The Killing Fields

[Smithers 388]

 

The Killing Fields

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

A small host of men sat in a circle around a clearing. Some wore peculiar medallions and some did not. They sat in the middle of an unnamed black forest, near a village no man cared about, amongst hills that declared allegiance to no nation. Swords glittered around the campfire, which at this point had reached a dull roar, and most men carried two each - one of silver and one of steel.
 
They had been forced to the Path, by virtue of hunters that sought them instead of monsters, but it was no matter - the world was a malevolent place filled with feckless men, and eventually somebody would have need of a professional. For now, they were filling their time with stories.

 

An old, weary veteran with one eye broke the dubious silence.

 

“Let me tell you of the killing fields of Kanaan.”

 

His words were paints on a canvas and he wove his epic with the finesse of a practiced master. 

 

=   =   =

 

The picture was one from the warrior sagas of old, akin to when the Exalted Godfrey spurred his legions to action and united the realms of Man. 

 

A legion of men, marching against a force to which peace and order was anathema. It was surely a sight to inspire legends - rank after rank of warrior clad in burnished gold armor with ornament enough to put High Elven artificers to shame, their helmets graced by scarlet plumage. At the flank of the procession stomped columns of dwarves bearing war machines mighty enough to bring kingdoms to heel, and elusive elves with long, elegant weapons flitted through the lines at will. 

 

In the third rank of the golden warriors strode a man whose dark hair had not yet become tinged with grey and whose vigor bore the weight of his armor readily. His mind was eager and pride blossomed in his heart, for he was part of an allied cause marching to do war with a dread dragon whose dark paragons terrorized the world. He had tested his mettle in single combat with several of these acolytes, coined ‘Harbingers’, and emerged only slightly scathed. His record in his Order was among the best, and against the enemies of the world he would make his name.

 

Such was the arrogant confidence of the host which sallied through a dark portal, which had itself been dragged screaming from another world, and into the meatgrinder of Hell.

 

They made their beachhead quickly. On the horizon - if it could be called that - towered a black spire that clawed at the heavens. This world was unnerving - organic and yet not, as if torn from a confused mind. The ground was fleshy and pink, and it bled malice from open sores in the earth through plumes of acrid smoke. The sky, which was truthfully no sky at all, was solid, red, and wept rancid tears that poisoned food and bit into armor.  

 

It was the haze that was the most insufferable for those first weeks, sweeping in at the worst of times to chill bones while the forces of men still labored to build a defensive line of small stone fortresses and weather the siege they knew must be coming. When it withdrew, some men were always found dead, and not always of the cold. The survivors bit their tongues and carried on - the horrors that the men could already see were enough to cause dismay without also pondering what wailed and shrieked in the dark and unknowable fogs that swathed so much of the world.

 

The brutes and fiends they had prepared for came eventually, but not all at once. The holy magicks of the Order fared well against the beasts of that ungodly realm. They faced the Ordermen in small skirmishing lines, never large groups, and inevitably fell to the retreat after inflicting only a few casualties and receiving many more. 

 

The commanders of the encampment first rejoiced and then despaired. They had recognized  the folly of their plan. They had no rations for a conflict this prolonged and this stream of constant brushfire skirmishes, as small as they were, threatened to belay the benefits of their initiative with an encroaching war of attrition that would eat at them slowly. The success of supply lines that would have warded against this fate was based in sheer luck; use of portal was an imprecise art. Some supply caravans would make it through entirely, enough to raise the hopes of the men, and then the rest would arrive as nondescript wagons of soggy wood, crowned by unidentifiable bundles of flesh and hair led by horses with open sores and festering wounds. The world itself seemed to be toying with them. At the best their legion would be forced to withdraw, bereft of supplies and in violation of the oath they had sworn to strike the black dragon from the sky. At worst they would be battered down to a sorry band and overrun by creatures drawn from a child's night terror.  

 

Spoiler

The men graced with the responsibilities of command decided that this was no option at all and, with their backs pressed to the wall, made the decision to sally forth into the barren wasteland and march on the black tower with the remainder of their forces. The man rallied in the morning, which they had branded 'morning' arbitrarily as time passed without method of measure, and formed columns. The pace was exhaustive, for the commanders did not want to provide the men a chance to contemplate what they were to face, but the fleshy wastes were more vast than anticipated and the march only succeeded in driving the men to fatigue. When the drained legion finally neared the base of the great, mocking black spire that rose from the earth, the fog rolled back and revealed its secrets.

 

The black spire towered and dominated the foreground, but its state was not constant -  it shifted constantly in form, as though the mind that had wrought it was indecisive, and spite rolled from its zenith in visible waves, nearly forcing men to their knees with the weight of its malice. Every angle of it was subtly, inexplicably wrong, and to stare too long led to revulsion.

 

At its base sat a screaming, ungodly legion - a mass of diseased bodies bristling with weapons of black metal. Some were men, volunteers or conscripted into service, some were nightmarish fleshy facsimiles of life sustained by the energies of the wasteland, and others were just evil, yawning holes in the air. At the fore of the spire’s columns stood its generals; dread angels bearing flaming blades and swathed in billowing black robes, with a void presented where faces should be.

 

The Descendant races of the legion had no time to contemplate the horror that they faced, for the order to charge was given almost instantaneously. The legion faltered for a moment before building its speed, and the two forces clashed abruptly with a roar of bodies hitting bodies and metal slamming against metal. 

 

To call the fighting fierce would be to do it shame - the devil’s legion fought like a force possessed - for that was exactly what they were - and the Ordermen did battle with the vigor of men who found themselves confronted with an enemy that human nature rejected out of principle. The gray veteran was no stranger to the dance of war. Where he fought beasts and fiends he improvised as he needed, rolling and striking to disrupt lines of attack and debilitate the enemy. Where he fought men he reverted to the old fencing arts, taking the Imperator’s Defense to combat the rigidity of men studied in Callini or, naturally, attacking with the Thoulnbalt to belay the opponent’s Capa Corra.

 

Then, in the manner of a man burdened by the arrogance of skill and success, he fought his way to the fallen angel at the fore of the profane legion. He presented himself with a sneer, his blade crackling with a holy energy. The angel scoffed and, with a sword made of fire and reeking of brimstone, smote him across the face.

 

Pain drove through his skull like a lance as he fell. White lights danced through his head and clear fluid leaked from the mangled, fleshy socket that had just been his eye. Two men stepped up to fill his place and the dread general cut them down just as quickly, with relish that offended morality.

 

In every direction, men and dwarves died in droves. To his left a battle-captain of the Order toppled, his golden chestplate marred by a thicket of black-barbed arrows, and to his right a dwarf fell flailing under a wailing fiend of jagged, diseased flesh pieced together by the machinations of a devil. The air was marred by the rancid stench of voided bowels, split bellies, and open wounds.

 

He felt the despair run through the battle line and, as he lay dying on a field of corpses, he saw the men waver en masse. The accursed black spire rose above them all, taunting them quietly and laughing at their failure. There were no reinforcements to count on in this fantastic hellscape, and even the hardest of soldiers could last only so long against unstoppable odds.  

 

The last glimmer of hope that still fluttered in the veteran's breast died as the first men began to rout. The demons of that chaotic world screamed their delight and leapt eagerly into melee, shredding those who tried to flee. A deadly rain of black arrows fell from above, killing indiscriminately and peppering the corpse-strewn ground like so many gravestones. Their legion would be crippled. On this day the war for the endurance of the Descendant races would be lost, in a world far from home, and in the midst of a desperate melee none would ever speak of again.

 

Then time stopped and a gold light split the fabric of the world.

 

The veteran felt warm honey flow through him. He tilted his head with the last of his strength and looked to the source of the light - a being of unfathomable beauty and all the majesty of a lesser god. Its features were perfect, yet unknowable, framed in a corona of light so bright that it threatened to burn itself permanently into the eye. 

 

Were the veteran standing, he would have fallen prostrate in rapture, for who could fail venerate so faultless a being? The mastery of creation and an infinite breadth of knowledge were poised at its fingertips, and the presence alone of this avatar marshaled the surrounding maelstrom to order. He wore armor of a material too perfect to be mundane gold, and bore a long, slender blade carved with impossible swirls and of whose bright color no word existed.

 

In an instant, the figure stood before the awful angel at the head of the unholy columns. +KNEEL+, the being murmured, filling a thousand minds and dragging the war to a halt, and the veteran wept to hear a symphony of voices so perfect. The foul general spat its evil dogma in defiance, but its flaming blade sputtered and died. The demigod moved in slow motion - as if on his own time, disconnected from the world. He stepped forwards and, without effort or urgency, drove his perfect sword through the black angel’s chest with a ring; a single, immaculate tone that echoed for far longer than it should have. 

 

A last shuddering breath rattled past the veteran’s lips, released now without regret as he had beheld enough beauty for a millennia. The color dripped from the air, events cast in black and white as his mind died, and the final light began to lapse from the world.

 

Then the being looked at him and smiled, and the grizzled veteran felt his soul glow. 

 

Time snapped back with a roar and the arrows once again began to fall. He found himself on his feet - how this had come to be, he knew not. His energy was electric and, even for his injury, he felt as if he’d drunk the ichor of the gods. His fatigue was gone and he twirled his sword with the vigor of a warrior of purpose. He killed with an economy of motion that surprised even him. He stepped and cut, battered a spear aside and stabbed, then lopped off a limb on the backstroke. His sword was wreathed in a corona of gold and he channeled the blessings of his patron with an adeptness he had only dreamed of, augmented by the fury in his breast. The veteran raised his unoccupied hand and split the ranks of the damned with the force of a holy gale.

 

By his side, men who had routed or fallen seemed to have rediscovered the virtue of their cause. The battle line moved as a whole again, and the paladins of the veteran’s company cut swathes through the enemy columns. 

 

Ahead, far ahead of the battle line, the golden figure was amongst the foul legion. His sword was a ripple, far too fast to follow with the eye, and he moved through them without seeming to move at all. He simply existed and one point, and then the next, stepping through the folds that separated worlds and cutting down monsters by the score. He brandished holy magicks as an extension of his will, and where he pointed golden detonations shattered whole battalions in seconds.

 

The veteran at once both found his spirits emboldened and felt great shame to have wielded his sword so crudely, for even in a thousand lifetimes he would never match such grace.

 

The veteran and his company fought on for an eternity. He did not see the Dread Dragon plummet, pierced by a golden lance, but the unbridled roar it loosed as it fell felt as if it had brought the fury of warring gods to bear. The struggle after the demon died was not so much a battle as it was a mop-up. Its unholy generals were killed or fled. The majority of the monsters, no longer held together by evil force of will, perished instantly and those sentient beings that were volunteered or conscripted to its service were gathered and summarily executed by squadrons of men deaf to their pleas for mercy. Such was their cold fury that the surviving Ordermen in command were forced to discipline and dismiss three officers - they had lead their companies to torture and wage atrocity against those who had betrayed the races of men.

 

When the legion emerged from the dark portal with an eighth of their original number, there were no roaring crowds to meet them - they split up quietly, without fuss and with few words exchanged. Each man, dwarf, and elf returned to his own , their charges complete. The feeling was one of languidity, but not of a good kind, and the world seemed to march on at a snail’s pace; oblivious to the wars that were waged in other realms for the sake of simple survival and the continuity of men. 

 

Those that had marched through Hell had not returned entirely whole.

 

=   =   =

 

The old veteran’s story trailed off with a rasp. He registered then that his throat was a desert, and he eyed the stars distrustfully as he realized that he’d been speaking for the better part of an hour. He gestured for his earthenware canteen, provided by a wary acolyte, and took a long draught. His one eye was hollow, and demons danced in it.

 

“I believed in God after that.”

 

A burning log snapped. The campfire lapsed into silence.

[Wendigo 786]

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