Out of Character:
“See, this is why flesh isn’t suited to shaping,” Sigrun Kondrat remarked to nobody in particular. Stubby fingers worked her boomstick’s release mechanism. Springs snapped, and a heated metal casing whisked past her notched ears with the hiss of escaping steam. “It’s so... weak.”
Her cheerful brogue rolled down the slope of the dry embankment upon which she stood, through a night littered with the light of a waning half-moon. Drought cracks spread like tendrils of a spider’s web in the riverbed, a grim reminder to all who witnessed them of the toll that the Necromancer’s invasion had incurred. Once the Bards had sung of the farmlands between the Escaldor and the Elleduin as the breadbasket of all Althanas. Now, those rare travellers who walked the fringes of these newly-dubbed Eastern Plaguelands were far more likely to stumble upon a horde of wights than a farmhand or a herdbeast.
“Or a stray party of half-decomposed cadavers,” Sigrun continued the thought out loud. She had to pitch her voice to carry over the clamour of combat not a stone’s throw distant. “Wouldn’t you agree, Oby?”
Oby, or Obahyurur the Unwise, didn’t dignify her musing with an answer. Then again, when cornered by three zombies grasping and gouging at its body, even the most eloquent of speakers would have had trouble responding to such a half-articulated question. And Obahyurur, a black iron automaton two metres tall, was by no means an eloquent speaker. In fact, given that its creator had yet to decipher the mysteries of vocal cords or the means of infusing scrap metal with life, it didn’t speak at all. That didn’t deter its mistress Sigrun from yabbering away at it incessantly.
“Now, where was I?” She fumbled through her pockets for a spare cartridge, then remembered that she’d used the last one the day before. All she had left were the four on her belt. “Ah yes. Only amateurs work with flesh. Too easy to meld. Too frail for abuse. ‘Strewth!”
A grunt of effort rammed the wad of black powder and shot into place. She slammed the breech closed, tapping it once to ensure its integrity. Then the prosthetic iron fingers of her left hand curled around the dragon-belcher's oaken haft, bracing it in the direction of the walking dead grasping at her golem.
“Boom!” she called...
... only to realise that she hadn’t lit the fuse.
How could she forget? Not after two previous shots scarred the earth bank opposite! She’d even managed to blow the head from the first zombie before it had reached Oby, and its body still twitched spasmodically on the far side. Something in the star-speckled sky overhead crowed at her in raucous laughter.
“Oh shut up,” she told it, reaching into the pocket of her smithing apron. Her grimy hand re-emerged with a flint firestarter. She flicked it once to create flame, which soon took merry hold of the saturated hemp cloth, a small beacon of hope in the darkness.
“Boom!” she called again, and this time the boomstick responded to her touch.
Thunderous discharge tore the shadows asunder. Leaden fireball streaked through the night skies on a calculated ballistic trajectory, splitting them like a shooting star. Acrid fumes of smouldering black powder overwrote the noxious clouds of decay and rotten flesh.
The lighting was poor, but the angle good. The closest zombie lost its head in a disintegrating puff of blood and flesh, of shattered skull and splattering cranial matter. Its compatriot looked down at the sudden hole in its chest, the wound cauterised by a wreath of remnant flame. Promptly it collapsed to the pustulent ooze that seeped from the cracks in the corrupted ground.
That left just one shambler to face the dispassionate iron golem. The silvery splendour of its activation rune glowed across its beefy chest; ‘life’, it proclaimed to the world in the ancient dwarven tongue. But what Obahyurur granted to the undead construct flailing at its feet was not life. Sigrun had known the hypocrisy of the inscription when she’d carved it there. It spoke volumes that she didn’t care.
“Took you long enough, didn’t it?” she complained to her mute companion. Shouldering the steaming dragon-belcher across her back, she crossed the riverbed between them at an ungainly trot. The heavy leather apron she wore made it difficult to move with grace, and her legs were sore with the long journey south and east from Gunnbad. “Oh don’t mind that. It’ll wash off.”
She directed her last comment at the golem’s clumsy attempts to wipe dripping blood and gore from its immense fists. The pulverised remains of its erstwhile foe lay crushed into the dry earth at its feet.
“And you just had to go ahead and mash it into some sort of pulp, didn’t you. Even the elves wouldn’t dare serve this at one of their so-called banquets.”
Wrinkling her snub nose in a delicate grimace, she stepped with ginger care through the fleshy puddles of two of her opponents. On the slope above her, the headless third of their number still flopped from time to time like a fish out of water. But her interest lay in the unfortunate zombie that had taken her shot through the chest... the only one, in fact, with an intact skull.
“At least I only need two of these,” she grumbled, reaching down with pudgy fingers into a wide-open eye socket. She twisted, yanked, and then repeated the process again a hand’s span to the left. It took her five seconds to finish gathering the necessary ingredients.
“Well, that’s that,” she told Obahyurur, who was still trying to wipe its hands on the earth. Seeing as the golem’s arms extended twice the length of its stubby legs, a charitable person would likely have bet on it succeeding. But Sigrun had yet to work out how to design knees that would allow Obahyurur to bend over forwards without sacrificing bipedal stability. Thus every attempt could only end in dismal failure as iron palms swept over the riverside reeds. If the golem could manage an expression on its iron features, it might have been one of frustrated befuddlement. “Oh, Oby, stop that.”
Obahyurur turned to face her as she deposited her grisly trophies into her apron pocket. In turn she fished out a stained note of goat-skin parchment and a stick of graphite to accompany it. With swift exactitude she crossed out the penultimate item on her list, ending the stroke with a curled flourish. Then she peered close at the last line of the recipe.
“Hm,” Sigrun cogitated. “Now where in this blighted wasteland am I supposed to find the ashes of a long-lost muse?”
If only Obahyurur could have shrugged.
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