by Sean Rodden
And in the wake of that horrible harbinger came the beast.
Rundul stood alone amidst a chaos of blood and bodies and discarded weapons. His back to the wall of crumbled rock, he leaned heavily on the haft of his axe. His dark hair and beard dripped with blended bloods, one of which was his own now – a deep gash had been opened above his right eye, the skin torn and folded down to reveal the pink-white gleam of bone beneath. He stared down the corridor, his eyes as black as doom and as bleak as despair. There had been defiance in those eyes. Now there was only death.
For against this thing he knew he could not stand.
Forth came the beast, a terrible entity of darkness and of fire and of impossible power. But all Rundul could see of the fiend were two great crimson eyes, massive fissures of malevolent flame suspended in smoke and shadow. The Darad’s heart thudded with such force that his breast ached – for such a thing might move even the boldest of warrior hearts.
And Rundul’s warrior heart was indeed moved. But not by fear. Neither by despair nor by doom. And the death in his eyes was not his own.
Rundul met the beast’s fiery gaze with eyes of cold black ice. Something of a smile tugged at the corners of the Darad’s bewhiskered mouth. And for a moment, a wind of doubt wavered the flames of the fiend’s eye-fire.
Must be warned.
Then, with a speed and agility that belied his bulky build, Rundul spun about, putting his back to the beast, and swung his war-axe against the barricade of broken stone to the fullest extreme of his exceptional strength. Steel met stone with the ringing chime of doom, showering sparks like shards of loosed lightning. The rock was firm and sure. But Daradun steel was unlike any other – as hard as the hands of the people that forged it. And it did not give to granite.
The rock of the netherearth shuddered with the memory of impact, the after-tremors of steel on stone causing dark faults in the walls and the ceiling, creeping covenants of destruction.
The beast surged forward in a fury of flame and darkness.
His weapon wedged deeply and firmly in the rock, Rundul flexed his muscles about his frame like metal lattices and summoned from deep within him the quiescent power of Maiden Earth. From the very core of his soul she rose, true, pure, strong. Instantaneously, Rundul’s flesh became as stone and his bones were as steel. His being was as hard and as perfect as diamond.
Impervious.
The beast charged.
Maiden Earth arisen within him, Rundul sent her forth from himself, through his arm and hand, through the living steel of his war-axe and into the dead stone. The Maiden’s ancient puissance poured from him, flooding the red rock with pure, unsullied power.
Power.
Life.
The essence of Maiden Earth was life, and she was the fundamental foundation of each Darad’s being, of each Darad’s existence. It was this elemental quintessence that Rundul sent into the stone, altruistically expending his inner force, his spirit, his very life. Rundul’s soul beseeched the stone – stone long accursed, long spoiled, long dead – to remember Maiden Earth, to remember her, remember her.
Remember.
The stone remembered. Remembered. And revered.
Alive once more, the rock rose to respond to the call of Maiden Earth and to the selfless sacrifice of the Darad that served her. As Rundul willed forth more and more of his inner being, of his own self, the rock rumbled with a righteous rage too long pent, too long fettered. Alive, awake, and angry. The rock of the vaguely vaulted ceiling pulsed once, twice, like the pounding of a great concave heart. The stone beat with energy, with force, with life.
With Rundul’s life.
Thmm-thmmp.
At every beat of the stone heart, the cracks in the rock multiplied, widened, spread, deepened.
Thmm-thmmp.
Great chunks of granite fell to the floor. In the distance, Unmen shrieked with sudden terror. The corridor quaked.
Thmm-thmmp.
The darkness hove. Rock rained from above. The beast aborted its charge, its blazing gaze cast upward. The flaming eyes swelled in sudden comprehension. A roar of rage burst from the behemoth’s breast, and in fury and frustration it hurled a massive iron mace at the Darad’s exposed back.
Thmm-thump.
And as Rundul’s Maiden-armoured back absorbed the impact of Hell-wrought iron, his own roar thundered from his throat, rose into the rippling rock, beseeching the Maiden bestow upon him one final boon.
Thmm.
Silence.
Stillness.
An instant in time and space of precise and precious peace.
And then the earth exploded.
RUN!!!
Rundul was on the marge of unconsciousness when the word ripped into his mind as would a gleaming dagger down black canvas. The darkness in him parted, peeled away. Acuity, lucidity instantly returned.
He registered and recognized grave injuries to his form other than that which marred his brow. Something had torn in the flesh of his left thigh. His right arm was limp and lifeless. And most grievous of all was the wound on his back where the fiend’s monstrous mace had ruptured leather and inrinil to smite his Maiden-hardened body beneath and brand him with a great blue-black mark of shame. Rundul could feel the bruise spreading as swiftly and as surely as must word of his disgrace.
Fatigue battered at Rundul’s will with fists of doubt. He had exhausted the entirety of the essence of Maiden Earth that had been in him, all that had been his to call forth and command. He had spent all but the infinitesimal spark that defined life and defied death. That light he had not doused. And though Maiden Earth had shielded him, and in answer to his plea had raised him up through the rubble of blasted stone, her power was finite, and she had faltered and failed fully five feet below the earth’s surface.
There Rundul remained, his prostrate form encased in a sarcophagus of shattered stone.
Rundul had realized the risk, had considered the consequences. He had accepted them. And now the weight of those consequences lay in the form of tons of collapsed rock and earth slowly settling upon him, driving his breastbone in upon itself with each laboured breath, with each passing second.
The spark within him flickered dubiously.
But Rundul’s heart yet beat and his fires yet burned. His left hand yet gripped his war-axe. And he yet had terrible tidings to bear.
Must.
Be.
Warned.
Somewhere at the western edge of the Bloodshards, freshly shattered stone stirred. Something struggled for the surface with extravagant strengths of purpose and sinew, and neither could be stayed.
As the ebon of deepening night shadowed the land, a great war-axe was fisted through sundered stone into the cool sweetness of open air. The mingled light of moon and star danced on steel. And then, bit by bit, with an expenditure of energy that would fracture a more fragile heart, a dust-drenched Darad emerged from the earth.
Rising slowly to his feet upon the newly broken stone, leaning wearily upon his axe, Rundul of Axar surveyed his position, considered his condition. He found himself in the middle of a broad concavity of rock and rubble. Blood flowed freely from his forehead. His right arm hung from his shoulder like a dead thing. His left leg protested the weight he compelled it to bear, but held, though moving promised to be slow.
His back burned.
Muttering curses to himself, Rundul climbed to the western rim of the bowl and gazed out upon the night.
Westward the moon was falling, spilling soft white light upon windswept rolling hills. To the south, the terrain flattened to a plain of grass sparkling gently with moonlight on dew. North lay the tundral marshes of Coldmire, drear and dark in descended night. And at his bruised back were the broken ruins of the Bloodshards, desolate and desecrate, a morbid monument to the devastation of war.
Then, amidst that night-mantled maze of shattered stone, a shrill cry of discovery rose into the darkness.
Gazing back into the Bloodshards, Rundul cau
ght flits of shadow, dark flutters of movement in the distance. Myriad voices of malice and malevolence barked in answer to the initial cry, a hungry chorus of hunters in their hundreds.
Rundul groaned aloud.
The chase was not done.
RUN!!!
Spitting a curse punctuated by bloody sputum, Rundul lumbered as swiftly as his injured leg allowed. Westward. Into the hills. The terrain altered immediately, as broken stone gave way to razor grass and bramble. Despite the presence of vegetation, the eldritch essence of the earth had fled that place. The Maiden had long abandoned the Bloodshards and immediate environs. Rundul’s boots beat a carcass overgrown with gorse and grave grass. Abandoned without, expended within. The Warder knew he could neither call upon Maiden Earth to heal his hurts nor bear his message to the uldwar at Raku Ulrun.
He knew he was alone.
Alone, but for his hunters.
And with every laborious stride that Rundul took, the sounds of their pursuit shrieked nearer at his back. His right arm flapped at his side, limp and useless. Blood leaked into his eyes, into his bristling beard. The wound on his back swelled and small scarlet droplets oozed through his blackened skin. His exhaustion was like that of a pit dog forced to fight far past the limits of its stamina. The night seemed to have the physicality of oil, black and thick and viscous. Darkness weighed upon his shoulders and pressed against his progress. As he struggled down the sixth hill, his left leg faltered and he fell, his muscled mass rolling the remaining length of the grade like a bounding boulder.
Rundul regained his feet slowly. His fatigue was become prohibitive and final. He had drained the well of Maiden Earth within him. He had spent his physical strength in bursting free of the red rubble that was to have been his untimely tomb. And he had lost much blood. So much blood.
He was failing.
Rundul hunched heavily on the haft of his axe and gazed through his own blood at the rise of the next hill before him. The hill was higher than the others, and its benighted crown was marked with the blacker shadows of a scattering of immense boulders and great flat shards of stone. There was an import of design in the placement of those stones, a significance Rundul recognized and recalled.
He had been there half a millennium before, had been there when the warding stones were erected by the Daradur after the fall of Mekkoleth on Sark-u-surum. He had been among those who had gathered the corpses of their slain foes upon a broad flat expanse of the plain, layer upon layer of flesh and leather and iron. In little time the mound of the dead had risen higher than those of soil and stone around it, a small mountain of festering, wasted mortality. Innumerous enemy dead – Unmen and Urkroks, gargantuan Graniants, dragons and demons – were deposited there, doused with oil, and burned. The fires of that polluted pyre blazed for seven days and seven nights, the coals and embers smouldering for a dozen more. And when cinder was reduced to ash, and dust returned to dust, the healing had begun.
Green grass had sprouted forth from the black soil, abundant flowers unfolded and bloomed, and life arose where death had been. And then upon the mound’s crown the Daradur erected great grey stones as monuments of remembrance or markers of warning – that neither friend nor foe forget what had been done there, that evil would never prevail over the union of the Guardian Peoples, that the pureness of the Earth was sacrosanct.
And nearly five hundred years thence, the stones still stood.
Fongar ur Piruth. The Teeth of Truth.
Rundul moved toward these grey markers with the shambling gait of the walking dead. Wounded, exhausted, failing, he ascended the hill in slow silence, his blood slicking the grass behind him. He was keenly aware of the swift deterioration of his condition. But his only concern was for the delivery of the message.
Must be warned.
And so he struggled on. On and up.
The gently graded hill was as a sharply raised mountain to the weakening Darad. The howls of his pursuers hammered the hills at his back. In torturous time, he reached the summit and shuffled among the grey teeth of Fongar ur Piruth, seeking sanctuary among those stones of death and defiance.
Sanctuary – or a place to stand.
Rundul knew his condition forbade further flight. He could not continue. He felt a hollow humming through his boots – the earth there was not dead, but dormant, slumbering, a comely maid adrift in the blissful oblivion of deep sleep. Rundul stamped haplessly, but he could not waken her; the power within him to do so was exhausted, spent. His only recourse was to stand and fight and hope for aid. His axe might purchase him a little time. The hill gave him the high ground, the stones some semblance of defense. And if luck and chance and providence would have it, the nightwind might bear the din of battle to friendly ears.
Luck and chance and providence.
Nonsense.
Rundul turned to face the east, his blood-soaked beard become stiff in the turgid chill. The howling of his hunters drew nearer. The Darad gripped his axe as tightly as his waning strength allowed. Fongar ur Piruth was good ground. Despite his exhaustion, he might send a few of his pursuers to share the fate of their ancient forebears before he died.
Let…them…come.
Rundul did not see the hulking shadow detach itself from the stone to his left. He sensed movement in the air too late to avoid the blow of the mighty fist that took him fully in the face. The force and the fury behind that fist sent Rundul sprawling to the ground, his axe flying from his grasp. His nose split open, spewing fresh and precious blood. His head swam in a turbulent blackwater of shadow and darkness. The backs of his eyelids were bedecked with twinkling lights, and in his ears roared rivers of rushing blood.
The assailant knotted a fist in Rundul’s torn tunic, hauling the massive Darad to his feet with extraordinary strength and ease. The night whirled. Rundul felt hot angry breath on his face. He opened his eyes, striving to still the swirl of darkness in his mind. He willed his vision to focus. But all he saw was blood and shadow.
“Why do you run?”
The voice was harsh, guttural, thick with vehemence and accusation, laced with danger and fire. Spittle spattered Rundul’s eyes. He was entirely at the dubious mercy of his attacker. But flares of familiarity spurred the wounded Warder from his swoon, pulled him back from the brink of insensibility. The ruthless roughness of the voice, the power in the fist at his breast, the irresistible sense of peril and rage that emanated like flame from the presence of his assailant – all were known to Rundul. Known and loved.
Dulgar.
Dulgar. Garun-tar. The Wild One.
A Captain of the Wandering Guard, an ancient one of the Firstmade, Dulgar was wrath incarnate, rage and might conjoined and personified in the form of an indomitable Daradun warrior.
Dulgar! Chance, luck and providence! Forgive this fool his doubt!
Rundul’s sight swam into focus. And he immediately wished it had not. The face of his Captain was racked with rage, contorted with contempt. In the midst of a flaming red mane of hair and beard, Dulgar’s lone eye burned with a mad black fire.
“You run!” accused the Wild One, spitting the word with spite and venom. He spun Rundul about. “You fuckin’ run! And your back is marked. Marked! You flee enemy blades. Speak! Explain this shame! Or I’ll kill you right where you fuckin’ stand and regret only that I once considered you a brother.”
Rundul gritted his blood-smeared teeth against the accusation. But Dulgar could not be blamed for his vehemence. The charge was neither false nor unfounded. Rundul had run. His back bore the brand of his disgrace, but the wound to his proud heart ran deeper. Yet it had been pride that had borne Rundul so far from the abomination beneath the Bloodshards. That pride had served him well, and would not fail him now.
“I have seen things,” Rundul hissed into the knotted face of his Captain. “But” – a wave of dizziness took him – “I don’t…don’t have the strength.” He gasped for air. “I need…need you to see. Dulgar. Garun-tar. Can you see?”
Something in Dulgar’s hard face softened. “Fuck you, Rundy.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’,” sighed Rundul. “Look. See inside, brother. See what I have seen.”
Dulgar’s red brows twisted downward. “I don’t fuckin’ like...”
“Look!”
Dulgar looked. Looked upon the memory-tale reflected in the black mirror of Rundul’s eyes. Looked and saw. Saw all that Rundul had seen in the deep places of the earth. Saw all that he had done. Dulgar saw all.
And understood.
“Ah,” grunted the Wild One. Feral light flared in his solitary eye. “Fuck.”
Rundul waited.
“A fuckin’ army, is it?” The Wild One’s lone eye narrowed. “No fuckin’ dwar-Durka?”
Rundul shook his head.
Dulgar glowered. “Fuck. I feel the desperate need to kill some of those ugly fuckin’ bald fuckers.”
Rundul waited once more.
Momentarily, “So you aren’t a total fuckbeard, Rundy,” the red-maned Captain growled gruffly. “I’ll send word to Raku Ulrun.”
Rundul nodded. He expected no apology, and received none.
Dulgar stooped to ground, placing the flat of his hand against the hard dormant earth. He remained there momentarily, motionless – but power pulsed from him into the stone and soil, waking the earth, then streaking westward. When he straightened once more, Dulgar held Rundul’s axe in one hand.
“Done,” the Wild One said lowly. “Drogul’s fucked off up north, but Brully’s been warned.”
Rundul almost smiled. Relief assuaged his heart and soul. His flight had not been futile, had not been in vain. The scars of his back might be less sorely worn. Knowing that he had not failed in his purpose, Rundul might eventually learn to endure his shame.
But Dulgar was not done.