From our first breath, we are drawn like a bow. Ever increasing tensions build until that moment of perfect equilibrium, suspended breathless, then released.
To be an Aestrâgor is to be drawn tight. To be alive is to be released.
– Dylan ap Owain: With Hu and Gia
Think hard, very hard, before you travel the road to war. Think thrice before you declare victory. For victory, like defeat, wears many guises.
From death, there is no withdrawal. ‘Tis not a place we can visit and then depart. Yet death is as much a part of our existence as is life. Think thrice before you loosen death or beget life. Both will change the course of many lives, your own not the least.
– Drumizu-dôc: Lessons in Living by Sân and Tsu
The encampment fills the surrounding valleys like a vast sea. A sea swollen with the bloated ruin of a dark tide; ever-rising; ever-spreading its hide and felt hutments, its slave pens and bitter squalor, its silk palaces where all manner of wicked malice breeds, its gallows fields littered with the ash and bones of victims beyond count. This is the face of an empire reborn. Mârgrôllic. With an insatiable hunger for blood and souls she feeds upon the many tribes of this wide sweep of steppe and desert. A great expanse of desolate horizons set upon the earth’s scarred bones. Where only the deep rock and buried stone yet carry the memories of ancient evils and long lost glories. And of a final, cataclysmic defeat so complete as to leave the world whole fractured and wounded. But still, time is a rampaging river knowing neither bounds nor course. In its sweeping tumult men’s illusions are cast down like so much meaningless flotsam. Just so the foolish belief in finality, as this ever-rising, dark metropolis bears witness to.
Some leagues to the west, beyond the jagged scrape of stone-crowned hills, a thick haze turns the day’s end into a bloody smear of oily color above the sun’s dying orb. A whisper of evenfall’s breath has no strength to move the heavy smoke from a hundred thousand and more hearth fires.
In the gathering shadows of night two riders sit their skeletal ponies in silence, each casting sharp looks to their south. To the eye they are two pickets keeping their watch through the day’s end and into the night’s quiet hours. Both women carry a collection of weaponry that speaks of nearly every mode of warfare possible to a warrior. Short cavalry bows of bone and wood; spears, hide bucklers, iron maces, long scimitars; the taller of the two carries a triple morning star slung across her saddle’s high pommel. Both hang their helms strapped to their saddles. Each sports shaven heads and long, braided scalp-locks entwined with bone fetishes, feathers, and precious stones.
As dusk turns to twilight, and then only the starlight gives shape to the surrounding hills, the shorter picket, Toyö, leans forward, her body tight with the tension of hard concentration. “There, beneath the Drägon’s tail and four more points west. A party approaches.”
Her watch-mate, Miaso, turns her head, finds the constellation Drägon, follows its starry tail’s line down to meet the ghostly horizon and peers westerly from there. “I see them. Small party. Mayhap a Fist. Possibly two. But it’s no blade. Ten mounted, most.”
They watched in silence until the small detail of mounted warriors could be heard by the soft cadence of their slow canter. Warriors, because none but warriors would be riding within a hundred leagues of the Witch’s encampment. And warriors of the Mârgrôllic Empire for just that same reason. But then, where an ancient and lost empire may arise again from its ashes, who is to say that its resurrection will remain a singular phenomenon.
Miaso pursed her mouth, forming a rigid grimace from which a faint yet surprisingly far carrying cluck emanates, a call much like a ground fowl might make.
The approaching shadows slowed to a walk, their course changing by the fraction needed to bring them to where Miaso and Toyö waited.
Five warriors rode out of the starlit gloom. Even as they brought their mounts to a halt the larger moon pushed the point of a waxing sickle above the horizon. Astride a scruffy, dun pony a tall, broad-shouldered woman spoke, her voice a harsh rasp from days of riding over the dusty, dry steppe. “Grönishtâc.”
Toyö turned her head, spat something dark from between stained lips. Replied. “Störhâtâc.”
A keen eye might have caught the easing of tensions. A slight relaxing of tightly held muscles, hard eyes softening their cautious regard. The ponies sensed the change in their riders; a hoof pawed the ground; a head dipped and shook its neck; a tail relaxed to swat a fly’s bite.
With the rising moon’s soft yellow light more detail emerged from the shadows.
“It appears,” began the tall newcomer with gray-shot raven hair, “we have yet some additional adapting to perform. Toyö. Miaso. You look . . . bestial? I gather the head shaving and bone wear is standard? Along with whatever has your teeth stained as pitch as night.”
A black grin cracked Toyö’s already painted face. “
Aye, and we’re not as wild as many. It is good to see you again, Mikoa.” She dipped her shaven pate in welcome, then acknowledged the others. “Higodi. Iaôdo. Háda. Tiodan.
“I see you’ve given our instructions a good effort.” The grin widened. “But yes, it’s something else to fully grasp the savage nature of this army.”
“Come.” Miaso reigned her pony’s head around. “There’s a shallow ravine to the east. We can work on your appearance and speak in safety.”
Háda ran her hand over the short bristle of her crown; followed the tangled length of a scalplock. “Are these bird’s bones?” she asked. “And what is this . . . this smelly mess you’ve added in with the bones?”
Toyö chuckled as she stepped back to view her work. “Finger bones, actually. We only use their skulls when we use animal bones. Birds, mice and the lot. And their feet and beaks, of course. Though I have seen the occasional complete skeleton of some small lizard wrapped around a rope of hair. Looked like it was climbing.” She turned to where Miaso steadily wove something like a pale viper’s skin into the crest of Mikoa’s remaining row of stiffened hair.
“And skins. Mostly snake and lizard. But god’s help me, I saw a man’s face once used to cover a buckler.”
Miaso worked the viper’s flattened face so that empty eyes looked out from its perch atop Mikoa’s bristled hedge. Stepping back, she shook her head and smiled for the first time this night. In truth, for the first time in as many nights as she and Toyö had slipped themselves in amongst this savage menagerie of dark and twisted souls. A tight, hard twist of the lips that left the lips yet sealed, as if to hold what small humor she felt from such a bestial world. “Finger bones, bird skulls, skins of gods’ awful origins. But the smelly mess that stiffens your hair? Mare’s piss, dried mare’s turds – though why dried when we just have to wet ‘em again escapes me – and ash. And don’t ask about the ash. At least not on your first night here and before you see just what it is you’ve joined.”
“Ash?” asked Higodi, the smallest and fiercest of this fist of Shadow Warriors. “What’s wrong with ash compared to bloody dried shit and piss?”
Miaso shook her head, shared a knowing look with Toyö. “The ash is all that remains of the captive men when the Witches are finished with them. Most destroyed outright after a tribe is conquered. Some are kept for breeding. Raped until they’re dry as sand, then immolated by sorcery. The Witch Empress herself often casts the spell. Empress Hon Dröl Wi. Now there’s a true-born demon draped in human skin if ever was. You’ll see soon enough why the High Council has sent us here.”
Mikoa, until recently Doînyío of the Azure Sept and privy to the Council’s fears, caught and held Miaso’s pained gaze. “Aye,” she nodded, “this resurrection of the Mârgrôllic Empire, now, in this time of upheaval in the Prophesy’s weave, is why we are here. Never since the rise and fall of the Mage King, Dôrmingrísh, has such ill as the Witches placed its will upon the land.
“Still, we are Shadow Warriors, descendants of the Rân Empire. Let us remain within ourselves what we are, Guardians of the Prophesy.”
Still holding Miaso’s gaze with her own, Mikoa added, “Surely you found a substitute for this ash while maintaining your disguises.”
A chill stillness settled upon the group. Every warrior turned considering eyes upon Miaso.
For her part, Miaso’s gaze narrowed while her chin set hard around her words. “No we haven’t. And if I gave any sense of aught but my repugnance, any shade of levity in my speech, accept my apologies. We dared not but make of ourselves an exact mirror to those around us.”
Toyö stepped forward, addressed Mikoa. “When you have seen some of what we have witnessed, when fully you experience the evil, the malefic ill that sours the very air in the Empress’ presence, feel the caustic power of her generals even as they ride past at a distance, watch the very earth shrivel in pain beneath the clan Witches’ heels, then stand before us in judgment.
