Urist, a young dwarf, walked out of the ship, weeping with joy. After 3 years of water, water everywhere, after 3 years of sea horrors and after 3 years during which the future of the 4 races was in doubt finally he could rest his feet on ground again. Again he could see fertile soil to farm, high trees and tall mountains to carve, rivers from which water could be drunk , a new start to forget what had happened before.
His past... in a moment when a shiny future should be under his eyes, old memories came back.
He was just above the age in which you are called a child and was helping his grandfather at the forge. Urist was born in a small village on the border of the dwarven land, with his father, mother and grandfather. His grandfather was a skilful metalsmith and the only one in the surrounding area who could build steam machines; Urist was helping him at the forge, fueling it with wood blocks and watching his grandparent skilfully hammering the metal on the anvil like most other days since apprenticeship began, when a loud scream came from the hallway. Soon a peasant, pale with fright entered:" ANTMEN! from the chasm. An army of them came , the army couldn't stop them and they are now killing everyone in the underground rooms. We must run away or we will all die"; said that he ran away, never to be seen again.
Urist's grandfather took his axe and shield from a wall of the forge and put on his chain helm, the only things he kept from the time when he was an axedwarf in the military and defended the fortress against goblins, and told Urist words he would never forget:" Run to your house , warn your mother and run away with her. Your father, my son , is a guard and is fighting the antmen. I have to join him"
"But.. .granddad... you are too old, you must run away with us! And my father. We can't stay here"
The grandfather ,firm in the face but with sadness in the eyes, spoke again:
" Urist, you are still young, but you will a day understand that a dwarf is never too old to swing his axe and fight for his house and for his family. Now go, and save yourself or our sacrifice will be in vain. Go!"
both of them run in the corridor, the grandfather turned left and Urist, crying, went right. It was the last time he saw his grandfather.
Urist ran on the corridors, a road he walked on so many times but never in such an hurry, afraid to see antmen or his parent's corpses after every turn. Finally arrived on the hallway in which there was his house, 4 dwarves, fortress guards, stopped him:
" What are you doing here, boy? go away. antmen are behind us, they swarmed the army at the chasm and invaded the meeting room and the stockpiles. They will soon be here, we are evacuating the area so that we can flood it. I shall be damned if we let them take even one inch of our fortress".
" You can't do that! My mother is there, she was making some new clothes for me. Let me go there and look for her"
" Listen to me: there is nobody there. They are all dead or they ran away. Casualties are very high, and we don't want them to be even higher. We have to go"
"NO!" saying that, Urist tried to sneak past guards, but one of them quickly grabbed him by the arm and started dragging him away toward the exit.
" Stop trying to kill yourself, you will make nobody happy. If your mother is alive, you will meet her outside, but if she isn't... do you really think she would like you to die just because your are looking for her corpse?"
Urist stopped trying to free himself and let the guards drag him. Only a last word, a faint whisper, exited his mount: "mum...".
At the end of the day, only a small part of the dwarves who once lived in the village were safe in the mountains, looking back at the entrance of what was their house, now with a river entering it and antmen swarming out, from the entrance and every hole in the ground. Among them, there were nobody of Urist's relatives. The last person to escape, without an arm and heavily bleeding was Mafol, member of fortress guard and friend of Urist's father. As soon as he saw him, Urist asked him about his family
"I am sorry Urist. Your father was among the first ones to die when antmen attacked. They attacked him from the back... he didn't deserve it. Your grandfather arrived when the battle was already lost; I have never seen somebody fighting in such a way: he arrived swinging his axe, chopped in half tens of enemies and made several of them fall in the chasm, but at the end they were just too many. he fell in the chasm with 5 or 6 of them. After that, we had to retreat and evacuate the fortress. We flooded it, but even tough many of them died, they keep coming, digging their way to surface. it is a disaster. Now... I feel weak. I am bleeding too much. I need a docto--".Saying the last word, he dropped unconscious.
Despite the bad news, Urist couldn't cry anymore, he felt like he already spent all the tears he had and will have; he watched the doctor, luckily alive, taking away Mafol and thought that now he was alone. No family, no house; antmen on one side and harsh mountains on the other. His life could no more be the same.
With the village destroyed, retreat was their only option; after stopping for few minutes to see they started walking toward the eastern peaks, hoping to safely reach the human village on the other side.
It was winter and the mountains were high, very high, and covered by a thick layer of snow; the journey was going to be very hard, nobody would have tried it in normal times but they couldn’t walk on plains or wait for summer and they had to try. Due to their wounds , the freezing temperature , lack of medical herbs and food and due to the thin air , all the dwarves with serious wounds died few days after the group started travelling; only hard stone could be seen there and they had neither the time nor the tools to dig a tomb for them so it was agreed that the corpses would be put in the 2 wagons that could be saved from the antmen. It was proven not to be a wise choice. They weren’t alone in these mountains.
When the dwarves arrived at the top of the first mountain, they saw something beautiful. Freezing, deathly, where few people could live on surface, but indeed it was beautiful: the mountain range went from north to south, its end unseen; the mountains and the valleys were snowy white, forests everywhere but in the highest peaks, eagles flying high in the sky. Even though it meant that the journey would still be long and dangerous, it was much better than the hell they left behind. They decided to camp there, lighting a fire and planting the tents. But they weren’t alone. Not only eagles and peaceful animals lived in there, but also wolves. The corpses of the dead, their blood and meat attracted some packs of wolves that was hunting there. At night, when only a couple of guards were around the fire, dark figures emerged from the woods, behind the trees: tens of wolves, with grey fur and icy and ruthless light blue eyes approached slowly the campfire. the guards, who were as close as possible to the fire to heat themselves in that cold place, couldn’t see them until they attacked. A wolf jumped , biting the first guard in the arm. Despite the surprise and the pain the guard managed to throw the wolf in the fire burning it and he quickly he took his sword and prepared to fight meanwhile the other refugees woke up , and all of them prepared to fight, even though it seemed impossible to survive. Even Urist had to fight, with a knife. They all fought bravely, and wolves died, but wounds kept increasing, and it didn’t take much before they started suffering the first casualties: as brave as they were, most of them had no armour and only a few were skilled warrior . Urist was fighting against a wolf, the biggest one; he slashed it several times, without managing to do any damage, while the wolf wounded him with the claws in the arms and in the chest; now it prepared to land the final hit: it jumped, made Urist fall on the ground blocking him. Urist tried to free himself, pushing the wolf, pulling it, he tried to use the knife but all was in vain, the wolf was too strong and it kept attacking. Finally it decided to bite Urist in the throat, he opened his mouth , Urist already felt to be dead, and closed his eyes. But nothing happened. Opening the eyes again, a crossbow bolt was stuck in wolf’s mouth. And it wasn’t the only one, bolts and arrows landed on several other wolves, and the other ones fled . from the forest a person arrived, a human, followed by many others of their kind and several mules.
“ What was happening there? Who are you, why are you on these mountains? You obviously weren’t prepared for such a journey. If it wasn’t for us, you would all be dead now. We are the human caravan who is travelling to the dwarven village that is past the mountains. We can take you with us.”
“ Don’t. we used to live there, till a week ago, but the antmen suddenly attacked us from the chasm. No defence was possible and most of the village was killed. Of the few hundreds of dwarves who once lived here, we are the only ones left. We must go away from here, take us to east”
“ the antmen… already here. I wouldn’t have thought they were so near. When I got the last news about them they were still far away, on the western edge of the continent. And now they are on our borders… what you said is horrible. The dwarves are excellent warriors, but a village was totally destroyed. Ok, we will go back to the village from which we came. We will take you there, then we will send the news to the capital. The antmen are a danger bigger than we thought”.
The caravan , with the dwarven refugees, travelled and finally arrived at the village, in which the dwarves could rest and heal. Humans were friendly, and life could start again, but how much could it last? Everybody knew about the antmen coming, and the village prepared to escape to a safer place.
The village was relatively safe: on the east there were the human, dwarven and elven lands, and on the west the mountain range extended for many kilometres north and south with height , snow and storms repelling the antmen; also, unlike most dwarven settlement there was no cave river and no chasm from which the enemy could come.
Even though the village was safe for a couple of seasons, it is impossible to say that the antmen didn’t try to keep invading the continent: scouts on the mountain reported stories about antmen climbing the mountain, dying , and then other antmen climbing higher by using previous antmen’s corpses as shelters. Luckily, they probably decided it wasn’t worth the effort and decided instead to expand toward north and south.
But, while during winter nature managed to do what no person on this world could ever do, at last snow melted, and mountains could be easily crossed again. It didn’t take much time for antmen to notice that. a summer morning, just after the harvest of wheat, a unpleasant sight welcomed the peasant to the new day: the top of the mountain was no more green but black, antman black. Where there were once centuries old trees, now only antmen could be seen, and they moved, still far away but coming, destroying everything they could find. Traps were prepared, oxen were attached to carts, food and barrels of water were taken, and they started travelling, again. The last thing they saw , before being too far to see the place where they once lived, was antmen destroying their house, deconstructing them, cutting the trees, the bushes, the animals back in their underground lair.
For Urist it was the second time, but for sure not the last. They could travel eastward, and keep travelling, but antmen were always just a step behind them, ready to kill them as soon as they stopped. During the time the group increased in numbers as several other villages joined them, and such groups became common in all the continent. The whole population was fleeing from an unstoppable enemy.
A day, many figures appeared on the hills in front of them, several thousands, standing still. The group was afraid to see antmen coming down to the hill: if they were in front of them, and behind them, there was no way to escape, and they would all die. All men and childless women took weapons, but a sigh of relief came form them when they saw a mounted person running down toward them. Antmen don’t use horses, they eat them. It was an human, with full chain armour , a steel helm and a sword. It came nearer and stopped just in front of the migrants.
“don’t worry people , we aren’t antmen and we are here to help. Am I wrong or I have met some of you before?”
Few dwarves recognized him, and Urist spoke “are you the merchant who helped us in the mountain, a bit less than 1 year ago?”
“ yes, it is me. And you are the young one that was being eaten by a wolf if memory doesn’t fail.”
Out loud, he started speaking again: “I am here to take news, bad and good. Bad ones before: there are many other groups like your; dwarves, elves and humans are leaving their homes, birdmen are moving eastward. Half of the continent is taken by antmen and hey are always deadlier and faster. They keep growing, and we couldn’t stop them. Yet. Seeing the danger, kings of all nations started sending messengers to each other, and an alliance was made. Here start the good news: an army was raised, the biggest ever seen, and humans, dwarves, elves and even the peaceful birdmen will fight this battle . mages, archers, druids, cavalry , infantry, thousands of each, with the best armours and shields. Being a merchant I know these lands and I was asked to join the army as a scout. I accepted, they pay me well and… how much will my money be worth if everybody dies?.
Back to bad news, a horrible thing happened. A birdman messenger was sent to goblin’s dark fortress to ask them to join the alliance. They live in this continent too, don’t they? Or, better, lived. The messenger found only ruins, wastelands and antmen. For days he explored but the goblins are all dead. Whether it is good or bad, it is up to you, but think at it: for centuries we have fought the goblins, and we know they are strong enemies. And they were totally destroyed in a so little time. The question here is… will we be the next?
I hope not. This army will try to kick antmen back to their nests and to take our land back. If anyone of you want to join it, follow me. We will give you a weapon and armour. Civilians should retreat to the next safe village. Hopefully you will be able to rest there for some time, and then rebuild your houses.” Said that, he started going back to the army, slowly, and many people followed him.
Most of the group, however, restarted walking toward the next village.
As the army got nearer clangour of armours and swords could be heard, the Earth was shacked by thousands of feet coming down together, like an earthquake. From the hill dwarven axedwarves and hammerdwarves in steel plate and weapon came down, human swordsmen and cavalry, with their best chains to protect them, elves with their light bows and armours, given by the strongest trees, champions of all the 3 races wearing armour made of a light blue and supernatural metal, adamantine, from which the prisons of the demons were made. Above them birdmen with smaller bows and leather armour, but with their wings, their most powerful weapon, behind them mages of all the four races, and elven druids, and wagons with supplies for the soldiers: food, water, weapons and armours, even forges ready to be used when needed. All this went down the hill, and kept walking toward a final battle, when the destiny of the world would be decided.
After 2 days’ march, in Harador’s plains the 2 armies finally met, the alliance and the antmen. the antmen didn’t have armour, and used stones and wooden spear as weapons, but their strength was in numbers: their army extended as far as the eyes could see, from one end to the other of the horizon .
And the battle started: antmen charged the first line of the alliance in their blind rage and more kept coming , and coming, climbing the corpses of their deads just to land a hit before getting killed. The alliance kept fighting for hours, then for the whole day: swordsmen, axedwarves , hammerdwarves and human cavalry fought in the first line, retreating as the walls of dead antmen grew, elven bowmen firing their arrows to kill the enemies in the middle of their ranks, mages sending powerful spells toward the background, druids using plants and animals to fight and birdmen dropping arrows, rocks, dwarven explosive bombs or magical fire and ice orbs where it was most needed. Hundreds, thousand of antmen died, and their army was still the same, still as big as the eye can see, their numbers didn’t seem to drop even by one. And night came and went, the alliance fighting at the light of torches , the sky lit by mage’s lightnings and fireballs, the ground burnt by birdmen’s bombs; soldiers were tired, hopes in victory were low, antmen kept coming, but the sun rising on the east welcomed them with a pleasant sight: the hills on the background were finally free, the numbers of antmen were decreasing. Seeing this gave to the army a new energy, they were no more defending but attacking, cutting, impaling or burning the antmen on their way. Soon the antmen started fleeing, taking as many of their corpses as they could, and the cavalry was sent to follow them to their lairs, and to exterminate them. Surprisingly Not many of the alliance died, only a bit more than one hundred out of several thousands, while thousands and thousands of antmen were slaughtered , leaving mountains of corpses, and some of them even captured to be examined by scientists and druids. The soldiers could finally rest, the battle was won, the war was won, and they were finally safe, only thing left to do was entering their nests and killing the ones who survived.
It was during this time that most of the knowledge about antmen was gathered, both because of prisoners and because the lands that fell under antmen’s control could now be explored. Having a decent sized group of antmen to work with, druids and scientists could discover much about them and their society:
first of all, they were organized in a similar way as their smaller cousins, ants; it was a strongly hierarchical society, supposed to have several tiers of command, all controlled by the queen. there is no individual person among them, if we take the queen out: they are like small gears in an huge machine, they are that machine, they live for it, they die for it and they will do anything that is ordered by someone who is above them, blindly following orders. They will even jump into magma , just because the queen or somebody from a upper tier ordered it. Base intelligence of an antman is low, going up with tiers since the upper tiers have to think, but even then it happens only if they are separated from the queen. If the queen can’t give orders, a tier 1 will. If there is not a tier 1 antman, then a tier 2 will take his place and so on, but still following the orders given by the queen. People who studied the antmen can’t agree about what would happen if the oldest queen died. Due to this kind of organization, diplomacy is impossible. Only the queen is believed to be able to communicate to other races.
Third: it was seen that when a big enough group of antmen is separated from the queen without hope to find her again and in suitable environment, then a female antman will become a new queen. This was observed in a sealed underground biome in which experiments about antmen were made. Who saw the queen could describe her only as an abomination, an horrible and disgusting sight. At the beginning, the antman(or, better, antwoman) who will become the queen starts eating more, much more than usual. If there is shortage of food she will eat antmen, who kill themselves in front of her. Then, with the increased food, she starts growing and mutating. She stays on her back, her belly grows abnormally large, several times the size of a normal antman. The head lose every human feature, like the other parts of the body, and collapse backward on the neck, merging with the body ; at the end only a big mouth can be seen, eyes almost disappear and the brain is in a big sack inside the body since the old skull isn’t enough for a queen’s brain. All internal organs grow bigger with the lower body, and get pushed outward , moving the skin as they work. From outside, you can see heartbeat , you can see the stomach and everything else. The skin becomes more thick , change colour to light brown and glands start to secrete a green liquid to protect the queen from temperature. While the body grows, limbs don’t and the queen soon can no more walk. If for some reason the colony must be moved, antmen will carry the queen to the new place. As soon as she is ready, she mates with the males for a whole day, then she starts producing her children, giving birth to 20 antmen up to 2 times a day. At the beginning they are pale maggots, no more than bags of meat with a mouth, but if feeded by the other antmen in about a day they grow limbs and in less than a week they are adult, ready to fight at the queen’s will. If that wasn’t enough, the queen keeps growing, and becomes able to give birth to more antmen, and it is not sure whether there is a limit or she can keep growing forever. If the latter is true, then the antmen queen that rules them from her underground nest in the chasms is probably huge, many meters long and high, giving birth to hundred of children every day, and during the time in which antmen were ignored their number could have increased greatly. Needless to say, before the caged queen could grow more, she was killed, together with all her spawn.
And while all this was discovered on the east, on the west the scouts could finally enter the area conquered by the enemy: Where there were trees, grass, villages , crops and animals, now only a wasteland can be seen, dirt and rock everywhere; once beautiful lakes are drained, rivers no more exist. Birdmen scouts could enter the deepest antmen territory, and there wasn’t even the dirt, only rock, rocks and rock again, the soil layer probably taken down to their home. Everything that once existed in the territory taken by antmen, now is no more there and even if antmen were defeated it would take years, tens of years before these lands could be settled again.
The new informations about the antmen could only lower the morale of the army: how could they know that the queen wouldn’t rise another army? And even if they could easily win, the lands for which they fought, the lands in which many of them used to live, were a wasteland burnt by the sun.
to be continued
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Topic: Antmen Apocalypse - The rise of Golden Vengeance (Read 22136 times)