“So, you’re back again for another tale, eh? Right then. I’ve told you before, these stories is more than just stories. They’re living things, growing and changing with each telling, each teller. Now, you know what happens when two living things is bound to run headlong into each other? They’re either destroyed, or they make something new. Call it fate, call it the tides, call it plain old storytelling, but that’s where we find our tale now. Two destinies, shaped and grown, set to collide. That’s the Great Saga, beautiful and brutal.
So, you gits ready for the next story?” - Hogrog ug Weirdklaw
Animosity, Volume VI: The Shattered Dominion
“A Tale of a Kingdom of Light and the War that Came to their Shores, of Gods and Fathers and the Oaths that Bound the History of the Realms to Ruin, of Fire and Ice and a Tide that has Lost its Heartbeat, of Desperate Alliances and the Many and Varied Armies of Fate and Fortune that Followed the Call to War, as told by the Mad Orruk Hogrog Ug Weirdklaw, Wurrgog Speaker of the Great Saga, and Faithfully recorded by myself, your humble servant Nicodaemus Mikhail Grimm.“
Prelude to War
When war came again to the Prime Dominion, there were no trumpets to herald its arrival, no dramatic murders in the halls of power to signal the turning of an era. What came first was the cold, creeping and slow, a mist rising from the depths of the Ur-River’s plunge that dulled the very light of Hysh and robbed the strength from the arms of its defenders. Ice fought against the Catarhactes, clawing up even as its waters came crashing down. Then, the horde arrived. Sailing up through the Shimmersea upon an armada of lumbering hulks, their attacks struck the Prime Dominion through its shadowed reflection, the Lux Umbra. They struck everywhere, overwhelming the defenders and giving no single battlefield where the resistance could be brought to bear. An ever-shifting battle erupted upon the Shimmersea as each side tried to deny the other the ability to move troops and supplies across the various isles, while the shining city of Iscarion stood as a bastion of resistance in the Dominion’s centre, its high walls and mighty defenses holding fast. There, the Ceraph met with the disparate few who been bound by common cause to the defense of the realm, while anxious eyes peered outwards for the inevitable arrival of Mogrek Longblade, Doom of Cowards, Scion of Gorkamorka and Greatest of Warbosses.
Eye of the Storm
Mogrek’s steps echoed from the stone walls of the underground chamber, bouncing like an irregular heartbeat across the rough-hewn surfaces. To the orruks that marched behind him, this must have seemed a massive place, a barrow of titans from ages past locked deep below the earth, but that wasn’t so. His people had simply lost their way, forgotten how to be large. He would remind them soon. In ages past, this place had been alive with the revels of gods and conquerors. It would never be so again.
Mogrek walked, half in memory and half in the present, unerringly through the gloom. There, at the back of the cavern, where the space opened up into soaring darkness above, he knew he would find what he needed. He raised the Longblade high above his head and it flared to life, the dull embers erupting anew in fresh flame. Red light filled the chamber, and the orruks around him stumbled back in shock and surprise. A leering face glared down on them from the wall that marked the back of the cavern, shining like freshly spilled blood. It seemed to move and snarl in the shifting firelight. Mogrek placed a hand gently on its surface. Lacquered tiles slid smoothly across his fingertips, still in place after an age in darkness. He remembered the warriors that had placed them there, lining up in their thousands to commemorate some great victory. The snarling face of Gorkamorka, depicted in his form as the Evil Sun, dominated the centre of the mosaic, yet all around it were smaller scenes of conquest and victory. He knew the story he needed to find. It would be near the end, near the snarling Thunderbear sigil that once had been meant to honour Sigmar, when he was still a war god. There. A white circle, its tiles the lacquered bone of the godbeast Obhedj-Hahka, and beneath it a name.
He had what he needed. Mogrek began to turn away, then caught himself. There, on the mosaic, was an image he did not remember. A squat, round face, with jewelled and lifeless eyes that seemed to have the age of eons in them. He could not recall whose hands had placed those tiles, or what story they claimed to tell.
With a dismissive grunt, he turned his back on the mosaic, and began the long march back to the surface. His horde would have reached Hysh by now. If the aelves meant to bar his way, so be it. The lads could use a good scrap before they reach Azyr. Besides, the blade wound in his chest still ached, and he knew no better way to heal a wound than inflicting it a thousand fold again on those that had crossed him.
Iscarion, months ago
The room was not ornate. Embellishment and decoration meant nothing to the spartan warrior who once called this place her own. It was a sparring hall, airy and open, unadorned save for wooden benches and weapon racks.
Renaya Oathsworn had not seen the Ceraph who cast her into exile since the day he did so. Today, she returned from that exile, and now, the Ceraph stood across from her. He said nothing as he offered the aelder-oak practice blade, and said nothing more as he took position opposite to her. One hundred years worth of resentment and rage came to a boil behind Renaya’s eyes, and she struck with such fury as to make a Bloodletter blush.
She felt the blades splinter as Ceraph Dariel blocked her first blow, and drove him back on his heels with a relentless string of attacks. She knew his form well; it was the feeble fencing of aristocrats and hardly suited to battle. Forced against a wall, she landed a glancing blow across his shoulder as he pivoted away. Had the blade been real, it would have taken his arm off.
“Strike,” she snarled, circling him like some jungle predator, her anger hardly cooled.
Dariel simply nodded in acknowledgement and returned to his position… yet even as Renaya made to resume her attack, Dariel lashed out with broad, sweeping strikes, keeping her at arm’s length. Even as she rolled inside his guard, his form changed again, adopting the two-handed stance of a swordmaster and nearly breaking her chin with an upward swing. Leaping away, Dariel pushed her back, his form incredibly familiar to Renaya: the form of the spear.
Barely avoiding another blow, Dariel returned to his position as Renaya stayed away, watching her opponent. She reconsidered the sparring hall they stood within: Atressa Redhand’s sparring hall. Dariel had not been idle; he’d studied the blade with the same eye toward perfection he brought to everything else in his life. She hadn’t landed a strike before; he’d simply allowed her to.
Renaya resumed her attack, all the more enraged. She drew upon arts taught before the Spirefall, a breed of mastery only the most enlightened of aelvenkind could hope to contain. The Seven-Pointed Star, they called it: six strikes, supposedly taught by Tyrion himself, which always left the opponent vulnerable to a seventh deadly blow. Dariel did not even try to escape the trap as Renaya sprung it upon him, striking twice, three times… five, six…
Dariel’s wooden blade caught the seventh strike well before it could crush his windpipe. Their eyes locked a moment later: Renaya’s wide and confused, Dariel’s stern yet sad. “Your technique is antiquated, Oathsworn,” he said at last. “Atressa discovered how to counter the Seven-Pointed Star years ago. Caradryas practiced with her ceaselessly until they overcame it.”
He shoved Renaya back, and was upon her before she could recover, striking twice, three times… five, six… she made to block the seventh blow, but it wasn’t there? She twisted away-
Dariel’s sparring sword caught Renaya in the chest, just above the heart. An Eight-Pointed Star. “Strike,” he commented, betraying no emotion, and returned to his position.
Her breathing ragged, tears in her eyes, Renaya evaluated her opponent. This was not the Dariel she remembered, the Dariel she had gone to war with. This was…
She looked around the room, and understood the lesson.
Blinking the tears back, she took her form, the form of the spear. She attacked, but this time without rage, without resentment… without envy. Dariel was her opponent, no less and no more. She took him as he was, as his forms slipped from axe to sword to spear, and she countered them all. She paced herself, keeping up her attack, but never over-extending, drawing him out, splintering his sparring sword… and when he made a mistake, she snapped it in half, her own coming to rest against his neck.
“Strike,” she almost laughed, her breathing ragged. Dariel smiled, and cast away the length of shattered aelder-oak before gently removing her blade from his neck.
“I had to know you could beat me,” the Ceraph said, “before I could trust you to defend our people.”
The Daybreak General
Excerpt from the personal journal of Renaya Oathsworn upon her appointment as Warden of the Iscari Dawnguard
The Daybreak General, that's what they've started to call me. The hope of the Dominion, the light that holds back the darkness. The irony doesn't escape me. These are the same aelves that cast me out into the wilds after I gave everything for them. When I rode down the gates of Alti's keep at the head of that last desperate alliance. That's the last time I could truly have been called something as grand as ‘Daybreak General’. Since then I have hardened. In my exile I learned what it meant to look after oneself. I made sacrifices, engaged in underhanded subterfuge, put others in danger for my own ends. I sent Likspit into the chaos of Frørholm to spy for me, with no illusion that they may not have come back. I told myself it was all for the future of the Prime Dominion, but I find myself questioning the purity of my intentions. Did I merely wish to take back my place at the table, the safety of friends and comrades, my own morals be damned?
But nevertheless, I am here. I take up my spear for the Dominion once more. I wear the emerald of Celandec alongside Teclandec ochre. No longer do I champion the downtrodden and meek. No, I lead one of the greatest unified forces along the Ur-River. The people look to me for hope, for deliverance, and my doubts serve only to spit in their faces. I must stand, I must persevere. Not for Dariel, though I do not bear him the resentment which once consumed me. For the people of the Prime Dominion and beyond. Perhaps I still retain some of my old self after all.
Oh sister. How would you have handled all this, the weight of so many on your shoulders? I can't help but imagine you would have shouldered the burden with grace. That it should have been I, not you, that perished that day. But I know that this is wrong. I am you, and you were me. I carry both of our legacies now, and I must bear them with pride. I do not know if I shall ever live up to the moniker of the Daybreak General, but I must try. For you, for myself, for everyone. The fates of many, perhaps all, hang in the balance, and I shall rise to the occasion. I must. The Prime Dominion will live to see day break once more. I swear it upon my oath.
Test Firing
Caradryas Lightbringer rushed across the crowded bay, barking orders as he went. This had once been a grand ballroom, its gilded and mirrored walls a dazzling sea of spinning gold and riotous colours at the halcyon heights of Winter Balls past. Now the ostentation had been stripped away, and walls knocked through to open it out onto the city below. It would be a dizzyingly cavernous room, if not for the massive bulk that took up so much of it. The great bombard had taken him decades to design, a mad fancy that a few short years ago he never thought he would see made real. Now, in the space of a handful of months, he had built three of them. They were engineering marvels, each worth the yearly production of the entire dominion several times over. Tens of thousands of hours had gone into every aspect of their design. Every craftsman of any skill had been pulled from across the Ceraphate to work in concert. The dream of a unified Dominion he had fought so hard for had arrived with all the bitter irony of an existential war.
This would be it, the first test firing of the Dawnhammer Bombards. There had not been a moment to spare in their construction, none of the normal and incremental safety procedures Caradryas would have preferred. The first round fired would be at an active target, and they would not know until that moment whether all the time and resources they had invested in the weapons would be worthwhile - whether Atressa’s sacrifice would have been worth anything at all. Of course, Caradryas thought with a gallows grin, if the weapon failed then there was a good chance he and everyone else in the palace would be vapourized before they could even register the answer. He supposed it would all be someone else’s problem then, but here and now the responsibility was his. Stone Idols had been confirmed in Lhoris. His field mages had relayed their exact positions. Caradryas made a last adjustment to the bombard’s pitch, the massive gears churning down through several floors below him to raise the angle of the bombard by a quarter of a degree. Then, with a silent word of luck to someone he once knew, he pulled the firing lever.
The Dawnhammer Bombard bucked and roared, thousands of tons of steel rocking back on oiled tracks. Entire rooms of the palace had been turned to hydraulic pistons, absorbing the energy of recoiling mass. Steel forged with the height of artifice and enchanted to the limits of its physical being groaned and screeched until the immense pressure, but they held. The cannon’s payload shot out like a meteor, streaming green fire across the sky as iron shavings ignited off its sides. It pierced the thick and icy fog that had wreathed the lands, becoming a glowing ember in the sky, and then was gone. The machine sounds of the bombard slowly moving back into place as its hydraulic absorbers gradually released their pressure filled to the echoing chamber. The bombard’s mouth glowed an angry, hot white. It would take a day or more before it was fully reset and could be fired again. Steam hissed, and the seconds ticked by.
A small voice arose from the charm he carried, the magically transmitted sound of his field agent. “Target hit, confirmed. The Idol is destroyed.”
Caradryas slumped across the firing control panel, the sudden relief rushing through him. He hadn’t even realized he’d been holding his breath, and gulped down air. He hadn’t slept in Celennar knew how long. The bombards worked. An Idol had been slain. Only some hundreds more to go.
The Return
The Miscellaneum. Drokna had never thought to see this place again, not since she’d set out to begin her life as a mercenary many years past. Very little of the place from her childhood remained now, the place long abandoned and gutted by scavengers. Once it had been one of the largest repositories of ill-gotten goods in Underside, shelves reaching to the vaulted ceilings crammed with odds and ends pilfered across the Prime Dominion and beyond. It had also been her home once. Her grandfather had run the place, and when her parents had been gutted by pirates she had fallen into his care. Care was a strong word; she’d been expected to work, even at the age of eight, and days had been hard and grueling. She’d gotten out as soon as she could. News had reached her years ago that her grandfather had been killed in a robbery. She hadn’t shed a tear; the man had always been too proud and boneheaded to hire security, so it was always a matter of time. Nevertheless, Drokna had felt a leaden weight settle at the pit of her stomach that day. And now, standing in the hollowed-out corpse of her miserable childhood, she felt that weight return.
When she’d heard where their company was headed, Drokna had struggled to believe her ears. But apparently it was so. The Prime Dominion was facing an existential threat once again, and a hero of the last grand conflict against the vampire Alti was gathering the brigands, fiends and other assorted outcasts of Underside to the shell of the Miscellaneum to aid in the desperate defense. Made sense, she supposed. The building was enormous, robust, easily fortified and close to the Dominion’s centre. What made less sense was the one who had put out the call.
Likspit, their name was. A skaven out of Ghur, by all accounts, and Drokna had trouble understanding what business they had sticking their neck out for the Prime Dominion not once but twice. Still, they were evidently an exile and a pariah, and Drokna would find someone like that a damn sight easier to follow than one of the toffs from up above. She could see them now as she helped unload equipment from the company’s ornery pack longhorns. The skaven sat upon a relatively humble chair behind the rotting remains of her grandfather’s counter, listening intently to a group of gathered petitioners, steepling their clawed fingers and nodding along. Drokna could not really see what was so impressive about the rat. Their curved horns set them apart from most of their kind, for true, but Grey Seers were not so uncommon that the sight of one inspired any significant level of awe. Then, as if reading her thoughts, Likspit locked gazes with Drokna from across the cavernous hall. The Seer’s vermillion eyes sparked with cunning intellect, and for that briefest of moments she felt frozen, pinned to the spot, pierced, her darkest depths laid bare. Then, quick as it had come, the moment passed. Likspit returned their attention to the gaggle of cutthroats clamouring to say their piece, and Old Sawtooth, the company’s ogor paymaster was thumbing her on the back and demanding to know why she’d stopped working. Drokna quickly apologized and got back to her task, but her mind lingered on the peculiar skaven sitting where her grandfather had once coldly issued orders to her childhood self. Somehow, her doubts had been washed away by that strange, otherworldly moment. She still knew next to nothing about Likspit, but somehow she no longer found it so hard to imagine following them into the hell that was even now encroaching on the Prime Dominion.
Through a Glass, Darkly
Dariel rubbed his temples in annoyance at the latest interruption. He put down his quill somewhat less gently than was probably wise and strode over to the Shimmerpool at the centre of the ornate office. The usually still water rippled and hummed as one of the identical connected pools held by each of his allies. The particular dusky hue the water had taken identified the other as Grey Seer Likspit. Dariel sighed. He hated the rat. They'd proven their worth a dozen times over since their arrival in the Prime Dominion, but that didn't mean Dariel had to like them personally. Once more he wondered idly what Renaya saw in the rat.
With a swift wave of his hand, Dariel activated his side of the connection, preparing for the barrage of insincere bowing, scraping and self depreciation Likspit seemed to employ for no other reason than to get on Dariel’s nerves. When the water flowed up into a miniature simulacrum of Likspit's form, however, the expression on their face was deadly serious. “Speak,” Dariel said imperiously.
“It isn't good news, my Lord,” said Likspit, uncharacteristically skipping over the usual volley of condescending flattery, “I can feel something coming, something big-dire.”
Dariel was perplexed, “you're somewhat late with those tidings, seer. Mogrek is bearing down on our very gates.”
“My most wise lord Dariel,” there was the backhanded adulation, “I fear this is something else entirely. Something new approaches. I can feel it scurrying through my very bones.”
“Another worry to add to the mountain of worries then,” said Dariel, wearily. “This new threat; is it close? Does it threaten our foe as well?”
“The future lies clouded in the mists of Ulgu, my lord. I cannot see the shape of the storm, nor can I see how close it is. It does not feel like Mogrek though, and I don't believe it's connected. If I redirect my energy further I might learn more but…”
“No, no, we need your focus on our present predicament,” and more’s the pity, Dariel thought, “I'll keep this under advisement. If you do learn anything more, I hear it first, am I understood?”
“Of course, my lord.” With a wave of Dariel's hand, the water suspended in the grey seer’s shape fell, soundlessly returning to perfect stillness at the bottom of the vessel. Dariel leaned on the lip of the Shimmerpool for a moment, eyes closed tight, fighting the sick feeling settling in his already knotted stomach. This was his prize for victory, he thought bitterly. Then he stood straight, shaking off his cynicism. Yes, he had won ten years ago. Now, it was his responsibility to protect what he had claimed... and there was no limit to what he would do to protect his people.
Elsewhere
In the depths of a tent that seems much larger and more cavernous than it appeared on its tattered and unassuming exterior, hidden away by fug and foul vapour, a mind creaks and bends. A voice squeaks and giggles and burps until it snaps and dwindles as a voice pushes through the fumes: “Oi, Moonie, wotcher!”
The Mask takes hold, slithers towards the oaf. Wapkagut, simple, but with surprising depths of insight on occasion. “Greetings Wapkagut,” it says with the Mooncaller's reedy voice, “to what can I owe this pleasure?”
“I’s been feelin’ somethin’ strange in da beat of da Realms. Dere’s da big boss in da middle of it all, but dere's somethin’ else dere too. Somethin’ at da edges, spoilin’ da song. Somethin’ wrong. Figgered dis is more you's sort of fing, wondered what you made of it.”
Then the mask feels something new, something it hasn't felt before. Fear. Tendrils grab hold of its consciousness, pulls it down. Then the voice that speaks from the Mooncaller's cracked and bleeding lips is the Mooncaller's own. This should not be able to happen. When the Mooncaller spoke, it was because the Mask allowed it.
“Somefin' big is coming. Somefin' what's gonna shake the Realms. Oh, yes! Hee hee hee! You ain't ready, none of you is ready. It's gonna be so funny!”
Then the Mask is back, and it is afraid. It does not know what the Mooncaller was talking about, and its tendrils pierce every aspect of the Mooncaller's mind. Is this a true message from the Moon? Has the Moon chosen the feeble grot as its avatar, rather than the power of the Mask? “Out! OUT!” It screams, and with a muttered “blimey!” Wapkagut is gone. The Mask scuttles back to the rancid depths of its abode to think, and to plot, and to dread.
***
Everything changes, given time. Names are lost to history, caught in the bloody machinations of nations and dynasties who are themselves adrift amid the turbulent tide of years. From a distant enough vantage point, even the gods appear as afterthoughts while the Mortal Realms grind like cogs in an unfathomably vast machine.
Yet all history was once lived, and all wars fought for a reason. Each fleeting life so desperately spent had its own meaning, its own purpose.
Legacy.
Ambition.
A way of life.