Reborn as a Fantasy General (Army-Building Isekai)

[IronLung]

As Marcus and his army marched wearily through the winding tunnels back to Fleapit, the echoes of their footsteps reverberated off the damp stone walls, creating an eerie symphony that seemed to celebrate their hard-fought victory. The flickering torches cast dancing shadows on the faces of the weary soldiers, highlighting the exhaustion and determination etched into their furry features.

Yet the weariest among them was their General himself. Try as he might, he couldn't forget the faces of those who had been lost to carry him this far. Once again, he was forced to confront the fact that he was stepping over the corpses of these creatures to grasp at the fleeting hope that he could find Mari and get home.

As his Spineripper jostled forward at the head of the throng, he turned his face to the men beside him – Skeever, ever confident and filled with pride to have his new command (already the rats were fabricating the legend of the rat that had pierced the skin of a fat God by himself) and Deekius, who seemed paler by the second. Since they had begun their trek home, the venerable Gloomraava had not said another word.

His troubles have to be put aside, for now, Marcus scribbled in his (by now very tattered) journal. Preparations need to get underway quickly if we are to make good time to link up with our new recruits at Gulchnavel. I doubt Skegga can call reinforcements from his Kobolds, now. But there is the possibility of his Yokun benefactors sending him some form of aid if we give him the chance to call upon them…and considering how three of their assassins managed to throw this entire city into chaos, I don't like our chances if they enter this war for real.

Priority number one is finding this Silas and then Mari. If he has the power to send me home, he must have the strength to send me to her. It's possible – of course – that Skegga could simply succumb to madness and start executing his prisoners. But for some reason I don't see it happening. I don't think the toad is the type. He's too concerned with his reputation for that. And right now he needs all the numbers he can muster, even if he must know by this point that his best chance for his own self-preservation is unconditional surrender.

But then, that's also something his pride won't ever let him admit. He's like a chubbier, more overconfident Hideki Tojo. And just like him, Skegga's not the one who holds the real power here.

As they approached the gates of Fleapit, the air was filled with the sound of cheering and jubilation. The ratmen poured out of their homes and tunnels, waving makeshift banners and flags in celebration of their returning heroes. The streets were lined with cheering crowds, their voices blending together in a cacophony of joy and relief.

Marcus rode at the head of his army, his eyes struggling to keep up with the sights of all his adoring fans cobbled together in the bustling city. The foundry workers stopped their labors, those elderly rats in the black cauldron of their retirement crept out to kiss the feet of his mount, and Shrykul himself had assembled an entire array of Gloomraava to send up a chant of welcome and victory for the great army of the First Talon. The ratmen hailed him as a savior, a leader who had delivered them from the tyranny of Boss Skegga. The streets were adorned with colorful tapestries and lanterns, flags flying with the face of rats with glasses upon their brows, creating a festive atmosphere that seemed to banish the shadows of war and uncertainty that had plagued Fleapit for so long.

As they made their way through the bustling streets, Marcus could see the gratitude and admiration in the eyes of the people. Children ran alongside the procession, reaching out to touch the hem of his cloak or simply to catch a glimpse of the hero who had brought them victory. Elders nodded their approval from the doorways of their homes, their faces creased with age but shining with pride.

Finally, the procession reached the central square of Fleapit, where a makeshift stage had been erected for Marcus to address his people. As he dismounted his weary steed and climbed the steps to the platform, the crowd fell silent, hanging on his every word.

He looked to Skeever and Deekius, then returned to the crowd and almost felt his voice catch in his mouth.

After having just thought about it with Steven, this situation seemed so like that of his University back home. Except this time, the crowd was on his side.

He had to admit the adulation was infectious.

"Ratmen of Fleapit!" Marcus began, his voice strong and steady despite the weariness that weighed on his shoulders. "Today, we stand united in victory. Together, we have faced our enemies and emerged triumphant. But let us not forget the sacrifices that were made, the lives that were lost in the name of freedom and unity."

The crowd murmured their agreement, a somber reminder of the cost of their hard-won victory. Marcus paused, his gaze sweeping over the sea of faces before him, his heart heavy with the weight of their collective losses. He had to make sure the rats knew he wasn't simply waving their fallen Lords aside.

"What we have done today is this," he continued. "We have sent Skegga a message he shall not soon forget: he is no God. He has hopped back home, tail between his legs, in the face of those he sought an easy victory over. Let this day stand in your memory – rats of Fleapit – this is the day your fallen Brothers have been avenged. Festicus and Verulex both look down upon us with pride, sitting beside the true God of this realm – He-Who-Festers!"

The crowd roared with the army, the cacophony of their wails mixing together so it became difficult to distinguish civilian from armed combatant who had only just cleaned the blood of their yipping enemies from their blades.

The exhilaration of the parade was such that Marcus almost forgot the point he had to make here – something he'd resolved to say ever since his little 'chat' with Steven. Something that, like it or not, these rats needed to hear:

"But let us also remember that it is in times of darkness that the light of unity shines brightest," Marcus continued, his voice rising with conviction. "We have proven that we are stronger together, that we can overcome any obstacle when we stand as one. Today, we celebrate not just a victory in battle, but a victory of the spirit, a triumph of unity over division. Three Clans! One victory!"

The crowd erupted into cheers and applause, their voices raised in a chorus of gratitude and admiration for their beloved First Talon. Marcus raised his arms in salute, and then pointed out both Deekius and Skeever in the crowd, urging them to join him and accept their share in the glory

But though the rats of Fleapit joined in celebrating their kin, there was another chant that they had started to take up, spurred on by the hooded Gloomraava that walked among the crowd.

"Three Clans. One Leader!" they screamed at the top of their tiny lungs. "Three Clans! One Leader! One Destiny!"

The chant became a mantra. It became a living voice that breathed even more fervent life into the crowds. The triumphant cry that echoed through the tunnels of Fleapit and beyond, a testament to the power of unity and the resilience of the ratmen who called it home.

And though he tried to ignore it, the statement was not one so easily brushed aside.

One leader…

With the thought lying heavy in his heart, Marcus looked down at his hands before he left the stage for an audience with King Shrykul.

On impulse, he saw that they had both balled into fists.

###

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[IronLung]

*Important note: this week will be the final week of chapters before I start summer vacation. I will be heading home to see my family from June 16th to July 8th. There will be no new chapters during this time. Patreon billing will be paused. Book 1 of Fantasy General will be pretty much wrapped up on Patreon by this week's end.

Thanks for all your support on this story. This is my longest vacation in the year, I promise. I'll be using this time also to polish up all of book one and plan for the rest of the series - because this is a story I love to write, and I want it to go the distance.

Now, on with the chapter:
Marcus sat pensively in the war-council chamber of Castel Carfaxx, his quill tapping incessantly on his notebook as he waited for King Shrykul to attend the meeting.

It struck him as odd that the King would be late, but considering the multiple duties his position required (and those extra ones demanded by his voluptuous Queen) Marcus wasn't in the mood to complain. Beside him sat Skeever and Deekius in similarly quiet contemplation. This, too, struck him as odd. Here they were on the verge of victory, and a grim specter hung over the assembly.

The only one who'd said anything at all was the sickly Deekius, who had whispered to Marcus conspirationally when he took his seat beside him.

"Our friend's toughness is finally peeling away," he said. "After this, there is something she shall be telling you."

Marcus's eyes widened at the admission. If Yeeva finally had the information he needed…maybe his way out of here would come sooner than he thought. The time couldn't be more perfect. The war was close to being over – was all but won, in fact. This meeting would be just a formality. The resignation of the rats beside him, and those of the palace soldiers, was testament to the fact that things were finally going to calm down around here.

Perhaps, he wrote in his diary/historical documentation. They too are becoming weary of constant war. Movement, battle, movement, planning – it must tire out even a seasoned veteran like Skeever.

Deekius, however is another story.

Marcus looked with growing concern at the sniveling rat-priest, noticing how his furred lips were flecked with crimson.

Something's happening to him ever since he performed his Incantation at Razor-Ridge, erecting the Wall of the Unclean as the rats are calling it. From now on, the only way to Grindlefecht will be through Black Gulch, all thanks to the tiny creature sitting beside me.

I can't lose him – not when he's got such power in his hands. After this meeting, I'll have to figure out what the problem is. And why he's keeping it from me.

Marcus then decided to take the time to note down a few of the newest developments in Fleapit since his triumphant return.

The biggest changes being made around here concern the newest additions to the Fleapit standing forces. Now these rats have two entirely new pieces of technology they've never even employed before: the arquebus, and the 12-pound cannon.

I took some time to inspect them once we were back here and confirmed that the designs are eerily similar to those of the early-modern period of human history, with a few notable exceptions. Dwarf craftmanship is clearly beyond anything else down here, as evidenced by the internal workings of their firing mechanisms. For example, they've figured out the concept of spin-stabilization and factored this in to the rifling of their arquebus gun barrels. The result is a firearm with much-improved accuracy to what was seen in the early Ottoman matchlocks of 1465. The standardized bore of the gun furthermore allows the bullets to be loaded much faster – in a similar fashion to the 16th century caliver musket. An elegant weapon, to be sure, but one which is far beyond the ratman foundry's capacity to replicate, at least not without years of study and experimentation.

It is not, however, impossible for them to learn how to cast the ammunition. Both the arquebus and the 12-pounders use standard iron projectiles. It's a simple process to reproduce such metallic projectiles through casting, and down in the Fleapit foundries the directors and blacksmiths seemed to understand the basics of how to cast a rough sphere (after I spent an inordinate amount of time detailing the process). I estimate that within the next week or so a production line will be set up and these bullets will soon be rolled out en masse. This isn't to say it will be easy, mind – we're still talking about producing metal alloys capable of maintaining the grooves of the arquebus' rifled barrels. It will take them far longer to perfect this art. But if there's one thing I've seen in these rats – it's that they're quick learners.

The advantages are, of course, innumerable. We're talking about an entirely new perspective on ranged combat – something that the rats of Marrow certainly seem to scoff at. But even they can't deny the effectiveness of cannon shot against the fortifications of the Underkingdom. Down here, the most advanced defensive walls seem to be of timbre, stone, and at best earthwork – easy pickings for our dense metal projectiles. In the future, they might even consider casting grapeshot or shrapnel for the cannons. I can just imagine their joy in seeing the carnage wrought by an army charging them in an open field.

Of course, Ix is out there training the new ranged units right now. They're getting there – but the accuracy concerns are a problem. Perhaps a fork rest could be employed at least initially, till the men get to grips with how to handle the elongated barrel of their newest weapons. I've imparted to our versatile little Yip that there are plenty of advanced strategies one can use to make rifle-bearing soldiers more effective. He was at first skeptical, but I saw his little eyes light up when I explained to him the concept of Volley Fire – something the Dwarves of Corvaughn had already seemed familiar with judging by their disciplined firring lines. Setting up something similar will of course take time and allowances will have to be made for the ratmen to understand more advanced line-formations, but I'm certain they can pick it up, especially if its explained to them that it will compensate for the slow reload time of their rifles (we're talking about at the very least a 15 second delay in firing time after a successful volley. I have no idea how the dwarves were able to do it faster, and only now do I regret not being able to inspect that old sniper's crushed rifle…)

But such reflections will have to wait, Marcus finished writing. I have a King to see.

Shrykul burst through the double doors of the council chamber looking considerably older than he did the last time Marcus set eyes on him.

The three soldiers rose, even though the King rat didn't seem particularly interested in their display of fealty.

"Be at ease," he told them as he took his appointed seat at the opposite end of the table and began rubbing his tired temples. "We are having much business. Many changes are happening to the Kingdom. Such changes must be occurring with care."

I almost feel sorry for him, Marcus thought.

"Which is exactly why I don't wish to take up too much of your time, Sire," he said aloud. "The final stage of our plan is already progressing without our direct intervention. With your permission…"

The King simply waved him to continue. Marcus nodded to Skeever.

"We are hearing reports that Skegga's Kobolds are rebelling," the rat said, pointing a curled finger at their North Warrens map spread out on the table. "His perimeter villages are seeing him weak and are taking the chance to flee to our camp beyond Black Gulch. They are resisting his soldiers when they come to collect food for his palace. They are stockpiling supplies and rejecting him as God. They are joining their Brothers we are converting."

"Kovesh is doing good job," King Shrykul said. "But we should be cautious. Not all Kobolds should be allowed into army. Some may still be spies for Boss Skegga. We should be imprisoning them in Fort Greenwatch."

"Sire," Marcus interjected. "I thought we discussed this? More Kobold conscripts means more manpower to send against the walls of Grindlefecht when the time comes. With our new ranged support units, ratman causalities should be minimal in the final assault."

"And then what is happening after?" Kign Shrykul pressed. "Kobolds will want their own cities in our kingdom. Kobolds will want their own forts in our lands. Day may come when they rebel against us. No matter how much you are telling us, Shai-Alud, they are not being like us."

Marcus grit his teeth. Where was this coming from, all of a sudden?

"This is why we will install leaders whose loyalty to us is unquestionable," Marcus said. "Ix and his men have proven themselves through and through. They will ensure the Kobolds in your Kingdom stay in line."

The King was not to be dissuaded. "Marcus, we are already seeing what Kobolds do when they are thinking their rulers are not effective. When they are being presented with other options that are offering them more strength. One day, this Ix may be having delusions of grandeur on a scale similar to the fat toad he is once following – and would still be following, if you had not spared his life."

The King's outburst seemed to strike at the two other rats, who looked from him to Marcus as though watching a duel unfold before their beady eyes.

Marcus felt his hand scribbling away of its own accord, taking notes to assay his growing frustration.

This is becoming a theme. Every war-council seems to be more about ratman supremacy than about really establishing a true empire. This kind of rhetoric though…is this really the King speaking? The same feeble King that normally just smiled and waved, when he wasn't serving his Queen?

"I cannot turn our operations in the North into a plan to create Kobold-internment camps," Marcus said. "I will not reward their service to our cause with captivity. Then," Marcus added gravely. "You really will have a rebellion on your hands."

"My King," Skeever broke in cooly. "Perhaps we should be proceeding with the Shai-Alud's plan. His duty is to be ending war. What happens after is being another concern."

"A concern that is becoming more and more pressing," Shrykul replied, eyeing all three of them with gravitas, as though a hidden sword was poised at his neck. "If we cannot be showing that we are strong enough to hold the North, then there will be others who shall be taking it from us. Dark eyes watch Grindelfecht, my children. We are being on the eve of the greatest triumph in our history. I will not let our glory be taken away."

Taken away…

What the hell are you talking about?

"Sire Shrykul," Marcus said. "Once this war is over, you shall have more power than any of your Brother Kings. Once the North is won you will be as a God to your people, second only to He-Who-Festers. None would dare oppose you."

The King flashed his tongue at his First-Talon, his face twisting into a macabre smile while he shook his head slowly, like a father listening to his errant son.

"Marcus," he said. "You are still not having eyes to see what even the smallest infant can..."

###

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[IronLung]

Marcus stared at Shrykul's weary face, totally lost against the rat-monarch's candor.

"I am making decision on this," he said with a heavy wave of his hand. "Any Kobolds conscripted into army are to be no more than 500 Yips strong. The rest are to be kept behind, without weapons."

Marcus pushed. "Sire, you are depriving us of a war asset that we could use to crush your enemy faste-"

"There is being more at stake here than crushing our enemy," the King interrupted. "From reports you are making, it is seeming that our enemy is already beaten. We will not be letting his old followers get any ideas. Our equipment will be staying with our people, not his."

The King knew he was stepping on his First-Talon's toes. But he didn't care. Something had happened between their last victory and now that had him rattled. What that was, Marcus could only guess at…

"Sire," Skeever broke in. "Perhaps a good compromise would be putting the remaining Kobolds to work? There are many repairs our forts are needing. There are many more tunnels that can be fixed in the wake of Gutmulcher threats and Skegga's incursions."

Both Marcus and Shrykul looked at the King with surprise.

Skeever…out of all of us…that's actually the best idea that's ever been brought up at this table.

The King stroked his chin, considering the notion.

"This is being a fair notion," he said. "We could be using Kobold labor force to rebuild what they themselves destroyed. It would be punishment and make them useful at the same time, and could be done without giving them access to our weapons."

The King glanced at Marcus, visibly impressed.

With one of your own, Marcus noted. Not with me.

He could read the temperature of the room. There was nothing more for him to say except,

"Yes," he said. "If they cannot fight, they can work for the Empire. But this will require a surplus of rats to act as enforcers. It's hard for a force of deserters to think they've been saved if they're immediately put to work by the side they joined. They're more likely to see themselves as slaves."

The King laughed drily. "Sire Marcus, that is what the Gloomraava of He-Who-Festers are for. The Kobolds are seeing what our God can do. They should be honored to be tilling our soil in His name. If we can count on the Gloomraava of Deekius to continue their appointed duties, then that shall be enough to keep this labor force in line."

Marcus was about to respond – to say something more about the tangible threat of revolt that even a zealous workforce might present – when Deekius suddenly rose from the table and began to speak.

"You are speaking for the Unclean as though he has made you His anointed one," he screeched, spittle flying from his mouth. "But he has not."

The King narrowed his eyes. Skeever and Marcus, meanwhile, flew to try and calm the rat's sudden heretical words.

"Do not be touching me!" he railed at them, throwing up his staff and almost cracking their hands. "I am sitting and listening to you being insulted, Shai-Alud, by a rat that is thinking he is above our God. But none are greater than the Unclean One. None may speak for Him but his champion, King Shrykul. And that champion sits here before us!"

Marcus' eyes found the King's on the other side of the dimly lit table and saw the flaring of fury engulf them – his pupils dilating with every exhortation the rat-priest threw his way.

"Deekius!" Marcus shouted. "Stop this!"

But the ratman was not to be deterred. Like a rabid beast, he cracked his neck and cast an accusatory finger at the King of Fleapit.

"You are not the one, Shrykul!" he cried. "No matter how much you are wishing to be! The exploits of the Shai-Alud are what brought us here, not you! Not – n – not y – EUGH!"

The entire table shook as Deekius hunched over and belched a torrent of blood on its surface.

"Deekius!"

The ratman lurched, eyes bulging as though he were about to go into shock.

"I…I…I see…I see…you…at…the end…"

He collapsed in a heap below the table as both Skeever and Marcus jumped from their seats to catch him.

"Be bringing the guards!" Shrykul yelled. "We are having a wounded soldier among us!"

Marcus heard him speak those words – words garbed in the guise of concern – but his eyes beheld something very different. As he bent low to pick up the twitching form of the fallen priest, he saw something else that had been approaching him from underneath the table. Something that had been waiting, slowly crawling towards them for maybe the entire meeting.

Something with teeth as sharp as silver thickets, with an emaciated frame that showed it was starving.

"Hugin!" Shrykul shouted. "Be heeling, now."

The King's dog huffed and moved away, coming to rest under the palm of its owner, leaving Marcus to stare on in total befuddlement.

"I am being sorry, Shai-Alud," Shrykul said. "With the recent deaths of my cousins, I am taking precautions against assassination. My hounds are being well trained and best bodyguards in all of Fleapit. Unlike mortal men," he added. "Their loyalty is being unquestionable."

Marcus stood with Deekius in his arms, staring blankly ahead as two guards came to take the priest off to his chambers.

"Yes," he said. "I'm sure it is."

He did not know exactly what kind of face he was making as he stared down the once-pliant King. In truth, only Skeever knew how both rat and man looked in the room at that moment, and the tension that surged through his bones was greater than even they felt in the heat of the hour.

"Should we be continuing, Sires?" he asked, keeping his voice steady.

King Shrykul replied with a flash of his glittering teeth. "No, Brother. It is time for us all to be getting some rest. I am understanding that the army is moving out tomorrow, Sire Marcus? If so, you will be needing plenty of rest before you lead us in our final victory."

Marcus said nothing more. He bowed and left the room with Skeever in toe, hands crossed behind his back, trying to keep his expression as neutral as possible.

"The Queen is looking favorably upon your efforts," Shrykul added as he pet his demon-hound's onyx forehead. "When you are returning to Fleapit, she shall be thanking you personally."

Marcus accepted the compliment with another gracious bow, turning away and not even bidding Skeever a proper goodbye before he made for his chamber and packed his things for the trip to Gulchnavel.

He threw his notes down on his bedside table and began scribbling frantically while he packed, looking over his shoulder every now and then to ensure no surveillance was upon him.

His mind started working overtime, producing scrawlings that were barely comprehensible even to himself.

He needs me to win this war, he told himself. While I'm here, he can't touch me. Deekius is the High Priest – he can't touch him, either. Solutions? An assassination of a Clan leader is one thing, but a King? No, I couldn't do it. I couldn't trust anyone to do it, either. Not Skeever – he's a loyal rat. Not even Ix – it could be traced back to me too easily. Deekius? Same issue, plus he's practically on death's door by the looks of things.

What's happening here? What's going on? We're an inch from victory and Shrykul eyes me as though he's desperate to take the head from my shoulders…he's angling for an end to the power I've gained. I know it. But why now? What…

He stopped writing, his quill leaving his fingers and clattering against the ground. It had been so obvious, and yet he hadn't seen it. So simple, and yet he hadn't thought of it. Maybe it had been the plan from the start…

At the time, his frantic, almost erratic speed was not born of any logical thought. It was not indicative of any thought at all, save for the persistent knocking against his head of a notion that had suddenly become all too clear to him:

When this war was won, they would be done with him. He would never make it back to Fleapit alive.

###

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[IronLung]

Deekius' pale form shifted as the door to his chamber opened, and the two guards watching over him turned their spears on the intruder.

The groggy eyes of the ratman opened to nothing but the dank ceiling of the castle, and his ears perked up as they heard someone cut through the guttural cries of the guards:

"Leave us."

The guards hesitated, lowering their weapons but looking at each other in bewilderment.

"Did I stutter?" the intruder said. "No. Your Shai-Alud just gave you a command."

One brave guardsman piped up.

"B-but King Shryk-"

"Is your King, true. But he is not your God's champion, setting fire to His enemies. Do you wish to see what happens when you anger the Unclean One?"

Evidently the guards did not, for in the next second, they bowed and lumbered from the room, trailing their spears behind them.

Deekius smirked as he rose and looked into the glasses of his newest visitor.

"Finally," he said. "You are making good use of your title, Sire."

Marcus, though he forced a smile, was clearly troubled. The rat-priest didn't need the power of the Gloomraav to see that. The human's face was practically dripping with sweat.

"How are you?" he asked.

Deekius stiffened. "Sire, I have strength enough in me to be serving you. You must not allow yourself to worry over a lowly servant like me."

"It's not your usefulness that concerns me," he replied. "It's your candor."

Deekius blinked.

"What you said to the King," Marcus said. "It bordered on heresy. Something which I don't think your people take lightly."

Deekius craned his neck and looked down at his twisted limbs, flexing his claws that were still speckled with his blood.

"I am devoting my life to He Who Festers," he replied, smiling through teeth that were still stained by his last episode. "I am finding you. I am performing feats beyond any Gloomraava. I am doing these things as a single rat. If I do am doing these things, can I really be called a heretic?"

Marcus smirked. "That depends entirely on whose side you truly stand on."

"The only side that is mattering," Deekius said. "I am serving the Unclean before any other Lord or Master."

Yes, Marcus thought. And that's exactly where your problem lies. There would be a time when I might have lectured you. I might have taken you by the scuff of your thin neck and told you how your beliefs mean nothing – how the voices you hear are nothing more than whispers in the wind. Who is to say that the miracles you work with your hands – miracles that have saved my skin on more than one occasion – are the results of a God working through you? As far as I'm concerned, I only see you before me, Deekius. No one else. No one behind or above you. Among rats, you are on a whole different level.

But you'll never believe that. Because that's not in your nature, is it? Again, there would have been a time when I would argue the night away with you in spite of that, even knowing I couldn't change your mind. But now…what's the point? What good would it do you or me? Right now, I need your strength – and I don't care where you think it comes from. Does that make me a hypocrite?

Well, there are worse crimes to commit than hypocrisy.

"I am not thinking that you come here simply because you worry for my health," the ratpriest coughed.

Marcus held his head high. "You said you had something for me. From our mutual friend."

Deekius smiled, licking his crimson-smeared lips.

"Perhaps it is being fate," he said. "But our little snake is finally squealing. Come, and let me show you how a rat can break a serpent."

…

If walls could speak, the dungeons of Fleapit would have such macabre stories to tell that it would turn the stomach of even the most seasoned Green Beret.

Marcus was therefore mildly surprised to see the Yokun assassin's form barely changed from how he remembered it. There she was, shaken, sticking to a shadowed corner of her cell, but still outwardly recognizable as a snake-humanoid.

"You are being surprised, Sire?" Deekius asked.

"I admit it," Marcus said. "I expected to see this creature thoroughly debased."

The ratpriest smiled. "Do not be thinking that everything surface-level is revealing what lies underneath."

At Marcus' confusion the ratman raised his palm, closed his eyes, and clenched his fist.

The Yokun stirred, spittle flying from her mouth.

"Be telling the human what he wants to know," he said, in a voice that wrang out with such power than Marcus felt his heart knock against his shaking ribs.

Yeeva writhed and the bones in her neck cracked. She fell to the floor, eyes bulging like two bulbs ready to burst, tail slapping against the wall as though in death-spasm.

"I…I…am…Yeeva…of…House…of…Whis-"

"SILENCE!" the rat screeched, throwing the serpent against the bars of her cage, her every limb shuddering and slapping against the iron painfully, giving Marcus a vision now of the places where her scales had broken apart, revealing the soft, scarred flesh beneath that was moving with every twitch of the ratman's claws.

"Be ceasing your wails. Be dropping your walls. Be looking at him and telling him the answer to his question!"

The face slammed against the bars, sending Marcus staggering back.

"Be asking now!" the ratman commanded, his scaly marionette dancing before them. "Quick!"

"W-" Marcus stuttered, steadying himself in the face of the blood-magic performance. "Your Lady – the Pala Matriarch. Maria. Where is she?"

The Yokun's mouth opened in a snarl, displaying nothing but a toothless mouth, gums covered in sores where her blood was currently boiling.

"Be. Answering," Deekius roared. "NOW!"

And with a scream that rivaled even Hannibal's battlecry, the puppeted Yokun answered.

"P…Piper's…Hill…" she choked through a throat filling with her own ichor, speaking through lungs consumed by pools of phlegm. "There…battle…Temple..!"

"More," Marcus said, edging forward, ignoring Deekius as he started to sway, nose bleeding profusely again. "Tell me where this place is. What's she doing. Where –"

"Sire!" Deekius suddenly shouted. "Seek to know no more!"

"I…I must," he said, grabbing the bars of the cage and looking into the Yokun's bleeding eyes. "Tell me that she's ok. Tell me what you meant when you said she didn't want to go home. Tell me what your people did to her!"

All at once, the Yokun's scales were peeled away, purple liquid spilling out from behind her snout.

"May she…be…your end," she whispered. "Let this face…be an omen of…the death…that awaits…you!"

Before his eyes, Marcus then saw the Yokun's neck snap with a sickening crack, sending her scales splintering to the ground in a hail, evoking a cry of pain from Deekius that seemed to snap Marcus back to the real world beyond his own desires.

"Deekius!"

The ratman waved his reaching hand away, staggering to his feet and wheezing as he wiped his newest wound from his face.

"I…I am doing what I can, Sire," he said. "I am being sorry, but she is strong in mind. It is taking much time to break her."

Marcus wasn't sure whether to back away or give the ratman a hearty pat on his hunched back. Looking back at the crumpled Yokun's body beneath them, he decided on neither. Instead he faced away from the rat and coughed.

"No," he said. "I…I have asked too much of you once again," he said. "You gave me what I needed, Deekius. It was I who selfishly asked for more. As I always do."

"Sire," the Gloomraava croaked. "Do not be cursing yourself."

"I must," Marcus replied. "No one else around here will. Not openly, anyway."

He looked on as the blood of the Yokun pooled under her crumpled corpse.

Did I really order this? Will this world really be nothing more than a means to an end for me? This world…and it's people?

He then turned back to Deekius, seeing the rat snivel and wipe away clotted blood from his nasal cavities, and told him what he'd suspected since Razork itself.

"You're dying," he said simply.

The Gloomraava stared right back at him, saying nothing.

"You're dying," Marcus said again. "I've known it since Razork, though I wouldn't let myself believe it. But it's true. The power of your Incantations has overcome you. Because I've forced more from you than a Gloomraava can take."

"Sire," Deekius replied glumly. "Are you thinking I fear death?"

"I think you fear nothing, Deekius. That doesn't mean I'm simply going to let you leave this world because of me. Whatever you might think, the man you see before you isn't worth giving up your life for."

The ratman flashed him a smile that displayed a kind of brotherly admiration – the kind of smile that told Marcus this rat had known what his fate would be for a long time.

"Sire," he said. "He-Who-Festers is always choosing His servants wisely. He is working throughout time, always looking ahead to place His faithful where they must be, when they must be. Once, when I was but a suckling child that could not see the world, the Unclean One is granting me a vision. I am seeing myself, fully grown and hunched over in service to the Lord, standing beside a creature at least a foot taller than me. The creature is a light in the Underkingdom, standing above us all and ushering us towards the surface – where our Empire is becoming so brilliant that it is the envy of the stars themselves. Before the march towards the light of the surface is made, however, I am seeing my form curl and expire, returning to the ooze of the Unclean from whence it came. I am seeing this and weeping, Sire Marcus, not because I am being sad to see my demise, but because I am overcome by the beauty of the moment. The smells, the sounds, the sights and the feeling of the skies above as the clouds are turning grey, and the cities of Thea as they are consumed by our chittering…it is a gift that is worth dying for, Sire. What is the life of a single rat compared to the glory of a God?"

Marcus said nothing as the rat then shuffled away, nodding only briefly to the guards as he left the dungeon with his last limping ounce of life.

What happens to a man when he has servants like this? he pondered. When other living souls tell him they are not only willing to die to help that man realize his dreams, but actually happy to do so?

Then he looked at the crumpled remains of the Yokun and realized that he already knew the answer.

"Maybe you were right all along, Steven," he whispered in a voice that struck him with its harshness. "But I'm the one that's still standing. And I'm not about to lay down and die just yet. If a rat with that much power at his fingertips wants to lay his life on the line for me…then so be it."

He noticed the guards blinding nervously in his direction and barked a final order at them before he left the dungeon for good. He wouldn't be coming back.

"Clean up this mess," he told them. "I've seen enough corpses in this pit to last me a lifetime."

###

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[IronLung]

"SIIIILLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAS!"

He was going to slaughter that conniving little rat.

His fat folds, crimson curtains flailing with his every gyration, wept blood and puss onto his Kobolds that had helped carry him home – those who had not wandered off in the aftermath of the Razor-Ridge collapse. Skegga, in manner which flew in the face of his apparent omnipotence, had not noticed their departure.

"I WILL KILL HIM!" he screamed, ichor and tooth-scraps flying from his rabid mouth. "I WILL EAT HIS GUTS WHILE HE STILL LIVES! I WILL PAINT MY THRONE WITH HIS MARROW!"

The Kobolds of the outlying villages that surrounded Gulchnavel Keep saw their broken Lord as he glided by their huts. Many young Yips had emerged, already dancing the Jump of Jubilation with their mothers or invalid fathers that had not been conscripted into their God's crusading force.

What they saw was not the triumphant return of a war-hero and his band of merry men. Instead, they saw a gargantuan mass of wriggling flesh shouting into the dead winds that blew through the Northernmost caverns of the Warrens. They watched as their would-be deity smashed through fences and blundered through fields, still ranting about how he would kill his ratman advisor in the most sadistic ways possible.

The Yips of the North found themselves perplexed.

"Surely Boss Skegga does not mean good-good Silas?" an aging Yip asked his wife as they quit their dancing to watch their Lord pass.

"No-no," his wife replied. "Silas has always done right-right by us. Even for ratman, he is care-caring for Yip farms and children. He is a good-good rat."

The wife spoke true – Silas had quite the reputation among the Kobolds of the Northern villages. On the days when great Skegga had first come among them, parading Silas as a slave that deserved nothing but their scorn, the Yips had jeered and thrown their dung at him as all his heretic kind deserved. But their spirits had softened to the ratman with time, and as Boss Skegga had allowed him more free will to travel among their homes, solving disputes among farmers and giving them advice on how to till the land in this dark realm. He spoke well – with a manner unbecoming for one of this kind. He had shown the Yips how to don the armor of the Stunties, shown them how to fight properly as a unit, and helped oversee the village militias as they trained in the service of their Lord. Many Yips murmured how Silas was the one that wrote Skegga's great speeches he delivered to them on days of the harvest – speeches with big words that often perplexed even the God's great lolling tongue. Yes – they saw good Silas as one of them, now.

Certainly one who would never betray the trust of a God. No – something was wrong here, the Yips of the outlying villages decided. Boss Skegga could not have lost his battle because of good Silas.

Those that cheered to see their God return were promptly shut up by either Skegga's roars or his commands to his troops to cut out their tongues. Eventually, word had spread to all those villages surrounding the great toad's fort that the battle had not only been lost, but their God had been wounded.

And that was something not even the most devout Yip could doubt.

As the Kobold villagers of the North whispered, words that were once thought heretical began to take on new life – it was said that the magic-rats under the command of their Shai-Alud had managed to enact miracles the likes of which God Skegga had never performed. It was said that an entire army of Yips were flushed away at Gulchnavel, and now bowed down to welcome a new God into their hearts. Word also traveled of the destruction wrought at Razor-Ridge, and how their gracious deity had indeed taken a spear in his belly after attempting to retreat.

As Skegga's fledgling army continued their laborious march home, confusion only continued to run rampant through the ranks of the civilian Yips in this manner. Normally, Silas would walk amongst them whenever there was a setback such as this. He had done so when the army of their Lord had fallen at the last battle of Razork village. He had done so whenever there was a bad harvest, or whenever their Lord was in a particularly stormy mood such as today. Such storms came and went for one of such boundless intelligence and emotional range as Boss Skegga.

But today, Silas was strangely absent.

In the twin Forts of the North that remained becoming more chaotic. At the sight of their God, the captain Yips of the garrisons readied their troops to move out to speed up the great toad's advance. However, scouts riding upon half-eaten Skogs rode out from Skegga's forces to meet with the commanders of both forts, explaining the situation in detail and telling the garrison that, yes, the army was lost.

"So, what do we do-do?" the Yip commander of Fort Charnel asked his messenger.

"Fort Commander can do-do as he likes," the Skogsrider told him. "Me? I am going home-home. Me is having enough of war."

Normally such sentiments would be followed by a righteous smacking from a Yip commander. But, strangely, the atmosphere of the North was beginning to change. The commander of watched the rider go, taking several of his men with him, wondering why, exactly, he was not performing his duty as a Kobold loyal to Boss Skegga.

Perhaps, he reasoned, the answer lay in the fact that the creature he was loyal to looked nothing like the wet bag of blood and broken limbs that screamed in the villages below the fort's battlements. As he looked to his Slingers who manned those walls, he realized his misgivings were more than mutual.

"SIIIIIIILLLLLLAAAAAAS!"

Skegga's final squeal announced his arrival at the golden gates of Gulchnavel, his Kobold carriers finally taking a much-needed rest from their duty of shepherding their God's behind up to his home.

Unfortunately, their ears would not get to enjoy such leisure.

"DO YOU HEAR ME, VERMIN!" Skegga screamed up at the spiked walls of his stronghold. "SHOW YOURSELF!"

After a few seconds where it seemed like the God's increasingly desperate command would go unanswered, a tiny ratman popped his furry head up from between two spokes of the stronghold's battlements.

"Sire Skegga," Silas shouted. "You are returning. How are we faring in the bat-"

"DO NOT DARE ASK ANYTHING OF ME!" the toad bellowed. "YOU WILL SAY NOTHING MORE, LYING, WRETCHED SCUM-SUCKING MONGREL!"

"Good Sire, I must be saying –"

"OPEN THE GATES!" Skegga demanded. "NOW!"

Several Kobolds manning the shining gatehouse of the great Dwarven stronghold appeared over the lip of the walls, seeing their wounded God yelling up at them.

"YOU!" Skegga screeched, every pulse of his throat filling him with pain. "OPEN. THE. GATES!"

Skegga was not a toad with a penchant for narcotics. When he was a slave of the Masters – the hideous humanoid snakes that ruled the jungles above – he saw them usually using various forms of chemical enhancements in their daily lives. When they beat him and shoved him around, or burned his belly with their smoking sticks, Skegga saw their pleasure through the pink haze of his pain. He had seen the power of their warriors firsthand when they murdered his brood and took him as one of their own – warriors who, it was said, fought with such ferocity in battle because of the drugs that made them fearless in the face of even a thirsting demon.

Skegga had rejected such substances even when they had freed him. He was a toad that would live and burn bright through his own will alone.

But when he looked up now at those Kobolds on the battlements of his stronghold, he thought that he must have ingested something toxic during the battle below.

Because they did not obey his command. Instead, they looked directly at Silas, who tapped his claws upon the golden walls.

And after a few seconds during which Skegga's scarred stomach lurched in sudden panic, the ratman gave a curt nod of his head.

The gates opened and the Kobolds ushered their fallen God inside, getting their strongest Yips within the castle keep to attend to him and his wounds.

"Be…be careful!" he spat at them. "Your God has taken the blades of your foes so that you might live!"

"Yes," Silas said as the Kobolds lay the great toad on a large slab of stone. "You are being brave, brave fighter, Sire Skegga."

The toad lurched, ready to grab the rat and tear him apart.

Then something happened that once again sent his mind reeling.

He could swear, in the moment that he reached out to crush the skull of the rat, that the Kobold assembly in the Keep courtyard flew to draw their swords.

Skegga did not cry out. He did not scream. This time, as he lowered his pudgy arm, he said nothing at all.

"Ah, I am understanding your anger, Sire," the whispering voice of Silas told him as the world began to blur before his eyes. "Defeat is being a hard thing to swallow, yes? But, be resting assured. The time of your ascension comes soon."

Skegga blinked through his pain as his wounds began to gnaw at his consciousness.

"A…ascension?"

"Indeed, Sire. For the four remaining great cannons of your palace are now being operational. When the ratmen are coming, they shall not be knowing what hit them."

Skegga felt something crawl on his arm and would have recoiled if he had any strength left in him. But he could do nothing. He could say nothing – and so Silas' arm gripped his with more strength than he knew the little rat had in him.

"You shall be a true God of this Underkingdom soon, Sire Skegga," the ratman smiled, dark eyes gleaming against the fading world. "You shall be burning like the brightest star in the night."

"Y…yes," Skegga said, laying his massive frame down on the stone slab and feeling himself being taken away. "I shall be…a God…"

His last thoughts were swirls of anger tinged with fear, because he had only now realized that he had come home to a very different palace.



-Two Weeks Later-

Another clap of thunder sounded in the deep. The Boomtail engineers' cries of "Be bracing!" were barely audible against the bellows of the twelve-pounders belching their retort against the walls of Mudklip below.

The tiny Kobold village had been the first they had come across in their trek across the Black Gulch, forging on down its narrow bridges with care and control, each Ratman sub-commander maintaining good marching order within their regiments. To look upon them now was to look upon a fighting force worthy of being called an army: they walked in disciplined rows, the new Handgunners (which the ratmen had taken to calling 'Sharpshoots') in tow, shouldering their weapons and keeping pace, the twelve pounder guns rolling behind them. There was enough weight on those things to collapse the bridges, Marcus had thought, but by the will of He-Who-Festers (Deekius' words, not his) they had endured and had been allowed to cross into Kobold lands.

That was when discipline was needed most. Marcus had addressed the army firmly when they reached the other side, noting the need to maintain formation and set up their ranks with proper adherence to the battle strategy he was employing. Seven hundred spearmen of the Clans provided the brunt of their infantry at the core of the army, with Kobold auxiliaries standing beside them. As Shrykul had commanded, these Kobolds numbered no more than five hundred, and their capacity in battle was relatively limited by their disabilities. But their mere presence would achieve the desired effect Marcus was going for: the morale of their former comrades would be shaken when they saw their brothers marching against them.

The unit of Sharpshoots – two hundred strong – were stationed in the frontlines. Their practice drills were, by this point, almost up to par with those of an average human. Their orders were to fire upon the enemy, step back, get off another volley, and then retreat behind the lines of infantry that would swarm what was left of their battered foes.

In the wings of the formation were, of course, the Spinerippers of Marrow – bloodied and battle-willing. Marcus had the most trouble instilling the idea of patience in them, but those veterans of the battles of Razork were helpful in that regard. They explained how victory was achieved through the cavalry charges that came in the middle of those battles – not by the opening bouts of the armies. Listening to such tales by the flickering bonfires outside their camp, the Spinerippers seemed just as entranced as their riders. It was odd, Marcus had to admit, seeing such pensive looks on the faces of such outwardly loathsome raptors. Odder still was the fact that these beasts seemed to act in absolute harmony with their furry (but tough) riders. To look upon them was to look upon a vision of eternal contradiction: harmonious slaughter. Organized chaos. Two disparate beasts unified by their desire to kill.

The twelve pounders were the most cumbersome element of Marcus' invasion force – getting those lumbering machines through the tunnels of Knifegut was a challenge even with the fort now being cleansed of Gutmuncher infestation. Pockets of resisting arachnids remained – those who heard the thundering of a thousand footsteps in what they still believed were their hunting grounds. Such pockets of insectoid fury were swiftly put down, and acted as solid training for the Sharpshoots especially, whose arquebus made short work of the insidious arachnids. Still, it had cost them time. Time the enemy had to reinforce and make ready to meet their advance.

But once they had linked up with Koresh and his newly supplicant Kobolds, Marcus's faith in their victory was reaffirmed. The conscripts were gathered, the rest were put to work by Skeever. Koresh seemed to understand the assignment – he waxed lyrical about the boons of hard labor and graft, telling his new flock that toiling in the name of He-Who-Festers would be the first step on the paths of their new filth-ridden faith. The Kobolds, such as they were, obeyed unquestionably. They had seen this mangy rat command an entire sea. What could they say against his injunctions?

Koresh would not be joining them in the battle to come as a result. His Gloomraava force had suffered considerably in the wake of the miracle of Black Gulch – what the rats who walked on the blessed ground where the Kobolds had drowned were calling the 'Awakening of the Rot.'

"You do not wish to bear witness to the most glorious hour of your people?" Marcus had asked the priest as the army resupplied and rested in Gulchnavel fortress.

"Nay, Sire," the hooded Gloomraava replied. "My place is not being on the battlefield. The workings of the Unclean are needed to keep these new converts in check. I shall be leading them to our tunnels, where they shall be toiling under no whip, but the eyes of the Unclean Himself. They shall be doing so out of fear, Sire."

"You are sure you do not have another miracle in you?" Marcus asked half-jokingly.

The ratpriest smiled.

"Not in me, Sire. The miracle is being you. You, and these forces you are bringing with you. I am being a man of God, and He is already filling my plate with plenty. Who am I so base as to ask Him for more?"

Deekius seemed to understand, and so Marcus let the issue drop.

"Then it seems there truly is no substitute for good old-fashioned boots on the ground," he said.

The ratpriests had exchanged timid glances, not wishing to offend the Shai-Alud by explaining that 'boots' were an aversion to the Unclean – worn by only those who wished to shield themselves from touching the rocks of His world with their bare flesh.

"Just a figure of speech, Koresh," Marcus explained. "Farewell, and may the blessings of the Unclean go with you."

The blessings of the Unclean…Marcus had scoffed to himself as he bid the priest and his Kobold workers goodbye. You really sound like a believer now, Marcus. When exactly did you make the decision that pretending to venerate this God was a good idea? And why, if He really was so high and mighty, is such a God allowing you to succeed?

As Marcus looked presently upon the field of chaos spreading before the Kobold village of Mudklip, he came to realize what the answer to this query might be.

The cannons had softened up the walls enough to create a breach from which the miniscule town guard had sallied forth, carrying little more than slings and pitchforks. They had charged their ratman foes with not even a battlecry on their lips – for how could they call for Boss Skegga when he had so clearly left them to die on their own blades?

As the Kobold defenders came charging up the hill, that's when Marcus gave the signal. His Sharpshoots, cloaked in the smokescreens discharged by the now silent cannons, revealed their arequebus and leveled their barrels at the advancing horde.

"Being ready-ready!" Ix cried at their head.

The gunners smiled, thinking how pleasurable it was to see a Kobold adapting to their way of speaking. But Marcus swelled with pride to know that Ix still kept his own vernacular too. He really was a testament to the unity they were building through this campaign.

"Be FIRING!"

At his order the ratmen opened fire, their volley splitting apart a solid chunk of the charging town's militia and practically throwing back the entire force as it scrambled up the village hill to try and get a single scratch at the attacking force.

By the time they'd met it within striking distance of the ratman army, however, they were met by a force of very different units.

"Be crushing them!" Skeever yelped in the face of his opponents, his spearmen thrusting into the barely armored Kobolds and throwing them back, pushing away the opposing force like water spilling through cracks in a flimsy dam. The Kobold battle line faltered, and by that point the Spinerippers of Clan Marrow had already flanked the tiny force, whittling away at its rearguard and throwing chunks of the Kobold ranged units into the smoke-filled air of the village perimeter.

In all, the Skirmish of Mudklip Hill would be remembered not for its strategic merits or valor of its combatants. The battle was far too short for any such embellishments. No – instead it would serve as a punctuation in the final paragraphs of Boss Skegga's failed empire. It would serve as a reminder that, when the hordes of He-Who-Festers came, the Kobolds of the North never really stood a chance in hell.

When the smoke settled, and the militia was soundly crushed, Marcus led his forces into the village proper, seeing the terrified faces of the Kobold civilians who knew that the pale specter of death they had heard about had finally come amongst them to add their bodies to the corpse pile he had strewn across the North Warrens.

The Shai-Alud regarded them with stern eyes, ordering his soldiers to bring all those women and children before him in the village square.

And there, with Skeever and Deekius both beside him, he delivered a proclamation that would become legendary amongst the Kobolds of the Underkingdom…

###

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[IronLung]

Deep within the fortress he had earned through the sacrifice of a thousand lives, Boss Skegga was roused from his slumber by a thunderclap.

His eyes shot open to the ceiling of a chamber that was certainly not his – its drab grey brickwork was nothing like his golden temple appropriated to praise his glory.

As the world shook around him his bloated hand reached towards his stomach where he now remembered that he had suffered a grievous wound. He looked down, eyes expecting to see his guts hanging out his side, and instead saw that his stomach had been stitched up with a surprising degree of precision.

But his brows furrowed as he felt something else – something small and spherical…no…not just something…but…many…many things.

There were bumps on his gelatinous torso. There was something inside him.

He opened his mouth to scream and yet, in his moment of panic, found that that had been sewn shut, too.

Each new second brought confirmations of new terror: his legs could not move. His body – once the pride and joy of his brood – would not obey his commands. Even his arms felt heavy and useless. All they could do was slowly float before him, stretching out and trying to dislodge their master from the stone tablet he was lying on.

It was a feeling he had felt before – a feeling of begging himself to move, of pleading every bone in his body to fly from its socket and at least show him his limbs still had a will of their own. He had felt this before – back when the Masters first caged him.

As with back them, his every attempt to release himself was in vain – he was stuck. He was stuck, desperate in the moment to do nothing more than squeal with unbridled rage for his savants to come and remove whatever invisible shackles bound him.

And that's when he realized that one of them was already here.

"Quite a thing, isn't it?" a voice said, calm and collected, yet utterly viscous in its piercing cadence. "Quite a thing to live in terror."

His eyes flew to the shadowed corner of the room where the speaker was sitting on an old rickety chair, his frail body straight-backed and utterly stoic, while his conal face cocked in contemplation.

His dark eyes looked right into Skegga's, and the great toad stretched out a fat arm to claw those beady little things right out of the ratman's skull.

"Oh, please," the rat said. "Do not struggle. You are fighting against nature, good Skegga. Or, more specifically, this."

The ratman produced a thin vial from under his cloak, shaking it before the toad like a child's rattle.

"Tathlatka serum," Silas said. "Taken I believe from the venom of a beast native of the Jungles of Arasaka, distilled by the finest Yokun alchemists. A gift from your former Masters in exchange for – well – now that would be telling, wouldn't it? The point is this: a single drop produces temporary paralysis in the victim. I dare say you've felt it before, good Skegga. It is, after all, what makes the Yokun of the Southern Jungles so adept in their slave trade. Unmoving cargo is far easier to transport and auction off, you understand. "

If eyes could kill, Skegga's bulging sockets would have slain the ratman nine times over, so great was the fury that was bubbling from every fiber of the great toad's being.

"Fury," Silas said with a patronizing sigh. "Is that all you have for me? I admit, I would quite enjoy hearing the curses you hurl at me, especially now that you hear me speak without that dismal droll associated with my kin. But, alas, I'm afraid our fun is coming to an end, Skegga. Your Masters have decided that you are no longer a worthwhile investment on their part. There is a human phrase that summarizes such an attitude quite nicely. I believe it runs along the lines of: 'They are cashing you out.'"

Skegga's sweat glands were working overtime, not helped by the fact that the honeyed words of the ratman were punctuated by explosion after thunderous explosion against the walls of Grindlefecht.

"Hear that?" Silas asked, coming to stand beside Skegga's pitiful form, staying just out of reach of his grasping claws. "It is the sound of death knocking at your doors, good Skegga. I would say that I am sorry for deceiving you. But I believe that dead men are owed a certain degree of honesty, in the end."

The rat leaned in close, seeing what little ounces of strength the toad had left in him begin to dissipate entirely as the toxin running through his veins took total control of his faculties.

Only the toad's rage-filled eyes showed any signs of flickering autonomy. And it was into these eyes that Silas spoke.

"The truth is that you have always been nothing more than a pawn in a game far bigger than the one you thought you were playing," the ratman said. "My servitude served its purpose, for a time. I admit that I truly thought you would bring the pitiful reign of my cousins to an end in the service of greater powers. But it seems that I backed the wrong toad."

The ratman's teeth shone in the dark, a sickening smile smearing itself across his features that chilled the paralyzed toad to his bulbous bones.

"How could I have known that a Shai-Alud would come? Of all things!" he laughed. "It is almost enough to restore my faith in the false God of my people. Almost enough," he added, a glimmer of hate overcoming his dark features. "For I saw the truth of this world long ago, Skegga. There is no strength, no power, beyond that which we take for ourselves. Every night I sang songs to that disgusting pustule of corrupted flesh I called my Queen…every day I drooled on about a God I knew was nothing but a child's fabrication – a shadow on the wall…well, such reflections are not for you, my sorry toad. I do apologize – no doubt you have rather less eloquent reflections of your own to express. But time grows short. My only regret is that I shall not hear your pitiful scream when your demise does come. But I have learned that, sometimes, one must forsake one's ego for the greater good."

The wriggling fingers of the ratman found Skegga's belly, and the toad felt himself lurch, his brain begging his body to turn and tumble off the stone slab he was stuck to.

"It helps if you realize your place in this world," Silas whispered. "You were not meant for great things, dear Skegga. True leaders are not made. They are born."

At that moment, the door of the chamber was thrown open, and a spear wielding Kobold bearing dwarven armor marched in.

"S-Sire Silas," he said. "Yip-Yips of Mudkrip see Ratmen march-march. They are taking slaves, accepting surrender as you say-say."

"Of course they are doing this," Silas barked at the soldier, slipping effortlessly back into his ratman cadence with such slippery simplicity that Skegga would have gasped had he the capacity to do so.

"It is being the Shai-Alud's weakness," Silas continued. "Our plan is working perfectly."

The soldier nodded fervently, completely ignoring Skegga until he acknowledged him with nothing but a point of his little pinky-claw: "Is the pot-pot ready?"

…Pot-pot? Skegga's mind mumbled.

"He will be ready soon," Silas smirked. "Be bringing your Yips for transport."

The Yip bowed and left the room, a devious smile smeared across his face just like the rat it had deigned to call 'Sire'.

"It is remarkable, is it not?" Silas said when he was sure the Kobold was gone. "Remarkable what can happen with a few fancy words and patience. I dare say there is nary a Kobold in the entire Underkingdom that is believing in your divinity anymore, good Skegga. But do not fear – they will remember you in death far more than they would in life. They even call you 'pot-pot' with some affection. I hope you like it. It is the only legacy you are going to be leaving."

Once again, the ratman stroked Skegga's bulging belly, fingers trailing over the globules that showed themselves beneath his skin.

Skegga watched in mute horror as the ratman then produced something else from beneath his cloak. Something round. Something black. Something that smelled…like fire."

"An ingenious little device," Silas said. "Something scavenged from our dwarven prisoners you didn't smear across your puerile little place of worship. So elegant in form, so potent in content…the dwarves really are the master craftsmen of these depths. I must admit, one of my many misgivings with my kind is our unfortunate distaste for technological advancement. It seems the Shai-Alud has gone some lengths to change this. Although his particular moral…misgivings…hold him back from using such tools to their full advantage."

Something about the way the rat spoke chilled Skegga's already frozen flesh. Looking at him, and the way he looked at the iron orb he held in his hand, Skegga felt his own belly start to rumble.

His last revelation that day before he lost consciousness again came in the form of his eyes now looking upon the bumps in his stomach with newfound terror.

"Something so small, so insignificant in the grand scheme of things, will allow me to suddenly attain all that I desire and more. In the end, you proved to be a useful little accessory after all, my good Skegga."

The toad's eyes slowly began to close, his tongue lolling out as he went back into a coma that stilled all the fury rising in his heart.

"I did tell you, did I not?" Silas told the toad's closing eyes. "You will burn like the brightest star."

###


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I will be back with more chapters on July 7th. Wishing all you troopers a good couple of weeks and get ready for the conclusion of this rat-based insanity when I return!

 

[IronLung]

WE ARE BACK

--NEW SCHEDULE: M-W-F-Sun. This is so I can maintain chapter quality while avoiding the dreaded author burnout--

---

"Those of you who still value your lives," Marcus 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."

---

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[IronLung]

"Truth, eh?" Marcus smiled.

Skeever approached him cautiously, like a sick cow approaching its driver.

"You once told me to trust you, Sire," he said, weapon suspiciously absent from his hip.

A sign of trust? Marcus thought. He's never been seen dead without Gatskeek's cleaver…

"I did," Marcus nodded, rising to meet his favored champion. "And in that capacity, you have served me well these past months. I wager I wouldn't have had half as much success as I have in our campaigns without you. It's almost strange to think they are coming to an end, here and now."

Skeever eyed him warily, responding to his clever praise with trepidation rather than excitement or appreciation. Indeed, he turned away, staring at the thin flaps of Marcus's tent as he spoke the words he had to tonight. It was almost as though they were words meant for those outside, each and every rat who was currently dreaming of victory that was soon to come.

"Grindlefecht will fall," Skeever finally said. "Is that what you want, Sire?"

Marcus narrowed his inquisitive brows. "I'd certainly hope so. Otherwise, this would all be a real waste of our time."

"I will be blunt then, Sire," Skeever said, turning only now to face the Shai-Alud after checking no one nearby was listening in to their conversation. "I do not think we should return to Fleapit after this battle."

Marcus said nothing at first. He tried to look past what the ratman had just told him. He tried to see what cogs were spinning in that battle-hardened, scarred head.

"Skeever," he said. "You know that this is the end of the road for me. Once I find the Prime Putrefact –"

"You will leave us," Skeever finished.

Marcus blinked at the ratman in response, relatively surprised by the creature's interruption.

He had just become used, he supposed, to complete deference after all this time.

"I have always been honest with you, Sire," Skeever continued. "Are you being honest with me?"

"Of course, I am," Marcus said, keeping his tone measured for the moment. "I've been honest with you all this time, have I not? Ever since the very day you found me, I told you how I want nothing more than to return to where I belong. I am no rat, Skeever. I should think that much should be obvious to you, especially after all this time."

Skeever bristled, his eyes flying to the flickering candle that provided the only illumination in the tent.

"I am thinking that…perhaps…"

"I would stay?" Marcus broke in. "That I would continue to be your Shai-Alud even after this damnable, pointless conflict is concluded? You know me better than that, Skeever. You are no naïve pup still suckling at his Queen's teat."

"No," the ratman replied. "I am a hero to my people, all because of you."

"You're wrong," Marcus scoffed. "I didn't do any of the feats you performed. That was all you, Skeever Steelclaw. You always had greatness in you, you just didn't know it."

"As long as I am speaking honestly, Sire," Skeever said, becoming brazen enough to plant his claws on the desk right before Marcus's eyes. "It is you who does not know what he could be. What he is, and what he means to my people!"

Marcus was surprised to find he didn't have a comeback. Instead, he let the ratman continue, not really knowing why.

Maybe it was his eyes. Maybe it was because he saw something in those rough-cut crimson diamonds that he barely ever saw.

Belief.

"You are leading us to greater glory than we have ever had before," Skeever continued. "You are building an army that could rival even those of the surface-world of Thea. You are bringing three clans together under one banner – your banner – and you are leading us to our greatest victory the Underkingdom has ever seen. From dirt, you are raising us, and now…now you wish to leave."

At the sorrow-drenched anger Skeever was exhibiting, Marcus found himself disarmed.

"Skeever," he said. "Your world is not mine. It is not where I belong."

"Is the Place Beyond where you belong?" Skeever retorted. "I have heard how you speak of it. I know you hate it, Sire Marcus. I know that there you have nothing like you have here among us. Here you have power that is second only to He-Who-Festers himself. You could make real change. Real progress. Yet for all your talents, you are not able to see what could be."

"This is not a future I can build," Marcus said, sitting to meet the ratman's intense stare. "Skeever…your people will never truly accept me. They venerate me now, but the second I fail them…I will be tossed away like a broken tool. Once again, I will become a 'human wearing the skin of a rat'. The priests will turn against me and a usurper will rise. I have no interest in playing petty politics with you and your ratman kind."

Skeever moved away but did not break eye contact with him.

"You are enjoying it, Sire," he said. "Perhaps you do not wish to admit it. But you are enjoying it. I have seen it in your eyes during battle or during outmaneuvering your enemies. You enjoyed it when you had Verulex killed in his sleep."

Marcus froze.

What…

"How did you…"

"It does not matter how," Skeever said. "Sire, I bear you no ill will for this. You are doing what you must to secure power. You are eliminating opposition in a way that is appropriate for rat-kind. I thought then that you meant to keep this power. You are doing so much – what? Just for a woman? Sire, you are selling yourself short!"

"Enough!" Marcus thundered, rising and pacing away from the rat. "You forget yourself, Skeever Steelclaw. Even if I stayed, what would you have me do? Become a servant of your vestigial God? You do not even believe in His divinity, Skeever. Do you?"

Marcus watched as the ratman's stare took on a look of desperation. He thought that he had gone too far the second those heretical words left his mouth. But he did not see insult in the rat-warrior's face. He saw a loyal servant that didn't want his Master to leave his side.

And it was in such a capacity that the rat knelt before him, head bowed in total supplication.

"Sire," he said. "Hear my words. Take Grindlefecht from the Kobolds. Welcome them into your army, but do not send them to toil for King Shrykul. Hold this great fortress as your base of operations and establish your own fiefdom here. Take the Kobold farmlands, fortify the walls, and use the cannons to force the other Clans into a treaty with you. Make them accept you as a legitimate head of a new Clan – a Clan that shall lead us into a new, glorious future."

Marcus took a step back. This…what he was hearing…it didn't just border on the unthinkable. It was, well, it was exactly as heretical as it sounded.

"Skeever…" he said. "What you are suggesting would be to spit in the face of your own king. What you are suggesting is treason."

"Treason?" the ratman spat. "Is it treason to know that your people are suffering because our Kings bow to Queens that do not care a jot about their spawnlings? Is it treason to want what is best for your species? I told you before, Sire Marcus, the only thing I am loyal to is my people. And my people need change. They need you."

The rat's head rose to regard Marcus again, and this time he was fighting to keep himself from shaking.

"I never believed," Skeever said in all but a whisper. "I never thought life could be anything but killing in the dark, huddled with my Brothers as we all suffered. I did not believe life could be better. Until you appeared in a flash of light before me."

"This…" Marcus said. "All this time, this is what it's all been about for you, isn't it? This is why you never cared a jot about me being human. All you cared about was success for your people. No matter who gave it to you."

The rat dropped into a bow again, one so deep that he practically kissed the ground beneath Marcus's feet.

"Sire," he squeaked. "Do not leave us. I told you before: I shall follow you into the abyss if you ask. All those men out there, they believe in you, now. Give us the word, and we shall take this entire world in your name."

Marcus listened with bated breath, his hands clenched and twitching with desires long locked away within his being. To be a part of history rather than just a recorder…to be a man of significance...to be more than just another student who would rot in the obscurity of a world that wanted to forget him.

"Yes, Skeever," he said. "I could leave it all behind, if I wanted. But that would be the easy thing to do. It would be to reject personal suffering and force those beneath me to toil in my name. And Skeever, if you want the truth, I've had quite enough of that."

The ratman's eyes bulged as the Shai-Alud bent down and bid him rise so that they both knelt on the same level as the other.

"You look at me," he said. "And you see someone you wish to follow. You see someone you wish to pin your hopes and dreams to. It's a very human desire. Believe me. But you know who really deserves your worship? You know the only person in your life who deserves your veneration?"

Marcus placed a firm hand on his warrior's shoulder.

"You, Skeever," he said. "There's no force in this entire universe stronger than the individual's will. Men have made war based on their own desires – to follow their own dreams. The greatest men – the ones who stand the test of collective memory – they are those who saw the future of their people with such clarity that they led armies with those very dreams that you describe to me as the foundation of their forces. Their resolve drove them, and it built great things. So no, Skeever. I am not the man you need to take you into the future you want. It is not my future. It is not mine to claim. It is yours."

The ratman listened to him unblinkingly, his hands shaking still. And Marcus thought that, even though he understood his words, that ratman looked altogether more sorrowful than he had when he had first entered the tent that night.

"Then there is nothing more to be said," he whispered.

Marcus nodded. "I've made my decision."

"Then…" Skeever murmured. "Then…you must know…"

"SIRE MARCUS!"

The voice was coming from outside, punctuated by another roar from the twelve-pounders that had been doing God's work all night.

"Sounds like we're needed," Marcus said with a wink. "Are you with me, Brother?"

Skeever's eyes did not waver. His arm flew to grab his Sire's and yet…there was no strength in his grip. Marcus would later think that he could have understood what that meant. But with how close he was to victory, he dismissed what could easily have been attributed to perfectly normal hesitation.

Instead, he heard what the ratman said. He heard him say exactly what he wanted him to.

"To the death, Sire," Skeever murmured. "To the death…"

****

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[IronLung]

When Marcus opened his tent flap and breathed in the smog of the Underkingdom, he wasted no time in getting right back into where the fighting would be thickest.

It would be better than trying to justify all this, and it would take his mind off of Skeever's words which, like it or not, were ruminating in the melting pot of his consciousness.

It seemed his primary commanders had assembled to meet him. There was Ix, resplendent in his newly pilfered dwarven armor and arquebus, eyes trained on the still shimmering walls of Grindlefecht in the far distance. Deekius stood beside him, mumbling of tremors he could feel in the earth, fluctuations of the Gloomraav that bode ill for what was to come.

What else is new? Marcus thought.

"What's our status?" he barked over the din of yet another dual blast from their twelve pounders.

Skeever slowly ambled behind him to meet his fellows, seeing the looks of concern plastered across their faces.

"No-no effect on big walls, Sire," Ix said. "Cannons cannot be break-breaking dwarven fortifications. Golden towers not tumble down so easy. Our loaders are tire-tired."

"Of course they are," Marcus nodded. "They've been at it all night. Send word that they are to cease their bombardment swiftly. If we haven't put a dent in the walls yet, we're not going to by conventional means. This siege will require boots on the ground. Or, to be more exact, claws."

Ix sniggered while Deekius shuffled to his Shai-Alud's side.

"There is being something else," he said.

Marcus followed his shaking finger as he pointed across the stretch of decimated Kobold houses and farmlands that lay beyond their position. In the far distance, thin strips of crimson moved like bloody snakes towards the open gates of Grindlefecht. It took Marcus a few moments before he realized what he was looking at.

"Kobolds…"

"Refugees, Sire," Deekius agreed. "They are starting to move in the last few hours. It is seeming that neighboring villages are being welcomed into Grindlefecht for a final mustering against us."

"Idiots," Skeever sniffed. "Even now they are not knowing that they don't have a chance."

In the next instance, Marcus caught the angered look Ix shot towards the ratman commander. Such a look would normally have resulted in the little Yip's head being torn from his neck, but Skeever merely shrugged by way of apology.

"They are throwing their lot in with Skegga even till the end," Deekius wheezed. "It will be difficult now to be taking Grindlefecht without spilling the blood of those Kobolds who are still remaining loyal."

They watched the line of refugees disappear into the gleaming monument to excess and despair that the fat toad-servant of the Yokun had built, leaving their homes either burning or in ruins. It seemed there had been fighting among them, after all. But it was just as Deekius said, Marcus realized: at this point, the lines of loyalty had been drawn.

All that remains, he thought as he looked towards Ix. Is to see where we stand, here…

The Kobold could barely tear himself away from the sight of his people abandoning reason beyond them.

"Ix," Marcus said. "I cannot force you, or any of your species who walk among us, to slaughter your own kind."

As both ratmen made to protest, the Yip turned abruptly and stared up at his Shai-Alud.

"You've always had a choice," he continued. "Whether to join us or to leave. I have not forced a single act upon you. When we walked the walls of Knifegut, all those months ago, we spoke of power, and of how pivotal it is to your culture. I ask you now, Head-Yip, will you follow me one final time?"

The Kobold blinked his bulbous eyes and scratched his armpits hastily, his face half-turned towards those from villages he once called brother and sister. Infant Yips that would never know the promise of the Great Leap, or learn the dances of victory and love on a night dimly lit by stuttering firelight.

Then he looked down at the silver rifle in his claws, and without even thinking about it, his hands tightened round its barrel.

"I follow-follow you and only you, now," he said, simply. "Kobold is Kobold, ratman is ratman, but army of Shai-Alud Marcus is a family stronger than any of the dark-dark tunnels. Skegga says we must jump alone. You say we can jump together. Only together do we reach the high-high heights. Any Kobolds who can not see this are not worth-worth your mercy, Sire. Ix will show-show them how a real Yip leaps."

"You are speaking well for one of your kind," Deekius said affectionately.

"As are you-you, magic ratman," Ix nodded.

Marcus couldn't help it. To look upon the three of them was akin to looking at a series of once-furious pets that were no longer at each other's throats.

"The same goes for the rest of the Kobolds that follow us," Marcus told Skeever. "Gather the men, I will address them all."

Skeever's eyebrow raised. "All of them, Sire?"

"All of them," Marcus confirmed. "This is the curtain call. We rush Grindlefecht, breach its walls, and take the stronghold by force."

"Would it not be prudent to be waiting for Glitterpak reinforcements?" Skeever asked. "I am hearing from mayor Tekal that there could be a pack of at least five dozen shipped here within a tenday. We could be prolonging our siege until they -"

"No," Marcus interrupted, not even realizing he had done so until he saw Skeever's confused glare from out the corner of his eyes. "I…no," he repeated. "We go in now. I've wasted enough of these warriors' short lives on a march towards this den of shit. I'm not going to wait till their blood runs cold. We proceed with the plan: the walls are battered enough that the claws of our Spinerippers will give our cavalry enough of a footing to make it to the battlements and let down the gatehouse for us. We'll swarm them. We'll take the place by force, sparing only those who surrender to us willingly. I've given Skegga and those loyal to him enough chances. If they wish to make this golden monument their graves, then so be it."

Skeever bowed low, deferent and dutiful. "Very well, Sire. I shall be gathering the men."

Marcus was left standing beside his two faithful lieutenants, each one looking at the place that could easily become their grave, seeing the end of a path they had been walking all their lives.

"It is as it began," Ix said. "When Boss Skegga is leading our army against the wall-walls, sending thousands of us to death-death…so many bodies we could climb-climb them over the walls in the end."

Marcus noticed the Yip clenching his claws again. Retribution was on his mind. An emotion shared by every ratman currently assembling for their final strike.

"A more glorious finale to our struggle…I could not be asking for," Deekius said with a warm sniff. "The histories shall be remembering this day. The day the Underkingdom is fighting as one against a common foe."

Marcus listened to them both, his head spinning with thoughts of home. Here he was, closer than he ever had been before, staring at the last obstacle in his way before he could see natural light again. It would not be the end of his journey, but it was an ending of sorts. A final punctuation in this chapter of his life that he hoped, to any Gods that were listening, would be over soon.

He'd been pushing. He'd been driving those who walked behind him forward in the past week with more tenacity than care for their wellbeing. He'd been pushing himself, too, losing sleep to dreams of explosions and stalactites and the teeth of munching, rotten Queens…one way or another, he was leaving this place. And he wasn't looking back.

Sorry, Skeever, but I'm just not the man to build your empire.

He looked towards the golden walls of his final hurdle before turning away to address his waiting forces.

Skegga, he couldn't help but wonder. What are you doing in there?

…

-Grindlefecht, Good-Boss Silas' stronghold-

To look upon them was to look upon a sea of the devout.

He remembered faces that had looked back at him with eyes like these before – back when he called himself Prime Putrefact. Back when he sang the praises of a false God like a mad prophet high on his own supply. He'd guided thousands of his kind towards a path he knew led to nowhere but darkness. After a while, he'd simply realized: it had gotten dull. It was all so…pointless.

But he'd forgotten how he missed seeing those faces. This would be his greatest sermon yet.

He stared out at the swelling sea of his Kobolds – for they were his Kobolds now. He looked into the eyes of the thousand that remained, all packed into Grindlefecht's grisly temple interior – and raised his arms, extending every nail of his onyx claws.

Almost instantly, the crowd fell into abrupt silence.

He spared a look at the wretched form of 'Boss' Skegga that was strung up behind him like a patchwork doll, face strewn with blood, stomach bloated beyond recognition and oozing with purpled spume that made him even more abhorrent to observe than usual.

He smiled, making sure the unfrozen eyes of the toad-fiend were upon him before he turned back to his flock and eyed those in the crowd who bore the same swollen bellies of their once-God.

"Brothers," he said. "Welcome to the hour of the Kleansing."

***

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[IronLung]

-Grindlefect perimeter, Sire Marcus Graham's War Camp-

Marcus looked upon the army assembled in his name – a patchwork force compiled of creatures that could turn the stomach of a seasoned Green Baret.

Spinerippers, spearmen, swordbearers and ratguards all bearing implements of war, flanked by Kobold skirmishers and slingers that were his. He could see their willingness to fight – and die – in their battle-stances.

He'd settle for them fighting. He'd trod upon enough skulls to get to this point.

"I know some of you know that you view those opposed to us with hatred," he said as he climbed atop a loose boulder and addressed the armada. "But look around you, ratmen of the North, there are Kobolds who stand shoulder to shoulder with you in the name of the same God you venerate. We have opened our arms to them, and they have come to us willingly."

He let that statement sink in. There were still rats among them who doubted the loyalty of the Kobold recruits. But their murmurings were cut down in their throats when they saw Ix take up position beside the Shai-Alud, standing with the two rats that had fought with Marcus since the beginning of his campaign.

"Look you, Kobolds of the North!" Marcus shouted. "You see one of your own raised to the status of champion, bearing the new weapons that shall secure you a place in the history of this Underkingdom. I ask you, creatures of the North, do you wish to have your names inscribed for future ages to remember? For your children's children to revere with just as much pride as that which you put in your God?"

"YES! YES! YES!"

The crowd's tenacity was overbearing. Even Marcus had to steady himself as the sheer volume of their united cry flew towards him.

You've made something here, Marcus, he couldn't help but think as he looked into the sea of faithful below him. It's a hell of a lot more than you ever had back home…

To watch them all beat their chests with his name on their lips…it was something he could have gotten used to. He was a man who stood on the wrong side of what his own dimension dubbed 'progress'. He'd be lying if he didn't admit that what Skeever had hinted at in his tent mere minutes ago hadn't already crossed his mind. Fortifying Grindlefecht, setting himself up as a new power in this realm – it would be the smart thing to do.

And it would be exactly what a tyrant would have done.

Well, we all have our fantasies… he thought with a smirk. If you were here with me, Mari…I wonder what you'd say?

It was her face that dominated his thoughts as he threw an accusing finger towards the battered walls of Grindlefecht behind him.

"Warrios of the North!" he roared, Deekius amplifying his voice with the essences of the Gloomraav he had left in his veins. "Before you stands the last, final barrier to your freedom! I ask you to commit yourselves, body and soul, to cracking the walls of Grindlefecht forever. I ask you to put your faith in me, and ride beside me into battle one final time. I ask you, warriors of the Underkingdom, what is your answer?"

"SHAI-ALUD!" they cried in response. "SHAI-ALUD! SHAI-ALUD!"

It was a chant that soon became a battlecry as they charged as one, Marcus hopping on his own Spineripper to lead them in the final assault.

Skeever and Deekius had tried to talk him out of partaking in the thick combat that was to come and, in truth, he could feel every bone in his body quake and his muscles atrophy against the prospect of fighting their enemy to the very last man. But he wasn't about to dishonor the sacrifice of those who followed him by hiding on the sidelines. If he had really become a fantasy general, he would play that role to the very end.

So with his commanders at their posts, propelling their respective units forward, he thrust his fist into the air of the Underkingdom and added his voice to the thousands who ran with him.

…

-Grindlefecht, Good Boss Silas' Stronghold-

The rat who once stood as a prisoner in the hallowed halls of the Dwarven fortress now held his fur-covered head high as he spoke to his flock of Kobold refugees.

Refugees carrying some very special packages for their guests.

"Suffering!" he bellowed once he knew, by their silence, that he held them rapt in his grip. The cadence of the ratman was gone. Now he was himself. Silas. No Clan. No devotion. Nothing but what he, from his birth in this dark realm, had always known he was.

"It is our suffering that brings us together!" he cried. "We, the small-folk of this earth, who must toil and trundle beneath the soil the ilk of the surface trod upon, know this reality better than any who breathe the air of Thea. This is the truth of our being, Brothers and Sisters of the Underkingdom. Its revelation to you was the true purpose of the Great Kleansing."

The inert form of Skegga wriggled behind him. Perhaps the toad still had some fight left in him, in the end. Not that it mattered – the Kobolds lining the temple and courtyard of Grindlefecht had only one hope, now. That hope was what had compelled those brave souls among them to consume the tools that would be their end. They had done so willingly.

"The Ascension you were promised does not belong to a God!" Silas continued, his claws flying about like he was possessed by the jumping spirits of the Kobolds themselves. "It is not the right of Skegga the weak – Skegga the mad – who has done naught but bring your enemies to your doorstep. Look upon him now and tell me, Kobolds of the North, is this the God you worship?"

The answer that came from the throats of every adult Yip – women and children included – filled Silas with more pleasure than he had felt in years.

"NO-NO! NO-NO! NO GOD-GOD SKEGGA! SKEGGA LIES! SKEGGA LOSES! SKEGGA FAIL-FAILS!"

"Who is your God, Kobolds of the North? Who shall ensure you the ascension that you deserve? Who shall take you into the light of the eternal, where the leaps are endless and limits of one's jumps lie beyond the earth and the sky?"

"WE ARE!" they screamed, those bearing their special payload beating their swollen bellies in assent.

"You know the truth that has been kept from you," Silas furiously agreed. "The sorry thing you see before you thought to keep the ascension that you deserve from you for too long. Now, the infidels who would block you from the gates of heaven are here, and they seek nothing more than the annihilation of your souls. There may be those of you who know relatives that have joined the cause of these heretics. Know that they have done so by forsaking the truth of the Kleansing. They have betrayed you, and, worse, have betrayed their own spirits. Their feet shall waver on the path to the heavens."

Sniffles and cries were heard reverberating up the crowd. Silas bowed his head, concealing his snarl of indignation. These beasts were as stupid as they were sentimental. If only he'd realized that sooner.

"But those of you who have come here today," he bellowed. "You have come for one thing only: you wish to be saved. You have come here to celebrate one thing only: the culmination of your mortal lives. And you have come here to begin your journey to a plane beyond this one. You have come to finally achieve the freedom you have craved for your entire lives. Freedom from the cage of this ever-dark realm, freedom from the constraints of your bodies. Freedom from shame, and pain, and all it requires is one final push of will from each and every one of you. Are you prepared, Kobolds of the North? The Shai-Alud is at your doorstep. The God-killer has come here with his army of indoctrinated infidels. Kobolds of the North, how shall you greet him?"

"WITH FLAME-FLAME!" the congregation chanted, spittle flying from their starving lips, Silas' every word feeding the hallucinogenic frenzy of their minds. "FIRE-FIRE TO BURN AWAY SIN-SIN. WE SHALL RISE-RISE. WE SHALL RISE. WE SHALL RISE!"

They sang like children drunk on faith. They sang like conquerors ready to move to the world beyond that they so desperately craved. Silas of Fleapit could paint a pretty picture, even if he did say so himself.

He let them continue their chanting as he turned back to good old Skegga.

"See how they bleat like cattle?" he whispered to the bloody toad. "They are a testament to the power of faith. It's pure faith that shall light this Underkingdom ablaze, Skegga. Such belief was wasted on you."

With one wave of his hands he bid the swarm go forth, rallying behind their martyr commanders.

"Come, good Skegga," Silas snarled. "The Shai-Alud is coming. Let us give him a warm welcome."

***

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[IronLung]

They often said that the moments of calm before battle was where fear struck most men's hearts.


But personally, Marcus found that the sprinting towards the enemy was generally worse.


He urged his Spineripper on, nestled amongst the inner ranks of Skeever's advancing ratguard, and looked up at the increasingly large walls of Grindlefecht looming higher and higher above them.


The outlying villages were, by this point, nothing but rubble and dust – the Kobold loyalists had seen to it that they left nothing for their enemies to use. It struck Marcus as strange – this reversed Scorched-Earth approach to defense that Skegga had employed. Maybe he'd commanded that the remaining villages burn as he stumbled home, wounded and debased.


But that still didn't explain why they flocked to his walls, now.


He rounded up the infantry and ushered them towards the fortress gatehouse, setting up Testudo formations that brought joyous nostalgia to both he and Skeever both. Even Ix had to smirk as he ran alongside his Sharpshots and noticed the strategy that his old pack leader had failed to account for. Back when the Underkingdom didn't have its Shai-Alud. The formation meant a slow, cumbersome advance, but he wasn't about to discount the possibility of ranged attacks from the battlements. Even if the walls still looked unusually quiet.


He eyed the cannons as the army advanced. Still silent. Like demons waiting to be woken and belch their infernal innards at their foes. If those beasts started firing, he'd have to rearrange the columns of ratguard and kobolds into a wide formation to compensate. Again, it would take time, it would expend energy, and it would lead to mass casualties…but it would work. These creatures of the dark had often proved more versatile to adaptive warfare than he had at first thought.


As Marcus pulled his infantry to the left side of the fort, the Spineripper detachment surged forward in a V-shaped wave that smashed through any obstacles in their paths. They were to be the vanguard, this time, and their commanders had taken the opportunity to lead the charge with pride in their furry hearts. Marcus and Skeever both looked on in awe as they made it to the walls in little over fifteen minutes and began their ascent – propelling their beasts to dig their claws into the beaten, broken ridges of the battlements and start climbing towards the dark heavens above.


"Phase one, complete," Marcus told his Talon-Commander. "Ratguard! Into position! We won't be caught with our breeches down when that gate falls!"


"HO! RAH!"


The army was arranged exactly as Marcus had envisioned it. To the North, he saw the stout gatehouse of gilded metal that barred him entrance to his objective. To the East, round the side of the fort, his Spinerippers were already nearing the tops of the walls, their cries of fury begging for battle.


But something was still bothering Marcus: the silence of their enemy.


"Sire-Sire!" Ix shouted from the firing-line he'd set up on their Northwestern wing. "Why do they not strike-strike?"


He looked to Skeever who nodded once, watching the Spinerippers made more progress than they'd envisioned. The ratguard waited, wondering when this great 'battle' was truly about to begin. Deekius walked among their front ranks, administering blessings with confidence. It seemed the ailing priest was the only one among them who could see their victory close at hand.


For the rest, there was a growing sense that something – somewhere – was about to go very wrong.


He looked about him for any signs of enemy activity, suddenly scanning the ruined twigs of the villages that had once stood as proud markers of Kobold civilization. Ix – he knew – was scanning them too, and seeing nothing. Hearing nothing. This deathly silence was not normal.


"Tell your men to assume a defensive position," Marcus informed Skeever. "I have a feeling we're about to see some-"


The earth shook like an undulating sea. Marcus saw nothing but his Spineripper throw him from his saddle and then felt the rocky earth beneath his hands. He saw the ratmen around him fall one by one like dominos, each one tripping over the reverberations that had just torn through the entire North Warrens. Then, Marcus felt head radiate up his back – gentle at first and then, gradually, rising to a fever crawling up his neck.


"THE – LEAN –"


He looked up, cupping his hands round his ringing ears as his blurred vision began to pick of Skeever's face before his own, spittle flying from his teeth.


"W-wha-"


He couldn't even hear himself form proper sentences. He watched the ratman's lips moved, felt the ground continue to shake beneath his boots, and tried to keep from turning towards the source of the sudden fiery deluge at his back.


He saw a brilliant flaming flower burn into life in the ratman's beady black eyes – like an atomic bomb shredding through a starless sky.


And only then did the sound of the explosions that had rocked Grindlefecht's walls catch up to him.


He turned around just in time to see something the four dwarven cannons disappear in a plume of radiant light that seared the retinas of the ratguard's sensitive eyes. They dropped their spears and shielded themselves, the entire army losing its cohesion just as quickly as he'd had them form up at the stronghold gates.


The Spinerippers who had reached the top had gotten the explosions full blast – they were sent flying from the walls trailing smoke after them, the charred bodies of rats and 'rippers alike flying like fireworks across the now light-filled cavern skies.


Marcus staggered, taking in the sight of the chaos, and tried barking new orders to his units. He practically held on to Skeever for dear life, keeping the ratman close as a kind of crutch for his still shaking limbs.


"TURN AWAY!" he shouted. "RETREAT TO THE NEAREST VILLAGE AND TAKE UP A DEFENSIVE PERIMETER IN THE RUINS! THIS PLACE IS COMING DOWN!"


"WHAT-WHAT!?" Ix screamed from the western perimeter of the quickly crumbling force.


"I SAID THIS PLACE IS COMING DO-"


Once again, Marcus's voice was lost in the chaos of yet another explosion – this time one not simply concentrated to the Eastern battlements. The cannons of Grindlefecht had crumbled, and the walls now went with them – before Marcus's eyes a series of concentrated detonations occurred one after another along the foundations of the fortress' which broke whatever structural integrity remained. The Spineripper units that had managed to continue their climb now fell with the wall sections as they crumbled into pieces, disappearing in the plumes of smoke that shot forth from the stronghold like a grey ring of death.


Marcus watched the cavalry fall with eyes that couldn't conceive of the reality they presented to him. It took him all of his courage to not simply drop to one knee, then and there, and simply order a general retreat.


Only Skeever's strong arm and dolorous barking at his men to stand firm and follow his orders kept him sane. It kept him standing even as the curtain of ash expelled by the fallen towers of the castle crept towards them all.


"HOLD YOUR BREATH!" Marcus ordered to the men still standing around him. "ASSUME A DEFENSIVE RING! MOVE BACK! MOVE BACK!"


He begged them to hear his shrill cry as the ashen clouds descended on them, burying the infantry units in their midst. The ratmen's eyes were sharp – so too were those of the Kobold auxiliaries – but they were not immune to blindness. The power of the initial explosion's searing light had brought them low, and now the ash infected their already blurred senses. Their forms became nothing but flickering shadows in the dark. He wouldn't be surprised if some had already abandoned their posts.


"Sire!" he heard Skeever shout. "We – I cannot find –"


Marcus's arm shot out to assure the rat that he was still here, even as his lungs filled with soot and he resisted the desire to vomit.


"Tell the men to keep retreating!" Marcus wailed. "Get them out of the radius of the smoke-screen. Find Deekius and have him clear this mess! Any minute now they'll be upon us!"


"'They', Sire?"


"Don't you see, Skeever!" Marcus roared as both men began sprinting for the edges of the ash storm. "This cough this was always their plan! They never intended to give up Grindlefecht. Boss Skegga is taking his palace down with him!"


"That cough fiend!" Skeever sputtered. "He shall be feeling the brunt of my blade before this day is done! Be damned! EVERYONE, BE GETTING OUT! BE BRINGING ME GLOOMRAAVA DEEKIUS, NOW!"


The shrill screams of ratmen filled the filthy air. Combat had begun. The clashing of swords and evisceration of limbs came from all directions. Marcus and Skeever yelled into the world of grey, seeing nothing but shadows fall one-by-one, followed by the sounds of more explosions in the distance.


And the only voice that pierced the plume of death-fog that this battlefield had become, was a collective voice belched from the throats of a thousand fanatical demons:


"KLEANSING! KLEANSING! KLEANSING!"


***


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[IronLung]

"D-Dekius!"


Marcus stumbled his way through the thick ash cloud that had enveloped the ratman forces, hearing the sounds of sporadic combat echo and weave through the battlefield.


"C-cough complete madness!" Skeever shrieked beside him. "MEN! IF YOU ARE HAVING EARS TO HEAR ME, BE FORMING DEFENSIVE RINGS AT YOUR POSITIONS NOW!"


His command was punctuated by the chilling shriek of two kobolds that came running at him from out of the mist, daggers glinting in their already bloody hands. With a single twist he turned and cut them both down with Gatskeek's machete, wasting no time as he stepped over their corpses and guided Marcus out of this chaos.


"Deekius!" Marcus kept coughing. "Deek-"


"BE FEELING THE MIGHT OF THE UNCLEAN!" both men then heard – a statement that could only belong to the rat they sought in the death-fog that had engulfed them. "BURN, HERETICS!"


They watched as a gout of green flame snaked its way through the fog before them, seeing five Kobold warriors fall to the ground in fiery heaps.


Skeever swiftly ran to slit their throats and finish them off as Marcus finally set eyes upon his Gloomraava.


"Sire," Deekius spat. "The situation is being dire, I – I am feeling the claw of the Unclean upon me."


Marcus blinked through the death-haze and saw Deekius' bleeding limbs as the rat shuffled up to him, slamming his staff into the ground to clear more of the fog and unveil where their enemies had begun gnawing away at their once-disciplined lines.


"We're not done yet, my Gloomraava," Marcus said, spitting the phlegm that was rising in his throat. "With you beside us, we stand a chance."


Deekius barely croaked out his answer. "Be…be giving me your orders…Shai-Alud."


"CONTACT!" Skeever screamed as another unit of six Kobolds appeared like wraiths through the grey world of the battlefield. He managed to slice through the leather armor of two of them before the other three leaped at Deekius, scimitar's spinning wildly in their hands. The old rat only just managed to meet their assault with his staff and push them back into the waiting maw of Skeever.


But one of the Yips had resisted the strength of the Gloomraava. One of them managed to pin him down as his comrades flew to distract his brutish cousin with their feeble lives. The Kobold stared into the eyes of the Gloomraava and grimaced as he brought his blade up to finish him.


Then the little creature went flying from the body of the priest. His dagger left his hand, and he felt the weight of a very, very filthy human pinning him down.


Deekius watched with no small surprise as he saw Marcus bear down on the Kobold and start pummeling the little creature's face with his bare fists.


"By the Unclean…" the priest whispered. "By – SKEEVER! Protect the Shai-Alud! Protec-"


His final wish was fulfilled almost at once – Marcus took up the fallen dagger of the little Yip and plunged it through the creature's throat, watching its eyes bulge and its tiny limbs spasm and finally give up under him.


When he rose, he did so as a bloodied warrior, now.


"I – I told you, Deekius," he said with a stammer. "You won't be dying until I'm good…and done with you. That's an order."


Deekius met the stare of his General with new eyes then – eyes renewed by the determination he saw in the man he had summoned so long ago to lead them against their enemies. Such a man would never simply give in. And neither would he.


So as Skeever slit the throat of their last assailant, the Gloomraava plunged his staff into the solid earth that still existed under them and chanted a prayer that he knew could be his last.


"ARK'RAHSALUUR!"


The fog and filthy air around them was pulled away like a curtain being opened to reveal the grim night beyond their ken. As the blanket of fog died, they looked out onto where the army had once stood and saw now a sea of corpses littering the grounds before Grindlefecht's gatehouse, with pockets of ratmen fighting against increasingly desperate Kobolds.


It was almost impossible to tell which Kobolds belonged to Marcus's side anymore – the mass of red death that had surged forth from the smoking remains of Grindlefecht had smashed into his army from all sides. It looked like they had massacred the Kobold auxiliaries first – Marcus could make out the forms of Yips screaming as they rubbed their blinded eyes and fled from the battlefield.


So much for choosing a new path in life, he thought. But, considering the madness this battle had devolved into, he couldn't really blame them.


Grindlefect was now just a pillar of smoke and burnt rubble. Whatever explosives had been employed, they were of a kind far more sophisticated than Marcus had ever seen in the Underkingdom. Those detonations had not been random, had not been haphazard – they had been the result of a conscious effort to bring down the walls and cause this eruption of ash as a strategic move. Such strategy was not something he had forseen. How could he? Skegga had heretofar demonstrated nothing but the propensity for throwing larger and larger numbers of men at a problem and hoping they would make it go away. How could the wounded toad have come up with something like this?


Marcus continued to scan what he could of the environment and saw that the Spineripper units were missing. For all he knew, the detonation of the walls had taken them all. Three hundred good, strong men. What were to be the vanguard of their victory…


Damn it. Damn it all!


Skeever looked about him with nothing but unrestrained fury.


Don't let them see you bleed, Marcus, Marcus told himself. Remember, this battle is far from over…


"I will be slaying them all myself!" he roared. "They will not be taking our day of glory from us!"


Marcus looked into the broken battlefield with an altogether different attitude, however. He looked at the tight clusters of Kobolds that swam before the spears of the ratguard infantry and saw the chance they presented.


"Patience, Skeever," he said, still coughing through the residue of the ash blanket. "There's not need to throw your life away. We aren't done yet."


The ratman turned to his commander with abject confusion.


"Sire!" he shouted over the din of clashing blades. "The army is being decimated! I must be joining the fight to –"


"You will order the troops to fall back towards the nearest outlying village," he said. "Tell them to maintain as wide a formation as possible."


Skeever's eyes went wide as he realized his General's contingency – something even he had forgotten about.


"What?" Marcus asked with a bloody grin. "You didn't think I would bank everything on pure strength of manpower alone, did you? You know me better than that, Skeever Steelclaw."


As his Talon-Commander smirked back at him, wiping the bloody chunks of his fallen foes from his chops, Marcus turned to Deekius and commanded him to amplify the voices of both himself and Skeever. Communication would be vital if they were going to turn this shitshow around.


"RATGUARD OF FLEAPIT!" Skeever bellowed, his voice cutting through the confusion as he charged towards the East flank of their dwindling spear column. "FALL BACK! WIDE-FORMATION! BE MOVING!"


The ratguard gave a jilted 'HO-RAH!' as they saw their commander sprint towards them. Then their spirits soared as they heard the Shai-Alud deliver his own command to their metal monsters that had been waiting in the shadows of their camp for their moment.


Deekius sent small burr of light into the air, a shimmering star that acted like a flare, signalling the twelve-pounder handlers that they were to ready their weapons.


And Marcus, looking into the screaming faces of the Kobold red-mass leaping after their retreating enemies, bellowed one simple command:


"FIRE!"



***

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[IronLung]

"FIRE!"

The cannons roars ripped through the dank, dust-filled air, tearing into the Kobold's uncoordinated mass with the ease of an eagle in a dovecot. The cannonballs struck true, splintering pieces of Kobold skulls and torsos and then rolling along a deadly path that cut right into the horde.

In the meantime, the ratguard seized the opportunity to seek out defensive positions at the nearest rotted farmstead – leaping the tiny walls and using them as makeshift shields from which they could ready their spears.

"SHILTRON!" Marcus bellowed from the sidelines of the spear-columns, Deekius and Skeever running alongside him to escape the rabble that had been spewed from Grindlefecht's rotten, smoking guts.

The ratguard obeyed without question. Their spears came down, they readied their arms, each man braced by the rat behind him, and thrust their weapons into the oncoming hordes with as much power as their bodies could muster. Their eyes still stung with the debilitating mix of light and ashen-dark. But they didn't need eyes to poke dents in the oncoming mass of flesh that threw itself at them, chanting "KLEANSING, KLEANSING!" with frenetic breaths.

"They are going insane!" Skeever yelled among the cries of suffering each speared Kobold suffered. "They are coming at us in droves, Sire, not caring for their safety!"

"It…it is not like them," Deekius told Marcus as they spat commands into their newly-formed battle lines, trying to make sense of the devastation they were seeing play out before them. "Kobolds are being stupid creatures in packs, but not suicidal."

"Unless," Marcus said with a dust-filled gulp. "They have something new to believe in…"

His thought, barely formed, did not have time to expand – the Kobold lines had faltered and they began to pull back, seeing that they could not penetrate the ratman formation.

"HAH!" Skeever cheered with his men, punching the stale air with his bloodied cleaver. "Finally, some sense is being shown by the enemy. Now, CHARGE THEM!"

"Wait!" Marcus shouted, watching the Kobolds as they moved. Their retreat was slow, deliberate, and possessed of a kind of coherency. They moved as one towards the Eastern ridge of the North, just beyond Grindlefecht's perimeter. Such movement, and the complete lack of fear denoted by their focused eyes and movements thus far, did not imply a collapse of morale.

Instead, it implied quite the opposite. This was a planned retreat.

Towards…what?

The cannons continued their clangoring assault on the Kobold battle-lines, sending the loyalist Yips flying in hazes of blood and broken bones, but still they steered towards an objective that lay back at their base.

And only then, hearing the richochet of gunshots in the darkness up ahead, did Marcus realize their intent.

Ix…

"Sire?" Skeever asked. "What is your-"

He stopped as he saw Marcus bite his lip, his fists clenching in consternation.

"CEASE FIRING!" he bellowed at Deekius, forgetting entirely that the rat-priest could not read his thoughts in that moment. "Send up another flare – tell the cannons to stop firing."

Deekius did as he was bid, while Marcus rounded up the rats into five small columns of two-hundred men, ordering them towards the Eastern ridge after the Kobolds.

They want us to follow them, he told himself. They want us to take the bait. They…they know how much stock I put in Ix.

"You are hearing your Shai-Alud!" Skeever yelped into the crowd. "FORWARD! MARCH!"

The smart thing would be to maintain a defensive perimeter now, Marcus's mind said, begging its bearer to listen to logic. The best chance you have is waiting for reinforcement. Grindlefecht has fallen. Its destruction is complete. You've failed – but only partially. Don't make a pyrrhic victory into an utter defeat just because you've grown sentimental for some tiny red demon.

But equally, another part of his mind spoke to him in moving pictures, not words. This other part of his brain showed him the bravery of a Kobold that had done more for Marcus's cause than he had any right to. A soldier that had come to Marcus as nothing more than a slave, and proven not only his usefulness, but the usefulness of his entire species to the ratman cause. Hell, their usefulness to unifying the Underkingdom under a single banner itself.

Who cares, Marcus? This is just a fantasy. You're a General in a fantastical world of little creatures all biting at each other's throats. This isn't your world. These aren't your people. They never have been.

"Sire?" Skeever asked. "Do we move?"

And Marcus, gritting his teeth in what Skeever assumed to be fury, did nothing more than give a curt nod of his head and nod, sprinting with the remaining ratguard up the blasted hill towards the ruined stronghold's perimeter.

Damn it, Ix, he cursed. If you're dead…yours is not a ghost I want hanging over me. Not another one. Not you…

…

When the walls had fallen, he had looked beyond the ashen cloud and seen what remained of his people.

They swarmed like wraths through the mist, knives flashing as they threw them at Ix's squad of Sharpshots, and he was forced to re-live the pain of the Battle of Black Gulch – where the Shai-Alud had first used the exact same tactic against Head Yip Gith and his forces.

But that was back when he was nothing more than a simple Yip. Now, he was a leader. He wasn't about to see his men perish even if he was blinded.

"Stand fast-fast!" he told them. "Wave is coming!"

Those that listened were able to bring their firearms to bear against the shadows that sprinted at them, though the discharge of their arquebus did little now that the forces of Skegga had closed the distance between them and the bulk of the ratman ranged forces on the Eastern bank of the stronghold. Already Ix could see Kobold daggers finding the hearts of his squad. One-by-one, his newly formed battalion was dwindling.

"Commander Ix!" one of his ratman subordinates shouted over the din of battle. "What are we doing?"

Ix wasted no time, answering the rat as he brought up his gun and bashed the brains out of a sprinting Kobold with its steel stock.

"Move back-back!" he ordered. "Dust cloud cannot cover whole tunnel!"

His men obeyed his commandment without question, and if young Ix had notions of historical legitimacy about him, he would have remarked about how this moment may have been the first time in recorded history that a ratman had taken orders from a Kobold as his superior.

But such thoughts were those meant for later. They were more the domain of the Shai-Alud than creeping creatures like Ix and his kind.

The Shai-Alud…Ix thought.

No word had been sent to them. The last thing they had seen from their firing position had been the Spinerippers falling with the walls. As far as Ix knew, the ratman columns were already decimated. They could be all that was left…

But he put such thoughts from his mind as soon as they started to form. This was Sire Marcus, after all. He was no fool. He was strong. If this battle could be won, he would win it.

And so he kept his men close, demonstrating just how to deal with setbacks like this. He'd seen enough, and been in enough, to know exactly how to keep calm under pressure.

"Keep line-lines straight!" he squeaked over his shoulder, letting fly another shot that struck a leaping Yip right in his shoulder and sent him tumbling back the way he had come. "They will be striking at us from North-north! Keep up volley, and bash-bash any that come too close!"

The men obeyed, but the lack visibility didn't do them any favors. It seemed that every inch they moved back simply brought more Kobolds sprinting at them, some not even bearing weapons – simply running at them hoping to take a chunk out of the opposing force with their infected teeth. Ix watched them go down one by one as his men moved back – and with every five kobolds they felled, the beastly loyalists slew at least one Sharpshooter for good measure.

The squad was wavering – Ix knew it. He could feel the vibrations of their tentative paws on the ground. He knew they wanted nothing more than to turn tail and flee.

"Talon-Leader Ix-Ix!" one of his Kobolds screamed. "The tide do not stop! Should we be retreating? Should we be falling ba-"

"No run-run!" Ix cried back into his faltering ranks. "Shai-Alud Marcus will have plan-plan! He will not want us to run. He never run-runs!"

Ix's form became almost feral as he kicked out at an advancing Kobold with his bare feet before bringing up his arquebus and popping a cap in the flailing creature to make sure he was dead. He looked down at his fallen once-brother and was overtaken in the moment by something strange. Something that become so, so much stranger once the fog was finally lifted and the Sharpshots of Ix saw their Brothers staring back at them across a field littered with Kobold and Ratman corpses.

"Be readying shooters!" one of his ratman units shouted. "There they are!"

***

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[IronLung]

The once sprinting Kobolds of Grindlefecht had dropped their weapons before Talon-Commander Ix. They threw themselves to the ground, faces twisted, doubled-over with fear. As soon as the ashen cover had dropped, it seemed they had finally succumbed to rationality. They had realized just how insane all this resistance was.


"Talon-Commander?" the ratman shouted over the crying forms of the now supplicant Kobolds. "Shall we be taking them down?"


Ix calmly stepped forward, his small hands lowering the guns of his squadron.


"Talon-Commander?"


Something had possessed the Kobold in this moment. Looking out at a sea of dead brethren – it wasn't as though he hadn't done so before. But to be this close…to be staring into the dead eyes of those who still served Skegga, and to be looking at those still living who now wept before him…something snapped in the normally cool-headed Yip that he couldn't explain. He had not the words. The only thing he was able to say was simply, "Why?"


He had known his Brothers to always love the spirit of community. Families danced round the totems of their old heroes - the greatest Yips who had made the greatest jumps in history. To see them reduced to unthinking, unblinking slaves like this...it didn't make sense. Skegga was strong, he had come to them with a great story of leaping to the heavens themselves under him, but the Yips Ix knew would never have chosen death over the chance for glory. It didn't make sense. They had always respected and revered bravery, not foolishness. They believed in power, yes, but knew the difference between naked bravado and true strength. Ix had followed Skegga in the past because he truly believed that the bloated fool presented the greatest hope for his people. Of course, he wasn't going to keep following him when he saw that his judgement had been wrong. Stubborness was not a Kobold trait. Pride came from realizing one's mistakes and altering one's perspective to reflect them. No matter what the shadow-rat used to walk among their villages and tell them all, that was something Ix could not forget.


No. No matter how much he wracked his brain trying to understand these foolish cretins that he once counted himself among, he couldn't understand them now. Not their aggression, nor their surrender. It just didn't make sense...


"We should be slaying them here and now, commander!" his ratman underling shouted, bringing him from the realm of reflection back into the cold reality of the present. "Shai-Alud Marcus is taking enough prisoners. These ones are deserving to –"


"Why?" Ix whispered again to the supplicant Kobolds he looked at down the barrel of his gun. Then, voice raising to a shriek of total, unbridled frustration. "Why do you fight-fight when you know you cannot win?"


In response, his misguided brethren simply wailed and beat their heads against the ground. Some of them seemed to be in the grip of a particularly nasty disease – their bellies were bloated and festering beyond all recognition – a fact that only served to irritate the Kobold more.


History would remember them as cowards. As worse than trash. All because of these...these idiots!


"Why do you do this?" he asked the surrendering loyalists. "Look at me! You could have been part of strong-strong side. You could have been making something of your selves! Instead, you are following dumb-dumb Skegga to grave!"


"Talon-Commander…"


The firm, furry hand of his comrade gripped his shoulder, trying to impart some wisdom back into his small bones.


"Why are you so dumb-dumb!" he railed at the kneeing forces, walking up to restrain them as Sire Marcus had ordered them to do for any surrendering Kobolds. "You do nothing but make our race look bad-bad. Do you not see-see that we must work with our once-enemies to stay strong-strong? Can you not understand that…"


By the time he finished uttering his final word the first of the bowing Kobolds had looked up at him with the smile of one who was possessed. And by the time Talon-Commander Ix had realized what the creatures really bore in their stomachs, it was already too late.


…


Marcus felt the searing heat of the explosions at the top of the hill before he saw the billowing dome of flame that surged through the ranks of Ix's men, accompanied by the shrill cries of the Kobold forces that cheered to see them burn.


"IX!"


"INTO THEM!" Skeever yelped, practically throwing his men forwards and ordering them to bring their spears to bear against the Kobold army that now turned back to its foes that had followed them, their faces smeared with macabre smiles that spoke of the desire, pure and simple, for bloodshed.


Theirs, and their enemies – they didn't care now.


The rearguard of the red wave braces as they saw the ratguard charge uphill, Skeever and Deekius taking full command and making sure the Schiltron formation was well maintained and making good speed. Marcus would have been proud to see them work their magic were it not for the fear that had taken grip of his heart the second he saw Ix's position go up in flames.


The logical part of his brain was trying to work now as best it could, trying to understand the smiles and screams of glee that dripped from the dwindling Kobold forces mouths.


These Yips had no weapons besides their feeble claws and teeth. They were more like rabid animals now than a species that had once called the North their civilization.


But where had their explosives comes from? Marcus wondered, scrambling up with the ratguard to watch the final throes of this battle take place – to see those bloodied scum pay for every ratman and Kobold they had slain this day.


Those…those cannons fell, Marcus told himself as he watched the Kobold rearguard ready itself to meet the steel-thorns of the ratguard. I saw it with my own eyes. They have no ballistics capacity. There's no way they could have brought any kind of explosive devices to bear against us.


Unless they have a Gloomraava of their own…but no, he would have surely revealed himself by now, or succumbed to the power of the strange magic that dominates this world. Even Deekius couldn't summon a pillar of flame like that which he'd just seen.


The only other possibility was…


Marcus stopped running. The next few moments of confused screaming happened as a series of flickering images locked in slow-motion: the ratguard charged, spears down and ready for the final strike, while the Kobolds took up their own people in their arms – those who had joined them from the remains of Ix's now charred position at the top of the hill – and threw them into the ranks of the ratmen like they were living, sentient projectiles.


Kobolds with swollen bellies, trailing through the air with their knees bent, arms hugging their legs, before opening up and exposing their bare bellies to the ratmen spear-columns.


"To the skies, Brothers!" Marcus heard Skeever yelp. "Be bringing them down!"


"W…wait…" Marcus murmured, seeing the mad delight in the Kobold jumper's eyes and knowing, only then, just how blind he had been this whole time.


"WAIT!"


Only Deekius heard the cry of his General and leaped to cover him from what came next: the Kobold jumpers exploded in a brilliant gout of searing fire that burned through the ratguard ranks, singing them in their armor and sending them flying back into the ruined village below. Marcus saw them burn through Deekius' arms, watching the hope finally leave their beady eyes as the darkness of the Underkingdom once again gave way to utter chaos, and the loyalty of his rats was repaid in fire and blood and anguish.

***

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[IronLung]

"-ire! Sire!"

The world was a blur of sound and fury.

Marcus's eyes opened to reveal the bloody form of Deekius above him, his hood long since singed and discarded, revealing a face scarred by the remnants of the explosion.

Around him was a field of burning ratman corpses – the ratguard. Those who had not been caught in the immediate radius of the Kobold's suicidal explosions had suffered the most. They lay, screeching in infinite pain, as their fur burned down to their bones and their skin peeled away. They would have been easy pickings for the Kobolds who had charged them in the aftermath of the detonations if Skeever had not led the small forces that still held firm against them.

"INTO THEM!' Marcus could hear the ratman scream in the eternal night of the North Warrens. "BE GIVING NO QUARTER!"

Marcus rose without taking Deekius' waiting paw. He swayed, slowly taking his eyes away from the dying rats around him in the craters that would now serve as their graves. He watched Skeever cleave clean through the lines of Kobolds that had tried to break through his vanguard force – the ratman was practically holding the entire army together. Beyond even them, the Kobolds on their side were right at the frontlines. It seemed Skeever had even managed to wrangle up enough of them to strike back against the loyalists in the time Marcus was out. No matter what anyone said, that rat was a commander worthy of the title of First-Talon.

Worthier than I am, anyway…

"Sire," Deekius said. "Skeever is taking command. We – we are thinking that you are –"

The look Marcus gave Deekius stopped the ratman's voice in his throat.

"Ix…" Marcus said in an almost dream-like daze. "Ix – where is he?"

Deekius avoided his gaze. He dropped his snout to the ground and clenched his staff with a firmness that might have indicated that he was about to produce another one of his Unclean-blessed miracles.

"Deekius," Marcus said firmly. "Tell me where he is."

It was a command, this time, and the rat-priest obeyed.

"Be following," he said.

Both of them climbed the last stretch of the blackened, blasted hill, stepping over the bodies that littered the floor of the cavern until there was no free ground left to step on. In the distance, Skeever and the remaining ratguard and Kobold units were pushing the meagre forces of Kobold loyalists back. It looked like they had expended their suicide troops in the last attack – banking everything on a last-ditch effort to achieve victory.

No, Marcus caught himself thinking. No – not victory. There is no victory here. For anyone.

A kamikaze run…an assault so debased, so desperate…how could he have predicted it? He had never been able to understand the fanatical faith that compelled soldiers and civilians to strap explosives to their chests and run into the field of battle knowing, to a certainty, that death would follow them. Knowing that they would walk a pathway to heaven…be reborn from the ashes of their demise.

Is that what this butcher Skegga's 'Kleansing' really is? He thought, walking like a limping zombie up the hill, his eyes hazy, focusing on only the shambling form of Deekius before him. Is that what I failed to see? To understand? Were these Kobolds really so indoctrinated as to believe that, in death, they would finally have the power they dreamed of?

He didn't know. He couldn't know. Not for sure…

That, he knew, was the tragedy of this whole sorry affair. Not that he had failed – but why. His failure had not been one of strategy. It had not been one of hot-headed egoism or impractical decision making born from inexperience. In the end, whatever 'victory' he could claim here was tainted by a failure greater than any wartime blunder: a failure to understand just how far his enemy was willing to go. A failure of hypothesizing that, even with the fair terms he brought to the table, there were still at least a thousand Kobolds who would never see life his way. And there was a toad who would never surrender, even if there was no way he could truly ever win the war he had started.

In the end, Marcus's failure had been born from a lack of imagination.

Deekius finally paused at the apex of the hill overlooking Grindlefecht's eastern perimeter. Here and there on the ridge, the remainder of the Sharpshots were discharging what meagre ammunition they still had into the enemy below, their eyes possessed with animalistic focus – birds of prey sending their sweeping claws at their foes.

It took Deekius a few strained attempts to actually get the ratman that was issuing orders to them men to listen to him. Only when Marcus stepped forwards, grabbed the rat's arquebus out of his hand, and threatened to snap the thing upon his head did he finally relent in his firing and address the Shai-Alud.

"Your commander," Marcus said wearily, through eyes burning with rage. "Where is he?"

The ratman's voice caught in his throat. He looked from Marcus to Deekius, who bowed his head again, before nodding once as though in understanding and bidding Marcus to follow him.

Amidst the death-throes of the Kobolds of Grindlefecht, Marcus stopped at a small collection of rocks that had been piled up at the end of the blackened hilltop, behind the Sharpshot's firing line.

The rocks were piled just above the head of a Kobold that lay in a dark crater formed in the earth, his arquebus just out of reach of his still flexing fingers.

The Kobold's body had been sliced clean in half, his tiny intestines still weeping blood under his waist.

Marcus staggered forward, tripping and falling over himself as he stumbled down the crater and didn't even hear when Deekius shouted for him to stay away.

He didn't care. His eyes were glued to the Kobold at the center of the crater, the Kobold who's heavy breathing consumed his attention. In this moment, the world narrowed to the tunnel-vision of death that struck at the heart of his being, and when the twitching eyes of Ix finally found his in the dark, Marcus did everything he could to not allow the creature to see the despair that possessed his features.

"S-Sire-Sire," Ix coughed.

"…don't, Ix," Marcus said. "Don't say anything."

He dropped to his knees before the fallen warrior and took his tiny claw in his hand, feeling the Kobold's sharp fingers grip him tightly, drawing blood without really trying to.

"You were always strong…" Marcus murmured. "Even now…"

"Y-you," Ix sniffed, blood and snot spewing down his snout that Marcus wiped away with his handkerchief. "You are…strong-strong, Sire…strongest man-man…in the Under…"

"Not without you, Ix," Marcus replied, ignoring the screams that echoed overhead. "You – you were the backbone. The ranger specialist. You learned everything you had to faster than anyone else. And your commander is ordering you to hold on. You understand?"

"I-ngh," the tiny creature bleated. "I…I am done-done…Si-"

"That's an order, you understand?" Marcus practically shouted in the fading eyes of the Kobold. "You're not going anywhere without my say-so. Deekius!"

The rat-priest was already at Marcus's back. He hadn't even heard him approach, so gentle was the rat's shuffling.

"Fix him, now," he said.

"Sire, he is being –"

"I SAID FIX HIM!" Marcus spat, turning and leveling the arquebus in his hand at his Gloomraava's snout. "You've worked miracles before in the name of your damned God. WORK ANOTHER ONE, NOW!"

He watched Deekius stare blankly up at him down the barrel of his gun, the ratman's eyes unblinking and unphased as he gave his answer.

"Sire….he is being gone."

"Bullshit!" Marcus spat right back. "BULLSHIT! Your Shai-Alud just gave you a command. If you value your life, you'll –"

"I should have…kill-killed…them."

Marcus's rage was abated by the feeling of Ix's firm claw on his leg.

"I…was…weak-weak…"

"No," Marcus said, dropping to one knee again and clasping a firm arm around his fallen lieutenant. "Never, Ix. Never you."

He expected this moment to be like in the war-films he'd seen as a kid. Either that, or dry and detached like his textbooks presented battlefield deaths. Somehow, neither of them could relate the truth. The truth of the matter wasn't even somewhere in the middle. Because he'd been here already, he realized with a sickening, tiring heart. Gatskeek, Festicus, more Kobolds and ratmen than he could count…

Because of me…

So, when he looked through the grief he was trying his hardest to swallow, what surprised him most in this moment was the bloody smile that stretched across Ix's face.

"Sire Marcus," he said, hand gripping his General's mud-drenched coat ever tighter. "Be…strong!..strong…"

Then, like a light being snuffed from a flickering candle, he was gone.

***

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[IronLung]

As he let Ix's limp arm fall from his hand, Marcus felt only a dull numbness take over him.


He ignored Deekius' words meant to console his fading spirit, and instead stumbled away from the Kobold's fallen form in silence, lumbering back up the crater to see the seven or so still-living Sharpshots complaining about a lack of ammunition.


His glazed eyes hovered over the environment, seeing clouds of smoke drifting across the battlefield to reveal an ocean of blood. Where the walls of Grindlefecht once stood tall, Skeever was making his final push, his ratguard wavering in the wake of the Kobold's suicide-bomb runs. Though they were pushing the ailing defenders back, every rat tried to keep his distance, prodding at their bellies from afar with his spear. Such care rendered the Schiltron formation's key strength practically nullified – they weren't making enough progress.


He watched them, seeing the rats at the vanguard move back from every desperate strike a Kobold made against him, and then being pushed right back into the thick of battle by the exhortations of Skeever – the black, one-armed ratman who walked into the thick of the horde with no hesitation at all. To their credit, the Kobolds Marcus had picked up on his way here were still fighting back – ironically it was they who looked as though they did so without fear, following Skeever's lead.


He looked at their demon eyes – little crimson slits that held scheming brains – and thought of how willing they were to kill their own kind. Power – that was it, wasn't it? That was all their existence truly was.


Then, Marcus felt something in his hand. He looked down and saw the silver stalk of the loaded arquebus that had never left him.


The barrel of the weapon was coated in Ix's blood – the last blood the Kobold would ever shed. And in that moment, it was as though Marcus could see the eyes of his faithful servant reflected in the still shining barrel, the words of the Kobold echoing down its stalk: "I should have killed them…I should have killed them…"


"Deekius," Marcus said, not even recognizing his own voice.


"Sire?"


"Fire a flare. Let the cannons fire on them."


The Gloomraava hesitated.


"But Sire," he said. "We may be hitting some of our own Kobold auxiliary-"


"Deekius," Marcus spat, and the dark fury in his barely reserved tone stopped the rat-priest before he even formed another thought never mind voiced one. "I want to hear nothing more except the roar of our guns. Understood?"


The rat-priest bowed his head, licked his lips, and acquiesced to his Shai-Alud's command.


"As you are saying, Sire."


Marcus didn't look as the flare went up. He found Skeever's bloodied eyes in the midst of the crowd and a moment of psychic understanding seemed to pass between them, for just as the first bellows of the twelve-pounders thundered again in the deeps, the ratman ordered his men back as far as they could make it.


The Kobolds, however, did not have time to unshackle themselves from their once-brethren.


Marcus's unblinking eyes beheld the devastation that came next: the cannons made short work of Grindlefecht's final defenders – crashing through the vestiges of their battle-lines and detonating the final suicide troops in a series of red flashes that singed Marcus's retinas. The Kobold auxiliaries looked behind and around them at the carnage, seeing the ratmen flee in time to mostly avoid the explosive teeth of the iron cannon-shot. They probably died with nothing but hate in their hearts, cries of betrayal flying from their charred lips that turned to ash on the blasted field of battle. But Marcus did not spare more than a cursory look at them.


Instead, he held his arquebus firm and started walking towards the fray, his rats cheering as they watched him limp towards the carnage without fear, or hesitation. To them, they were looking at an unfazed commander storming towards his destiny. It was something Skeever noticed, and it was something he exploited immediately.


"Be following the Shai-Alud!" he wailed, a sound barely audible in Marcus's ringing ears. "Be slaying the dying where they lay! Be leaving none alive!"


Thus commenced the act of slaughter that would live in infamy – the final punctuation in the tale of Marcus Graham's underground campaigns as the Shai-Alud: the ratmen began storming through the dark grounds of Grindlefecht and slaying any Kobold that still drew breath. No chance for surrender was no given. Marcus meandered by the screaming Yips as they tried crawling towards him, leaving them to be speared by a ratguard looking for vengeance. For that was the only thing that was now on anyone's mind. The cannons worked until their ammunition finally ran dry, and though Deekius tried to tug on the rim of Marcus's trench coat to tell him that he was proceeding towards a still dangerous area of the battle, the Shai-Alud did not turn once to acknowledge his priest.


It was said by those rats that survived the bloody Siege of Grindlefecht that the Shai-Alud entered a state of battle-trance in the end-stages of the ordeal – walking wounded, trailing blood down his shoulder that dripped onto the arquebus he carried with him. On a few occasions, the ratguard gasped as they watched him bring up said arquebus and unload into the face of a Kobold straggler who had run at him, eager to defeat the enemy of Boss Skegga. The Shai-Alud did not stop to watch his enemies fall before him. Instead, he lumbered on, through the smoke and haze and the ruin caused by his plundered cannons, and even those rats who were engaged in torturing or gutting the fallen Kobolds on the field knelt in supplication as the human General passed them by.


The truth, of course, was far from heroic. Far from exceptional. Marcus's mind had simply ceased to care about the carnage he saw unfolding in front of him. For him, reality had become naught but a kaleidoscope of blood and viscera – a moving mosaic of charred bones and severed limbs passing by his vision like macabre travelers in the dust of this world. He kept walking, his favored commander and Gloomraava shielding him from any who would attempt to overpower him, and it was his feet that crossed the threshold of Grindlefecht's interior keep before any of his troops.


The Keep was of solid material, gilded and still standing strong even amidst the wreckage of its walled exterior. The intricate markings left by the Dwarves were lost on Marcus entirely. He only looked forward into the darkness of the keep interior, ignoring the calls Skeever made for his men, now distracted and reveling in their applications of torture, to form up and secure the perimeter in case of reinforcements. For some reason, however, Marcus simply couldn't feel fear in this moment. He crept forwards, into the long expanse of the dark, with nothing but his firm grip on the gun that shook in his hands telling him that he was still alive.


Eventually, the pitch dark of the keep receded, and Marcus arrived with his two ever-companions at the temple of Skegga himself.


The doorway was framed by grisly displays of hanged Kobolds and Dwarves, each one's stomach opened to drape their innards down from the roof, their blood long since dried up on the ground the invaders now walked on. Marcus ascended the crimson-gold steps to the temple without much fanfare, hearing the ratguard forces finally scurry their way up behind him.


"Stay back," he ordered quietly, stopping only momentarily to address those new arrivals. It was an order that Skeever and Deekius immediately relayed with gumption, hearing only their Shai-Alud's next quiet words: "Enough of you have died today…"


The Shai-Alud stepped over the threshold of the golden palace doors, smelling the raw stench of dry meat and stale blood from the grisly tableau decorating the temple's walls. Dwarven meat and Kobold bones, stretched beyond recognition, bound and sewn up together like the grisly biological experiments performed the angel of death Mengele himself, greeted Marcus as he trudged through broken bodies and discarded weapons, seeing the stone operating tables where the Kobolds must have been stitched up to carry their deadly payloads.


And there, at the very end of the hallway of horrors, sat the mad God behind it all.


You…


Marcus considered the limp, tiny limbs of the beast who sat upon his floating throne, his eyes blinking as he recognized the Shai-Alud who had finally come to stand before him.


An assortment of five Kobold honor guards stood, rusted scimitars ready, before the bloated toad, their legs shaking as the enemy commander of legend stumbled towards them, his two elite lieutenants keeping in step beside.


He saw the dwindling desire to fight within their eyes. He saw that, if he had offered them the chance, then and there, they would have thrown down their arms and begged for mercy.


"Skeever," he said instead. "Send them to the paradise they long for."


His Talon Commander's blade was a blur of blood and steel, his swift and sure strikes making short work of the guards while Deekius looked on, chanting a prayer to He-Who-Festers as though it would drown out the blood-curdling screams of Grindlefecht's last defenders.


And when the final Kobold hit the ground, all that remained was a one-armed ratman slathered in their blood.


He unsheathed his blade from the broken torso of a Kobold and shook it free of the little imp's blood – the same blade Gatskeek had held proud as the commander of Knifegut.


Another one who died…because of me…because of me…


No…no, his mind barked, vehemently refuting what was so plainly obvious. No…not me…not…


Marcus's eyes lighted on the great bulbous toad again.


"Sire," Skeever barked, snarling up at the inert toad shriveling in his throne. "The honor should be yours."


You.


Skegga was both more and less than he'd imagined. He did not know, really, what his imagination had cooked up when he thought of his enemy. Seeing him from above on Razor Ridge had not truly allowed him to look into the eyes of the beast that had caused all the pain and torment of untold thousands in this underground realm. He had expected a grand welcome. He had expected one final trick that the bloated thing would give him to deal with – a final, bitter curse or recremation that he would throw at the Shai-Alud who was his enemy. He at least expected to see hatred in the fat beast's eyes.


Instead, he was surprised to look through the veil of his own grief and fury and see only a set of glazed grey eyes staring back at him. He had heard tale that this amphibian was the architect of all the horrors he had seen, and yet, all he saw as he looked upon him now was nothing but a giant frog, slathered in pus, practically stewing in his own juices.


Somehow, that only served to heighten his rage.


"You."


He said it aloud as he approached the creature's throne, Skeever and Deekius urging caution from his back. He didn't care. He had eyes for nothing but the freakish oaf he saw sitting in that chair – little more than a barely breathing corpse.


"You – you did all this."


He threw the accusation at Skegga with slurred speech, like he was talking in a dream, moving through a sea of treacle. He knew he should say something glorious – something history would remember in this point. For wasn't that what all the great commanders of legend said when they finally came to the end of their toils?


Looking into the chortling snout of Skegga, Marcus now felt nothing but weary resignation to the anger that had been rising in his gullet since he'd first set foot in this damned world.


Maybe even Alexander the Great had felt the same way…


Marcus thought he saw the toad start to mumble – his slimy lips tried to mouth something.


But the Shai-Alud was done listening. He brought the rifle up, aiming directly at the toad's chest, and grit his teeth in animal fury.


"This," he said. "Is for Gatskeek. For Festicus. For Ix…for the countless souls of this place you've wasted…and the countless more you've corrupted."


Something at the back of his mind shook him – something that told him the toad's silence might have more meaning…


Even Skeever and Deekius were starting to get antsy at his back…


"Sire," Deekius warned. "Wait…"


But Marcus's body had its own will, now. After letting so many kill in his name, he decided it was time for someone to die by his own hand.


"Your reign of terror ends…now."


A pull. A click. A moment – that's all it took.


In the flash of his weapon's muzzle Marcus finally saw what the expression was on the great toad's face: terror.


When the bullet traveled through his gut, Skegga's body vanished in a budding flower of flame, and the walls of his temple finally came crashing down.


***


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[IronLung]

"How do you do it?"



He asked her the question in what felt like a vacuum, the stars above serving as the only reminders that he was still on earth.



"Do what?" Mari replied, turning over on the grassy knoll to face him. "If this is about my looks, I wake up in the morning like this. And – yes – you are punching way above your weight."



He rolled away from the stars to look at her, seeing the twinkling lilies that were her eyes gazing adoringly down at him in the midnight gloom.



"How do you make people believe in you?"



It was a question she would have scoffed at – he saw the beginnings of her nose twitching the way it normally did when he said something naïve or schoolboy-ish in her presence. She always did a great job of keeping him grounded with little more than a look.



But tonight, amidst their quiet stargazing, she didn't bash away his complaint. Instead, she leaned across the grass and stroked his grizzled chin.



"It's super easy," she said. "I tell myself that doubt is for wimps."



"Come on –" he began.



"See?" she replied, cutting him off by rolling on top of him and giggling like a schoolgirl when he tried to resist. "Already you've failed, Marcus Graham. You've doubted that your impeccably intelligent girlfriend has the answer you want to hear."



It was his turn to scoff, now, staring up at her as the blanket of constellations hidden above framed her face.



"It just comes so easy to you, doesn't it?" he laughed, stroking her hair. "A Psychologist equally at home in the digital world as the physical one. Everyone loves you. Everyone listens to you."



"Everyone listens to you, too, you know. They just don't like what they hear."



He chuckled at what he assumed was a joke, but when he looked through the mist that covered his groggy, sleepless eyes, he saw she was completely serious.



"You wanna know the deep, dark truth?" she smiled down at him. "People are simpler than you think. Think about how folk occupy their time – their lives are filled with all these big, horrible happenings. Parents dying. Lovers' quarrels. War. Famine. Disease. Sure, we could talk about those things – the mainstream media outlets certainly do – but they ain't the ones pulling in the big numbers, honey. Why is that?"



He sighed. Already he didn't like where this conversation was going.



"You're going to say that they don't want to hear about the harshness of reality."



"Correctamundo, baby," she giggled, leaning so close that her voice dropped to a whisper. He was immediately taken in by the aroma of her perfume, the thin nape of her neck, the paleness of her skin as it caressed his own coarse, rough body.



"People want validation," she whispered. "They want excitement. They want an escape. You think Vtubers catching fire during the Pandemic was a coincidence? Big anime tiddies sell, my young apprentice."



"And yet you prefer to stay aw-naturale," Marcus murmured with a cursory glance down her blouse.



"Because there's something more to that desire," she said, with such passion behind her words that he thought she might have gotten far more blasted than he'd initially thought when they downed the whiskey he'd brought with them on this little trip. She always was a lightweight.



"At the end of the day," she said. "People don't want to feel alone. That's it. That's the big secret. That's what every online bigshot has been able to monetize: loneliness. That's why my clients listen to me, babe. Because I listen to them. But you," she said, bending down to plant a wet kiss on his dry lips. "You're the other piece of the puzzle. You actually have something to say. You have something worth listening to. A message."



"Not as sexy as a buxom cartoon girl," Marcus murmured into her ear.



"Anime," she corrected with an air of faux defiance. "A sacred Japanese art, don'tcha know. Besides, passionate men are always more attractive. I might be a cooky Psychotherapist, but I love a man who's crazy about a lost cause."



"Hey!" he all but screeched as she bent down to kiss him again, pulling away only when he held her tight, and the stars seemed to melt into her like she was a titan pulling them into her warm embrace.



"Imagine what we could build together," she said. "Imagine what we could do…"



He stared up at her, stroking the stray folds of her hair away from her pale face.



"If only you'd stop doubting," she whispered. "If only you'd seize the power that's always dangling in front of you, waiting for you to take it."



He saw her eyes shift then – maybe it was just his own imagination. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. Probably more likely it was the alcohol running through his bloodstream – but he saw a change come over her. The lilly-pads of her eyes were gone – replaced by a set of four glowing amber bulbs with black slits drawn across them. Her pale skin grew thin hairs that ran down her body, and her thin hands now felt like elongated claws digging into the soft flesh of his cheeks, holding his mouth shut, keeping him from screaming out in pain. A set of six horns burst from the back of her skull and twisted into the night, each one a corrupted pike dripping with rot and bile.



"Come to me, Marcus Graham," the thing that was once Mari told him. "Accept the Gift that my servants give you."



It spoke with the voices of all those who had died to protect him. In its mad eyes he saw Gatskeek, Festicus, and Ix all adding their voices to its whisper-roar that boomed throughout his conscience.



"You are mine…" the creature said, its vicious horns bending down to rake his forehead, scraping away the flesh there and inscribing something in his own blood. "My General. My Shai-Alud. My progeny from the Place Beyond. Whatever comes next, remember: you shall always be mine."



The last thing he remembered was the creature's great yellow tongue that shot from its mouth towards his opened forehead, licking at the pulsing muscle of his brain and inscribing something there before its amber eyes burst open, and the dream-world of Marcus's slumber gave way to a harsher reality.



…



He woke to pain surging up his every limb.



His eyes adjusted to the cloud of dust that blanketed his vision, and any movement he tried to make was hindered by the stacks of gold rubble that encased his body. He was buried. And he was dying.



Not even a carefree dream to…send me off…



He could feel his life running red down his arms and his legs, wherever they were beneath him. No muscle responded to his mind's dull calls for motion, and no impulse but that which compelled him to scream in agony could be felt.



This…this is how it ends?



He tried blinking through the filthy dust that lay thick in the air, his ears starting to pick up sounds of furious combat nearby. Of swords slicing through flesh, ratmen screeching as Kobolds died.



He looked up at what was once Skegga's great floating throne and found that it, too, had been reduced to rubble and cinders. Around its seat and hand-rests sat the remains of its once-host: the flabby, bloody scraps of Skegga that had barely survived the explosion.



He…He's dead…



The thought was enough to bring tears to Marcus's ashen cheeks.



He's finally…dead…



So engrossed was he in this realization that he did not even hear the shouts that had started up nearby, nor even pay attention to the bricks and wreckage that were currently being removed from his position.



It's over…



"Sire Marcus! Be waiting!"



There's little else I can do…



He couldn't recognize the voice as it drew closer, and the weight on his limbs began to lessen. He knew the bones in his arms were broken. He knew his legs were a mangled mess. How he was even able to stay conscious might have had something to do with the strange blessing he'd received when first he was spawned into this dark realm of war and filth.



Or maybe that dream was more real than he'd thought.



He felt himself being dragged from his position – his legs unlocking from their crushing prison beneath the crumbled remains of Grindlefecht's main keep – what Skegga had appropriated as his temple. Now it was nothing more than a desolate, smoking gravestone. The final chapter in the great toad's history had just been written.



And so has mine…



Marcus's thoughts trailed off as he saw the dark ceiling of the Underkingdom above him. Only dust and smoke surrounded the crumbling wreckage of the temple.



Then – a feeling of weightlessness overcame him. What he assumed was death finally taking him after all this time.



I've cheated it enough, he thought. I've sent enough ratmen to their deaths to deserve this. And yet…I can't leave Mari here. She's up there.



This thought – and this thought alone – was what compelled him to grit his teeth and fight through the pain that was still coursing through him, begging his heart to finally give up.



"Be holding on, Sire! Be holding…"



"I'm…I'm here…" he said, coughing through blood and spittle, feeling his bones begin to crack back into place and his muscles contract as they began to function once more.



His vision was still clouded, his eyes were still glazed over, and his head felt like a weight was bearing down on him.



But he was alive.



"Sire," the rat who had just saved him murmured. "How are you feeling?"



He turned to see Deekius panting beside him.



"Like shit," he said.



The rat-priest smiled. "Don't we all?"

***


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[IronLung]

Marcus stared through his groggy eyes at his servant, watching the high priest work his magic, weaving threads of restorative energy through his gnarled fingertips. Energy that he sorely needed himself, by the looks of his pallid features.


"We are born…in rot," he said with an almost serene air. "We…die…in rot."


His statement was punctuated by a series of bloody coughs and sputters. Every movement of his lips, every word he formed, seemed like a lingering agony. Marcus watched him double over in pain. He was practically holding himself together with any strength he had left in his tiny body.


"Once again…" Marcus groaned. "You do too much for me, Deekius."


He looked towards Skegga's old throne.


"He's dead?"


It seemed so odd a question that even Deekius couldn't help but chuckle, his yellowed tongue flicking between his fangs as he did so.


"More dead…than one can be. We are…victorious…Shai-Alud…"


"Then why," Marcus murmured. "Do you look so…so…"


He suddenly felt something lurch within his stomach – at the very spot where Deekius had laid his healing claws and directed the green light of the Gloomraav to his body. He tried to move, and yet he felt his every vein surge in the instant he tried to command his limbs. His eyes darted around, seeing the smile stretched across Deekius' face, feeling something travel through his body. Something…foreign. Something new.


This something was traveling through his body with speed hitherto unknown – like a new chemical sending every synapse sparking off into explosive life, a drug that was changing the very anatomical structure of his being.


He tensed, veins popping on his forehead as he snarled and foamed at his mouth, before fixing his attention on Deekius again.


And with any dark Gods that did exist in this world as his witness, he saw the light in the ratman's eyes fade away to nothing before him.


"Deekius…" he murmured. "What have you…"


"I am…telling you…" the rat-priest whispered, his voice little more than a hoarse choking. "I saw…where my path ends…long ago. I am doing…what must be…done…before the end."


Somewhere nearby, a set of wet paw steps clattered on the bloody stones of the palace floor.


A blade glinted in the shadows.


"And yet still," Deekius said. "This path is taking…strange turns."


The shadow crept closer, a set of snarling teeth shining through the dark.


"I knew my life would…be ending here," Deekius told the shadowed figure appearing through the dust of Grindlefecht. "But still…I never expected…you…would be…bearing the knife."


Marcus peered through the dust that still enveloped the ruins of Grindlefecht.


And slowly, a figure in the shape of a hulking rat phased through its gaseous curtain.


"You were not wishing to stab me…in the back, then?" Deekius asked the approaching shadow. "No…it was never…your way…"


As the gnarled paws of the warrior-rat came into focus, Marcus breathed an intake of acidic air that was still tainted by the fat toad's final discharge of ordnance in death.


"You knew it would come to this, Gloomraava."


Marcus's addled brain flew to catch up with the reality unfolding before him, seeing the hobbled form of Skeever march into full view to stand before him and Deekius.


"Skeever…" Marcus snarled. "G-gather the troops. We have to find…Silas."


The rat merely looked down at the shuddering form of his Shai-Alud and did nothing.


"Skeever?"


The ratman warrior met his confused stare with barely checked rage, his dark eyes flitting towards Deekius.


"If you wish to fight, Brother, you shall be losing."


The rat-priest gave a throaty chuckle. "I have done…what was asked of me," he replied. "My feet are treading the path…meant for me. As have yours, dear Brother."


"You do not know the reason for your end?"


Deekius spat a globule of corrupted blood at the dull stones of the temple floor. "Your…reasons do not matter," he replied. "None of them…do. All that is transpiring…is according to the Unclean…"


Marcus spat through the pain he could still feel gnawing at his ribs. He couldn't make heads or tails of this nonsense.


But a sinking feeling was beginning to gnaw at him.


"Skeever," he said. "Obey your Shai-Alud's command. Return to…the foot of the temple. Gather the men that…remain."


Once again, the Talon-Commander of Clan Red-Eye simply looked blankly at his General, his eyes looking right through Marcus as though the human was not even there.


Then his eyes flew again to Deekius' shuddering form, and Marcus saw the glint of fury that overcame his features.


"Skeever…" he breathed. "No…"


"So be it," Skeever Steelclaw whispered as he marched towards his Brother rat and raised his cleaver. "You always wished to stand beside He-Who-Festers, did you not?"


"Skeever," Marcus growled, forcing his body to move through the strange pain that practically left him helpless. "Don't –"


"Then let me send you to him."


His machete flashed through the filth-ridden air with such speed that Marcus couldn't have intercepted him even at his full strength. Through his foggy vision, he saw the ratman slice through Deekius's quarterstaff and then twist his blade to deliver a mercy stroke to the rat priest's jugular.


"No!"


He stumbled forward, body still shuddering as though the dark energies that had once swelled within him clung to life. But when his head hit the ground, his body tumbled down with it, and Marcus was left to stare into those tired old eyes as the priest that had summoned him finally left his grim world behind, still wearing a strangely serene smile.


"Bastard!" Marcus yelped, throwing himself at the snarling rat, knowing that a single stroke of Skeever's blade could end him just as quickly as he'd just felled his brother.


The eyes of the betrayer met those of his General, and in the split second of unrelenting fury Marcus displayed, the rat made up his mind and struck him in the gut with the butt of his blade, winding him and sending him slumping to the ground, consciousness fading away once again.


He looked up at Skeever from the bloody, dust-laden temple floor, heart too heavy for anything but hate, head too addled to think of anything more to do than spit one word at his hateful face.


"Traitor…"


Skeever fixed him with his cold crimson eyes before Marcus once again tumbled away into the blackness of sleep.


"To you, Marcus," the ratman said. "Never to my realm."


***

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[IronLung]

A single torch sconce burned bright against the darkness of Grindlefecht's fourth dungeon.

Most of its underground chambers had survived the initial assault and the subsequent collapse. The etched carvings on the cold iron walls were untouched by the chaos that had erupted above. Through two great battles it had stood strong, and stable – a testament to the endurance of those who had built it. Many of them now occupied its main cells, their skin long since wasted away as they succumbed to the tortures Boss Skegga had visited upon them.

One truth of Thean existence, known to those of the Underkingdom in particular, was that Dwarven crafts were made to last. Dwarven walls could only be brought down by their own weapons. Or, at the very least, through the deaths of thousands of their foes.

Such walls had even withstood the screams of their old masters – screams that had echoed through the twisting, labyrinthine chambers of the stronghold's five interconnected dungeons with just as much power as the cannons which had roared above them. And just like those cannons, the dungeons now lay silent. Only the intermittent trickles of blood from the torture racks or the bodies of dwarves and kobolds still hanging from the rafters could be heard in the eternal night of this dreary sanctum.

And it was here, amidst the bones of the dwarves, that Marcus Graham sat and waited for death.

The silence of this place that was soon to be his tomb was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because he could finally be alone with his thoughts. He could finally hear himself think, unhindered by the din of cannonfire or the screams of the dying above ground.

It was a curse, for the exact same reason.

"So, this is how it ends for me, huh?" Marcus said to his audience of dusty skeletons. "Not with a bang, but with a patter. Betrayal, backstabbing, and imprisonment in the very lair of my enemy."

He leaned his head against the far wall of his chamber, his repaired muscles groaning with every movement. Skeever didn't harm him, and he needed to know why.

The only thing still keeping him even close to what one could call 'sane' down here was his journal – for it had now truly become a journal – that he still scribbled with. They hadn't stripped him of his possessions when he was thrown down here. Possibly because they reasoned that his simple words would broke no threat to them. He entertained the thought that perhaps he should leave it behind as his final words even if there would be precious few rats who would ever read them. He was vain enough, it seemed, that he'd like his life to be remembered in his own words. What man didn't, when his time came?

What's it going to be, then? He jotted down noiselessly in the dank darkness of his prison. Will they hang me here, like a did that Dwarf back in Spearclaw when he refused to surrender? Or maybe they'll feed me to their queen, and see what monster she spits out next? Or, maybe they'll trade me to the Yokun above as a slave – as a way to broker some kind of fragile alliance with their once-enemies. It wouldn't surprise me. Nothing would, anymore.

He paused as he inked that thought, his tattered quill leaving a messy ink-blotch on the crumpled pages of his notebook.

That was my real failure, he then noted. Pride, and a lack of imagination. Thinking that I knew what motivated these bipedal rodents better than they knew themselves. You were waiting for your chance this whole time, weren't you, Skeever? You always hated Deekius. And every word of 'honor' and 'loyalty' you ever whispered in my ear was a lie.

But maybe lying's what I failed to learn. And now, here I sit. An honest General with nothing but the ragged shirt on his back, standing on the bones of thousands who I've led to dusty deaths. What do all my successes even matter if they led me here? I'm like the Marquis of Montrose –winner of a dozen tactically adept victories and loser of one battle that cost me everything.

"Except," Marcus sighed aloud. "Montrose had something tangible he was fighting for. If my dreams have any measure of truth about them, my reason to fight might not even be alive up there, anymore…"

He remembered his death-vision of Mari morphing into the rat-abomination so vividly that it could have happened right here in this cell. His body reacted every time he closed his eyes and saw that face snarling back at him, its hard horns and lithe tongue drooling over his forehead and etching words into his brain – words that chilled his bones.

The thought had murdered sleep for him. He dared not try and doze off, now. He must have been awake for at least three days straight. And he wasn't planning on napping anytime soon. The next time he closed his eyes would be the last, he knew it.

But something else was occupying his hazy thoughts besides those of his inevitable demise. It could be his lack of sleep, or it could be something else entirely, but he could swear that something thin and wiry played across the fingers on his right hand when he flexed them – something that glowed with a sickening green hue and arced its way around his palm like a ghostly light made manifest by nothing more than thought. He looked at his palm and saw that light glowing even now, and he stared open-mouthed as he realized insanity must finally be taking him.

Either that, or…

The door to the dungeon flew open, its clanging ringing out in his ears as it echoed through the whole rotten labyrinth. Footsteps pitter pattered in the pools of urine and fecal matter that lined the narrow corridor separating him from freedom until. Those same footsteps brought the light of a flickering candle close to Marcus's cell and then stopped abruptly before him. Without even looking up, he knew who had come to visit.

"Well," he said. "Come to revel in your victory, Talon-Commander?"

Skeever laid the candle down at the bottom of his cell-door, and sat opposite him.

"There is being no victory here, Marcus Graham," he said. "There is being only sad end of a long, long night."

The eyes of the First-Talon met those of his commander through the bars of his cell.

"Why?" Marcus asked. "Was it about power, Skeever, all this time? Were you simply waiting for your chance? Or do you simply despise a human more than you love your own people?"

The hairs on the ratman's neck stood to attention. "Know this, Marcus: I am loving my people more than anything. It is for them that I am doing this. Not myself."

"You lock away the one who saved your people from oblivion."

"'Saved'?" Skeever spat. "Is that what you are calling this? The army is being battered. The ratguard is being in lower spirits than when we are beginning our march. I am telling you to wait for reinforcements. I am telling you to use Glitterpaks. But you are committing us to the charge that killed us all."

Marcus hid his face from the light. "I did not know what awaited us in this place," he said. "No one did. I thought we could save them before they killed themselves. I thought you belieived the same thing."

Skeever shook his snout. "Are you not learning? Your wish to save the creatures of Underkingdom is what is making you a butcher, Marcus."

"And yet it has won you the North, in all its glory," Marcus scoffed. "I thought we agreed never to lie to each other, Skeever? If your loyalties were dependent on a sense of altruism, you would have slit my throat long ago. I've sacrificed plenty of your people to defeat Skegga and his minions. And through it all, you flapped not a single gum in complaint."

He crawled forward, bringing his face as close to the bars of his cage as he could. He looked right into the eyes of the traitor and saw the candlelight's stalk reflected in those crimson eyes.

"So, tell me what this is really about, Skeever. You owe me that much, even if you are a traitor."

The ratman leaned forward too after a moment. He bared his teeth and practically spat the word that was as much a blow to Marcus as any battlefield wound:

"Honor," he said.

***

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[IronLung]

"'Honor'?" Marcus spat back at Skeever. "You have a funny way of showing it, Skeever Steelclaw."

The Talon-Commander shook his proud snout. Whatever his aspirations were, he clearly didn't imagine that the man sitting across from him had the moral high ground here.

"You think I am a traitor, Marcus," he began, stoically facing his now-foe. "But I am being loyal to my people. Nothing more."

"By imprisoning me? The General chosen by your people?"

"By imprisoning one who would use us to fulfill his own ends."

Both man and rat stared with determined eyes at the other.

"You have wished to leave us all this time," Skeever said quietly. "You do not care for our plight. Like all humans, you think only of your own ambition."

"If you believe that," Marcus said with an indignant scoff, "then you're more deluded than I am."

Skeever shook his snout again. "I saw it clearly when you refused to take and hold Grindlefecht," he whispered as though sentries of his King might have eyes and ears amidst the dead of the underground tomb. "I should have known it before. I did not even believe the King at first. But… that was doubt eating at my mind. It will not happen again."

Marcus blinked. "So," he said, "now it comes out."

Skeever locked eyes with him again and gripped the bars of his metal cage.

"Did you think the King would not find out that you murdered Sire Verulex?" he railed. "Did you think he could not see how powerful you were becoming in the eyes of the priesthood? He assumed you would make a move against him eventually."

"Which you yourself suggested, Skeever."

"I suggested your only means of survival!" the rat roared. "How can you not see? If you had taken this place, you could have brought us into a new age of wonder. But you only wished to leave and return to your own kind. You never thought of our future."

"And you, Skeever?" Marcus asked. "Is it the future of your species that you have in mind here?"

"It is the only thing I ever think about," he replied with a cursory look at his misshapen stump of an arm. "I gave my body and soul for my people. Not for commanders. Not for Kings. Not even for He-Who-Festers. Ratkin must endure. We must be strong. It is how life is for us."

"If that is so, then you have doomed your people," Marcus sighed, gripping the bars of his cell just as Skeever did, paying no mind to how the rat's razor-claws pierced the rusted iron of the bars beside him.

"The King gave me an ultimatum," Skeever sighed right back at him. "He forced me to make a choice…"

Marcus could finish the sorry story before the ratman could even begin: "Kill the disobedient Gloomraava – the head of the Sha-Alud's new cult – and then end the reign of the Prophet himself before he gains a power base here."

He didn't need the rat to confirm his suspicions. He could see the truth of the matter written plainly on his face.

"Skeever…" he wheezed. "Don't pretend you acted out of a sense of loyalty here. It was to save your own skin that you murdered your Brother in cold blood. It was to save yourself that you cast me down here to wait for your weak King's execution."

"N-No…" the rat stammered. Then, growing more bestial as he looked into the unchanging eyes of his foe. "No! Marcus – how could you know what it is to hold the entire hopes of your race upon your shoulders? You – a human – can only care for yourself. Perhaps you think all other races must be the same. But we who are born in the dark, born of the dark, know what true kinship is! We know sacrifices must be made for the sake of building something that will last forever."

"Even if it means sacrificing your own comrades you fought back-to-back with to build it," Marcus said, his face a bloody mosaic of pained disdain in the dim illumination of Skeever's candle.

Skeever lingered on the bars for a minute, snout twitching, fangs bared, and claws digging so deeply into the bars of Marcus's cell that the latter thought he might pull them clean off and tear the human limb from limb right then and there.

Instead, the ratman merely sighed again and moved away, taking up his candle before he turned his back on the man he once called General.

"The King's army will come in the next three days," he said. "King Shrykul will find you and deliver you to his cousins as retribution payment for the slaying of their Talon-Commanders during The Skittering. Once they have you, you will be theirs for eternity, or until they are done with you. I suggest you take the food my men and I will give you during this time. They could be the last meals you have in your life."

Before the ratman finally departed, Marcus stood and rattled the bars of his cage for a final time to halt his steps.

"SkeeverSteelclaw," he said, his dirt-caked face pressed between the bars where the ratman's claws had made their marks. "You say that I, like a human, sought to do nothing more than sacrifice your people's own hopes and dreams to claim my own. But shall I tell you what it is that I dream? Shall I tell you what I see as I close my eyes every night in this realm of darkness?"

The Talon-Commander did not turn. He barely stirred at all. But he did halt.

Marcus licked his lips as he said what he knew was probably pointless to say but which, he knew, he had to say. Again, it could be his own vanity that compelled him to have the final word of their conversation. But he liked to think, even long after this pivotal moment in his life, that it was a commitment to the truth that guided his tongue.

"I see the faces of all those who have fallen under my command," he said, fighting to control his wrists – forcing them not to shake as the memories swept over him. "I see them raise their blades in my name. I see them fight tooth and claw for something they believed in. And I see the places where they died – the fires of that same belief still strong and pure in their eyes. I close my eyes and see their faces, and I remember all their names. I'll remember them long after their faces vanish, and even though it causes me nothing but pain, I'll cling to the memory of the memory when even that fades from my mind. Because I carry them with me, SkeeverSteelclaw. I'll carry them and their belief with me till the day that I finally fall. And then I'll join them wherever they are now – in the dirt or with your God."

He saw the shoulders of the ratman slump slightly. His massive gait gave way to something which was hidden by his hulking back.

"So, tell me, Skeever," Marcus said. "Do you really think that, after all this time, I never once stopped to care for you or your people?"

Whatever expression might have weaved its way through Skeever's face was lost to time and the dust of Grindlefecht's forgotten dungeon. When he spoke again, his voice was nary a murmur:

"Goodbye, Marcus Graham," he said.

Marcus watched him go, seeing the light of his single candle gutter and vanish as the steel-clad dwarven vault-door closed behind him. Once again, the First-Talon was left to stew in the juices of the fallen.

"The funny thing is," he told himself as he slumped against his cell door. "I can barely blame him. The mortality of a ratman like him is probably measured in months, not years. He's survived this long on cunning and strength. He'll probably survive much longer than even that docile King of his."

As these words left Marcus's mouth, a thin gleam of green sparked into life on his hand again, and this time he fell to the bone-cluttered floor, overcome by whatever was now flowing through his veins.

He clutched his hand and watched the veins on his palm bulge with alien life, seeing the thin arcs of emerald light zap between his fingers. The light of the lightning flashed sporadically as he tried to still his shaking hand.

"What…" he breathed, thinking of the horror that had appeared to him before he had woken above ground. "What's happening to me…"

As though answering for the priest from beyond the grave, a voice suddenly emanated from the depths of the cell across from him.

A dark voice, yet one tinged with the tenor of sophistication.

"Quite a thing, isn't it?" the voice said. "Quite a thing to live in terror."

***

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[IronLung]

"Quite a thing, isn't it? To live in terror."


Marcus looked into the dark beyond his cell, trying to make out the creature that spoke in clearer tones than anyone he'd ever heard down here.


The cracking green light from his throbbing hand afforded him just enough luminosity to bathe the face of the speaker in lambent green hues, and he saw a sniveling snout twitching across from him, with a face scarred by scratches and wrinkles of age. The ratman was possibly the smallest he'd ever laid eyes on, dressed in dingy leathers and with the shuffling gait often possessed by servants.


As he neared the bars of his own cage, the creature flashed Marcus a sickly grin.


"Did the brash commander speak true?" it said. "Are you truly Marcus Graham? The one they call 'Shai-Alud'?"


So surprised was he by the clarity of the ratman's speech that Marcus momentarily forgot about the pain surging up from his fingertips through his entire arm.


"In the flesh," he replied tetchily. "You have me at a disadvantage, Sir."


"'In more ways than one!'" the creature cackled. "How quaint. It has been some time since this lowly thing has conversed with one well-versed in the human tongue. What I would give to talk the night away with you, such as it is…"


Marcus found himself smiling warily. He flashed the resigned smirk of the condemned awaiting their inevitable demise.


"I have three days, as you probably heard," he said. "Is that enough time for you?"


The ratman shook his mangled mane. "Oh, no," he said. "I don't imagine you'll be staying here for long, Sire."


"I'm no 'Sire'. Not anymore."


"But you are, Marcus Graham, and so much more than just that. As one of the Unclean's most favored servants, I owe you more than you might think."


Marcus narrowed his eyes at the excitement he sensed in the ratman's voice. He saw the elongation of his pupils – like the creature was looking upon an Avatar of his God bound and imprisoned right beside him.


And Marcus dropped his hand as a realization overcame his entire being, surging through his brain with as much intensity as the grim light flaring in his hand.


"Silas…" he said breathlessly. "You're Silas, aren't you? You're the Prime Putrefact."


The ratman took a sarcastic bow in the human manner. "In the flesh," he said with a wink. "Though it has been some time since I have been called by that title."


Marcus couldn't help but just stare at him, looking upon his lowly form with new eyes now. Here, after all this time, was his goal. Sitting right beside him. A prisoner just like he was.


And yet he had sat in silence all this time.


Before Marcus could even open his mouth and question him, he replied coolly, as though he had anticipated this very query.


"Forgive me," he said. "I have languished in this prison for some time. The days in this place bleed into one after a time. I presumed that I would have gone mad quite some time ago. Perhaps you shall be the judge of that, Shai-Alud."


Marcus cocked his eyes at him. "You seem surprisingly lucid for a prisoner of the old toad. Tell me, why did he leave you here? Why capture you at all?"


Silas shrugged with a weary sigh. "Who can know the mind of a beast?" he replied. "Perhaps he sought to deal a morale blow to our people through my capture. Perhaps he thought having the font for the Unclean beneath his feet would afford him some form of protection. He clearly did not understand what it means to have true faith. Tell me, Marcus, is he dead?"


Marcus narrowed his eyes. The ratman saw him do it.


It was not that there was anything particularly wrong with his answer. But there was a certain fluidity to his speech that spoke of a desire to control the flow of the conversation. Recalling his frequent debate classes and observations in college, Marcus knew that such speedy responses and swift movement to new topics often signaled a lack of confidence in dealing with the topic at hand.


Lack of confidence, or outright obfuscation.


"You must have heard the rumbles above," he finally answered. "The bloated toad is quite dead, I'm sure of it. And he brought down this fortress with him."


"Sad tidings indeed," Silas shook his head. "And now the forces that remain are at each others' throats. The ambitions of my kind are unquenchable, it seems. Do you know that your errant commander even deigned it fit to keep me imprisoned here? He took one look at me and decided I was not fit enough to be returned to my King's service. Though, from what I understand, Skeever Steelclaw has never had much respect for the servants of He-Who-Festers. Even now my Brothers cannot see that we require unity if we are to defeat those who threaten our existence."


"'Unity'," Marcus parroted, staring into the now dimming light in his hand. "It's a beautiful dream. It's one I once thought could have been possible for your kind. I fought – I killed – so the Kobolds could enjoy freedom just as the Ratmen do. Even as I sought out my own goals, as Skeever said, you must believe me when I say that I wanted to leave this place on good terms. I even imagined petitioning for Skeever to become the new First-Talon. Such lapse in judgment no doubt contributed to my own demise."


"You must forgive Skeever Steelclaw his transgression," Silas sighed. "He acts as one of his station must, always at the beck and call of the Pack Leader who holds the most power – whether political or martial. You must understand that such power now lies with King Shrykul. And that in itself," Silas added. "Will be a grave problem for our kind."


Marcus cocked an eyebrow as the ratman elaborated, rolling each syllable with his tongue as though he were reciting lines of poetry:


"There will be civil war," he continued. "The other Kings will look with envious eyes on Shrykul now that he has the tactics and technological advancements you have given him. Even within this prison, I have heard tales of your prowess, Shai-Alud. I have heard how you have changed things. And a law of the Underkingdom is that change does not come without slaughter."


Marcus bristled. "You are implying that this coming civil war you predict will present certain opportunities?"


Silas shrugged. "Don't they always? Nature abhors power vacuums."


Marcus looked back at the rat with more than a small degree of trepidation. But he looked, too, with a higher degree of desperation. He could already tell what this particular rat was angling for.


"You speak well for one of your kind, Silas," he said. "You are the first ratman I have encountered who doesn't talk with the present-tense cadence common to members of your species."


Again, the ratman gave a curious little shrug. It was a gesture that was mechanical, Marcus thought. It was supposed to betray humility.


"I have always lamented much about my Brethren," Silas said, looking with great interest at Marcus's faintly glowing hand. "One of our many foibles is our inability to learn the languages of others. Our penchant for isolation. Our lack of cooperation with other species – all these things are, I think, connected. It is why I have enjoyed hearing about your exploits, Shai-Alud Marcus Graham. You have done much to elevate our species. It is a shame you will not be able to do more."


Marcus detected a hint of something in those words. Frustration? Admiration? Or was it envy…could it be this creature had more ambition in his tiny frame than Marcus thought?


"I have had little power on my side throughout my life," Silas continued, speaking into the dank air that was growing ever more stagnant by the second. "It is not strength, companionship, or resilience that have served me. Instead, it has been my curiosity. My patience. And my words."


"Tools just as powerful as the sharpest sword," Marcus murmured. "Perhaps even stronger, in the right hands."


Silas nodded humbly again – and Marcus found himself thinking just how much of this little rat was real and how much was an act.


"Power is a curious thing, is it not?" the rat said. "It only exists where people believe it resides. I have heard that, among the races of this world we call Thea, this notion is the only thing that connects us. Ironic then, that it is also the one thing that keeps us divided."


Marcus nodded. "It is not too dissimilar from the conflicts in my own world."


Silas seemed unusually pleased by this admission, and not at all as shocked as Marcus expected him to be. He would have pressed the Ratman further were it not for the agonizing pain that suddenly ripped through him again, centered on his pulsing arm and the emerald-green lightning sparks coursing over his shaking hand.


"Yes," Silas said, looking with fascinated eyes at the glowing hand. "Sometimes belief truly is all it takes."


"What…" Marcus grunted. "What is…this?"


His hand looked as though it were about to erupt – his veins seemed almost ready to burst and spew their corrupted contents across his cell.


"It is power," Silas whispered. "The power to make and unmake. Power that is known only to those closest to He-Who-Festers."


"But I - ngh!" Marcus groaned as he tried to control his twitching fingers. "I'm not a Gloomraava!"


"I had heard as much," Silas nodded sagely. "But I have also learned never to distrust what my eyes can plainly see. And I see the untapped potential of the Gloomraav within you. Mostly, such power is attained only by those born to the will of the Unclean and bound in His service. But sometimes," he added with a smirk of satisfaction, "such power can be transferred. Though the process is…unfavorable to the Gloomraava who chooses to shed the light of the Unclean."


Deekius… Marcus's mind rumbled, remembering how the very light of the High Priest's eyes had all but vanished as he healed him.


Was that it? Was that the 'Gift' the horned beast offered me? Was that a dream, or a commandment to his servant? If that's true, then I owe Deekius a life debt once again. A debt I fear I can never truly repay…


Marcus's eyes rose to meet those of the Prime Putrefact once more, and he saw the swirling light of his new power burning within those deep, black eyes.


"You still wish to go home, do you not?" Silas asked. "I also have a wish I would see fulfilled. I think we can come to a suitable arrangement."


As Marcus struggled with his corrupted hand, he also heard the ratman's words, unsure what filled him with more abject terror. On the one hand, he had a Gift he knew he could make use of. He had a way to finally leave this black abyss.


On the other hand, he had just met possibly the most dangerous little rat he'd ever seen down here.


Death or a deal with a devil, he mused. A Faustian bargain if ever I heard one. But at this point, what do I have to lose? Like the little rat says, I can still go home…


That's more than most disgraced Generals get.


"Alright, Silas," he said, seeing the eyes of the Ratman sparkle like a magpie's. "What do you want?"





***

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[IronLung]

Silas licked his lips in the face of Marcus's pain and the urgency of his question.


His answer was no less urgent: "In exchange for your transportation, I will require some small payment."


Marcus's raised brows asked his next question for him.


"That," Silas said, nodding hungrily at the tatty notebook lying at his feet.


"My journal?" Marcus queried, fighting through the increasing pain throbbing up his arm, wracking his whole body with shudders as though he were experiencing a death-spasm. "Why – "


His words were swallowed by the next surge of lightning, and he doubled over in agony, seeing the ratman watch his every move with sharper eyes than any he'd seen before.


Just give it to him, Marcus! his inner voice yelped. It's your life or your damned book. What would Mari say? Let the little beast satisfy his curiosity.


"I – alright!" Marcus yelped. "Once I'm out of here, you can have it. Take it and the shirt off my back too if you want."


The ratman's eyes pulsed with delight – even though the little creature tried his best to hide it.


"The journal shall suffice, Shai-Alud."


"Fine," Marcus barked back. "But you're not going to be sending me back to the 'Place Beyond'. Instead, I want you to – ngh! – take…take me to Piper's…Hill…Piper's Hill!"


He said the words as though he were a real wizard intoning a spell that would vaporize an entire continent. Maybe he was at this point – the pain that sent whole tremors through his veins right now certainly made his body feel like a ticking time-bomb. But even through his agony he could remember the name of that place – where the Yokun assassin had told him he would find Maria.


He'd come this far. He wasn't going home without her.


"Piper's Hill…" the ratman mused. "Yes…yes, I believe I can do that."


Marcus saw the smile that stretched across Silas' face. He wasn't making any attempt to hide his emotions, now.


"Yes," he said again with a lick of his rotted fangs. "That should be eminently agreeable."


"I – I have a condition of my own," Marcus then grimaced, clamping his hand down on the metal bars of his cell.


Silas eyed him curiously. It seemed he was quite entertained by the question.


"Name it, Marcus," he said. "Though I must urge haste. The energies of the Gloomraav do not often wait upon the commands of their host. Especially not one so unused to it."


"If belief is all it takes…to bring it under control…then it'll have to listen to me. I'm it's master now."


As he said those words he looked with newfound determination on his pulsing hand, and watched the sparks travel towards his fingertips as they dug into the iron bars.


"Yes," Silas whispered. "Perhaps you are at that."


Marcus all but whirled on the rat. "I have…someone," he said through a snarl. "Someone that I have to find up there. Someone I can't go back without. Silas…as Prime Putrefact of Clan Red-Eye, when I find her and return here, you'll send us both home."


He watched the Ratman grimace, his beady eyes flitting between Marcus's face and his closed fist.


"A journey to the surface," Silas mused. "And then a return. It is a pilgrimage legends are made of. But…are you sure you shall survive the trip? The surface of our world is unforgiving to even a seasoned General."


"Except, as you so eloquently put it yourself, I'm not a regular General anymore."


Both Rat and man watched the cell bar Marcus was gripping begin to melt away at his touch – the sparks of green lightning traveling from his fingers up its surface and causing the very foundations of his cell door to bubble like a corrupted broth.


"Miraculous…" the Ratman murmured. "To think a human could command the Power so quickly…But you are asking for my trust, Sire? This is surprising, considering your…track record."


"Oh no," Marcus said, a grim smile breaking under his duress. "I'm through trusting rats. You will do this for me, Silas, or I when I return here, I will destroy you."


Marcus watched the ratman's smile drop for only a fraction of a second. A snarl had formed there – a snarl betraying something that ran far deeper than his surface-level eloquence.


Then, just as quickly, the moment passed, and he was back to his rather jovial self.


"That's it, Sire," he said quietly. "That's the way. If there is a lesson you have learned here, it is how the races of this world can be coerced. Sometimes the carrot must be used, yes? And sometimes…the stick is preferable."


Marcus said nothing as he stared back at the devious little Ratman. For his part, Silas understood the urgency in his demand. It seemed the well-spoken rat now needed no more persuading. The time for pretty speech was evidently over.


"I give you my word, on my honor as Prime Putrefact," he said. "Upon your return to the Underkingdom, you shall have your final wish granted."


With their compact thus formed, Marcus closed his eyes and grit his teeth, focusing on the energy slowly building up through his whole body. His thoughts, once tinged only with the devastation of his impending demise, were now filled with thoughts of freedom. He still had a chance to save at least one soul trapped in this world. He wasn't beaten yet.


Maybe it was infernal luck that was on his side – the same luck that had put him in the same dungeon as the very rat he had quested for since first he'd heard his name. Or maybe the machinations of the sinister intelligence these beasts called 'The Unclean' had set him on this path. It has called him its 'champion', had it not?


Regardless, he refused to be a puppet to anyone else in this blasted realm. Right now, his own will was his guide. And his thoughts finally fixed on one primal desire at the very core of the maelstrom of agony that was dominating the root of his being:


Freedom.


Almost as quickly as the thought formed in his mind, the bars of his cell collapsed, and Marcus Graham walked free.


…


"Are you smelling that?"


"I am smelling nothing but your eggy breath."


FimianScabpaw stood watch over the Southern exit of Grindlefecht dungeon, taking in the strange, yet distinct scents that he could sense emanating from behind the wrought iron door that led to the cells.


"It is smelling like…burning," he told his compatriot – the grey-brown form belonging to ratguard SkevusSkampper, who was just getting ready for his shift change.


"Of course it is smelling like burning, idiot," Skevus told his junior as he straightened up his chainmail and corrected his guard-stance. "Are you forgetting what we are all going through to take this place?"


Fimian nodded once, dumbly, and with embarrassment. This was to be the greatest triumph of his short career – not only surviving the great battle that had won the ratguard of Red-Eye Grindlefect, but being here to meet with King Shrykul and hand him the Shai-Alud himself! His name would pass into the annals of legend with great Greyfax and Talon-Commander SkeeverSteelclaw for sure.


"Alright," Skevus told him. "Be waiting here until I am returning. Be standing just like that – like a good ratguard – and do not be whispering any more of strange smells!"


Even at his superior's ire, Fimian bristled.


"But – what if the Shai-Alud…"


A stout clap round his ears silenced Fimian before he could say more.


"Bah!" Skevus growled. "The Shai-Alud is gone. He is forgotten, now. You are seeing him when they are draggin him down here. There is no way he can be escaping – not even a miracle of the Unclean could be saving him now! And even then – are you knowing He-Who-Festers to be granting miracles to soap-sniffing humans?"


Fimian shook his head sadly, ashamed of his own stupidity. He didn't even look up to see his Brother march up the long, angular stairs up to the tower that still stood above – perhaps one of the only structures that still remained of Grindlefecht in the wake of the great, and terrible, battle.


But fortune often came out of terror, Fimian reminded himself. From the ashes of war, the greatest champions rose. Hadn't the Shai-Alud himself once been nothing more than just a naked man summoned in a war-locked cave? If even a human could rise in their ranks, then Fimian would have his chance. He would have his day, no matter what strange sounds he was hearing approach him from behind, or the increasing smell of burning flesh assailing his nostrils, or the growing pressure being applied round his ne-


…


Marcus tightened his grip round the ratguard's neck and grunted as he felt the green lightning of the Gloomraav travel down his arm and leap into the creature's every pore before the little critter even had a chance to scream. The beast kicked out, tried to grab his assailant's arms, and his blooddhot eyeballs twisted as they lighted on the man who was quietly electrocuting him – sending volts of searing, killing light into the ratman's organs until each one blackened and failed, ending finally in the rupturing and burning of his heart's valves and the blackening of those same eyes that would dream of glory no more.


Marcus let the charred body drop and turned his attention to the thin strips of light emanating from the staircase before him.


"Where…" he panted, his hand still buzzing with the evil light that was now his weapon. "Where did you say we needed to go?"


Silas came creeping out of the melted dungeon door and inspected the corpse with his toe, prodding at it like a child would a legless spider.


"The Summoning Chamber," he said. "Or, at least, what remains of it. Boss Skegga constructed it as a means to force me to summon a Shai-Alud to our cause. He did not expect my Brothers would accomplish it before me. But then," the ratman added with a mischievous grin. "The Path of the Unclean often takes strange turns."


"That's something I've been hearing a lot, lately," he said as he looked down at the inert piece of char-grilled rat lying at his feet. "Come on."


***

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[IronLung]

The unlit staircase of the Grindlefecht West Tower seemed to stretch on forever as he stumbled up its dank, dust-strewn steps.


"How much farther?" he asked his companion.


"To the top of the tower, Marcus!" Silas shouted up at him as they peered around the bend in the staircase column. "We must make it through the guard barracks to the adjoining spire. Let us move with haste—I fear our unfortunate dungeon guard will have been discover—"


His voice was stopped by the sudden appearance of two ratguards that had just thrown open a door beside them, eyeballs bulging with the shock of what they'd just found.


"Sh-Shai-Alud! The Shai-Alud has—"


Marcus's hand flared with green fire that leaped from his fingertips to silence the ratguard. His friend brought his halberd to bear with cries of "By the Unclean!" on his lips as Marcus threw himself at him and jammed his fingers in the ratman's eyes, searing them clean from their sockets and leaving his face a hollowed-out skull while he kept the creature's body pressed down under his own.


He'd already taken enough lives down here…what did two more matter?


The rats had come from the guard barracks that were still in a relatively stable state. Evidently, the Western Wing of the keep had managed to weather the explosions.


If the adrenaline of the escape was not overcoming Marcus's senses at this moment, he might have paused to reflect on how curious it was that this tower in particular, and its adjoining buildings, had been left untouched by the explosions.


Presently, he heard a general shout go up from the bottom of the West Tower, and he stood shakily and began following Silas as the latter scurried to the end of the barracks.


"Hurry, Marcus!" he shouted. "They will be coming for us!"


Marcus wasted no time in staring at his broken foes beneath him. He forced himself to sprint past the barracks tables, flipping them over as he barged through the hall, still grabbing his wrist to still the raging energy coursing through him.


"STOP!"


A voice—a chorus from behind. He knew they had found them.


"ARCHERS! BE FIRING!"


Silas was at the far door as the first volley of crossbow bolts sailed past Marcus's neck and he fell into a roll, taking up one of the long barrack tables and pressing his back against it.


"Silas!" he barked as he heard the crossbow-rats reload. "What's happening?"


The Putrefact was fumbling with the door-lock, trying to pick at it with his fumbling claws.


"Silas!"


"They are changing the locks on my spire's door, Sire!" he shouted back at him. "I must pick the lock with—"


"We don't have time!" Marcus screamed as the next volley of bolts slammed into his table shield and almost pierced his neck. "Let me burn it."


"No, Sire!" Silas called over his shoulder. "Focus on our enemies—do not let them gain on us!"


Chancing a look over the lip of his meager defensive position, Marcus saw a squad of ratguards advancing on his position, shields bared, nostrils flaring with murderous intent.


Damn it, he thought, looking past them to the small unit of crossbowmen that had him pinned, readying their weapons to splinter the table apart with the next volley. This time…they're shooting to kill.


He dragged his hand up over the lip of the table and let fly an arc of scintillating green lightning that instantly sent the ratguard squad flying back into their compatriots, their backs taking the brunt of the crossbow bolts that had just been fired.


It seemed that there were more uses to this little trick of light in his hand than he'd at first thought. Though, with every new use of the power, he felt his every muscle become weaker and weaker...


"Silas!" he shouted as the ratguard threw the wounded forms of their comrades from them and readied their weapons again.


"Just…a second…longer!" the Putrefact groaned, his fingers working like thin silver picks as they turned each tumbler of the rusted door locks.


"A second's about all we have!" Marcus shouted back, looking up at the grand chandelier that dominated this room's ceiling—a testament to dwarven craftsmanship that, like the rest of this place, was about to become just another pile of decorative rubble.


Before the next flurry of bolts struck his table, he sent a spear of lightning towards the chandelier's anchor and watched it tear free from the ceiling to crash in between both him and the slowly advancing squad at the door.


"Ready, Sire!" Silas squeaked from behind.


Marcus didn't wait for the dust to settle. He'd seen enough in the rage-filled eyes of the ratguard that had once been his to command as they sent their projectiles flying towards him to know that they had completely turned against him at this point. His friends—his real comrades—they were dead and forgotten. So much for the constancy of rats...


He and Silas slipped through the door without slamming it shut behind them.


"There is no time!" Silas roared as Marcus turned and sent two more arcs of light cascading towards the advancing rats. "Come, Marcus!"


Up the spiral staircase of the West tower spire they lumbered, Silas taking the lead, being careful to check around the narrow column of the staircase lest they have assailants already charging them from above. But it was from below that the threats were coming. Even from within this grim passage of stone, Marcus could hear the shrill cries of the ratguard as they thundered up from below, chainmail and weapons clattering in their hands, paws scampering to capture the human that would bring them glory in the eyes of their King.


When they finally reached the top of the tower, Silas pushed open the ornate metal door and ushered his charge inside, with Marcus sending three more bolts traveling down the staircase to slow their assailants. He watched as the green tendrils shot forth from his hand, ricocheting off the pristine masonry of the Dwarven walls and traveling down the length of the staircase. The anguished wails of the rats below, coupled by the sounds of clattering shields and burning bodies falling like dominoes back down the stairs, told him his aim had been true.


And yet still, he had to stop and collapse as the pain of his new power overcame him yet again. He looked about at the low-ceiling chamber they had just blundered into, filled with meager tables and chairs and a star-shaped imprint etched into the center of the room. At various raised grooves along the six-pointed star were set a series of gray-waxen candles which Silas was presently lighting with haste.


"Silas…" he breathed as he moved to barricade the door with the simple furniture he found in the room. "What do you need?"


"Time, Marcus," the Putrefact replied. "The summoning ritual is delicate. Not so violent as that which would result from one's transportation from the Place Beyond, of course. But the experience will be no less jarring for you."


Marcus grimaced as he rose, beating his twitching right hand against his door-barricade that Silas momentarily paused to regard him as he slumped down beside it.


"Silas," he wheezed. "Can you do it?"


The ratman smirked down at him. "If the Unclean is willing."


"I suppose we'll find out soon enough," Marcus snorted as he felt the barricade shudder behind him, knowing the ratguard had made it to the door with murder in their hearts.


And they weren't alone.


"Stand in the center," Silas told him hastily. "Breathe deeply. Keep your body as steady as possible. A single limb outside the radius of the summoning sigil is unlikely to remain attached to its bearer."


*Just another horror before I leave this place. Typical.*


From outside the glass windows, Marcus could hear the scarpering of paws on stone, digging into the grooves in the spire's brickwork and bearing relentlessly towards their destination.


"Do it, Silas," Marcus ordered, readying his shaking hand and aiming it, open-palmed, at the window nearest the door. "You have until they take this hand from me."


The ratman nodded relentlessly. "You are as brave as they say, Marcus Graham."


The next few seconds passed by in a series of snapshots punctuated by the roaring of Marcus's lightning. Two ratmen smashed through the windows, teeth flaring and weapons shining in the light that arced towards them.


He got one in the jugular, the lightning coiling around his neck and burning the life out of him almost instantly. The other rat was faster, dropping into a roll to avoid the next attack and managing to enter the circle proper. Marcus threw himself to the ground to avoid the vicious swipe that his assailant aimed at his kneecap and felt his calf open as the blade nicked it.


He crouched low, his hand raised to strike back, still thrumming with the energies that he felt would kill him any minute if he didn't direct them at another target.


And then he looked into the eyes of the ratman who had maimed him—the ratman who was presently staring right back at him from the other side of the summoning circle, and whose blade was now dripping with Marcus's fresh blood.


He was looking into the eyes of Skeever Steelclaw.





***

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[IronLung]

The First-Talon watched the eyes of the Talon-Commander of Clan Red-Eye in the split second he had before the latter lunged with his machete, killing instincts well and truly taking over now.

Marcus's hand flew of its own accord to protect him, firing an arc of chained green lightning at Skeever's body, which the ratman only narrowly managed to meet with the edge of his weapon. He was pushed back, slowly being dragged from the circle by the power of Marcus's new ability.

"Deekius, I am being sure!" Skeever roared. "He is being a thorn in my side even in death!"

Marcus grimaced, one eye flying towards Silas as he made his final inkings on the edge of the star-platform. Behind him, his basic barricade was slowly being torn apart by the claws of the ratguard, who had managed to rip through pieces of the doorway.

"Is this the ending you wanted, Skeever?" Marcus asked as he pressed forward, focusing all his remaining strength and willpower into his flaring fingers. "For the sake of the camaraderie we once shared, I'll offer you this: drop your weapon, and I shall go in peace. Tell your King you did your duty."

"Tsk!" Skeever grimaced. "You are thinking I will ever trust the word of a human?"

"You dare talk to me of trust?" Marcus screamed back, sounding more rat-like by the second.

Slowly the ratman began to press forward, his blade deflecting the energies of Marcus's lightning right back at him, so that its thin, deathly tendrils ripped past his shoulders and impacted the furniture and walls behind.

"Sire!" Silas wailed. "I am ready!"

Marcus saw the crimson eyes of Skeever fly towards those of Silas for only the briefest of moments before he turned his attention back to Marcus, taking another beleaguered step towards him.

"You are being a fool, Marcus," he growled against the cacophony of Marcus's cackling light. "You are thinking this creature will truly help you escape?"

Marcus saw the intent in the rat's eyes. He saw him eye Silas again as the Putrefact knelt to intone the words of Summoning – words that Marcus could barely even hear over the chaos that was to be his final moments in the Underkingdom.

"Try it," he said. "And I will kill you."

Skeever Steelclaw licked his lips, clenched his fingers tighter around the handle of his Brother's blade, and grinned.

"You. Will. Try."

Before the final syllable even left his mouth, he had tossed his weapon at Marcus's throat, and the killing light of the Gloomraav traveled with the blade – turning the weapon into a vicious boomerang of magical energy that flew for Marcus's head.

Had the luck of his God been with him, the attack would have severed Marcus's forehead and sent nothing more than a blathering numbskull into the surface-world. Instead, it tore clean through the Red-Eye insignia Marcus wore upon his helmet and continued on its path of destruction around the room, breaking everything in its path and even slicing through the ratguard who had just managed to get the door open.

But Skeever did not wait to see the results of his desperate attack. As he had launched the blade, he had leaped for the crouched form of Silas, and only Marcus's lean, lanky body allowed him to intercept the rat and hold him down, pinning him to the chamber floor.

"SILAS!" Marcus wailed as Skeever bit down on his arm with raw, animal strength. "NOW!"

But the Putrefact needed no further instruction. Before Marcus's eyes, he saw the room begin to spin, then felt a distinct feeling of weightlessness accompany the sudden change in motion. The Summoning Chamber of Grindlefect melted away – a kaleidoscopic vision of browns and greys mixed in with the vibrant crimson of Marcus's blood rising like a levitating stream above his arm, where Skeever's teeth had made their mark. The ratman himself had cried out in fury in the very moment when the spinning room finally disappeared entirely, the last sights being those of the ratguard blundering their way into the room and seeing nothing but Silas's doubled-over form bowed before them.

The world vanished as all light receded. Nothing remained except pure, unfiltered color – a spectrum of light that Marcus could barely comprehend. The entire floor had opened up and swallowed him. The ceiling had broken and given way to the deluge of otherworldly light. It was like the most lucid dream or a hallucinogenic trip brought to vivid, full, and blooming life around him. All sound was gone. All pain – a memory. Nothing but he, his body, and the feeling of motion as he traveled through means unknown towards a destination he could no longer even remember.

Skeever tumbled beside him, his voice lost in the unknown passage between lands. His weapon was gone. His claws, teeth, eyes, and mouth all dribbled and frothed, alight with agony. Perhaps such teleportation magics were inherently dangerous for Ratkin. Perhaps their brains simply could not cope with the sudden onrush of stimuli. Even Marcus was having trouble focusing as he floated towards the twitching rat.

Skeever seemed to acknowledge his presence. For, as he swam towards him in the psychedelic void, the Ratman's beady eyes lighted on his face. His face – and the pale hand outstretched towards him. The one that did not bear the marks of the Gloomraav.

"Take my hand!" Marcus shouted, his voice practically a child's whimper.

Even in this moment of lucidity, Marcus was struck by just how powerful unchecked hatred could be. He saw the shuddering eyes of Skeever see his hand, watching as his fingers stretched towards him. He saw the Ratman look up at him with quiet, seething disdain – disdain born from the fact he had let this human command him all this time. Marcus saw, as clear as the deluge of colors that cascaded down all around them, just how palpable Skeever's anger was – and how resolute was his belief that Marcus had betrayed him and his people.

Love for his race, and hatred for another. That was the dichotomy that ruled Skeever Steelclaw.

And it was that same dichotomy that made him relinquish his one good arm and kick away from Marcus, floating silently into the psychedelic ocean until he finally disappeared from view.

"Skeever…" Marcus murmured as the lightshow finally began to recede. "Damn you…"

…

He awoke to a sight that he never thought he'd ever see again and had to blink through the hazy blur before his face to assure himself that he was really looking at what he thought he was:

A clear, crisp, pale blue sky.

He took it in. He focused his vision, seeing the sun of mid-afternoon peek through a small wisp of cloud before vanishing again like a celestial deity playing a children's game.

He breathed. Air. Pure. Unfiltered. A little humid, perhaps, but anything was a blessing compared to the corrupted stank he'd had to put up with in the cavernous realm that now lay below his feet.

As he lay, enjoying the feeling of the sun on his grime-soaked skin, he suddenly began to make out thin trails of black streaking their way through the air – like small blankets being draped across the day. Like little columns of smoke being belched by a cheerful bird gracing the heavens with its flight. Or…or like…

"MOVE!"

Someone grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him up, throwing both of them into the rain-beaten mud of the jungle that had suddenly burst into view before Marcus's unblinking eyes. Just as quickly as he had picked out the sight of the smoking column streaking towards them, the thing exploded and threw up a blanket of dirt and vegetation across their backs.

"Alright, up, son!" the voice of Marcus's savior grunted. "The next Hakka volley's comin' in three. That's plenty o' time ta hog tail it outta dodge!"

Marcus found himself unable to even protest. Without another word, the owner of this voice lifted him up and slung him over his shoulders, sprinting through the thick jungle overgrowth towards a destination that must have been deeply ingrained in his mind – so singular was the path he tore towards it.

Marcus then looked down at the hasty feet of his savior and noticed something even more shocking to his system than the blue sky and clean air of the surface:

This man was a human.

A great, burly mountain of a human, true enough. But – everything – down to his physique, his relative lack of skin-hair, his tailless behind…everything about him just screamed 'human.' Everything, that is, except the iron collar affixed to his neck. And the disconcerting, laser-focused imprinting of '#621' along its dull length…

But his voice, gruff and tinged with what sounded like a blend between a country accent and that of an old English peasant farmer, only cemented Marcus's suspicions.

"By the blazin' balls of Anathemus!" he laughed, panting with every frenzied step. "I knew that damn light was the work o' magic. Thought maybe we had a new shaman to help out Jun-Ei, but hot-DAMN did we strike it lucky! Woulda helped you out regardless o' your station, good sir. But ho-ho! When I saw it was you lying there, smiling up at these skies like you'd never laid eyes on 'em before, well! I knew I'd done the right thing taking the chance during the daily barrage. Name's Marvin, by the way. Marvin Trellosk. Farmer – well, ex-farmer, technically, owing to the whole slavery thing. But – hey! Now that you're here, I'm thinkin' we don't got nothing to worry about no more! No, sir! Not when we got –"

"Y…you," Marcus stammered.

Marvin glanced around to see Marcus hanging off his shoulder, bloodshot eyes glaring at him like a hungry gremlin.

"You…you're human…"

The sprinting ex-farmer smiled a toothy smile. "Sure am, bucko," he said. "Same as you. Am I your first? Hope I make a good impression. The way I hear it, you've been hanging with rats for way too long."

"Rats…" Marcus mumbled, taking in the sights of increasingly dead or burning trees and foliage around him. "Where…where are we?"

"Questions for Jun-Ei, son," Marvin rumbled as he quickened his pace. "Brace yourself – next barrage incoming!"

Before Marcus could ask any follow-up questions, the piercing, shrill din of another arcing projectile screamed through the sky towards them, hitting a tree to their left and engulfing it and the small primates that called it home in white-hot fire.

White-hot…Marcus thought. Come to think of it…this increasingly ruined jungle environment does remind me of something…

Another rocket screeched through the air to batter a small river running alongside them, throwing Marvin momentarily off course and sending him careening towards a nearby cave.

"Almost there!" he roared above the din of the next rocket flying right towards them. "Let's see if you really do have the luck of the Gods on your side, son!"

"W-wait!" Marcus shouted as he looked up to see the dark pillar of screaming death homing in on them as though it were watching them with a killer's own eyes. The feet of this former farmer weren't going to outrun it. Not even with all his tenacity and almost childlike confidence. Not this time…

***

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[IronLung]

"We're gonna make it, son!" Marvin screamed above the death-rattle of the rocket that was currently on course to turn them both into mincemeat.


No, Marcus thought again as he looked into the black column homing in on their position. Not this time…


Marcus's hand flared up of its own accord and he sent a spark of cackling green energy straight up at the projectile, shielding his eyes as it then exploded directly above them, and Marvin finally lunged towards the stone cave mouth.


When the back of his head hit the grey stone of the cave floor he grimaced in pain and turned back to see the devastation the explosion had unleashed on the landscape. Clearly, these barrages had been a common occurrence – beyond the mouth of this little sanctuary the density of the jungle was carved away like a thin layer of skin peeled from a rotten body. Only the charred, dead earth remained where nothing new grew, and pockets of still flaming vegetation were creeping up the trees that remained to snuff out their colors – sticking to the leaves on their boughs and dripping down to burn clean through their roots.


As his eyes adjusted to the smoky haze that hung over this dying place, Marcus finally recalled what this particular fiery discharge reminded him of.


Napalm…


His companion, meanwhile, seemed much more preoccupied with Marcus's glowing hand.


"Well I'll be a Tuthlatch'ka's flopping teat," Marvin wheezed. "They didn't tell me you were a bleedin' wizard, too!"


"Recently…anointed," Marcus groaned, the pain radiating up his arm becoming more pronounced again, and he was forced to remember exactly how these new powers had come to him. "But…wait…how is it you know who I am?"


Marvin smiled, wiping the residue of soot and dirt from his face, creeping to the end of their small cave and beating his meaty hands on the back wall.


"Buddy," he said as he stood back, apparently satisfied. "You don't know how famous you are round these parts."


At Marcus's questioning glare his savior merely nodded as a small rectangular slab was removed from the wall he'd just knocked on.


Two amber eyes stared out from the gap.


"What is the song of the Pipers?"


"The song that lives in every slave's mind," Marvin said with a full-lipped smile. "The song that breaks the chains that bind."


The eyes blinked once, the slab closed over, and Marcus heard a series of indiscriminate clicks and bumps of activity on the other side of the wall.


Then he saw that it was no wall at all, but a door. One that opened to afford the entrance into a dimly lit hallway that was certainly not part of this natural cave formation.


"Best to let me take the lead, son," Marvin said as he stepped forward abruptly. "The Piper's are a little overly-cautious. Can't blame 'em, really."


Marcus cocked an eyebrow as he followed Marvin into the metal bowels of the hallways and heard the 'door' of the fake cave wall bolt shut behind them.


"Pipers?" he asked, suddenly remembering everything that had been locked behind the wall of color he'd traveled through – the flight from the Grindlefecht dungeons, the confrontation with Skeever, and the name of the place the Yokun assassin had told him to run to if he wanted to find Mari…


"You got it," Marvin smiled, pointing to the number on his neck. "See this? Used to be my 'number' the bastardYokun slapped on me before the Pipers came and torched their slave market. Shoulda seen it, son. They killed the bastards good and shackled the overseers themselves. Jun-El – she's our head-shaman - calls it 'poetic justice'. A Yokun herself, though I don't hate her for what her people do. After all, she's out here fighting the good fight, right?'


Marcus shook his head as he tried to take in all the strange new details this 'ex-farmer' (who was really as it turned out a slave on the run) was imparting to him.


"The Pipers…" Marcus mouthed, almost not even noticing the metal door towards which Marvin was reaching. "You mean to tell me that this is…"


"You got it, son," Marvin smiled, opening the door to reveal an entirely new kind of underground world to Marcus. "Welcome to Piper's Hill."


An entire cavern dug deep into the earth filled his vision, filled with metal-sheath structures that resembled small slum-housing. Coal fires were currently burning within these huts without a care, and Marcus noticed how they stretched on seemingly for miles into the cave system – an entire shanty town built beneath the burning jungle above.


Not quite the 'hill' I had in mind, was Marcus's first thought. I escape one underground society and am immediately harried into another. Though as far as I can tell, this place looks like a temporary place of accommodation at most.


The air was far cooler than that of the Underkingdom, and as Marcus and Marvin stepped onto the creaky metal platform that opened out into what looked like a kind of makeshift town square, Marcus realized there must have been an internal ventilation system that was running down here. Either that, or some wizardly magic was at play – perhaps both, judging by what he knew about Thean physics. Orjust how much he still didn't know.


In the middle of the town square there was a ramshackle statue constructed out of pieces of metal shards and discarded weapons. The statue resembled that of a female Yokun in rags with both her hands crushing a pair of broken chains.Children of various races were engaged in hanging from its outstretched arms and playing around its booted feet – children that all shared the same defining trait: the branded number cut into the skinfolds of their necks…


They stopped playing when the saw the new arrival. And they were not alone – all around him Marcus could hear murmurs and whisperings coming from every slum-house that now surrounded him, seeing the eyes of at least two dozen creatures appraise him as though they were looking at a walking God. Some things never change.


THUMP.


His thought was cut off, along with his windpipe, as something fell from the sky and pinned him to the ground.


The crowd breathed a collective gasp and hung back, mothers and fathers appearing from their houses to guide their children away from the sight.


Above him, Marcus heard a distinct sound – something so familiar that it struck him even more than the pain as this creature's thigh dug into his neck.


The sounds of a hissing cat.


"Well, well, well," it said – in a voice that was distinctly feminine. "Whatever do we have here? New prey for this hungry little kitten, Marv?"


Marcus thought discretion the better part of valor. He resisted the urge to let fly his bolts of lightning. This time, if he had to redo his summoning process, he'd have to leave a better first impression…


Marvin, however, barely seemed troubled at all by this assault.


"Kara…" he wheezed. "Why you gotta always spook the new guys like that?"


"You aren't spooked, are you, little one?" the creature on top of Marcus asked as it brought its mouth closer and closer to its prey's pinned face. "Mmmm. You do have a rather pleasant scent. The type I'm quite fond of…"


"I can vouch for him," Marvin said. "He ain't no plant. In fact, he's exactly who we've been looking for!"


Marcus's assailant give him a hearty sniff.


"He smells human," she said. "He feels…human. But…yes…something is off. He's no Thean, that's for sure. But is he our man, really?"


"I'll be the judge of that, Kana," another female voice then called out from above.


Marcus barely even felt his attacker's foot leave his neck. He barely even marveled at her thin, furry tail that poked out of her backside or the twirling of her whiskers as she slipped stealthily away from him. Not because the sight of a catwoman didn't excite the imagination, but because the voice he had just heard compelled him to stand and stare at its owner as though it were a siren's song.


His eyes strained to look at the woman who stepped out of one of the shacks to stand before him. He could see her, alright – he could see the thin leather armor that clung to her body and could trace the pale limbs that poked out from beneath her tunic. He could follow the heavy rise and fall of her chest and could trace every curve of her pink-hued lips as she opened them to stare just as dumfounded at the sight of him as he was at her. He dared not even allow his mind to speak her name, for fear that the apparition he saw before him, parting the crowd of runaway slaves like a living, breathing Boudicca, was nothing but a cruel trick of his mind. A holdover from the hallucinogenic properties of Silas' teleportation method.


Only when she spoke again could his mind truly commit to the insane notion that she was standing here, in front of him.


"Marvin," she breathed. "I asked you to find me scraps out there. Instead, you've brought me gold."


There are times in a man's life when he must remind himself to stand even though he knows that every fibre of his being wants nothing more than to break down and weep. This feeling of responsibility surged through Marcus in this moment with more caustic intensity than it ever had before. He walked – at least, he thought he was walking – towards the lucid vision that swam before his eyes. A dream bearing the form of a woman.


And when he finally stood mere inches from her face, and looked into the lilly-pads of her eyes, the thoughts of oblivion that had so haunted him mere hours ago suddenly faded away into the nape of her neck, the light twitching of her nose as she sniffled, and the short gasp of breath that escaped from her mouth when he finally had enough belief to say her name.


"Maria."


She took his head in her hands and giggled like a schoolgirl as she blinked through the tears forming at the edges of her eyes. The expression was something so innocent, so pure, and so utterly incongruous in this new world that it made Marcus think what she said next was nothing more than the final lines of a nightmare he thought he'd never wake up from:


"Yeah," she said. "Welcome home, Marcus."


***

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[IronLung]

Silas stared through the cracked windows of his Summoning Chamber, watching the meagre force of ratguard bustle about as they tried to spruce up the place in preparation for the King's arrival.

He smiled to see it. Ants, toiling under his vision.

Only a week ago they had looked on him as an enemy when they burst through the Shai-Alud's barricade and found only the bruised and crumpled body of Silas lying before the Summoning Circle. They had probed him with startled questions – assuming that he was the one who had helped the condemned Shai-Alud escape – but their complaints were soon put to rest by the voice of the Prime Putrefact. As soon as they heard him speak, they knew they had been in the wrong.

With appropriate humility he had explained the situation: their crippled leader, Skeever, had taken pity on his old friend. He had been talked out of handing him over to the King by the honeyed words that dripped from the traitor's human tongue. Together they had beaten Silas and forced him to send them to the vile Yokun above. There, they would plot together to overthrow the very empire they had once helped to build.

Silas licked his frayed lips, savoring the supplication the rats who now danced below him were showing. They had accepted his story almost as quickly as he had spun it – hadn't it been known to everyone that Talon-Commander Skeever had always been the dogged right-hand of the Shai-Alud during their campaigns? Hadn't it also been known that Skeever had gone down to speak with the Shai-Alud on the eve of his escape? It made complete sense, even if it evoked more ire in the ratguards than they had ever had to contain within their tiny breasts. Two betrayals right under their noses…a few of them were beginning to blame themselves.

But Silas – good, honorable, Silas – was there to dissuade them from such notions. They were the bravest rats in all the North Warrens. They were truly loyal to their King, and would await his arrival with hope in their hearts. The Kobolds were no more – dead or enslaved – and the technology of the dwarves were still theirs. They would present the King with a greater prize even than this: they would offer up the Prime Putrefact himself – the ratman who had endured torture upon torture in the name of his faith. Truly, none of the ratguard were even worthy of standing before him…

In truth, it was a pity to be heading home. Silas sighed as he thought of his time within these dark walls. It had been toiling, at times, and it had been a grueling process to win the fat toad and his forces to his side, but he had to admit he had a certain fondness for their base natures. He admired the purity of their minds – untouched by notions of self-preservation and sustained by anger. He would miss their childishness as he entered the realm of petty politics that characterized his own race.

But, he told himself. At least I won't be going home empty handed…

He groped around in his robe and produced the tattered journal he had managed to secure from the Shai-Alud. Already he had flicked through its dense pages, his curiosity growing with every flick of each new page. Secrets were contained within this tome that went far beyond his own understanding – far beyond the ken of anyone who had been born in the grim darkness of this dismal underground they called home.

The mind of this man – this Marcus – had changed things down here. And these words would change yet more. As the man had said himself, they were tools. Tools that simply had to be placed in the right hands.

He wondered where the man and his right-hand rat were now. If they had truly made it to Piper's Hill he would be surprised, but it would not be unpleasant to think they had survived the impromptu transport. Silas wasn't about to believe that a commander as skilled as this Marcus would have truly been felled by an improper teleport. It was why the Putrefact had kept up his word. He'd sent him exactly where he'd wanted to go.After all, this world would be distinctly more interesting with this human in it. Who else would ensure that the war raging above continued? Who else would ensure that the conflict would keep all the surfacers preoccupied while he consolidated his position beneath their feet, biding his time for the Skittering that would end all Skitterings.

It would take time. It would take patience, and it would take a lot more than just honeyed words. But Silas was a very patient rat.

Silas recalled then the words of the man as he had given his last command. Crouched within the infinite darkness of the dungeons, the statement had seemed less like a threat and more like an implied challenge.

You will follow my order, Silas, or I will destroy you.

The Prime Putrefact smiled grimly as he finally saw the crimson flag of Clan Red-Eye appear on the horizon.

"We shall see, Marcus Graham," he said as he closed the book in his hands. "We shall see."