly and more powerfully than ever before. Hrothgar didn’t apologise, or give the younger werekynd a moment to steel himself. There was no time.
“My thread is up, Venneck,” he said. The apprentice blinked and glanced about. He’d been spirit walked to the Tanglewild’s heart, to the ancient, split warptree. All was shrouded in mist, and strange shadows loomed all around. Hrothgar’s body was not present in the trance meeting, they Venneck could feel the ancient seer infusing him with understanding.
“Say it is not so master,” he said. “There is so much yet to be done!”
“So much for you to do,” Hrothgar corrected. “And for that I am sorry, Venneck. But we do not choose the time nor the place of our unraveling. I can feel it happening even now.”
“What is your command?” Venneck said, straining for a sign in the eerie gloom. The vision was painfully sharp, yet clouded at the same time. Like a closing door that Hrothgar was desperately seeking to hold open long enough to impart his final message.
“The Miremancers are strong,” the old seer said, his voice a low, strained growl now. “They’re coming. They will be the death of all that is living if they are not stopped.”
“What do you will?” Venneck repeated. His master’s voice seemed to be growing more distant with every breath. The mist was thickening, coiling about the apprentice with ethereal tendrils. A rank stench filled the forest air.
“Save Ulthric,” Hrothgar whispered. “He is moments from falling. Enter the corpse-city, and save him. He will give us the victory, and beyond it a final, lasting peace.”
“The city had fallen,” Venneck said. “We are not enough in number to recover it!” But this time Hrothgar didn’t reply. Abruptly, Venneck realised that he was gone. The thread had come loose of the weave, and fallen. Around him the mist surged, a pallid wall now, rotting, reeking, clawing at him. A demented cackle, half laugh, half the suppuration of t
he marshland, filled the air. And with a great crash, the warptree shattered into ten thousand razored wooden shards. Venneck howled as the storm of splinters engulfed him.
And from Bilbalo, his howl was answered by that of Ulthric’s war pack. The beasts had been loosed.
For the Tanglewild and the Protectorate
Ulthric let the beast go. It was the sign in every battle that a pivotal point had been reached – either victory was almost assured and the final pushed was being made before the true slaughter could begin, or the man-beasts were near defeat. Driven back, cornered, they knew their only hope now was to rely on pure savagery and animal instinct to save the day.
It was very much for the latter reasons that Ulthric permitted a shift. He and his pack had moments to live, but minutes if they let the beast within loose. They couldn’t escape, so their only chance was to live long enough for the allied human and werekynd armies beyond the Wall to realise that they desperately required help.
Those thoughts were the last truly conscious ones Ulthric made. The beast took him, body and soul. He shrieked with the sudden, aching pain of the shift, his body convulsing and shuddering, his flesh splitting and fur bristling. There was a grisly snap, and an instant of wild, adrenaline fueled, panting exhilaration. And then it was one. On all fours, claws and fangs bared, the Pup went for the nearest mirebeast.
His pack followed his example. Animalistic howls, roars and snarls rent the air, and the muck flooding the street churned as the morphed men-beast set upon their adversaries, all pretense of civilization sloughing off in a few terrifying moments of spine-snapping transformation.
If the mirebeasts had been any ordinary foe, they would likely have been terrified into flight at this point, or at the very least momentarily cowed. But the creations of the Miremancers were far from any ordinary foe. They were mud golems, automatons of unthinking matter and dark magic. Bound to their master’s will, they would do the bidding of the three Miremancers until their sorcery-infused forms dissolved. Because of this, they continued to lurch and lunge towards the werekynd without pause.
The two forces met with an audible crack.
Ulthric led the way, howling. His claws raked a mirebeast, then another, and a third. His mind was no longer rational, no longer sane. Instinct ruled him. Instinct was all that could save him. His vision was clouded, grey, and a thumping headache told him of the severity of this shift. The beast was wild, and it wasn’t going to give him up easily. Perhaps it wouldn’t give him up at all.
The mirebeasts shambled on, advancing as relentlessly as the werekynd tore them to pieces. One would disintegrate just in time for another to take its place, and as the seconds ticked by the press around Ulthric and his kin became ever greater. The mirebeasts couldn’t so much as land a blow, for the werekynd were elemental, a blur of fangs and fur coated in a thick layer of muck. But the mirebeasts didn’t need to strike the werekynd down.
They merely needed to bury them.
And inch by inch, like the tide rising upon a muddy flatland, they did just that. Pressing together, congealing, coagulating, forming a literal wall of running muck which pressed in on the werekynd like some vast amoeba, dragging in its prey to be consumed. Ulthric could not stop it, none of them could. They could only delay.
* * *
Venneck lashed out with a bark. His fist connected, and the human who had wandered too close reeled back, barely keeping his footing.
The seer grunted an apology, blinking and unsteady as the trance abruptly left him. Thomas was already at his side, a hand steadying him. The human, Roddick, was mewling with pain and holding a hand up to his bloody nose.
“What did you see?” Thomas asked urgently. Normally he knew that a seer, especially a relatively young one such as Venneck required time to recover from a deep trance. But time was a commodity long used up.
“There’s howling from within the city,” the human boy pressed. “It sounds like Ulthric.”
“He’s in danger,” Venneck confirmed, expression hardening as reality finally and fully reasserted itself. “All of them. We have to attack now, or they are lost.”
“Where’s Novo?” Thomas asked, turning to Roddick. The miserable human shrugged his shoulders dejectedly.
“Here,” said a voice behind Thomas. It was the general himself. He’d been keeping an eye on those Ulthric had left behind, and when he’d seen Venneck go into a rigid trance he’d paced over, subordinates in tow.
“The city, your city, is infected,” Venneck said simply. “We have to attack now. It grows stronger with very moment we delay.We have to attack."
"The Keep," Novo said, nodding. "We'll aim towards the Keep. And put anything in our way to the sword. For the Tanglewild."
Venneck nodded once.
"For the Protectorate."
Unstoppable
“Listen,” Novo said, eyes sweeping his assembled officers. They stared back, wide-eyed. Some grinned with nervous, adrenaline-fuelled anticipation. Novo could feel the same sensation – the blood pumping thrill of imminent battle, driving away despair, banishing fatigue, making even the grimmest odds seem like a simple afternoon’s work. The men around him were soldiers one and all. They’d fought in the bloodiest conflict the Protectorate had ever been involved in. Now, with an enemy to their front, they would not fail him.
“The heavy cavalry will dismount,” the general begun, his men listening on in expectant silence. “Crownell, that’s you. I want your men heading the columns, five deep. We’ll form three, Brandish’s, Vexil’s and Garren’s cohorts. Brandish forming from left to right. Harrow’s will be in reserve. Clear so far?”
“You want skirmishers?” Captain Pellick asked. Novo nodded.
“Yes, send them out now. The main line will advance immediately. Up and over the Wall, boar’s tusk formation, Crownell’s men leading. Let your plate take their hits, and drive in hard. No stopping, for anything. If a column stalls, it’s lost.”
“What’s the objective?” Major Vexil piped up.
“The Keep. If there are any survivors at all, that’s where we’ll find them. If we can secure the Keep we can expand out across the city centre and the Grand Bazaar. If we can take them we’ll have an opportunity to expand to the outer districts, maybe even the Wall itself. Secure the Keep, and we’ve got reason to hope.”
“Are the werekynd still on our side?” Pellick asked slowly. Novo could tell from the expressions on the faces of his other subordinates that it was the question they’d all been thinking.
“We’d best hope so,” was all the general could say. “Let’s move out.”
Trumpets shrilled, shields were hefted, visors lowered and spears shaken. Banners, hanging limp and damp, were carried to the front of the assembling attack formations. As one, with a discipline earned across a dozen battlefields, the Army of the Protectorate stepped forward.
To raise their fallen city.
* * *
“Spread out beyond the Wall,” Vega said, his burning gaze sweeping across his pack leaders. “No clumping, no waiting. Kill anything that resists. For the Tanglewild.”
“Can we shift?” Samni asked, the young pack leader panting with exhilaration.
“Not unless ordered,” Vega snapped back. “We don’t want to start killing humans, yet.”
“It sounds as though your Pup’s already gone,” said Vroktar, one of the older longfangs. He should have known better.
“Don’t speak to me of Ulthric Wereborn,” Vega barked. “Not until this is over. Follow my orders, or a worse fate awaits you than his.”
“What do we expect to find in the city, Vega?” Vroktar went on. “More cowering humans?”
“We’ll just have to find out, won’t we?” Vega said, not deigning to even glare at the longfang anymore. “Forward!”
Their bloodcurdling howls echoing over the encroaching marshland, the werekynd began their advance.
To save a sworn enemy.
* * *
For the brie
fest of moments, Ulthric Wereborn found out what it was like to die.
One of the mirebeasts overcame him. It was a huge thing, a conglomerate of dirt and sewer sludge, shattered masonry and what looked like a protruding tombstone. It had formed from the hacked and crushed remains of its kin, and it fell upon the shifted werekynd like a suffocating avalanche.
Ulthric was subsumed.
The werekynd gasped for breath, snatching at air that wasn’t there anymore. Like a rising tide the sludge dragged him under, and he felt a crushing weigh pressing against his back, grinding him down. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and the beast within panicked. It thrashed and howled, but instead it choked on mud, and Ulthric’s claws clenched instinctively. The tide of decay spun him, around and over, and he found himself gripping onto the object bearing him down to the street’s murky depths – the tombstone.
Werekynd - Beasts of the Tanglewild Page 14