The next day’s march was slow as their cartographer noted that they were close to location they most suspected would be home to Mardok’s forces. A lone scout spearheaded the army’s movement, while others maintained a perimeter around the main force. All had been given specific instructions to turn back as soon as there was any sighting of enemy forces. They could not afford to lose their tactical advantage.
It had been half a day’s march and Lady was brimming with nervousness and excitement. In the distance she saw the figure of her scout, returning far sooner than she had anticipated. She encouraged her horse forward and rode out to her scout, not wanting to wait for him to return with the news she had already guessed.
“My Lady, there is an enemy encampment not far from here, as well as a tower about a full day’s march from here. It must be quite the structure to be visible this far out.”
“Good. The men will be disappointed when I give the order that there will be no fires tonight. We don’t want to alert them to our presence, we need that upper hand.”
“Shall I return and continue to monitor the enemy?”
“No. I wish to organize a team myself to get a good look at our opponent. You may rest for the time being.”
Turning on her horse, Lady rode back to where her men rested. Her heart was pounding in excitement. It was almost time to go to battle, but she wanted her trusted Captain of the Guard to be with her.
She slid out of her saddle and landed next to her new recruits, who were busy listening to Sir White explain how to patch broken armor when full repair could not be acquired. Sir White paused as Lady approached them, the biggest grin that he had ever seen on her face.
“Good news, everybody. We draw close to our enemy.”
Everyone’s interest picked up as Lady continued.
“I want to get a look at the forces for myself. Sir White, I assume you are coming along?”
“I feel we should leave this matter to the scouts,” he protested. “It dangerous, and this is exactly the role they were trained for.”
“Indeed it is, but I would feel more confident facing an army I’ve seen.”
Sir White protested no further, knowing that she would not budge once she started.
Lady turned and looked at her newest recruits and smiled.
“You three should also come along as well. It will be a good opportunity to see what you’re getting yourselves into.”
All three gave an affirmative answer.
Darth’s grin ran from ear to ear, the urge for a fight peaking within him.
“Remember,” Lady said, “we are to maintain stealth. If they should discover our presence this whole campaign will be at risk.” She hoped that would quell him, but his grin only slightly straightened.
“The area is a thick forest of colossal trees, whose branches grow long and lush, so we should all have plenty of cover. We will break into teams of two, except for Darth who insists that he works best alone. Mearm and Parune, you will go to the east side of the camp. Darth you will approach from the west end, and Sir White and I will be stationed at the south.”
Darth found himself some five hundred feet from the west end of the encampment, wondering what he was looking at. He had expected the usual forces of the enemy, but what he saw now was either a monster, or someone who had fallen off the ugly tree and managed to hit every branch on the way down. Just as he thought to classify it as a revolting zombie, another walked up with the same pustule features, causing him to hesitate. They looked humanoid, dressed in armor and carrying golden swords, but they lacked the bumbling unorganized manner that the undead seemed to possess. They looked less than human; things were disproportioned even at a distance, their hands looked swollen and their skin was a pink mottled fleshy tone covered in boils, and at points it looked as though it had sloughed off, revealing white bone underneath.
He had never encountered anything like these creatures in his seclusion. Had these once been human, or were they new beings that darkness had spawned? Darth skimmed the tents of the encampment, spotting several more. Each was dressed in leather armor and carried a golden sword, and donned a golden helm.
Darth worried as to what their role within Mardok’s army might be and wanted to get a better idea of what they were up against, but could get no closer. The likelihood of being spotted was too high. He could, however, get them to come to him. Smiling at the thought, he began plotting while his sharp eyes scouted the nearest creatures.
Mearm and Parune shared the same disgusted look, with Mearm’s lip slightly curled into a snarl from the revulsion. Among the ranks or Mardok’s pig men they saw a man, one who had lived within Thundersnow before its fall.
“Traitor!” Mearm hissed under his breath before spitting on the ground, cursing the name. Parune gave sideways glance to his comrade, who was all but brimming for hatred for those who had abandoned humanity.
Parune spotted out of his peripherals some strange looking contraptions boiling off at the edge of camp, producing odd clouds of smoke and a foul odor. Surely, he thought, the fumes would be harmful, hence their being kept so far from the main forces. He tapped Mearm on the shoulder and indicated his find, signaling for Mearm to follow.
They crawled along the ground, ever so slowly, and after what felt like an eon of inching along, came to the crates near the edge of the forest. There they found odd colored liquids, heated within glass flasks. They pulled their undershirts over their noses to blot out the stench.
Mearm wrote in the dirt, “Alchemy?”
Nodding, Parune looked around, hoping for some sort of item he could take back.
Alchemy, or the brewing of potions and enchantment of items, had been heard of in faraway lands, but nobody today could claim to have honestly witnessed the practice. It was even frequently written in legends, but the art had been lost over the centuries, a result of inaccurate records, or records kept only in lost languages.
Among the odd items were strange reddish bulb shaped plants which he could only guess were fungi. They looked beyond anything natural, clustered in a pile by the brewing stand. A valuable prize they would make, but there was too much risk in reaching for them. Parune felt a tap on his shoulder, and glanced over to where Mearm was pointing.
Before them was a book, seemingly defying gravity as it hovered just above the obsidian alter. Suddenly aware of his hanging jaw, Parune sealed his mouth and scribbled in the dirt before erasing it. “We need to get that book.” Nodding in agreement, Mearm studied the area around the book. There was some protection in the nearby shrubs, but they would not conceal them completely. It would be an interesting challenge, if only some of the blasted bloated pink rotting creatures would wander off.
Suddenly there was a sharp squeal from in the distance, a horrifying guttural noise that caused Mearm and Parune to cover their ears impulsively. Mearm and Parune held still, all but willing themselves to become a part of the underbrush, not daring a glance for fear of being spotted. They listened to the grunting huffing noises of the decaying pink creatures. The clatter of armor moved away from them, and Mearm seized the moment to belly crawl for their target. Parune followed, swearing in his head the entire time, thinking this would be a damned bad time to be captured.
They arrived at the strange obsidian alter, the book hovering above rotated in the air and fluttering a few pages before landing resting page in particular, whose symbols were incomprehensible to the two of them. Debating for a moment as to what would happen if they just grabbed the book, Mearm reached into his leather pouch and pulled out a scrap of paper and quill, scribbling the design of the alter. It would be impossible to lug the obsidian pedestal around with them, but seemed to be something that they could build, given the time and materials. Parune kept a sharp eye out for the creatures return, worried they may lose interest in whatever had pulled them away. All too soon did this occur.
Nudging Mearm, Parune made a last second decision that he hoped he wouldn’t regret, and snatched the floating tome. There was no resistance from the book as Parune tucked it under his breastplate. Tome in tow, the two of them returned to the ground and crawled back into the forest.
They used the comfort of trees to avoid the guards outlining the encampment and placed their steps carefully so as to minimize foot prints. It was a tedious and long process, but the two of them silently worked in unison, using hand signals for communication, scouting ahead and carefully picking their way back to the encampment. Both of them wondered on the journey home if it was one of their companions who had been the reason for their good fortune in obtaining the book, but also worried if there was going to be one less individual returning.
Darth sat atop of a tree branch watching two fumbling rotting creatures try to figure out where the object of their searching had vanished off to. He had been forced to hide in the tree after a stray gust of wind brought his scent into the nostrils of the pustule monsters. It wasn’t exactly what he had planned, but Darth was easily able to adapt to the situation.
The beasts looked as if undead men had been melded with swine, their stature human, but their heads possessing long snouts that revealed tusks piercing out of their mouths. They had humanoid hands capable of wielding the golden weapons, but their legs were bent with hooves. Their festering bodies stunk with death as rotting bits of flesh had been peeled back, revealing muscle, bone and organs, out to putrefy in the open. Flies and other small insects had made comfortable homes inside of these wet crevices, allowing small maggots and other unnamed writhing things to wiggle just under the skin. How they could smell anything past their own bodies was beyond Darth.
They didn’t seem particularly intelligent, but their noses proved to be a problem. The creatures stooped to the ground where Darth had been crouched moments before, their nostrils huffing up the air in the spot. Their snouts wiggled, moving the underbrush around as if searching for something under all the pine needles, then the nearest slowly crawled on all fours towards Darth’s tree.
Darth’s eyes glanced towards the other undead pig-man, whose back faced the tree, searching through the river trail that he had taken to get here. With his breath held, Darth watched as the creature directly under him followed his scent to the roots of the tree before standing, the nose all but dragging along the bark of the trunk before looking directly up. It met with Darth’s sword, as he leapt down, slicing cleanly though the decomposing flesh and severing off its head.
The commotion turned the remaining undead pig-creature around, and its sword had just enough time to swing down, blocking Darth’s blade.
The swine parried each of Darth’s strikes, and with a powerful push, it took the offense. Darth blocked with all his speed and strength as the swine’s steel connected with his own. With unnatural speed and power, the swine began to gain the upper hand. Darth paced back to gain some room, his arm becoming numb with each strike, but the soil proved slippery this close to the river. The swine noticed the slightest slip in Darth’s footing and pushed forward, sending Darth sliding back in the mud.
The swine brought its golden blade down upon Darth, but met only the stone below the mud. Darth’s sword pressed up into the swine’s chest, finding a clean path between the ribs and out the other side. He twisted the blade and looked up into the black orbs that were the creature’s eyes, and swore it smiled as the skin around the tusks split. A deep, last breath was drawn.
Darth’s hand reacted on instinct alone as he drew his dagger and thrusted it up underneath the chin, the blade splitting brittle bone, through the roof of the mouth and into the brain. The creature shuddered, black eyes going wide, the intended shout of alarm dying before it began, as the creature staggered, then toppled over.
Mearm and Parune were the first to return to the rendezvous point and waited patiently. Agreeing to keep their prize secret until Lady returned, they tried not to let concern mount as the minutes passed. It was a half hour before Mearm looked up towards the sky, noting the location of the sun and frowned.
“What’s that,” remarked Parune, who returned his attention to the forest. In the distance there was a gleam of gold as an individual approached. Mearm and Parune reached for their weapons instinctively, remembering the grotesque creatures of Mardok’s forces, but relaxed once they realized that it was Darth’s grinning features that adorned the golden helm, the new sword swung over his shoulder along with a liquid stained sack.
It seemed that Lady’s earlier concern for Darth being the one to find trouble wherever he went was right on the mark. Mearm shook his head while Parune could not help but snicker at the sight of Darth’s gleefulness over his trophies.
“Something tells me that you didn’t just stumble across those,” Parune quipped as Darth approached.
“Your eyes must be bad Parune, I’ve always had these,” Darth responded with a smirk. Mearm let out a laugh, and after a look around Darth asked, “Is Lady back?”
“Not yet. There was a commotion while we were at the monster’s camp, but we couldn’t see anything.” Parune noted as he glanced back to the woods, hoping to see the figures before the sun set.
“Thant was my doing; those creatures have noses on them that wolves would envy.”
“I take it you got a good look at them. What are they?”
“Have a look!” Darth said as he threw the bloody bag to the ground. It opened, exposing the hideous face of the pig man.
“OOGA BOOGA!” Darth shouted, startling the two before laughing uproariously. “The rest of him is floating down the river, if you want to see what the rest of him looks like.”
The two caught their composure and glared at Darth, who continued to chuckle. They turned their attention to the head, wondering what unholy magic conjured such creatures. Further discussion was interrupted as Mearm glanced back to the forest and nudged Parune.
Smiling, Parune turned, expecting to see Lady and White coming down the path, but his expression changed as he frowned in concern. “That can’t be good.”
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