The Realms : On The March
I. CANDOR AND TRAVIOCH
War -- it's a funny thing. You plan for it for months, maybe even years. You gather armies. And then, at last, you march.
And on that first day your blood is up, your nerves tingling, your heart pounding. Trumpets sound, banners crack in the wind, harnesses jingle and hooves pound against the road.
The excitement lasts for a few hours and then it's gone.
And then the tedium sets in.
War -- the Sun Rose Company had some idea what to expect, but even its years of experience didn't prepare it for the incredible boredom that accompanies the movement of over a million troops across five realms. The announcement of war should lead to glorious battle -- but instead it leads to interminable travel and trouble-shooting.
As the Destined King's bodyguards, the SRC is constantly on the move, teleporting back and forth across the realms and even onto airships and ocean-going vessels, checking in with generals and captains, relaying orders, building morale, overseeing defenses both mundane and magical. Skirmishes, magical ambushes, terrain problems, recalcitrant villagers, and military crimes all must be dealt with. In-fighting between armies isn't uncommon, either, old enmities exacerbated by the smooth-tongued lies of spies apparently backed by Sardonicus. More than once the SRC wishes it could just get to the battlefield and some honest warfare instead of the policework it's stuck with during the overland.
Thame and Chymrae didn't die without causing deep, grievous rips in the fabric of society. Churches stand empty, some with dead clerics and worshippers inside -- some murdered, some dead by their own hands. Both real mages and disliked locals accused of witchcraft or hedge-wizardry have been killed by mistrusting townspeople, many crucified on X-crosses along the side of the road in the manner of the hierodule murders several decades ago. In many places lawlessness followed the social disruptions, and burned homesteads dot the countryside, as do bandit bands filled with the hardest types of mercenaries, the ones who don't give a damn about the Destined King or the Metal Gods -- only about their own pleasures. Some villages are ravaged by plague brought by Mock-worshippers, and the army must keep a constant crew of healing priests moving from place to place to fight the diseases that keep cropping up among the troops, livestock, and horses. Even though Decad itself might be removed from the board, its influence hasn't vanished, and the use of potent drugs is a recurring problem in the ranks, as are camp followers who seem to take pleasure in causing as much jealousy and fighting as possible.
II. THE SOMADIOS PLANS
The fighting begins in the Somadion Plains, as the Destined King's armies first hit opposition in the form of armies from Bahr al' Raml. Primarily composed of hadjjin, these are fierce, relentless holy slayers for whom dying is a ticket to paradise. They have no fear for their own lives and attack in surging waves of raiders, lizard-riders, and wyvern-flyers. Spells flash across the bloody battlefields as their shamans and wizards fight the Destined King's. The infamous hashishin of Bahr al'Raml's drow tribes stalk through camps at night, fearless assassins wielding daggers, gasses, and virulent poisons. The monkish ascetics of the desert also cause more damage than expected, attacking in guerilla moves that do much to cripple supply and communication lines.
Still, the Destined King's armies vastly outnumber the Bahr al'Raml forces, and slowly the northern army keeps moving forward, over fields soaked with blood and littered with corpses. When the desert front collapses and breaks into independent guerilla forces the Destined King's armies celebrate, only to face a brand new danger:
The maruk avaranu wyrm erupt from Harad's Fault.
The maruk avaranu, the eldest races of Samru -- created out of the First God's pain. Deep dwellers, dark dwellers: creatures of the ocean's depths, creatures of the earth's crevasses. The wyrm were the insectoid creatures, that scuttled and squirmed through the dirt and rock, and the cruelest, for they gave their slave-creatures, the satamharanthu, intelligence. But this was also the wyrm's undoing, for over thousands of years the satamharanthu learned, and plotted, and finally escaped.
And then the satamharanthu in turn created their slaves, the humans, who also learned, and waited, and finally escaped.
The wyrm -- a third army, unexpected, and aligned neither with the Destined King nor with the Metal Gods. Both the forces of Bahr al'Raml and the north fall back under the terrible onslaught of creatures out of mortalkind's deepest reptilian-brain nightmares. Spells gutter out uselessly against the creatures' carapaces and slime; weapons slide harmlessly from chitin and are snapped in two by pincers and mandibles. They attack on the surface; they leap into the middle of armies; they spread translucent wings and fly over defenses; they dig into the soil and burrow beneath campgrounds. The armies reel back in horror as horses are picked up and bitten in two, as warriors are swallowed whole, as support personnel are tangled in webs and dragged underground by serrated claws and spiderlike legs.
The wyrm seem to have two goals: to eat, and to enslave.
The Sun Rose Company is swiftly called in to penetrate the deep chasms and tunnels that hide the wyrm slave camps. Armed and crackling with defensive spells, the Company teleports into a dark, muddy, slime-covered undergound world of inhuman monsters. The Company finds deep breeding grounds where captive humans and demihumans writhe in agony as huge maggots hatch from their chests and bellies and begin to feed on their flesh and blood. It finds underground pools where soft, pale, psionic queen-things float and command their armies. Pip nearly dies there, under the onslaught of previously unencountered mental attacks, until the group links its Four Swords and creates a barrier of protection long enough to teleport away and regather its strength for another attack. The cyborged Hellebore are brought in to fill the caverns and tunnels with bombs and cannonfire, sticky flame and searing gasses.
Help arrives in the form of an old enemy: the feline satamaranthu arrive in their airships, summoned by dragoncall, bearing the same technarcane weapons that had conquered the Cognoterre a half-century ago. But this time the slender, hated Dawn Masters turn their weapons against their old enemies, pushing the wyrm back into the depths of the earth.
The cyborged Hellebore are a good fighting team with the satamharanthu: frozen in stasis long before the Domination War, they have no axe to grind with the Iron Autocracy, and they welcome a chance to learn about and use new automated weapons. Soon the weapons of the Iron Autocracy and of Iron Scream are being used in tandem, and pieces mixed and matched to create new, deadlier hybrids.
The Sun Rose Company leaves the fight in good hands and helps the army press past the city of Garamile and into Bahr al'Raml.
III. BAHR AL'RAML
The trek across the desert is one day of battle after another: hot, grueling, and unforgiving. Nearly as many soldiers collapse from heatstroke as wounds, and the armies struggle to travel across unfamiliar and dangerous terrain. At one point desert winds whip away the sands to strand the army on the Glass Waste, the remains of an ancient battle that left the sand fused to glass for a day's journey in each direction. More die then, of the sun's heat as it is reflected from below a hundredfold, at times literally searing flesh from bone.
The worst of the battle surrounds the age-old city of Spir, wherein the albino warrior-king Orthodoc Hai rules. He wields the intelligent, shapechanging weapon Shrike, and is fearsomely intelligent. What is worse, Spir has been armed with more of Iron Scream's weapons -- flamethrowers and exploding cannon among them. Here the warriors defending the walls carry pistoles and longer-range projectile-throwers, against which normal armor has no effect.
Not only that, but Orthodoc Hai's pact has not only been made with Iron Scream: the city's walls and buildings are magically protected from transportation magics and other spells that should be able to easily topple its defenses. The mages are forced to fall back into support positions, and the fight for the city is carried out in the most brutal, old-fashioned way, day by day, for several weeks.
The siege is broken at last when dragons appear over the city and begin to batter it from above as the northern armies attack from the sides. The deepseated, traditional fear of dragons that dwells in the heart of every Bahr al'Raml native breaks morale, and finally the army breaks through the walls and enters. Behind them, the sand is loose and liquid with blood.
The slaughter in the city is cruel and -- there is no better word for it -- evil. Some generals and adventurers do what they can to minimize the horror -- especially Halkem and the other worshippers of Carrick to whom the massacre of noncombatants is blasphemy -- but the northern army is angry and weary, and by the end of the day, very few natives are left alive. Fights even break out in the palace over the evil weapon Shrike, a bloody fray that ends only when Elianora and Valere both wade in and throw combatants aside, then smite the weapon with the Light and the Fire until nothing of it is left except a battered and twisted heap of metal. Then they call Minimin, who finishes the job with lightning.
IV. THE RHARIHU PLAINS
Months have passed since the army began its journey from Candor; longer than expected, longer, perhaps, than necessary. But at last the first wave of troops see green again as the lush plains and mountains of Rharihu come into sight, and despite the knowledge that this, at last, is the final battlefield, there's a sense of jubilation in the air.
The Sun Rose Company, along with ten other crack high-level mercenary groups, teleport away from the main army to recon the battlefield. It isn't easy to leave the king and hundreds of thousands of men and women behind, but it's unavoidable. While the armies group themselves at the border between desert and plains, bringing in forces from the airships and from Jack of Shadows' grotesque sea ships, the most skillful members of the army must gather intelligence.
The Metal Gods' forces, spread out on the vast grasslands, are horrific. The Sun Rose Company gazes in dismay at the endless camps and forts that seem to stretch across the horizon, flying three flags: the open jaws of Iron Scream, the flyblown corpse of Mock, and the twisting flame of Sardonicus.
Like the Destined King's armies, these are composed of every race known on Samru, as well as countless creations. Unlike the Destined King's armies, these are supplemented with endless ranks of undead, immobile ranks of metal and mineral golems, and bone-chilling monstrosities of metal and clockwork that no sane mind could possibly have constructed. The Destined King's agents see vast groundworks where weapons have been planted to funnel and then cut down attacking troops. They see great tilled fields where who knows what has been planted -- undead? explosives? And far to the south, at the base of the jagged, unwelcoming Ebbikuk Range, is a huge, rust-colored metal palace, instantly familiar from the dracsadha's vision.
The fortress of Iron Scream. And, standing before it, the group sees a huge warrior in black armor, another familiar figure from the vision. Pip groans to himself -- it is undoubtedly Havoc, the Champion of Iron Scream, garbed in unholy armor and cloaked in the flayed skins of its victims.
For a moment the company debates whether or not to attack, but its momentary indecision is nearly its downfall. As it flies, invisible, a huge explosion of black flame engulfs it. Sticky, acidic black flame that eats through armor and clothing in seconds, burning into flesh, etching its mark over even magical weapons. Though Caprice, Pip, Halkem and Minimin are all four in agony, they manage to lock their sword hilts. Valere and Elianora thrust the Light and the Fire into the construction and Earle teleports all away, back to the campground, where clerics descend upon the howling group to heal the still-burning wounds.
It doesn't take long for the group to decide that Sardonicus's Champion, Bane, must be there, too. Further surveillance isn't advised.
The Sun Rose Company hunkers down with the rest of the generals and adventuring groups, and slowly the battlefield and opposing armies are mapped out.
Three days later, the sky roils and darkens, and lightning begins to light the plains up from horizon to horizon. Caprice and Halkem both awaken, like every other high priest and priestess in the army, with battle cries on their lips.
The Young Gods have made their presence known.
The Final Battle begins today.
