Chapel of Chains Part 2
Catastrophe's Gallery
While the surface of Thunder’s Vale is a state of bedlam, the undercity is an insane asylum and prison mid-riot…
27:30 Vasilios, 14 Moiraios 14389
A runner in the reds of foreign soldiers told the Primus the fighting here would be 'a knife fight in a stagecoach'. The latter was so besotted with the phrase he richly laughed that echoed off the stone shaft with near-perfect harmony and offered the runner to stay for some tea amongst the metal balconies. The tired-looking man in red declined, stating other pressing messages to deliver, and the Primus gave him a cigar and a clap on the back as the haergiothan departed with a salute and a nod.
Every moment he spent in tight formations, cramped spaces, multiple fights, against waves of humanoid biomass that surged and receded with tidal regularity. Such, the lot of the Hob'ghobli-kha'an Infernal Knights of the Order of the Tetsubo defending the central keep of their Arc Royal hosts against what he concluded was an invasion of Tijakim. And his hobgoblins were having a grand old time of it.
The place--the part far above them that the city could see--was called the Morningstar for its resemblance to said weapon. And because of an architectural trick involving a star only seen in the morning and a charming garden on the kaczern he and the Tetsubos liked to take tea at in months anon--probably now soiled from seminal fluids and excrement thanks to the grotesque mutants, priests, and demons occupying the marshaling grounds.
Much of what one would call the 'haft', actually a shaft, of the keep extended underground--far underground, near the base of the saddle of Thunder's Vale. A hollow cylinder of mineral resembling black-and-white marble, lined on the inside with metal balconies, catwalks, gantries, and stairs the way a weapon's haft is lined with metal rings and langettes on the outside. Down the center dropped a beefy metal lattice enjoined to the platforms by scaffolds; it extended down far past the bottom-most catwalk, yet the marble-like shaft had no end they could see, even on the rare occasion nothing misted up, blue and glowing, from the black depths.
The sappers guessed the latticework kept the keep up, and it was by that understanding they worked double-shifts on the metalmongery. When it became clear the attack was a full invasion with a pinpoint goal--one which the Morningstar's underground hub was a key objective--the Primus appraised Lady Bochra at the skydocks and recalled his Tetsubos with her blessing. Now, a plan the two of them chuckled over and which Governor Whalen helped formalize only out of commitment to the bit, they were scrambling to make happen while friends and subordinates died. That was seven days ago--almost a haergiothan week--and most of his losses happened in the mad scramble back to the Morningstar and securing the many-doored shaft from the Tijakim.
Like nails keeping those metal rings on a haft, the circular balconies each bore four evenly-spaced doors which, beyond hallways of variable width and length, opened to the wider underworks of an incredibly ancient city, if the volume gave any hint. The balconies were stepped in close pairs, the doors on one offset to the doors on another, so each pair had eight evenly-spaced doors.
There were eight such pairs, the fighting to hold them all an exciting contest for his eight hundred assorted vassals. There were only about five hundred warriors, the rest being specialists and priestesses. As time went on, the hallways were sealed, the hobgoblins defending them moved to other fights. He passed one such hallway at the topmost platform, currently manned by a lone priestess in practical robes and a black hat, greeting her with a clap on the shoulder. "How fares the spry mikdukan?"
"I'm fine here, their own dead are more than enough to break them and add to the wall," she looked at him with a catlike grey face over her shoulder, closing her eyes and raising a hand. Ahead the hallway bore a cave-in of dead bodies. A handful of degenerates tried crawling over them, only to be grabbed and mangled by reanimated limbs, adding to the grisly fortification.
"Ingenious. You would honor us undertaking the trials," he said, sparing them both the subtle language that he wanted her to join the formal Order of the clan. The mikdukan blushed and resumed her station and he returned to a campaign table with a schematic of the underworks surrounding the keep, a kettle, and some cups.
"Primus, our men on the bottom…" spoke up an adjutant looking over a catwalk wall.
His ears twitched. Whoever built this place used engineering far beyond the ken of the living; the acoustics were near-perfect. "I can hear it. Shore them up with boys from the other doors on that level, no traffic's coming through them." Someone in the corridor-fight behind them shouted in pain. "Armiger Bilguun's lost an eye." He donned a kabuto, grey-toned like the rest of their armor, modified from a style from a part of the world the clan had territory in. "Keep me informed," he said behind him as he walked to the commotion sword in hand.
The adjutant sighed and gave a runner the order. His eyes rolled as he reached for the teapot, and they stopped on his hand grasping for air.
Some more mikdukan under the tutelage of a masked praecantrix--a formal member of the infernal knights dedicated to the rites and ceremonies of the Tetsubos--knelt as they carefully poured with bound-up sleeves odd-smelling substances into ceramic jugs. Their breastplates shone with the tarnish of their reagents, the exact formulae were secrets kept by the priestesses and tied to the sacred rites of initiated knights. The woman in the mask offered him a jug stoppered with cloth bearing a prayer and he declined, telling them to be ready.
"Bilguun!?" he asked as he shoved his way into the formation, a mess of grunting grey plates, blue clothes, and golden silk cords. An affirmative told the Primus that Bilguun was next to him and still alive. Rectangular shields stacked two-high. He knocked on the inside of the shield wall, the men opening their defenses to let their boss through.
In the time the Primus got to know the Arcadians and other haergothians, he came to appreciate their overall appearance; the gods gave them the luminous palette of the beautiful landscape paintings of the clan citadel White Mountain Castle, as opposed to the more uniform coloration of hobgoblins from the far West.
But gods, not the Tijakim.
This one glared with all-black eyes, jaw broken and mouth distended from a mass of finger-width quills where its tongue was. He saw how it fought with this freshly-induced mutation with the quills stuck in his men's shields and armor. Seeing movement, he twitched his arm up, cradling his head, and felt something hot against his other ear. Quills caught in his armor, and he felt the weight of the ones embedded in his helmet.
So he smashed a hot tea kettle on it.
The men whooped in surprise as their commander licked his sword forward and left the screaming mutant's scalded head hanging by some sinew. Lances shot out from either side of the Primus, impaling the thralls on either side of the fallen mutant before retracting.
The Primus stepped forward and braided cords of steel and blood with his sword. The mob in front of him was distracted, either startled back trying to avoid maiming or jostled by those withdrawing. The hobgoblins advanced their shield line, thrusting with lance and sword, crushing necks and skulls of fallen foes as the rear ranks dragged back their injured and honored dead, until the Primus stood at the trough of an inverted wedge that ground the misshapen thralls the harder they pushed.
A moment's lull. "Jin, switch with Bilguun, he can't see on that side." Ah, got it! “Ancestors, it’s tighter than a knife fight in a latrine!” The boys approved. He stepped forward to give the two ghobli on his either side room to switch places, parrying thrusts made with weapons taken from dead Arcadians--a sight he noticed with disquieting increased frequency. The two subordinates pulled him back to his place in the trough as a pair of glowing embers appeared over the mob, far in the back of the hallway past the outer door. "Demon! Get the muskets on the line! Ladies, get ready! We are closing that door!" The men reflexively tightened their shields and stopped striking with their weapons: the more foes still standing, the more the hulking fiend had to push through to get to them.
Moments later, the call came back. The Primus kicked a thrall-leader, raked with his blade, and crouched. The ghobli making the top ranks of shields lowered, covering the front rank. The spray of crude missiles--sling bullets, arrows, quarrels--invited by the shift ended quickly with a roll of thunder, bullets of a wholly different kind flying from the far side of the shaft, over the Tetsubos, to concentrate on the glowing eyes and charcoaled-black body that radiated inner hellfire. The ladies hucked their firebombs next, the Primus demanding they "Advance on the outer door!" He moved ahead, crushing a neck here and a skull there, the inverted wedge inching forward. The thralls they overran lost what little morale they had falling victim to the priestess' firebombs and seeing the infernal knights unaffected through sacred rites by the fires borne of sacred mixtures.
At last they won the far end of the hallway--fifty feet about--and another mob tried to unmake their efforts. But the new attackers were hindered by the fallen demon--an ape-proportioned, animalistic-headed humanoid whose horns would have scraped the twenty-foot high ceiling, skin charred from a dimming inner flame. The door slid out from a slot in the wall, a few priestesses showing initiative rushed forward and prayed a ward to repulse the degenerates from throwing themselves in the door's path. As the door closed--slowly, anxiously--more Tetsubos shifted from the grisly work to the left to pile into pushing the door closed.
Finally, Hubris-Masked-As-Obedient-Initiative found xis strength. The black powder weapons of these tinies nearly killed xim, but xe had a chance to stop the door from closing and reaching in to grab the bladed one. Xe reached with one hand, grabbed the door by the edge and shifted to match xis shoulder with the gap. First xe just had to breathe on them, then he could snatch--
As the demon opened the door a few feet and looked in, it saw the Primus, two priestesses, three shoulder-cannons, and eighteen muskets. The former blew it a kiss. The rest blew it to pieces.
"Lord Primus," asked Bilguun as they withdrew to the shaft, "…wasn't that your sister's favorite kettle?"
A loud sigh. "Yes. I'm fucked."
00:30 Palicas, 15 Moiraios 14389
RUNT'S NECK AND BACK were sore--from spending the previous days accounting for an injury, and from sleeping on her horns wrong to remain concealed under the fragrant bush; just another discomfort she long ago acclimatized to. A knowing in her lizard brain told her it was a little past midnight; shuffling out from the cover of the fallen turret offered a brief glimpse of Tray's string touching the moon's ring which in turn touched the cosmic chain--she always wondered if her knowing informed her surety with celestial bodies, or if her astronomy reinforced her knowing.
She stalked her way to a gate a blue whale wearing a spacious cabin could comfortably fit through. One side of it was one of the monoliths that spat death all over the city and skies for a week. As she passed under the arch every one of the spires came to life and gimbaled; she pictured all of them firing on her as one, collapsing the landing ahead and she falling with millions of tonnes of debris. Instead, they directed their wrath somewhere in the sky. The lights and scope of what she saw reminded her of fireworks—yet greater, older, and mysterious.
Space being a premium in a city built among mountains, even the ramps between terraces were built-up with businesses, homes, schools, and temples (gods of commerce, gates, and determination, of course) In a narrow garden between two hollowed-out mercantile establishments she looked over the edge, getting her bearings of the vista before her.
Before her laid the third, second, and first terraces; beyond that, the vast plains currently churned up in many places by something unfathomably large and malignant and surely meant to keep anyone from escaping out the south. She could barely see the feet of distant mountains in the dark, looming like white shadows, due to the light from the fires still burning. A critical glance showed the source of the continual fires.
Demons.
The fires were more intense the larger the fiend; she was unsure if it was natural for demons to combust when their outer-plane matter interacted with that of the material plane, or if it might have been a foible of the monoliths. She knew very little of them, concerned as she was about her infernal heritage, what she knew revolved around more orderly devils. She scratched and rubbed the bases of her horns; lack of bathing and the ash in the air made them itch. She withdrew her taloned hands, wary of giving herself another sore.
Periodically the sounds of fighting or the howl of a demon would float by; the light of a monolith killing a demon (and anyone close to it) would cast a brief flash over broken rooftops and piles of stone, the sound reaching her a moment later. She guessed a sizable defense still remained underground.
Runt stood back. Some gestures, some murmurs--nothing. Guess she was not floating down the side of the landing. She gazed down the incline as she crossed the town-square sized center of the landing, ringed by narrow buildings hugging the edge and wall to the fourth terrace. To either side of the incline stood single files of buildings, mostly wood in construction--the terrace ramps would have been the last to be built up in Thunder's Vale, when no other space was left. A perfectly-intact financial brokerage next to a temple-bank completely hollowed out when a piece of monolith-shell fell through the roof. A small school missing the façade when a demon took its last flight through the front.
The style of buildings spanning the spectrum of destruction were an even mix of Lidovican and Amortian styles as rendered in wood--evidence of the changing demographics of the city and constant stream of people quitting Lidovica and her neighbors. People attempted to capture the breath of civilization with this construction, but being working-to-upper-middle-class on the inclines, as well as wood structures in limited space, some artless utilitarianism was inevitable and evident: inevitadent.
If the invasion were repelled, what would any new construction look like? Amortian specifically or Arcadian in general, or Lidovican?
01:00 Palicas, 15 Moiraios 14389
Another door shut. No words even necessary, every hobgoblin knew their role: while the Primus and his warriors watched the outer door, sappers quickly rushed in with canvas parcels and began nailing them to the cavern sides; by way of the priestess' spells, several walked on the ceiling and nailed over one such parcel a large basin which they filled with water. In ninety seconds, an arch of parcels was in place, and in one-hundred fifty seconds the priestesses had small paper scrolls glued to them all. The rock here was the stuff typical of the local terrain, unlike the white-and-gray marble-like substance of the keep once they passed the threshold back into the shaft.
As they withdrew to the shaft, he watched the outer door shake from impacts, the wood splintering in the middle, as his men slid closed the final keep door for this floor. These things were curved like the perimeter of the shaft, mounted in some fashion within the wall and doorways. His men heaved it shut, and as it met the edge of the doorway, it fell off whatever rail it was mounted to; a deliberate mechanism to make it as hard as possible to re-open.
In the center of the loose group stood the priestesses and praecantrices; in the center of them stood the eldest among them; muttered prayers floated out her theatrical iron mask while she held in one hand a small paper scroll like those sealed to the parcels, her other hand holding a lit candle. She held the scroll over the candle and everyone heard the ear-biting sound of the outer door's hinges twisting, the ground shaking as the door fell and the call of a colleague of the blown-apart demon. The ink on the priestess's scroll finally caught fire, and being made of the same stuff as the contents of the parcels, flashed with enough intensity the mikdukan pulled her head back and averted her eyes. In sympathy the parcels ignited, and the call became a panic as the creature and its coterie of Tijakim cretins died in the controlled demolition opposite the sliding door.
02:30 Palicas, 15 Moiraios 14389
WHILE THE DESTRUCTION on the slope almost looked deliberate, as if the local crown was renovating the neighborhood for the denizens (parish that fantasy), the third terrace was catastrophe's personal gallery. No sooner had Runt's feet touched level stone when she gazed a stone-and-wood building, collapsed beyond discerning its original purpose. A unit of soldiers in blue were evenly mixed with a troop of abyssal pioneers, all worked--and worked over--with knives in the confines within.
Two figures, partially upright, stood out: a priest of fell powers, backed into a column painted with his own blood and an Amortian mage burned with his wounded comrades who braced him for a final stand, had met in a central atrium for the ultimate contest of opposed troop-leaders--and what must have finally collapsed the building. Runt felt the energy run through her like electricity. Even after the fact, the excitement of merciless combat between narrow walls with no escape left her wondering. Did she collect the lingering energy, or did the sight made her create the arcs running between her fingers and from cheek to horn? The pins and brooches of Arc Royal's soldiery shone undamaged in the dim light, and she imprinted the mage's final stand in her mind.
The middle-class third terrace laid dark save the abyss-fire. No sounds but distant fighting and demons' lowing. No lights in buildings, the stone broken and wood scorched. Pipes and ducts broke from their moorings, from their anchoring to buildings and stood as blind otherworldly creatures silently wailing to the night sky. No even-handed work being done seeing to the material needs of Thunder's Vale the gestalt institution of institution, nor of Thunder's Vale the people and their constituent ambitions and dreams. Businesses dark or demolished; the schools where children learned practical skills to surpass their parents' prosperity--windows black like empty sockets, walls crushed like skulls. Apartments where those families dwelt destroyed--depressingly, becoming the tombs of those families more often than not.
Here and there she heard others--hushed conversations, the sounds of people scrambling over rubble, the cry of a child, the wail of a woman, the sigh of a man. Survivors, since they were not openly roaming with zero noise and light discipline like invaders and defenders. Bodies laid everywhere, in every pose, in every state of dismemberment, and from every party. Soldiers in red and blue, members of the churches-militant, mercenaries, deformed mobs of the abyssal invaders, even demons. But more than any other were 'commoners' of every age--a term she despised.
Here: a city block was clearly burned down from deliberate arson and combat--and in a contest of terrain denial, it could have easily been the defenders--there were few of them, and mercifully few civilians, among the dead invaders pointed and posed this way and that, further deformed by combat than they were by default.
There: a demon, two stories tall and fitting the general red-skinned winged fiend stereotype looked like it was picking through a hollowed-out stonecutting business like someone picking through an apple barrel. The fiend was still, and as Runt passed under it, she saw it was filled with lances, a troop of Arc Royal soldiers had made their final stand and now laid under the collapsed structure, burnt by some final throe of their adversary.
She paused to look on one such scene: a group of defenders led by a single paladin squared off against a sixteen-foot demon that had taken roost in a collapsed building, but were themselves surrounded by a mob of abyssal skirmishers. All were dead, and Runt had to step over their corpses to continue down the street. And yet. Something beckoned the pause become a detour, and she turned to a large gap in the building's wall, drawn to the death-glow of the demon, her face twitching in an instant's snarl.
A mess of gore and limbs compacted and calcified into an egg-shaped necrobezoar, as tall as she was… and she was quite tall. Distressingly, the clothing she could see was all too diverse to be military uniforms, many of the limbs too small to be adults'. The elephant-sized fiend died focused on this grisly creation of its making, seemingly reaching for it as it was struck down by the vanguard of the overwhelmed soldiers.
Runt's insides churned in the demon's presence. It glowed from an internal combustion, and she saw why it smelled of burned skin. It was inverted. Organs in callused membranes hung to a skeletal frame among muscles and tendons, and whatever skin it had was on the inside--close to wherever the exothermal reaction happened, but the reaction would sometimes vent steam and sputter pus out of a fistula. She knew it to be a kardiophagos: a heart-eater demon, something borne of mortals' inward-facing passions and obsessions: all-consuming envy, contempt, wrath, the more extreme sexual self-abuses, and the poetic perversion to metaphorically eat one's own heart.
In short, mortals' unique capacity for emotional autocannibalism, and her own greatest deficiency.
Runt's breath hesitated. So her insides churned, so too her soul. What she stood before could have been her nemesis--a thing that would have killed her easily, manifest of vices she had difficulty subsuming, and here better men than her sacrificed themselves to stop it as it preyed on better innocents than her.
She knew for much of her life that these kinds of demons, both ephemeral and physical, would especially notice her for two reasons. First: that she was guilty many times over of eating her own heart. Looking on the thing, every memory alone in a sleeping bag or leaf-pile crying herself to sleep out of impotent wrath at life arrayed themselves ahead of her. Exactly what entire genuses of demons looked for, this frightful specimen being one of middling power, no less.
Second, and more blithely: demons would naturally pursue and seek to ruin a scion of their lawful, orderly counterparts, and Runt bore clear (and not-so-clear) infernal heritage. In many ways the animosity between fiends was greater than between fiends and angels.
And now she was face-to-face with a kardiophagos, with a complete necrobezoar it was on the verge of unbirthing, but for the efforts of the soldiers. The paladin must have seen it and knew what would come next--a process that would have strained Runt not to contemplate, but for a new compulsion that seemed to volcanically assert itself.
Chains. Horns. Drums. For some reason war-instruments and the sounds of domination came to mind, unsure whether the images of stone ramparts overlooking magma flowing down a mountain under a hoary sky were of her own imagining. The drums shared a beat with what she heard when the grave-knight-thing beneath the city made itself present. Another presence she felt in her horns and mind, and she was drawn to the slablike bladed weapon in the dead paladin's hands. A feeling of begrudging concession from the implement like gold deigning to be mixed with iron, and Runt's reptilian paws twitching with frightening strength.
Another fistula breathed putrid steam, ochre fluid bubbling out; the smell distracted Runt from the breath of the heart-eater demon itself, but she saw it stir and its hands clench around the bezoar. Oh Hell. "Oh Hell." Oh Hell. Shivering wet fear poured out of her skin. She absently tried for the sword, not strong enough to not trip and extract it from the debris half-burying the paladin, her dual-minded instincts carried her away from the beast as it uttered a reverberating low. Around the neighborhood, grotesque cries answered it as it reached one hand to the new quarry--an infernal-blooded victim tasting of fear was worth interrupting the unbirthing.
The glow of lights--torches, lanterns, arcane figments--appeared down the way she came. A scramble over the bodies and out of the building as the first of a mob rounded a corner and screamed hoarse at the sight of Runt.
THE DESTROYED NEIGHBORHOOD turned into an expressionist blur of blacks, greys, and blues; sponged here and there by a lingering fire and speckled by whatever countless things reflected the light of the three major celestial bodies. Her pursuers' cries grew louder--closer--projectiles hitting her pack and anorak, pushing the fabric for a moment in the way of her arms and legs. Their incoherent chanting a mess of simultaneously platooning their gasping voices while vying to be the lead voice.
A level street last week now curved with loose scree around moguls of stone, of timber, of pipes, of furniture and flesh. Mounds of rubble impressed as passing hilltops, the skeletons of buildings resembled thickets of trees and their branches, and the odd intact building reminded of crags sidling narrow mountain paths. Having spent more time in the wilderness than not, the sudden alternations of terrain features intensified unease and panic.
The minor miseries of fleeing came to focus all at once. A hamstring as she vaulted--stumbled--over a laid column. A stubbed toe on an uprooted flagstone, the other foot slipping on a loose tile. A pipe scraping her foreleg, an elbow struck while careening into and off a lone-standing corner. Dust and smoke as she gasped for air. Her clothes catching the gaining mob's missiles and the stress wondering if they were just stones, and when bows or even rays would dart at her. She turned to an uneven patch of rubble, a whole neighborhood a uniform roil of stone, hoping to lose them over the terrain.
Finally something did strike and entangle her loose wools, passing right through her anorak and catching her plus-fours. She felt it on her leg a moment before trying to kick it away like an aggressive pest while mounting a difficult rock--compromising her footing, the entanglement sending her prone on the foot of the mound. She turned as someone grabbed her foot--and was face to face with the same features as the last time she used blood magic back in the cistern: masculine, feminine, wiry, corpulent--all confusingly at once, in makeshift leather and chain armor. The thrall's expression--simultaneously blank and impassioned--perturbed her as much as where it's eyes and knife pointed. Runt let out a surprised, frightened yell. And chains.
The mob did not register the rust-colored links with thick barbs and sharp angles leaping from the stone around their prey, and they merely flinched when one length constricted their vanguard grasping Runt's foreleg as it pushed her assailant down the rubble amongst them. The other lengths attacked the thralls nearest the first victim--and all those behind them paused, stupefied. Runt made the far side of the mound, out of sight of her pursuers. In the soft roars of a distant monolith's wrath, she thought she heard a volcanic laughter from deep in her blood memory that beckoned her to watch the carnage her powers wrought.
(Title Image by https://www.pinterest.com/srjdpollard/)