It had been a month since the successful conclusion of the quest for the Seeds of Life, and life had returned to a semblance of normal for Gorfang and Eloy. Things could never be quite the same again without Lynien, but each had plenty to do and the days passed swiftly. Then, on the morning of the 28th of June, Gorfang started awake, his eyes flicking to the massive golden wristband around his mighty wrist. Here we go again, he thought.
His dream had been filled with the stern, yet approving, face of his patron Hektis, Khabran god of war, and the deity had spoken to the Master of Weapons.
"We have Our edge over the upstart gods now," he said, "but We have not yet the numbers to resist their earthly forces should they come against Us. Your neighbors to the east are aware of you now, and their forces are gathering to crush you and conquer your kingdom."
"I have placed two questions in your mind. Ask these of the scrying stone Myrasian and you will gain the knowledge you need to avert this threat and turn it to your benefit!"
"Despite his regrettable allegiance to My brother Sabath, you will need his Regalia Bearer in this Quest, for all will not be as it seems. Such situations, as opposed to clean, holy battle, are meat and drink to the Man in the Shadows."
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Eloy was settled at the table in his house enjoying a rare fried breakfast and moment of domestic bliss when the room was darknened by a vast green bulk looming outside the window. "Will she let you out to play?" boomed Gorfang's unmistakable voice.
Rather to the orc's surprise, Eloy's witch-wife Sashia was content enough to let him follow the dictates of the Khabran gods once more, perhaps feeling that those strange and reprieved deities had helped put them together and would that the best chances of this continuing were for them to co-operate. After some renewed debate as to the value of resurrection magic ("So you don't want to come back from the dead?" "But I won't die!") they teleported northwards into the fourth floor of the Darkened Tower - once Skufruss' fortress and the greatest academy of magic in Known Alair, now a shattered ruin surrounded by the Steel Jungle of Vorsand.
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The Tower was as they'd left it; silent, abandoned, still scarred and scorched by the assault of Saryn Darrath and his dragons. A cold wind blew through the great rents the beasts had torn in the stonework, and the structure creaked and shifted occasionally. Following the green glow through to the Scry Hall, they found the great globe of Myrasian, the biggest seeing stone ever made, sunken half into the stone floor just where they remembered. Cold swirls of mist moved deep within the dark green glass, and the deep, inhuman voice spoke its' usual greeting. "My name is Myrasian; gaze into my depths - if you dare!"
"I dare," declared Gorfang, and both stepped fearlessly forward to stare at the giant sphere. The patterns of mist moved, and images began to form as Gorfang reached into his mind for the questions Hektis had placed there. The images were strangely alluring, and both could feel their attention being drawn towards them. Resisting, Gorfang felt the first word surface in his mind, and his lips say the word, "Kîshshul".
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An image of an underground courtyard appeared, a vast pillared hall edged by chasms bridged by slender bridges. Gorfang recognized it, for he had been there once in his youth after the death of his grandfather. It was indeed Kîshshul, ancient orc-fortress from the elder days before the coming of the Dragon Varkar, re-colonized by the orcs once held in thrall by the Elryid Empire, birthplace of Gorfang's father Múrhak.
The hall was not empty; it was filled, crammed to overflowing with ranks upon ranks of orcs, trolls, ogres, warg-riders and giants. îshshul mustered for war, and it did not require any great intuition to guess upon whom.
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As the image faded, the second word appeared in his mind, and Gorfang spoke it; "Sar'Prime". A new vision was granted; a totally alien city, quite plainly on a different material plane - the light, plants, angle of the horizon, clouds in the sky, all were different. Even the sky - this world had only one moon. At first, the view was of peaceful-looking cities linked by marching rows of vast mithril spheres, but after a while the scene shifted to a vast battlefront, with gaunt humanoids in baroque, peculiar armour fading in from nowhere amidst the wreckage of buildings and the spheres to battle the Sarkrith. In many places, it was an even fight, with just physical combat deciding the issue, but in one location an area about five miles across had been cleared of the mithril spheres and here the Githyanki were once again supported by magic and psionics. At the edge of this the Sarkrith were fighting with a berserk ferocity but more and more Gith were pouring in to hold their bridgehead. Slave troops are being used lavishly by the Sarkrith as cannon-fodder, including orcs and humans. These seemed very well trained and disciplined compared to those Gorfang had so far attracted to his following.
The image faded and Eloy and Gorfang glanced at each other. The meaning behind the cryptic words of Hektis fell into place for them. Gadûhvrás needed an army of orcs; the party's old enemies the Sarkrith had just that, all trained and equipped. Only the tiny obstacles of them being enslaved for generations by a whole world full of militaristic fanatics - a world enveloped in an antimagic field, except where another race of near-human fanatics appeared to be fighting them - stood in the path of acquiring them.
"You coming?" asked Gorfang. "Where?" "There!" "You have got to be kidding!"
The two discussed their options for interfering. Eloy had access to scrolls of Plane Shift, but both were fairly sure that they wouldn't work into an area of antimagic, and targetting them to the Gith bridgehead wasn't going to be especially reliable. There was only one viable option, but it could possibly cause problems.
"So do we side with the Gith?" asked Eloy. "Won't they see us as enemy soldiers and take us as slaves?" Gorfang shook his head. "That's the other guys," he said, "the Gith don't keep slaves." Eloy nodded. "And what happens when they see us cut through?" he asked.
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Returning to the city, the pair gathered the equipment they were going to need for their adventure; more flasks of Boom Boom Boom from Bog - who was now well set up in his business as an alchemist and potion-maker - selections from their considerable collection of magical items, and, a final item, a scroll of the rediscovered spell Raise Dead penned by Crastinuc, currently the only man in the world able to cast the spell. Eloy cast Mind Blank on them both, aware of the psionic nature of the Githyanki.
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Finally gathered in Gorfang's ballroom - now accepted by the staff of Southwold as the ready-room for their lord's extraplanar adventurings - the two squared their shoulders and Gorfang donned his Antimagic Ring and took out his Opener of the Way. With the confidence of regular use, he attuned his mind to it and leaned forwards to make the cut.
For the first time since he'd learned to use the thing, the blade seemed not to be completely under his control. Some malign influence seemed to be pulling it away from the path he was trying to guide it along, and after a couple of seconds the cut collapsed. Lifting an eyebrow, he shifted the black dagger and tried again. Once more the portal failed to open, and he gazed at the dagger in bewilderment.
Unsheathing his own Opener, Eloy stepped forward and made an attempt. This time, for some reason, the cut slid smoothly through the fabric of reality, and the portal opened in the air, showing the alien landscape of Sar'Prime on the other side. To their relief, the area on the far side appeared unoccupied, though the shape of the Githyanki camp could be seen through the portal about a mile away. Gorfang sheathed his Opener with a grunt, a little put out at Eloy's success, though now he thought of it, Hektis had said he was going to need his wily comrade. Loosening his khopeshoi, he stepped towards the opening.
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Suddenly, a movement at the edge of the opening caught his eye. Both were familiar with the slashes through reality the black knives produced, but this was new. A line of colour appeared along the edge of the hole, expanding as a shape became increasingly visible. Incredibly, emerging from the widthless edge of the portal hole, was a humanoid figure. Rapidly it took shape until, with a lithe twist in the air, a Githyanki warrior dropped to the ground and reached for the huge two-handed sword slung across his back. As he drew, he angled his body to slant the swing into a stroke down at Eloy, crouched at the corner of the portal holding the Opener of the Way in place.
Foregoing the drawing of weapons, Gorfang leaned forwards and delivered a devastating punch, straight in the middle of the Gith's vesitgal nose. The warrior was rocked backwards, and stumbled slightly, his strike faltering. Gorfang's other fist soared over his guard and crashed squarely into his chest. While the face punch had been slightly aborbed by his head moving back, this time the blow was straight to the body and the force of the strike sent the Gith flying backwards through the portal. Even as he did so, a second and third warrior were already pushing their way through the interface. "Through!" barked Gorfang, leaping over the threshold after his recent foe. Eloy pulled the Opener free and dived after him, and the portal zipped itself shut with its' usual speed. A shower of blood, bones and body parts showered down across the line where it had been as the two Gith were sliced apart by the reassertion of reality.
Eloy whirled to face the surviving Githyanki, to discover that Gorfang was standing on his swordarm, pinning him in place. With that threat discounted, he spun to look back past where the portal had been, checking for more threats. His shoulders relaxed slightly as he saw that the battlefront was at least a mile in the other direction, and that hordes of neither race were preparing to jump him from behind.
"Release your grip," growled Gorfang, the gift of ta'nara bestowing perfect fluency in the gith language from his experience of the Githmorein, "and I will not hurt you." The trapped near-human snarled up at him. "You have an Abomination Knife," he grated, "and you must die for that a thousand times over!" Gorfang lifted an eyebrow. Abomination Knife? he thought. "I am here," he said patiently, "to see your general." The Githyanki sneered. "My commander is on the Astral Plane, of course," he scoffed, "not that a mere orc could -" he was interrupted by a nasty crunch as Gorfang's boot crushed the bones of his ankle. His teeth gritted against the pain, but his resistance weakened. "Now," said Gorfang, "will you take me to the Gith commander here?" The gith writhed, then stilled. "Very well," he said at last. Gorfang stepped back and let him up, and Eloy offered to heal his ankle. "Otherwise this will take ages!" he pointed out. The gith nodded.
Eloy bent to his leg and cast a spell. To Gorfang's shock, the gith writhed in brief but explicit agony before subsiding, his leg whole once more. For a moment he lay still, his eyes glazed with pain and shock.
"Take me to your leader," said Gorfang, "or my friend will heal you again!"
The walk to the Githyanki camp took less than five minutes, and for the last two a steadily increasing number of gith warriors, wizards and psions surrounded them as they walked. Their guide had evidently communicated ahead, because they appeared to be expected. Surrounded by a ring of several hundred warriors, they entered the small tent where the commanders of the force were based. Amid all the alienness of the gith and the environment of Sar'Prime, the mundane wooden table covered in maps seemed a shock.
As the pair walked up to the commanders, one, even more baroque than the others, laid his sword down on the map table in signal of parlay and turned to them. "I am General Vanazha, commander of this expedition," he declared. As he spoke, both felt ... something ... spidering over the outside of the shields that Mind Blank had erected in their psyches. The uncomfortable feeling that this was merely a feeling-out, and that were they inclined these psions could shred both their shields and brains, settled on Gorfang and Eloy. "Bold, you are," said Vanazha, "to come into the midst of a war. You resemble our foes slave-races, but I can tell there is more to you than that. However, if we are to negotiate, I will require the surrender of your Abomination Knives." Eloy's hand twitched towards his belt, but Gorfang's outstretched hand stopped him.
"I don't know or much care why you're here, fighting the Sarkrith," he said, "I wish only to make things easier for you by taking away some of those slaves." Vanazha lifted a peculiar eyebrow. "You intend to appeal to the ... essential orcishness ... of their generationally enslaved shock troops? How?" he asked skeptically. Gorfang chuckled. "Just put me on the front line, and watch," he challenged. "You could end up being attacked by both sides!" said the general. "So?" said Gorfang.
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"You don't know what you're dealing with here," put in Eloy, "the very Gods tremble before him!" With anger and frustration, he added mentally to himself. "We are Number Two on the Sarkrith hit-list," said Gorfang. Vanazha nodded slowly. "You are certainly the first non-Sarkrith I have ever seen carrying the Abomination Knife." he commented. "Why do you hate the knives so much?" asked Gorfang.
Vanazha gestured both to chairs, and sat himself. "As you may know," he began, "we, the true Children of Gith, live in the Astral Plane. Our cities and fortresses ride islands of rock or the bodies of dead gods in its' infinite silver flows. The Astral touches every other plane in the Great Wheel, and many of the magics of creatures from the material planes make use of this - teleportation, gates, shifts, that sort of thing - all route through the Astral to reach where they are going."
The pair nodded, and he continued. "These are traceless to denizens of the Astral, but around a thousand years ago, we began to notice incursions of a different nature. Where the teleports were seamless, these opened great ragged slashes in the fabric of our plane, tore a significant distance across and exited with an equal lack of grace. Anything and anyone in their path - one gith, a whole city - was either sheared apart or sucked out of existence." He paused. "For an eon we strove to track down what was causing this, but the speed with which the cuts were made defeated our attempts to intercept them. Then, barely a year ago as you measure time, rifts began to appear differently. Made more crudely, they lingered, and we were able to study them and learn more. Finally we were ready, and we began to intercept the rifts. Many warriors died, but finally we broke through - to here - and discovered the truth of the Sarkrith. War was declared, and forces poured onto this world until a bridgehead could be cleared. Now we fight to eradicate the Abominaton Knives for ever."
"Ah." said Eloy, "that would have been us, I think."
"I feel we have a common cause," suggested Gorfang.
Vanazha nodded again, but remained seated. "Surrender the knives," he said, "and we will negotiate. Not before." Eloy looked a bit worried. "If we do, how do we get home?" he asked. Vanazha smiled a horrific fanged gith smile. "If we win, I promise you we will transport you to wherever you want to go. Even if we lose, the Sarkrith can't rebuild all this lot overnight," he gestured to the smashed ruin of mithril spheres, "so you'll be able to Plane Shift out."
Gorfang and Eloy glanced at each other. Then each reached to his belt and drew the slender black daggers, offering them to the Githyanki general. Vanazha gestured, and an aide stepped forward to receive them, holding them in a cloth so that they didn't touch his skin. He laid the cloth on the ground at the general's feet, and Vanazha stared down at them grimly. All around them, Githyanki stilled, gazing fixedly at the Openers of the Way, and despite their Mind Blanks Eloy and Gorfang could feel an increasing miasma of hate and anger boiling up. At it's peak, there was a sharp flash, and the daggers crumbled to dust, annihilated by the collected mental fury of a hundred powerful mind-warriors. The gith stood for a moment, looking satisfied and then movement resumed as they returned to whatever they had been doing.
Vanazha gestured the two to join him at the map table, and pointed at the perimeter of the githaynki bridgehead. "For what you want to do, you'll want to be close to an orc slave battallion," he said. "There's one here - but we've pretty much destroyed that. This one here has just engaged, and this one won't get here today, so the second one's your best choice." Gorfang's thick finger touched the map. "Then we'll strike here," he said.
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Eloy looked across the tent at where the githwarrior they'd encountered at the portal still stood, coughing slightly against his broken ribs. "Is he coming?" he asked. Vanazha glanced over. "Yavara?" he said. The warrior grinned ferally. "I would like to see if they're as good as they say," he said, stepping forward. Gorfang plucked a potion vial from his belt and handed it over. "Drink this then," he said. Eloy cocked an eyebrow, wondering if alcohol would turn out to be poisonous to Githyanki, but Yavara swigged it down and straightened his back. "Better," he said, "thank you." Gorfang drew his blades. "Right," he said. "Let's show these gith how we fight!" Yavara gestured and a portal appeared in the air, though which a raging battle was visible. The three dived through - to hell on some other earth.
The sheer impact of the vast conflict battered their senses. The struggle stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see, and the din blotted out all but the loudest attempts at verbal communication. The Sarkrith fought with massive savagery, their heavy armour and weapons dealing terrible damage, their massive frames absorbing wounds that would kill lighter creatures; the gith were like fluid lightning, leaping, spinning, twisting through the battle like dancers, always - always - aware of what all their comrades were doing. There was never any confusion or misunderstanding among them, and complex manuevers and set-pieces were coordinated without speech or line of sight.
Gorfang watched, feeling significant changes occur within his own mind. Regalia-bearer of the God of War he was, but the biggest force he'd ever led into battle had been a few dozen. Here, he was watching thousands upon thousands of fighters strive, and slowly his awareness of the flow of combat expanded from the tactics of individuals to the bigger pattern of the overall strategy - the move, countermove, sacrifice and victory of grouped units of warriors. Absorbed, he watched for long moments. Then Eloy spoke. "Who's the big threat? Let's make the best splash we can!" he suggested.
Gorfang shook his head and changed focus, allowing his Spirit Stance to analyse the many, many combatants and pinpoint the greatest threat they faced. His eyes narrowed as he stared at a single gigantic Sarkrith thane, standing on a grassy knoll directing the battle for the other side. He nudged Yavara. "Who's he?" he yelled. The githwarrior stared at him. "That is Magister Yuroko!" he exclaimed. "You want him dead?" asked Gorfang. "Him?" said Yavara. "That would impress the general - but you'd never - "
Gorfang bounded down towards the battlefront, bellowing commands. Alerted to their approach, the githwarriors shifted, and a hundred peeled off from the flanks to form a fighting wedge behind the orc. In a manouvre of deep beauty the githwarriors to either side folded back as the wedge trotted through, rolling down its' sides while still fighting, forming a perfect seal to prevent the Sarkrith gaining any ground. Breaking into a run, the wedge advanced across the short gap between the battlefront and the next rank of Sarkrith warriors. As one man, the githwarriors reached over their shoulders, chanting a rythmnic battlechant in deep, powerful voices, and drew the dreaded unbalanced silver swords of their people. Tucked in right behind Gorfang, Eloy prepared his magic. While a compentent fighter, he knew he could not survive direct contact in this environment, and he planned to support the specialists with a few rather nasty surprises of his own.
With a fearsome rolling crash, the wedge smashed into the Sarkrith front line. The inhuman co-ordination of the githwarriors allowed them to keep up with Gorfang's lightning movements, but in battle he was beyond any of them. His khopeshoi flashed and scaled bodies tumbled, limbs went flying, blood sprayed. Behind him, Eloy hurled potent curses, the magic focussing the misrule of chance that was Sabath on their foes and dulling their edges, deflecting their parries at the crucial moment, catching their clawed feet to send them stumbling into the ready silver blades of the Githyanki warriors. In the first impact, the wedge drove more than halfway to the huge shape of Yuroko. As the Magister's head turned to regard the new threat, Eloy invoked his Nullity, slithering between the weaves of the fabric of reality to vanish from everyone's perception. With his Ring of Flying, he soared above the wedge, pulling out a potent spell scroll. Swiftly reciting the words, he deceived reality yet again into accepting that he was really able to cast the spell on it, and a moment later the blast of a Destruction spell flared around the Sarkrith warlord. His head flung back in a scream of pain, the reptile writhed in the black flames of the unholy fire that enveloped him - and then Gorfang was upon him.
The orc was covered from helm to boot in hot, green reptilian blood, and his blades lashed out at the partially-stunned general. Blood and bits of armour flew in all directions, and the Sarkrith staggered back. His hand clawed for his great double-handed sword, but as he drew it Gorfang struck again and Yuroko's head bounced across the knoll. The orc siezed it and strode to the top, waving it wildly. He caught sight of the orcish battalion, fighting to his right, and bellowed wordlessly, rewarded by the sight of several of them pointing him out to each other.
Above, Eloy rained Word of Chaos spells cast from scrolls down on the Sarkrith to either side of the wedge, but it was apparent that both sides were becoming too badly mauled to fight more this day. The two lines seperated, each backing towards their own lines. As they did so, Gorfang and Eloy retrieved nearly a dozen wounded orcs, fending off the githwarriors who - like the Sarkrith - took no prisoners in this merciless war. Each was healed by Eloy, and once again the double-edged gift of Sabath's healing left agony and a tiny scorpion-shaped scar in its' wake.
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Session Date: 11th April 2012 |
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