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FG: Chapter 67
🕑 Added 2024-06-03 14:31:01 +0000 UTC“Those of you who still value your lives,” he said, in a voice that would reverberate through the ears of every Kobold child from that day forward. “Pledge yourself to my service. Open your minds to He-Who-Festers, and I will promise you fair treatment. You will have a place in our ranks where your contributions will be valued and your lives will have true meaning. You will serve as part of the empire that will write the history of this Underkingdom. Join us, and you shall have a place in the pages of that history. Resist, and you will be a footnote in its epilogue.”
The Yips listened. They heard. They looked at the human riding upon a great snarling Spineripper and knew that the Shai-Alud had come among them to save them from their tyrant. Most did not understand his words about history. Most merely wished to live – to serve one that would not see them as food or as decorations for the walls of a macabre temple.
Those Kobolds in the village of Mudklip bowed so low that it was said the cracking of their knee joints could be heard across the Warrens, down to Fleapit where the King of the new empire sat, and waited.
Yet still there were those Yips who resisted – those who the survivors would say could not see the light of the Unclean. Those who Deekius preached over as they tried, in vain, to fight off the advance of the First-Talon’s army.
Over a period of merely two days, three more Kobold villages fell to the ratman forces – the volley fire of Ix’s Sharpshoots providing the main thrust of each offense. There was simply little the little beasts could do to defend against such firepower. In the wake of their hazy deaths, the spearmen of Skeever advanced and slew any Kobold forces that remained to the man, with the Spinerippers doing little more than feasting on the leftovers.
The Gloomraava under Deekius, meanwhile, went door to door, claiming new members of the faithful by the hour. Those they dragged into the center of the Kobold ramshackle towns they fwere forced to listen to the Shai-Alud’s message of peace – something the Gloomraava were quick to explain showed great patience and mercy on the part of their Messiah. The Kobolds were lucky that it was the Shai-Alud prosecuting the invasion, for the rats of Fleapit were begging for the blood of the red demons and their toad-God.
When Kobold families heard such statements, what else could they do but throw themselves at Marcus’s feet, crying out for the human with the soul of a rat to save them from themselves – to lead them out of the darkness of their ignorance.
On the third day of Marcus’s crusade across the North reaches of the Warrens, he had brought his forces within a few miles of Gulchnavel, and commanded that a single Glitterpak be sent up with an offer of surrender. From their camp just out of range of the fierce-looking dwarven guns, the ratman army watched as the balloon-beast floated over the walls and then returned within the hour with a new note affixed to its spiny hide.
Marcus took the note and read it with utter disdain, crumpling the thing up as his eyes poured over each new word. So simple, and yet so effective in telling him exactly what he needed to know:
‘BOSS SKEGGA KILL-KILL ALL RATMEN. BOSS SKEGGA WILL BE GOD OF THIS WORLD, NOT STINKY MAN-MAN!’
“An offence to everything sacred!” Deekius spat through his lips frothing with blood and bile. “We should be storming their flimsy walls now, Sire!”
“I don’t know, Deekius,” Marcus scoffed sarcastically. “He has a point. I do smell like shit. I suppose I just got used to it after a while.”
“You have the stench of…of a champion…Sire.”
Deekius coughed and sputtered as he usually did these days. He wasn’t long from this world. They all knew it by this point. But Marcus got the feeling that the old rat had resolved himself to his end coming with the conclusion of this campaign.
If he had compunctions about the future of the ratmen, Marcus would have wondered what the Gloomraava’s death would mean for the faith. Without their Archpriest, would the previous Prime Putrefact simply take over again? Was he even alive in that hell-hole the great toad called home?
“Something is being wrong,” Skeever said, interrupting Marcus as he scanned the golden walls. “The cannons are not firing.”
“They are being afraid to fight us,” Deekius replied. “They are knowing they are dead. They are simply prolonging the…inevitable…”
“He is right,” Marcus admitted. “The fact they haven’t fired a single shot is…strange.”
“Perhaps the cannons are not being functional, after all?” Skeever asked.
“That is not-not likely, Sire,” Ix said as he hobbled over to join his fellow commanders on the eve of their final battle. “Boss Skegga is making Yips work-work all day and night to fix cannons. With army coming so close, he is probably forcing them to work to death-death to at least make defense good-good.”
“A sound assessment,” Marcus nodded. “But then the question remains, why isn’t the old toad striking back? By the looks of those wall-mounted monsters, he could tear through our formations with ease.”
The three commanders shared their General’s trepidation. They were, after all, getting ready to rest for the end of the day in full view of those cannons. Though their scouts had predicted the armaments’ effective ranges, there was still a chance that they would suddenly wake and bring the thunders of hell upon the ratmen while they slumbered.”
“Set up the twelve-pounders,” Marcus ordered. “They need sleep more than we do. While we rest, we’ll batter the walls of Gulchnavel with the roundshot we have left. When the smoke clears tomorrow, we’ll see just how defiant Skegga is.”
The General of the rats saluted his men and took his leave, retiring to his makeshift tent where he could try stop pretending that any of this mattered to him.
…
Is this ‘Silas’ isn’t alive…I can’t stay here. Maybe I’ll take up Skeever’s offer and just escape to the surface…take my chances on the open road. Maybe the Yokun would take me as a slave and present me to their ‘Matriarchs’. Maybe Mari would be there to release me.
But there’s a hell of a lot more ‘maybe’s’ in there than I’m comfortable with…
Marcus was committing what he was sure would be his final thoughts to his journal, turning over all the madness he’d seen in the last months in his mind, trying to find a sliver of hope that made it all worth it.
Home. Mari…the prospect of seeing either of them seemed so far, even though he’d never been closer to attaining both.
Piper’s Hill, he wrote. I must secure the Putrefact and contract his services as soon as possible – perhaps even before the battle is truly concluded. Let these rats slay their arch-demon toadman. I will leave them behind without shedding a tear. I’ll leave this whole place behind and think of it as nothing but a nightmare I finally woke up from.
He paused, looking up from his termite-ridden table his soldiers had set up for him within his field-chambers and listening to the chitters he heard outside the tent. Bonfires stretched for miles behind him into the once-dark of the Underkingdom that was now awash with hope and light in equal measure. The Kobolds worked to rebuild their homes, and erect shrines to the Unclean One already with the support of their new allies. In time, they would become assimilated into the ratman war-machine.
Probably, Marcus wrote. As a slave-caste. King Shrykul’s distrust can’t be torn from him – it seems to be an inexorable part of his psyche, just like it was Verulex’s. That’s exactly why that senile old rat had to die. That’s why…
His thoughts began to stray to his own future, now. A future where he never wanted to see another fur-covered tail in his life.
Yet, did he really hate them all that much? There had been rats within the ranks of this civilization that he had grown to respect. Skeever – the honorable commander who put his men first, Deekius – the faith-possessed cleric-warrior who knew how to whip up the ratmen into a religious frenzy. Gatskeek, Koresh, Festicus…some rats that were still with them and some who had perished, trodden under the march of progress that kept moving forward like a demonic engine bearing his name.
They were brave. They were dedicated. They have a faith that they believe in with every inch of their beings. All these things a General wants to see in his men. Yet, I know exactly what will happen when this war is won. Shrykul made that all too clear in our last meeting. They don’t want me here. But…think about it, Marcus. You have an army out there. Who are they really loyal to?
As though on cue, the flap of his tent suddenly flew open, and a ratman warrior saluted him with his one good arm.
“Sire,” Skeever said. “I am apologizing for interrupting your thoughts.”
“You never have to apologize to me, Skeever Steelclaw,” Marcus replied as he closed his notes and fixed his attention on the commander. “You’re almost as legendary as me, nowadays.”
The ratman smiled, but Marcus could tell there was something hiding behind his pride.
“You have something for me?” he asked.
Skeever walked forward slowly, with the deliberation of a man who was about to spill a secret that he’d hidden close to his heart for far too long.
“Sire,” the ratman said. “I am coming to tell you the truth.”
Comments
Stile The Fashionable
Nice way to dangle a guy over a cliff Lol TFTC
