2nd Opal
Solon, Maiden of the Spear, crusher of zombies and saviour of the halls marched to war today, much in the manner that the greats before her had gone, in cases such as NAV and Highmax. Her spear sisters beat the hide of their shields, and on the ground was strewn the shafts of many spears. A last rite. The last honour afforded to the dead by the living. She continued her march, not pausing, like so many other brave souls before her. The sun glinted on her red hair, making it seem to be fire, embers of ruby hue flickering on her head. Then the doors slammed shut, cutting off our view, and she was in that barren wasteland cleared by NAV, the no man’s land which no zombie dared inhabit. The fortifications were kept by a band of ravenous, undead dogs, the result of some previous overseer’s folly, and I could not get to them. I used a window instead, and this is what I saw.
Across the rolling plains I saw her go, her spear at her side, a line of silver clenched in her gleaming iron-clad hand. Around her there were tall, many fronded plants still glistening in the morning light. She brushed them aside, steely grey eyes fixed on the neat horizon, on that darkling tide which writhed upon the shores of the river, across a microline bridge. The blue of the stone and river contrasted strikingly with that fearsome host, and even from inside the walls we heard the sound of guttural singing, threaded through with much gulping and slopping. The sounds only the decayed can hope to achieve. The noise, what no doubt they thought to be music, crept down my spine in icy rivulets, and I fancied I saw those midnight wings again on the edge of my vision; I shook my head, and they dispersed as if made of morning mist.
Come, O come down deep beneath
The earth there lies a wormy place
Where roots protrude and dead things sleep;
Oh, deep beneath the earthen face!
Solon strode on, weathering the crude singing as if it were a gale and she a single spark flying into the depths of its fury. Her hair burned, though no sun shone upon it. The undead in their masses perked up, straining at the banks, trying to reach her. Grubby, decomposing hands reached across, and fell, flopping, into the flowing rivers. And still she went on, and the dead grinned and gnashed their teeth, all the while gurgling and snorting in a bestial manner.
You come to meet us, ha ha ha,
You come to greet us in our home
Where roots are wound throughout the ground
And light is pale as deathly bone.
Oh, ho ho ho
Ho ho
The river fierce betwixt us flows and writhes
But soon you’ll meet us here at last
Forgetting then your ancient fort
And all you did in times long past.
Oh, come at last to have repast
Beneath the grass and rolling field
Oh come to sleep, then rise again
To find your woe and sorrows healed.
Solon! Solon! Maiden!
Join us here where light has fallen!
This eerie chant echoed up to my ears and brought to mind death and doom, as Solon must surely fail in the face of such a maelstrom. She stopped once, at the foot of the bridge, then leapt across, her spear extended, a deadly dart; a thorn in the side of Ur. Her crutch she also brought, as she could not walk without it, and in the very heart of that midnight tide she whirled and hacked at the dead, no longer singing, but fearful. The crutch hit them resounding blows, and the spear was a line of death which none dared cross. From my vantage point I saw her clear a space, her crutch as much a weapon as her spear. Only Solon, I thought, could make a wound a benefit. I stood, open mouthed, at this display of fighting, of Forumite bravery, which lasted long into the day, the night and the day after. Not even Highmax, gifted though he was, could have beaten her in a fight; such was her unimaginable prowess.
3rd Opal
No zombie dared approach that flaming brand of life. No un-dead beast sank its claws into her. A wall of blackness grew and grew, one not even my eyes could pierce, and all I could see was the gleam of her spear, the flash of her hair. Then all stopped. The dead trembled, as if a leash had been fastened around their necks and tugged. Their moaning subsided, the walls receded, and I could see her again. She was panting, her sweat smearing her face. The old wound of her leg had opened, and blood trickled in red rivers down her crutch. The zombies looked on hungrily, trembled once more, then withdrew. A large circle had opened around her, and then I saw something which shocked me.
From the fetid, stinking mass came a human, tall and gangly, his lank hair plastered on his face. He seemed uncertain, and he glanced from side to side as if worried of the slavering beasts surrounding him, then quickly strode forward. His words carried far, back up to me, as he addressed Solon in booming tones; a safe distance from the undead, I noticed. “Lady! Wielder of the Spear! Maiden! Join our ranks, and you shall be rewarded by my…” He choked, as if the words coming out of him were foreign and disgusting on the tongue “Fair lady. Come, join us!”
Solon looked up between her strands of hair, glaring at this aspect of life before her, and said nothing. Her lips were sealed in a tight, white line of hatred. Her spear glowed like quicksilver, and the man stumbled back at its fury, shielding his eyes. Averting his gaze from the figure of white and red, he turned his head to the side and shouted in. “Lady!” Again his face tightened with distaste, “She will not come!” He then subsided, and stood, and waited. Another human came and stood before the first, this time in a tattered uniform. The uniform of Ur’s highest generals. Solon stayed as she was, not moving, the ring of foul darkness on all sides swaying and moaning as the breeze does in tall, fair trees which stand sentinel on the lowly graves of Man, Elf, and Forumite. From this breathless wheeze came the sound of words, shaped and dropped into the air like stones into a dark, dreary pool. The zombies continued to sway, but began to part in a seam down the middle, a lone figure making its way towards the centre, towards Solon.
“Sssshe comessss, She comessss, she comes to sssteal your sssoul,
Your flesh, she’ll rip, your faccce, she’ll tear-apart
And nooone, can sssave, your petty role
Within this placcce she’ll eat your beating heart!
As this new creature came ever closer the music gained more substance, with less windy, insubstantial noises, and more certainty. The dead roiled around her bubble of calm.
She comes! Her dress is silver, black and fair,
And in her hand she bears a bony rod
That she holds high in fist of steel
Above the ground and grave strewn sod.
The whispering lyrics faded back into the rustling of leaves on the ground and again the zombies grunted and howled. The figure stood before Solon, and as the song had said her dress was black, shot through with threads of silver embroidery. No doubt the takings from some rich noble woman, or perhaps it was her original dress; for yes, the creature was a she, and in her hand she held a sceptre of bone, fashioned crudely into a parody of nobility and royalty. The face was fair, with silver hair to match Solon’s red in intensity, and her high cheekbones gave her face a strange, exotic tilt. But the flesh was rotten, the dress was wrinkled and frayed and her show of power rang false. She had but one eye, a bloody pulp which moved in small, jerking movements. She was one of the dead, but she stood in front of the two generals who flanked her in their faded uniforms. They cringed when she looked upon them, grovelling before her.
Her mouth opened, and a long wheeze came out, a groaning, craking sound reminiscent of the noise made by rusted hinges forced to open. The chin sagged down and hit her chest, barely held to her face by decayed ropes of muscle which lay in red slimy lines across the pearly bone. The creaks changed to half-formed words, and the words into sentences as it began to speak. Its hand clenched the white sceptre as Solon’s clenched her spear.
“I am Glowtours the Queen of Growth! I am the future of this land. Bow now before me, and you may keep your meaningless life; if you will but serve my cause.” Solon stood up straight and spat at her feet, the glob of spittle flying to hit the beast on the leg. The “Queen” trembled with impotent fury, and she raised her staff as if to strike Solon down. Her single eye quivered frantically, and she began to twitch furiously a she lowered the sceptre. “Join me!” She hissed, fury causing her grasp of language to fade. “You will join me in death if not in life! I am all powerful!” Her tone dropped to a sibilant, convincing whisper. “You need not fear death, for my servants” her head jerked sharply to the left and right, indicating the two humans on either side of her. Her hair fell in a curtain, but not silver now-it seemed lank, and strands fell slowly, winding towards the ground-“My servants will raise you again. Ever lasting life, Solon, in which to do good! Join me!”
Solon spoke for the first time, her face twisted in disgust at the being she was addressing. Its silver hair hid the worst of the decay, but she knew it was there. “No.”
A simple word, but it dropped like a pebble into a still, smooth pool. The zombies writhed and howled, baying for blood; none had addressed their mistress as such before, none had dared refuse their queen! The queen trembles once more with barely covered hate and rage. “So be it! You have sealed your own fate!” She cried in a piercing, shrill voice.
The jaw drops low, lower than ever before. Flesh hung like shreds of pale, fleshy worms down the side of her face, and tendons bulged and writhed beneath the thin, waxy skin. It lunged, all pretence at nobility discarded, and at her back and sides her army poured inwards. Solon stood grim faced to meet the tide.
The queen struck, and blood spurted in a sickly fountain, for her back was torn apart. A crunch was heard, and Solon screamed out in pain, falling twitching to the ground. She never again used her legs, and her spine stuck from the flesh on her back like pale, blood slick mountain ridges. Her yells echoed in the meadows of Necrothreat, a shout of stricken woe torn from her throat. The dress of black and silver flowed around her in a dizzying blend, and tears stood out in her eyes. In the mud she cried, the triumphant queen standing over her.
The beast kicked her hand, and her buckler, crutch and spear whirled out of her loose grasp to fall in mud as their mistress did. Solon wailed, the pain insignificant when compared to losing her weapons, and writhed in pain as the dead swarmed around, tearing her flesh in long, gleaming strips and feasting on her body. The sun began to set and lent its ruddy glow to the macabre scene of Solon, maiden fair, lost in a sea of her own blood. For a day they feasted on her flesh, and for a day she clung to the very edge of life, not giving her body up to the darkness that the Queen now seemed to control. No peace. She screamed again as her lung is ruptured, and blood spurted in an oozing line from her scored and scratched chest. Red-stained bile trickled from her mouth to pool on her shredded chest, and the Queen’s mouth, stuck in a rictus grin, was stained crimson. Solon closed her eyes and drifted, dreaming of a land where pain does not exist.
The Forumites were horrified but unable to help; we could only squat and watch, as usual. It churned the bile to see another hero suffer at the hands and claws of such evil, but walls cold and high stood between us and Solon, the sufferer in the mud.
Still, after a day she clung on to life, though her injuries were grave. The Queen herself bit Solon in the hand, the teeth still hard after death neatly slicing through bone and sinew. Solon lost a hand.
Stars filled her closed eyes towards the twilight of the day, and she drifted in comfort at last with NAV, and countless aspects of Former Forumites freed by Highmax’s benevolence. Her body shuddered and rose, but Solon was free, in that place which none bound to Necrothreat can achieve; the Light.
The bells of doom are ringing forth,
The vales and hills are shrouded black;
The hillsides weep in tears of tar
For she is gone and lost, alack!
Her spear was bright beneath the sun
And moon was paled before her shield.
The shadows, chased, were fearful then
Before her fate, alas, was sealed.
The hordes appeared to steal her soul,
Her shield it shone, her spear aglow,
She smote them down, and killed them all
But undefeated was her foe.
The river wept in tears of gold
Beneath the sun and turquoise sky,
And trembling mountains shook and cried;
Their snowy tears were seen on high.
They came again to wreak their wrath
Upon the Maiden, Solon Fair,
So on she fought in light and dark
Where evil dwelt and made its lair.
Before her eyes there flashed the scene
Of youthful days when she did war
In days and times already been
And places lost to ancient lore.
A strike! A hurt! A burning wound,
Her back ablaze was set with pain
And fall she did amongst the dead,
Her muddy face was washed by rain.
A torrent fell, it smote her down
To lie upon that sodden ground,
The drops in eyes became a stream,
Like tears—she cried with ne’er a sound.
Her doom! Her doom it was to die;
But soon she’ll walk inside our hall,
Her spear agleam beside her shield;
The mighty live to never fall!
As Th4DwArfY1 writes the last line of the song sung of Solon, a single, crystalline tear leaks from between his closed eyelids and falls, gleaming, to strike the page; a perfect, sorrow-filled pool on paper. “Another gone,” he moans between clenched teeth. Another soul lost to the armies of Ur.
Poll
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Topic: Necrothreat II - A Fort Cursed by the Gods! (Read 472158 times)