After divulging his personal history on the islands to his warband and orc hosts, Stoic investigates the ruins of a profane shrine in search of a family link.
Depending on who you asked it was The Great Land, Urtalamh, or the Penicillininsula--the relief was dozens of feet tall and carved from a variety of different-colored quartzes. It curved like a stone dagger north and west from where it merged with the larger landmass that covered the southern pole of Tray. A fifteen-thousand mile long mess of smaller peninsulas and wild interior regions, and only a small part of the world. Panatrajasthan laid to the west, and to the east were lands quite unknown to the races of the Pen. Both were represented with vague hints of coastline and strange creatures depicted in the border of the relief.
Stretching north and to the east in the relief was a deific image, carved from every color of soapstone. This goddess bore the back-breaking curvature typical of the Devipanatri pantheon, three faces, and multiple arms. The middle face was a placid woman; the face to the left was that of a hooded snake bearing the sapphic structure of its mouth ready to bite, and to the right was a woman's face, mouth full of fangs and three eyes contorted in wrath.
The Dancing Fiend. An advisor once uttered the name mortals had for her at the start of a heavily-warded Clan Overcommand briefing before the mission over the islands; the High King intentionally arrived late so his mind would never be burdened with such filth.
Each of the multiple arms corresponded to some quality of the deity, one of which held the depiction of a man's severed head. Stoic noted it was meant to 'bite' down on a chain (laying on the floor) holding up a long metal tray that would hang flush with the wall (but currently was also on the floor) to display the heads of sacrifices (skull fragments on the floor).
Yet what gave the draugr pause was where the depiction of the Penicillininsula and the chthonic goddess intersected, it was clearly pregnant--with Sidonis at her loins. From the image's nethers streamed serpent-figures that merged into the border of the relief. The islands of dead Thelessos were represented by a large emerald-leaved flora of petrified wood in the location of the goddess' navel.
So their plans for Sidonis and the haergiothan nations went as far back as their founding mythology, with these islands being the loci of where they meant it to begin. He noticed the area corresponding to Sidonis was cracked and scorched from the law of sympathy reacting to the great rent in reality leading to the demonic Abyss. His hand stretches out to touch it.
No. Even the second-hand accounts many centuries removed are too much--even for an undead mostly-unburdened with emotions. His hand recoils. The presence of the master of crags--the Tyrant--scoffs. The presence has yet to fully enter his mind, and to that point was little more than a whisper. "Do it. You were gone a long time. Learn what really happened, not what the smalls fed themselves over the generations. Why else exercise the ability to see the truth, straight from the mantle of reality itself?"
"You seem like you know what happened, Tyrant." The rising sun to his back, Stoic saw a shadow next to his own shadow--could this have been what unsettled the others? The shadow shrugged, raised his one arm.
"I know some, from my throne in the Ethereal. The calamity was no natural accident, but more than demoniacs. Certainly not you, contrary to the city-dwellers."
Stoic snorts in disgust as he reaches his hand out to the loins of a representation of a deity he utterly detests.
A brief flash of many images: poisonous flowers growing from mortals' orifices and wounds. And curiously, several voices--the plants warble foreign arias in masochistic ecstasy. The hiss of fabric, of a snake, of a woman. His mind pictures the deific image in the antechamber emerging from the wall as it--she--looms over him. The light fades, everything loses color. The dancing fiend speaks with no voice, but with the sound of fingers running down wet glass.
NOW YOU ARE MINE
Arcadia as rendered in miniature with wood and cardstock on a street performer's cart-stage. Marionette-Stoic the Guardian stands between Arc Royal and Thelessos, holding a massive tower shield, trying to protect his game-piece crusaders, crew, and orcs simultaneously from sock-puppet-demons, a cardstock mess of tentacles, and marionette-Rokuano, accordingly. All three reach over and lash at his neck, and he stumbles, falls prone on the island, sees the dancing fiend as a cast-bronze mantelpiece occupying half the background over Rokuano; he sees Arc Royal's once-allies reaching as a single clawed hand under another hand before it disappears.
YOU FAILED
Stoic's marionette-body turns to pulp, only a little wooden skull left. He wonders where the sense of failure came from, realizes it came from nowhere, realizes the she-demon is attacking his mind. YOU THINK THIS MY FIRST PSYCHIC DUEL, WITCH-GOD? The tusked skull turns, eye sockets angled in wrath. I NEVER FAILED. A matchstick skeletal hand emerges from the soil and grabs marionette-Rokuano's ankle. I FOUND THE TYRANT. Rokuano's strings are cut and he falls, the skeletal hand punches the foreground as matchstick-skeleton marionette-Stoic rises, and a million wrathful game-pieces face the deity. I CRUSHED YOUR SIMPERERS TO MAKE ROOM FOR A NEW NATION.
No longer a mini-theater, the water around the Thelessos-figment rises suddenly and matchstick-Stoic plummets beneath the surface as it rotates to form a ceiling of cloud decanting rain. Beneath him he witnesses the gray afternoon he killed his uncle Murokai in sole combat; the first and only time the student bested the instructor in the taiaha. The ceiling of water turns into grief at the reliving of one of his greatest failures and the personal humiliation of continuing the family tradition of fratricide.
YOU THOUGHT MAN AND ORC COULD LIVE TOGETHER
YOUR OWN UNCLE REFUSED AND YOU KILLED HIM
Stoic the Champion feels as much as sees the memory: striking the spike into his uncle's throat, screaming into the clouds as the Sternguard advanced down the rocky hillside to annihilate the orc war party. But… he never planned for men or orc to live in one another's land, and he never considered it a failure, only a major setback; even drafting generational plans to a resolution with the Orakareha. Distant figures watching the combat seemingly snatched away by hand-shaped fog banks. I GAVE THEM A CHANCE TO JOIN SOMETHING GREATER. THEY REFUSED. But he knew he screamed because of the clawing notion his uncle gave him the match. He never picked up another orcish weapon again after that day.
YOUR UNCLE LET YOU LIVE
YOU REPAID HIM BY EXILING YOUR MOTHER'S KIND
The sting of killing his own uncle remained with him for the rest of his short life, as he led his crusade northwards. Looking down at the image of Stoic the Marshal marching with figments of his armies under never-ending volcanic winter--Thelessos was not the only time. Urnomannen lancing out huge weapons over massed ranks in factory-made armor led by his own clansmen the Sternguard; casters inflicting mayhem on foes of every nation; the Left Hand making his enemies' commanders disappear. All to eradicate the adversaries who tried to exterminate Sidonis and Arcadia from their bastions among the hijacked haergiothan nations. Desperate measures and atrocities hidden from the heavens by a blanket of lightning and ash, a faint outline dancing against the aerial plasma.
TO OTHER NATIONS
YOU WAGED POINTLESS MASSACRE
AGAINST NONE WHO WRONGED YOU
The men all fell and died as a wave going back the way they came. In that distance, a red-fringed black inferno broke the sky in the shape of a multi-armed figure in a posture of dance. The ringed moon became a monstrous, alien skull with a serrated crown. As the satellite disappeared behind a hand-shaped cloud bank, Stoic the Hierophant held out his hand in castigation, focusing on a barrier polarized to the karmadynamic wavelength of the oncoming Abyssal storm of miasma and demons… for naught, they flowed around his barrier, over the lands and across the continent.
YOU UNWITTINGLY MADE THE OFFERINGS I NEEDED
YOUR NEW NATION DEAD AT BIRTH
A SACRIFICE
MY PROMISED DOMAIN FLOWERING IN THE CARCASS
Beneath him he sees himself, laying on the muddy ground in stamped armor in a pool of blood, no visible wounds. A passing banner cloaks the dying-Stoic-figment. When it passes, he lays in state: dressed in traditional plate, clothes clean. Men in then-modern Sidonian armor marching on.
Standing over the figment of his own body, Stoic saw the results of his lifetime: his nation extinct, his empire nothing more than a short record of rampant death and war, his name cursed by history and her authors, his homeland reduced to a broken hellscape where men are cattle, the demons who flowed out to molest the southern nations for centuries past, and their hole in reality growing like a cancer.
And the bastards who orchestrated it all only waxed in power and influence. In profit.
In death as he was in life--a mistake.
No. No!
A HUGE CHAMBER. Piles of debris and breaches in the wall here and there. Walls doglegged with square columns. A channel of water lines the perimeter of the room, algae casting a dancing light up the walls. Stoic comes to, standing in pale light shining through a breach in the ceiling. The light traces a jagged line across flagstones up steps of a raised platform to a statue: a familiar image, the dancing fiend, this time on a pedestal carved to look like serpents issuing from her distended loins.
"Lit by oil from below, your image undoubtedly looks imposing, she-demon; but under the light of the great polar star, the Pillar of Winter, and the holy arch, you look the very image of…" Stoic searched for the right word as he approached the statue; noting a long, skeletal, gauntleted arm gripping the statue's neck. "Pathetic. Degenerate." He grabs the skeletal arm.
EFFEMINATE! Stoic's psychic voice is the sound of cataclysms. Once again, a firestorm in the shape of the dancing fiend licks the sky over dead Sidonis. Once again, she speaks with the sound of fingers running down wet glass.
YOUR MIND UNCRUSHED
HOW
FROM YOUR REALM YOU SIT BLIND TO WHAT MORTALS SEE. Figment-Stoic squared up to the horizon-dominating image of the goddess. NUMB TO WHAT MORTALS FEEL. Opposite the fiendish image, a borealis-storm coalesces into four figures surrounded by a legion more. DUMB TO WHAT MORTALS KNOW. The four earlier images of Stoic appear behind him: a guardian, a champion, a marshal, and a hierophant. I WALK WITH ETERNAL SPIRITS WHO WEAVE THE TAPESTRY OF THE UNIVERSE. Behind them, the master of crags appears, standing twice taller than the Stoic-figments.
"Do it, boy!" Stoic comes-to again in the chamber; both hands are on the skeletal arm. He sees the Tyrant's shadow over his in the pale light. A light cast by cardinal markers for a distant, mythical homeland. The light sacred to the father-king atop the mountain. He braces himself and wrenches the arm. He has a brief glimpse of the psychic dreamscape: the horizon-dominating figures of his spirits and their legion setting upon the image of the dancing fiend towering over the world.
In the massive chamber, he breaks the head off the statue; as the neck crumbles, the gauntleted skeletal hand closes shut, the creak of metal sounding like an enraged roar. "With my arm in your possession, I am complete again!" Figment-Stoic on the Ethereal plain looks back and sees the master of crags raise both arms as a blizzard flies forth covering everything. Stoic shakes the vision away and sees a black figment of the goddess imprinted on the wall over her broken statue.
"At last, with an aperture to this plane you see who stands before you, slattern dancer." He straightened up. "For a fiend whose very presence kills men, Fate gave you a contest with a literal dead man, wielding power once used to contend with gods, possessed by and possessing the spirits who inform even your kind."
"The Guardian? To protect the crusades so they know me as the strongest among them, fit to command; to protect them until they hold enough strength to carry out my ambition. The Champion? Murokai believed in my empire, but his kin proved undeserving. I alone offer their descendants redemption or an eternity as vassals." The reality-breaching image of the goddess coils down as if to strike, three faces snarling.
"The Marshal? Command of vast armies laid in my past, and it lays in my future. My nation died, but her neighbors acquired our ways, honed into nation-weapons to sweep the world. The Hierophant? If Sidonis lays dead, then you fight a kingdom of the dead! Even if I need raise an army of bone, the Abyssal invasion of Sidonis will be avenged with a Sidonian invasion of the Abyss!" Four figments stand behind Stoic, all glaring at the image above them in the chamber. Behind them appears a frost giant, the master of crags, the Tyrant.
"And the Trickster?" A fifth figment of Stoic appears. "His hand gathered the information you sought to keep from me during this vision. Arc Royal's present fair-weather allies waiting to turn traitor. The foreigners on the other hill watching me kill my uncle during my unification. The secret advisors of my enemies during my crusade centuries ago. The vision of the alien god-thing on the moon that 'promised' you a domain on this plane." The goddess' shade reeled back, faces contorted in rage, arms clenching in impotent wrath.
"All this under the Tyrant's gaze. The father-king who lives atop the mountain and within the mountain, who shapes his children into soldiers and scours the foreign and the weak." Stoic approached the headless statue. "A force the Devipanat fated to meet regardless their threat to Sidonis--I despised them and everything they embodied. The haergiothan gods wrote their demise before they even arrived." Several images appeared of Stoic connecting the skeletal arm with the statue, they resolved into one path--he brought the grisly mace down from the top, smashing the statue in a clap of air. Immediately the goddess' figment turns into a giant sextet of eyes, hissing with their expression.
"Perhaps your benefactors lured me to their snare, that my nation fueled your ascendancy--you, their useful ditz. But the gods themselves transmuted my murdered nation into an everlasting weapon of celestial wrath. And the dead bear patience. My countrymen enjoy all the time in the world to exact vengeance from the Other Side--the High King their conduit, their champion as always. We come for your fiend in the moon!" He walks back to the tripartite head. "I abjure thee, whore." Multiple images collapse into Stoic bringing the skeletal arm down on the statue-head. Once the pieces hit the floor, the goddess' figment is vanished altogether, in a single note of fingers running down wet glass promising a future reckoning.
DAWN BROKE THROUGH the shrine's compromised wall and ceiling. The first ray to land on Stoic saw him end his hours-long dual-toned chaplet to Evulus Ioulos. Backtracking to the antechamber with the relief of the Penicillininsula and the dancing fiend in congress showed him he only moved a bowshot during the… well, it was many things, few of them conclusive. Being undead granted him an inner peace regarding the mortal need to quantify every little thing; being a cultural barbarian granted him the ability to recognize how one encounter was really several on different levels of significance. Across from the relief, the wall was fluted with narrow alcoves; in one of these someone sat on the stone bench lining the wall, knees crossed, head canted as if admiring an art gallery. "Taingaha. What part of 'a family matter' eluded you?"
His bearing expressed a reserve and polish that transmuted the self-indulgent aromatic smoke of tobacco into the incense of a centered monk.
"Ah, Stoic." He deposited the stub of rolled tobacco into a leather pouch. "Looks like you dispatched the fiend under this mound and acquired that strange, huge arm." Stoic held it over one shoulder. The chief nodded his head at the stone carving. Stoic saw the depiction of the goddess in soapstone shattered, most of it laying on the flagstones; noticeably, the tree representing the islands still held to the wall. "I'm always taken aback at the sheer scale of your 'Penicillininsula'."
The draugr shook his head and shrugged; no point telling amicable, silver-tongued Taingaha where he cannot go. "Your Penicillininsula. I exiled your ancestors, but sought their future repatriation after a few generations."
"A legend among the Horitirahu, and told to me by my patron." Stoic gestured for elaboration, and after some hesitation, Taingaha approached him. "When you doffed your helmet, I wanted a closer look at your face, and you a closer look at mine." Taingaha was a bald, older man; physique diminished with age, but he seemed to treat it as just another game piece of leadership. His knowing smirk was genuine, his eyes friendly, tusks not too large or small, ears manfully pointed. Skin a patrician shade of green. Whorls of ink from chin to cheek to brow, orange eyebrows growing back from recently being singed. His head, brow, and mouth tilted slightly like an armillary sphere or a gyro, as if his mind were always moving yet perfectly still. Orange eyebrows?
"Ginger features, like me…" Taingaha's eyes acknowledged Stoic's realization.
"A possibility. Yet I know your father and mother also both claimed siblings. Features such as ours happen among a few of the islands. I also don't suppose hair loss ran in the family? At an rate, my eyebrows at least show that heritage… when the spirit in our weapons decides not to singe them," his mouth canted at a self-deprecating angle. "A heritage, the protection of which, I take seriously." His head, face, and expression straightened. "What would Chieftain Stoic intend for repatriation?"
Stoic squared his shoulders. "In the face of demon-legions threatening to overrun the land depicted behind me, I intend a harsh but just rule. The Arc Royal Crusade meets a need for war parties of orc fathers, brothers, and sons led by me and those they and I trust, and the Orakareha enjoy greater security to prosper--and lands to prosper on.”
"Not to dissolve in the settled farmlands of pink and beige races, not to disappear among their soft villages? And on who's authority rests this promise?" Stoic motioned him over to the relief, motioning to the wide area west of Sidonis and south of Arcadia--and the lack of grime, microfractures, and growth informed by magical sympathy to define the myriad political borders littering the rest of the Great Land.
"Centuries of war left the Arcadian Outback bare of habitation." His hand moved north, past a loose wall of mountains separating the coast and its hinterlands from the outback. "Arc Royal shares agreements with her neighbors to honor claims made by crusaders to settle the land south of their mountains. Few rarely do, and coming from every sort of nation up north, they never coalesce. Everyone wants land near the borders and forts of the crusader kingdoms, naturally, so if the demons and their cultists break out, the coast is close enough to flee north by. Land in the kingdoms grows more expensive by the month, and they draw the eye of the demons with their populations."
"The land of our ancestors," the chief said, switching from the language of Sidonis to Orcish. His eyes fixed on the outback Stoic gestured to. "I've been here a few times, thought of those places. The great mountain, the twelve vales, the backs of our gods holding up the earth as they render the fiends of the underworld." He pointed to a depression between three peaks. "Karaunatua."
"Yes, the seat of the orcs," Stoic said, also in orcish. "An ancient fortress-city built by the giants and the dwarves, before they went their separate ways."
"We could resettle it, culture the land around it. The distance from Sidonis, the mountains between the two, and the landscape itself would insulate our nation from the demons focused on the humans."
"Thing bigger, Taingaha! Even more such strongholds dot those mountains. My uncle's taua defended one the day we fought." He pointed in a rough area along a ridge of low mountains. "Here." Stoic drew back his hand. "As a Sidonian, I know the locations. The benefits of fighting giants for generations. Sidonis intended to settle them, but for your ancestors and my mothers'-- ironically, as I implore their descendants to settle them."
"Under an undead Sidonan who seeks our sons to follow him into literal hell."
"Mainland orcs," Taingaha snorted at the mention, "and men alike sortie into my dead homeland every month. Half those you met carry the scars. A doomed fight destined to come to all, even these lonely islands, if any less than all stop it. I offer the best chance for my mother's kin to not only survive, but come out powerful. Arc Royal's leadership agree to land deeds while their soldiers yet still crusade. A man chooses his future homestead. Companies choose where their future villages rise. Armies choose the boundaries of their future counties."
Stoic pulled something from his sporran and drew a long border on the relief in soapstone. "Your old lands lie well outside the domain of Arc Royal and her allies. The Orakareha claim it, and more than issuing land within their borders, Arc Royal formally acknowledge a new nation--whom they owe a debt." He threw Taingaha the soapstone as he left and the spirits disappeared. "If you seize this opportunity."
"Sternchild," the chief called after him. Stoic paused and looked over his shoulder, perceiving a man who hesitantly just made a split-second decision. "Rokuano plans a raid of centennial proportions. Starting with awakening our great-whale-ship, followed by making the rounds of the islands, gathering every able orc for a massive taua. His search parties still look for your men--Rokuano was dead serious about decorating his ships with their remains." The chief points to a large archipelago just off the coast of the Penicillininsula. "His first target will be Arc Royal." Stoic was idling; at this mention, he became lock-still.
He turned slowly, his rasping voice a low growl like something predatory emerging from a cavern. "How. Much. Time."
"Until sundown." The chief of the Horitirahu drew back at Stoic's alacrity bounding up a pile of large debris through the breach in the wall and out of sight.