We of Murdermachines... we of Deathgate... We of the deeps, and the darks... We have come upon an ending. Perhaps, I should say,
the ending.
For, you see, the time has come to talk of many things. Of socks, and stones, and voidspawn bile. Of mushrooms, and Gods.
The dwarves of Murdermachines were struck, as one, by a dark force. It was like a fae mood or the possession by otherworldly forces to which many dwarves are prone, but so much greater. As one, their eyes turned downward, and they trudged deeper into the earth.
Ignoring their livestock, their livelihoods, their forges and crafts, their hopes, their dreams, their walls and mines, they came here. Those who could hold picks struck away at the earth like men possessed, chanting a litany in a dark tongue as they did. Those with no tools clawed at the ground with bare hands and fingernails, scratching the walls and floors smooth. Like the craftsmen they were, their work was exquisite; the rough-cut tunnel into the darkness began to look like an opulent corridor as fast as the miners could dig.
They delved. Deeper, and deeper, the mass of Murdermachines denizens behind them, scratching the walls clean and smooth as they dug. Until.
The very first dwarf to step his way into the fiery pit and meet his doom was Shaggard.
Wlerin followed rapidly, as a giant insectoid beast made of solid salt stove his brain in a kick.
Carnage ensued. The dwarves laughed and ran toward their destroyers, throwing down their tools and running to embrace flaming pillars of salt and daemons of wrath and malice.
A monster made of living brine spewed webs of salt through the halls as it climbed the stairs and pursued into the death-shrine the worshippers had carved. It had been stained with the blood of their fingers as they smoothed it with bare hands. Now it was stained with their lifeblood.
Some dwarves did not embrace death, though; true to their natures, they found meaning in death in battle. They found it.
Prosnorkulus earned his title as an Axe Lord before they killed him, beheading one of the Yellow Brutes with his trusty axe. I'd wish him godspeed, but no god would give him a second look now.
A stray guineahen put up a surprising fight against a demon. It died in the end, but it lasted longer than many of its bearded owners.
A demon of fire walked into the shrine, and bathed it in flame and the ecstatic screams of the dying.
Filled with an almighty, unnatural blood fury, Prosnorkulus destroys three more daemons: a salt devil, a yellow brute, and a ghostly steam demon. Finally, however, the brine monsters webs prove too much, and Prosnorkulus dies with blood on his face and a death's-head grin on his face.
Death.
Death.
DEATH.Maxwell Edison runs afoul of the brine monster that claimed victory over Prosnorkulus. It's bearing a cap, possibly taken from Prosnorkulus himself as a trophy, and it seems intent on beating Edison to death with it.
It beats on him, ensuring he's kept safely contained in inescapable daemonsalt webs, for over a full month.
The screams and laughter of the dying echo through the bowels of the earth.
Rage overtakes Dortimus, who picks up his axe and declares that he's coming to abort the entire fortress.
Maxwell, for his part, continues under his gentle-but-scratchy torture.
Recruits show up. They're not immune to the dark possession; they immediately seize weapons and head to the depths.
http://i.imgur.com/cZIqMmF.pngFinally, one of the salt-devils loses patience with Edison's longevity. It strides over to the entangled dwarf and dashes his body against a wall, ending his torment. He dies smiling.
Dortimus, in the end, fails to abort the salt devil and gets his head kicked in.
Raptor, too.
The demons have taken several casualties. Not a majority of their number by far, but impressive for unarmed civilians and deathseekers.
One of the migrant-recruits, one of the last surviving dwarves of Murdermachines, meets its end at the hands of a berserking Thorgrim.
And that was it. In just over a month, Murdermachines crumbled to its end.
Or so they thought.
The bodies of the dwarves lay still, but we were always so much more than bodies, weren't we, brethren? We were servants of a dark God, but when the great AnimaRytak tricked him into taking mortal form, we murdered him like all the others. We killed our God and left his corpse to fester.
We are monsters, and yet, the most monstrous thing of all was yet to be done.
These creatures of the depths. Salt and flame, sulfur and brimstone. They hunger, but for what, they do not understand. And now, we have unleashed them.
The dwarves of Deathgate sacrificed their lives, their souls, their sanity, to say that it could be done. To show that Hell could be tamed. And the attempt claimed us.
Now, look upon us.
Hell survived Deathgate. It survived Murdermachines. And in the end, it will survive everything else.
We murdered our God. We don't need another.
What we always needed were allies.
Allies of great power and number.
Allies powerful enough to make even the voidspawn quiver.
Allies ferocious enough to strike fear into the goblinkin.
Allies vicious enough to burn the foresthomes to charcoal.
Allies who needed only one final piece. A piece we have given them. A way to the surface, yes, but something so much more, something only we can show them.
The dwarves of Murdermachines rose, in shattered bodies and broken pieces, and looked not to the surface but to the stars. Infinite other worlds. New places to conquer. Forever.
Trumpets sounded in the deeps. The Mad Fool rose and cackled, the corpses of all those who had been patients in his hospital joining him, their souls and bodies tainted over time by his presence and now bearing boils and disease. When those boils burst, they dripped the sludgy green ooze we had dubbed the gecko sauce. For Pestilence was something with which we were all too familiar.
Prosnorkulus rose, and screamed to the heavens as the fallen dwarves of the military, past and present, rose from their crypts with him. Over the years, their bodies and souls had learned more of War than any other who had ever lived.
Yuli Vlasi's twin souls, Malach and Minkerrow, rose and snarled, as those claimed by the Forgotten Beasts, through starvation, through tainted meals and loss and misery, joined him. They paused and stopped in the larder, gathering baskets and barrels of their precious egg roasts as they shambled toward the gates. The war that was coming would cause Famine across the land, and they had just the thing to render a permanent cure to that ill.
And finally.
HE rose. AnimaRytak himself, his Void God armor bleached bone-white. The bones of voidspawn, of fallen daemon, of goblinkin and elves and dwarves and humans, of kobolds, and of all those who his brothers had not claimed... they rose, a horrifying host to rival any army ever raised. Joined by daemons of salt and brine, of steam and sulfur, they marched out of the gates of Murdermachines, never to return.
The Dwarves of Murdermachines had realized their destiny at last. Not to be cast down and destroyed by the God they killed. No. No longer to be cast adrift in the void.
The end of all things, all worlds, all life, had come at last.
Armageddon rises.
Author
Topic: Murdermachines - Return of the VoidGod (Deathgate II) (Read 828772 times)