Part IX:Halls of Red
5th of Felsite, 383GrownwatersIn the north-west of Minbazkar, in the Dipped Hills was Grownwaters, the retirement home of Ova the mandrill man. For many a year he had not been seen there, and so the elephant man necromancer Cañar Spiritcoal the Armored Groove of Persuaders and his faithful friend the once-dead goblin, now death hunter, Rin Fisthearts the Robust Flesh of Charring had made it their home for almost a decade now.
The somewhat tattered cloak of the elephant man flapped in the breeze as he sat legs crossed and eyes shut on the ledge overlooking the entry to the burrow-house below. The undead goblin with a hollow stare in his eyes walked to the elephant man with four shambling corpses -- a few of them dragging their rotting entrails behind them -- following him.
“Is it time already?”, the elephant man said without opening his eyes. The goblin nodded.
Cañar, the elephant man, stood up slowly, breathing deeply of the cool wind. He turned to face his companion, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, “I must have been meditating for a long time then... It is easy to lose track of it these days, get caught in deliberation, for time matters not any longer for me.”
Rin, the goblin, stared at Cañar blankly.
“It is a tranquil day. Or perhaps it has been tranquil for some time now... How long? Days? Weeks? Months?”, Cañar said to no one in particular, still deep in his thoughts. “It makes one forget the world around us. All the troubles and burdens of it. All the hate, anger and fighting. All the war. One can almost feel at... Peace.”
The goblin continued to look at the elephant man with his empty gaze. The walking corpses moaned, flies buzzing around them.
“If only Ova were here with us...”, Cañar contemplated with a hint of sadness in his otherwise emotionless features. “I know not where he went and I believe we will not see him ever again. Not alive, at least. Time has passed. So much time that the Prince must have claimed his body. But you and I know that if were to find his remains, we could bring him back...”
Cañar sighed, turned and walked to the wooden stairs leading down from the ledge.
“...But it is not our old companions we have to think about now,” he continued his monologue. “No, it is our mission. To bring peace. It is apparent to me now that it is no use allying ourselves with the fools of Islandfences. They are not a solution. They are a part of the problem: infighting with each other, each trying to be Kadol in place of Kadol. Spending more time with dusty tomes than spreading the mercy of a life after life without strife...”
He looked back at the goblin as he unslung his steel war hammer, Nethlîlar Emlïd, and steel shield.
“If they are not a part of the solution,” Cañar began, “They are part of the problem.”
He took another deep breath. The goblin continued to stare at him with blank eyes, but there was understanding in his expression.
“We must deal with them,” the elephant man said sternly, “Come, let us go.”
Cañar, Rin and the shambling corpses headed north without stopping, for earthly needs such as food, drink or sleep was something they did not need. They passed hamlets of humans, ignoring them, for they had no business with others than the necromancers of the Prestigious Glazes and their minions for now.
Their first stop was at the forest retreat of Fatedmorning in the Forest of Helping. It was one place said to have fallen under the shadow of the necromancers.
The elephant man and his followers marched to a huge lychee tree, named the Tempest of Excavating. There they saw several humans: one on the ground among the tall, dense grass and another or two in the flowering branches of the tree grown by elf magic.
The humans looked terrified when Cañar said calmly, but with a threat in it, that they must lay down their arms.
The humans replied with bolts from their crossbows.
Cañar, Rin and the undead replied by slaughtering each and every human they found in the forest retreat, the dead soon swelling the ranks of the undead.
Through the night the elephant man and Rin, followed by a horde of undead, walked, passing several other forest retreats on their way to the tower of the necromancers. The stars shone bright and bold from the clear sky, casting a bluish white light upon the dead and withered grass that crunched beneath their feet.
Many of the old elven settlements had camps around them, but Cañar decided to let them be for now. Their time would come later.
And peace would be brought to them.
6th of Felsite, 383The sun had began to rise when they saw the spires of Islandfences finally in the south, rising from the barren dead land.
Past dead trees they walked down a slope, following the determined steps of Cañar leading the way.
The elephant man grasped his war hammer tightly in his hands. He was not particularly fond of getting into the excitement and chaos of battle yet again. That is one reason why he had only dealt with the one fallen forest retreat. He hadn't longed for battle, but he knew that if he and Rin were to go up against the tower he needed more followers.
For too long he had thought that the necromancers were the solution, the way to bring peace to the world. No, he understood now that that was not the case. Their goals may have intertwined for a while, but what the necromancers sought was power. Power over life and death. And none from this world should wield such power.
It was the domain of the gods.
But today, today Cañar would strip the necromancers of their power and lay waste to their schemes.
Cañar stood on the ledge surrounded by his twitching and fidgeting mindless undead and with Rin standing behind him. A sudden gust of wind blew from the west, making his cloak flutter like a flag or war banner. Dust swirled around with the breeze, carrying a strong stench of death and decay with it.
He felt a vengeance coursing through his veins. It was strange, for ever since he had read the slabs, he had felt empty and devoid of emotion.
The elephant man raised his war hammer and pointed at the spires of unnatural gray knotted stone rising from the desolate silty fields surrounding the ominous structure. “There it is. Islandfences. This is not the first time I am here, Rin,” Cañar said. “But it will be the last.”
There was a spark of eerie light in the baleful eyes of the goblin, but he said naught.
“This is what we set to do then. A decade or more ago. We strayed from the path,” Cañar glanced at the goblin. “And it was for a purpose, for our quest was misguided -- or, more precisely, we had understood it all wrong.”
He then turned his back to the tower, so he could face the goblin.
“Do you remember Lòr's dream, Rin?”, Cañar asked. Rin was silent for a moment, then nodded.
“It was something I contemplated while meditating.
'There were those who through sacrifice and perseverance stood their ground, raised a wall of shields.' Those words struck me then and they strike me still. What did they mean? Then we thought it was us who would be the
'shields', fending off
'Darkness and Night'. Perhaps we were the shields, and still are... But that matter not, for the dream went on and, according to Lòr,
'There was no curse, no pain, no death behind the shield-wall.' No curse. No pain. No death. Now, tell me Rin, what do you think that means? With all that we have learned since?”
Rin raised his brows and twitched his head.
“No idea?”, Cañar continued. “Well, think of your state. Your current state. You have no curse. You feel no pain. There is no death for you. You fell
'under the sway of the Night.' Yet... Here you are now, made
'whole and good.' You are past the suffering. You are at peace.”
The undead goblin looked at Cañar, not flinching a bit or giving any hint of what he was thinking -- if he was thinking.
“Do you understand?”, the elephant man went on. “We are still the guardians, the shield-bearers of Lòr's dream. We are still on the Quest. But what we must do is not only put an end to the Darkness, we must, too, bring all the living to a state like your's... Or like them.” Cañar waved his hammer at the horde of undead milling about.
“But enough for now. Let us go and put an end to what Kadol set loose upon the world,” he finally concluded.
Cañar stepped inside through the crooked entrance of the tower of Islandfences. It was dark, the air thick and filled with the scent of blood -- old and new -- and rot, but he was familiar with the smell, the large entry hall and many of the winding passages of the necromancers' lair.
What was new were the many mangled and mutilated corpses strewn about the floor, the stones blackened by dried blood or made a slick red with fresh.
Sounds could be heard from many directions further in, echoing around the chambers and halls.
Cañar walked to the little fat human girl with hair flowing all the way to the floor. It was curious that her hair had turned grey, though it still had traces of its original color, chestnut. The child was a ghoul, a plague thrall of Kadol, and had apparently lived a life of unlife for a very long time indeed.
She was playing at the feet of a concave-nosed goblin with protruding red eyes. The goblin -- also a plague thrall -- paid little attention to her, and turned to face the elephant man.
“Who claims the title of Overlord of Islandfences currently?”, Cañar demanded.
“It is a title I hate and abbhor. It has been a plague upon these lands for far too long,” he continued, his voice rising to a boom. “Speak now. Point me to the master and I will put an end to this madness... And then I will give you peace.”
There was no reply. The plague thralls were not the least bit interested in what Cañar had to say, nor were they intimidated by him or the undead horde lumbering behind.
So Cañar crushed and skewered their skulls with his hammer and tusks.
It was something that would happen a lot that day.
Soon the entry hall was littered with even more corpses and the floor was all painted red with a coating of fresh blood.
There were only a couple of Dimpledbronze's Hounds -- abominations with downy feathers and large mandibles, vaguely shaped like boars -- left in the hall, and in the center... In the center there crawled a baby, all smeared in blood, dirt and brain matter.
Cañar hesitated.
He had already killed several plague thrall children. But a mere toddler? Something inside him stirred and stayed his hand for the moment.
...Until he realized that this was no infant. It was an old being in the body of one. Decades of unlife had turned its hair white and it had an animalistic hunger in its eyes.
It was one more abomination created by Kadol.
Cañar walked to it and brought his hammer down in an arc.
The plague thrall was no more.
Cañar and Rin went from room to room, through twisting hallways, up and down narrow stairs, leaving a trail of blood, body parts and heaps of plague thrall corpses behind.
Disturbingly most of the thralls, infected with a ghoulish condition wrought by Kadol, were still children -- or, more precisely, in the bodies of children. It was horrid to think that these poor souls had once been subjected to terrible experiments and unimaginable pain that turned them into these abominations that were neither living, dead nor undead, but something else.
Up in one of the spires the wall was open to the outside, the wind rushing in through the opening and howling in the hall. A human plague thrall child was playing with some old bones next to a steelen table when Cañar came, his gore-drenched war hammer ready to strike, his tusks dripping the blood of his victims.
And soon this thrall and the one further down the hall lay unmoving, too, their skulls caved in by hammer and shield.
Hours passed as the elephant man traveled the halls and chambers of the tower, crushing all in his path.
And finally, when he was certain he had put down everyone in the tower except the overlord, as he returned to the entry hall he saw before him a broad and muscular goblin with the look of a plague thrall. She was dressed in robes of thin leather -- possibly made from the skin of poultry -- and wore a woolen hat ending in a curled point, her long carmine hair flowing from under it in a tangled mess.
This had to be the overlord.
“You!”, Cañar shouted at the goblin. “I am the one who put down Mec Urgedguard not only once, but four times. I have come to put an end to your villainy, to the terror you and your ilk inflict upon this world. I
will slay you -- even if I have to do it a thousand times!”
He charged at the goblin plague thrall.
The overlord did not answer, but turned to move up the stairs. Cañar leapt to her, swinging his hammer down on the goblin's head, crushing it with a mighty crack, spraying blood and brain matter around.
Yet the goblin kept going.
Cañar swung and swung his hammer time and again.
The goblin didn't put up much of a fight and soon lay dead on the stairs, blood flowing down them from the lump of gore that used to be a head.
After the overlord fell to Cañar's onslaught, they left the tower grounds, not bothering to check all the surrounding smaller structures. Cañar knew they were only inhabited by the unintelligent beasts of the necromancers, and when left to fend for themselves, they were not something that needed to be dealt with immediately.
They walked southwards through the Jungle of Consideration, a once verdant forest that was now grey and dead due to the malign influence of the evil magics of Islandfences. A thin mist rose from the barren ground, making the husks of the leafless fruit trees more dreary -- not to mention the rain that poured from the dark grey sky.
Cañar stopped at a slope and gazed southwards. He motioned to Rin, who came to him, pushing himself through the lumbering zombies who dragged along with them.
“It is done fore now,” Cañar began another of his speeches. “Islandfences will not rise for some time after what we did today. Yet, the grasp of Kadol reached far and wide, as we came to know during our first journeys. The Prestigious Glazes has other strongholds and there is bound to be a new overlord...”
Cañar continued peering to the south, and Rin turned to look in the same direction as if wondering what the elephant man was looking at.
“Our work, once again, has only begun,” Cañar continued with a burdened voice. “Will the fighting ever end, I sometimes think. Is this of use? With every step forward the distance to our goal -- to peace -- seems further off. Yet it nears still. We must continue. We have time. We will not grow old nor weary no more. We will see this to an end eventually.”
The elephant man then turned to Rin, “But before we continue on this path, there is something I want to show you... There are...
things that you are unaware of, that happened when you were... Away.”
Cañar turned to walk south down the slope, and once again he motioned Rin.
“Come, Rin. I will take you to a place not far from here and tell you the whole story. The whole truth.”
If Cañar would have looked at Rin at that moment, he would have seen a spark of intense curiosity and questions light up in the death hunter's eyes.
=====
A bit of a check up on what's happening with our elephant man necromancer and Rin.
I didn't clear the surrounding buildings of the tower, because I actually did that, but just as I was about to save I had DF crash to the desktop. So, didn't feel like killing all the beasties again and made up a silly excuse why they left them be after killing all living things in the tower proper.
Also, god damn those undead followers were a pain in the ass. All the time getting in the way in the tower halls.
I hope next update I get a conclusion of this part of Cañar's and Rin's adventures and then I'll hop back to Tanzul and his adventuring group.
Hmm, I probably had something else on my mind I was supposed to write about, but seems like I've forgot it... Ah, well, in any case, hope you enjoyed this sidetracking.
(Edit. Oh yeah, it was rather disturbing that, uh, the vast majority of the undead in the tower were actually plague thrall children... Now I don't know how that happens/what causes it, but elsewhere in the world many of the plague thralls I've seen were also described as being kids.)
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