M1919

- [ x ] - The street was quiet and peaceful. Hours of the evening have made the capital of Norland so soft and gentle that you may even forget that it had been a fortress city. A quiet gaze had kept a man from the tundras studying the vast skies above—in the graceful heavens, said to be where souls ventured, the landscape where greater giants would fight. Where the Jotunn of the Old World would die in their crusades of the River of Dreams, he had stared for so long that it had all begun to sting. The fiery burn of the cold air faded, and he rubbed at the nose and the brow before smoothing over the lids. Too long, he thought. The air was bitter, and so was he. “Conan,” a familiar voice called out. It was a horseman whose legs and stirrups he saw before the man-at-arms' dark blue eyes and golden hair. The Northman turned, his sapphires set onto the lone horseman… The road had taken them south, as it always had for handling southron debauchery. The wind howled at their backs, the cloak of the slain griffin keeping the thegn comforted. A thousand hells could not have steeled the man better. His companion's words had brought out a particular ire from within that he had not experienced in some time. So they stormed the palace, Conan guiding the pair within the quarters he had routinely broken into since first Tiberias had informed him of the attempt on his life - how far away that seemed, then. How distant. Yet how close it appeared even to now. The right foot of the brute found a wedge in the rock; the left swung onto a railing of marble and wood. He reached over, hoisting up his companions with a huff and familiarity to ease. Then, two became three. And three became four; what began as a lone wolf's pursuit became a gathered fellowship who had broken through doors and all uncontested. A portrait is even slightly crooked in response to the thudding of the soles against the marble - the only clean semblance of life within the halls. “The whole of it’s a barrow of ghosts,” the thegn grumbled, rounding a corner to study something. Then they took up a flight of stairs before one arm reached up to grasp at something before the boot kicked up afterward. Up, up, ever up did they have to climb. Ever forward, did they move. The scent wafted over afterward, and how foul it must have been. Conan went still when he found it, the first to see the still rotting remains of a friend he once knew. The brother who had been slain by his own laid out before himself. The memories of watching them flee into the catacombs under Whitespire resurfaced, and underneath the maille and scaled gorget, the Northman expressed his discomfort and horror. They had left him in the chapel. They had abandoned him there to deteriorate until the walls and ground were sickly ripe in all the findings. His eyes stung from the wicked manifestation, only blinking what must have been a minute afterward. He dispatched a man to find a priest, a cardinal, who would later come to verify their findings. The sickness left by the sights clung to him like a chain to the prisoner’s ankle, even after he had carried the cardinal out and James as well, guiding them to the Holy See. But that was some days prior, and the darker thoughts had not escaped the thick skull of the chieftain. Doubt had run its course; wounds were suffered at the expense of other beasts and devils, and GRENDEL and its ilk were ever-elusive to him, but he did know one thing: they would surely dine pleasantly on the rotten caricature of Southron dynasties. Somehow, winter had been more comforting than any bask of gold the lower dirt of Aevos had to offer. "There exist few souls that froth so readily to bestow themselves into the shieldwall of swine, but more can always be convinced," the thegn remarked to his great wizard and oracle. His nose wrinkled, and a finger traced one of the many scars that lined his image. "Here exists a pit, and within that webbed labyrinth of catacombs, we will find that GRENDEL lures them all. A pity,"

"Doom, doom, doom," sings the canary. Konan-Thegn, a skaldic chronicler of the Sagas is said to have written: " Entombed in the barrows low where GRENDEL of writhe and stir, His wicked flames burn while the edges of his wroth's darkness blur. He who is most foul gifts smoldering fate in timber and steel for DRAUGR to yearn, When the night falls into GRENDEL's maw, he must drink daylight—no light left to spurn. " The cadavers of the underdark had crawled beyond the periphery and into the face of the Nornic tribe, and the cautionary tales of the old wives and brittle husbands had finally been felt and understood in-full. The Sólvikingr are to be mustered and meet the draugr as so many of their ancestors had before them. The greatest fear, to be a warrior-eternal that has been damned and constricted into the clutches of Hel has been made manifest. "Endure," commands the ancestor.

I will pray for you.