Uneasy Alliances

The corpse of Lord Reginald Hereford made a wet slap as it fell to the floor. Congealed blood splattered from the eviscerated body, staining the polished cherry floorboards an altogether more sinister red. Vaahnzerekh stood in the center of the deflated mass, dark bone frame glistening in the flickering lamplight. It stared at the congealed slime coating which dripped from itself to join the rest of the macabre ooze on the floor. High quality cherry wood was difficult to obtain in the desert country of Fallien, and the sight of the mess filled him with an errant moment of frustrated panic.

Haide only knew how hard it was going to be to clean the boards once the stain set in, it thought. But at least the blood was already days old. If the body had been fresh the entire corner of the office would have had to have been replaced.

It took a moment for the infiltrator to realize that it was still mimicking the dead Lord that it had been posing as for the last several days. Vaahnzerekh sent a mental command to end the mimicry protocol and felt the last remnants of Reginald Hereford cease. The Coronian merchant was finally and truly gone.

With no need to ruminate over the future of decorative accoutrements, Vaahnzerekh stepped out of the hollow shell that had been Lord Hereford and made its way to the man’s desk. Lord Hereford had been an important noble in the bygone days of the Corone Empire, and had fled to Fallien seeking refuge when the rebellion had claimed the island nation. Gaining admittance to the isolationist island had been difficult, but money was the universal language and Lord Hereford had spoken it well.

Once established, the exiled Lord had turned his business acumen to building a trade empire. He shipped exotic glass, spices, and more than a little poison to his contacts in Corone and brought back construction materials which were common in Althanas’ bread basket but hard to acquire in the deserts of Fallien. Unfortunately for the shipping magnate, his caravans had unearthed a relic during one of their excursions. This had led Lord Hereford to mount an expedition into the largely unexplored and incredibly hostile Empty Wastes of southeastern Fallien in the hopes that he’d be able to find the relic’s source.

He hadn’t, but the expedition had nonetheless come uncomfortably close to discovering the ruins of the Kron’tyr Empire’s largest tomb. Silent spies had watched the caravan’s progress and had assessed it to be a potential threat to the Kron’tyr reawakening. Unwilling to allow anything to complicate the process, the Storm’s Herald had tasked Vaahnzerekh with the complete dissolution of Lord Hereford’s estate. This was not the first time that it had performed this task.

It had been easy for Vaahnzerekh to kill Lord Hereford and assume the man’s identity. Hereford had been a cautious man, frightened of retribution for his crimes against the Coronian people finally catching up with him. But he’d also been a man who didn’t pay a piece more than he had to in order to get what he wanted. The thugs that Lord Hereford had hired to guard him were large and aggressive, but they were also lax, trusting in their size and reputation to ward away potential threats. They hadn’t expected slim black death to glide into their midst in the middle of the night, razor talons extended.

Vaahnzerekh had put one of those bloodied claws into the back of Lord Hereford’s head as the man had tossed about in a drunken slumber. It had then slid into the body and assimilated the man’s thoughts and memories. Hereford had been engaged in so many duplicitous dealings that it had been child’s play to dismantle the trade empire once Vaahnzerekh knew all of them.

Everything fell over the course of three days. Warehouses full of product burned or were seized by the authorities. Confidantes and underlings were found to have committed suicide or had otherwise been the victims of foul play, thin lines of crimson parting their throats. The location of a caravan’s route happened to find its way into the grimy fingers of a band of murderous thieves. And so it went.

The last of Lord Hereford’s favored concubines had finished looting what she wanted from the Lord’s palace and had fled into the cold Fallien night. Vaahnzerekh’s emotional mimicry had found it too difficult to simply kill the girl, young and frail as she was. Now that it had shut that off, the infiltrator pondered chasing her down to ensure that all loose ends were tied up but quickly dismissed it. She had known nothing of Hereford’s business that would turn any suspicion back towards the Kron’tyr.

Vaahnzerkh rifled through the drawers of the heavy oak desk that Hereford had used until it found the log books that it was looking for. It had painstakingly hunted down and destroyed all written manifests from Hereford’s business dealings during the last three days, even the ones that had no connection to the exploration of the Empty Wastes. Three swipes of Vaahnzerekh’s obsidian claws completed this endeavor, and then a spark from the pipe flint in the top drawer rendered their remains forever out of the grasp of prying eyes. No recorded trace of Hereford’s merchant empire remained to threaten the Kron’tyr. Now all Vaahnzerekh had to do was to open the man’s private lockbox and retrieve the relic that had led Hereford to his destruction.

Combinations were no deterrent when a thief had the ability to pull the combination from the user’s mind, and the location of a key could only be kept secure if the owner was alive to do so. It took less than thirty seconds for Vaahnzerekh to finish destroying the log books, open the hidden panel in the floor beneath the desk, and remove the lock box’s clasp. It removed the silk bag containing the relic from the lock box and opened it. What it saw inside resonated within Vaahnzerekh and it took a moment for it to realize that what it was experiencing was a sense of fear that it thought it had lost long ago when its consciousness had merged with the Storm. The flickering green glow of Vaahnzerekh’s eyes wavered slightly as it resealed the silk bag.

The Kron’tyr Empire wasn’t safe. It would never be safe again.

Agrotha sneered at William as it dropped off its perch. It surveyed the wreckage that its trap had caused with satisfaction. A cruel chortle escaped from the desiccated beast’s dry, withered lips as it bent down to look the trapped hunter in the eyes. It raised one of its five mummified arms and pawed at a gash in William’s side where a twisted bone had pushed through blackened skin but pulled its hand back with a hiss as the searing blood singed it. The sneer curled into a frowning snarl and it said something to William in its blasted tongue. The words sounded familiar to William thanks to his gift of the All-Tongue, but he was too disoriented to make any sense of them.

William had learned what he could about Agrotha before hunting it down, but hadn’t learned enough. He knew that the creature was a deprath, but the remnants of the Knights’ library had given him little information about it other than the fact that the Knights of the Apocalypse had praised them as haindmaids to the Horsemen of Famine. The Keeper would have known more, but William didn’t have time to travel to the lore master’s great library to ask. Besides, if that know-it-all had wanted William to find out more about Agrotha, he’d have done so.

All that William had been able to learn was that the deprath possessed a natural anti-magic aura akin to his own aura of molten heat, and that they could sap the strength of their victims. Agrotha was known to be a particularly strong specimen of his species, and the Knights and offered it gifts and sacrifices in the past. That hadn’t deterred William though, obviously, because Agrotha had something that William wanted. Besides, he’d faced countless monster paragons since starting the whole monster hunting business. He’d figured he’d just kill his way through whatever Agrotha threw at him. Only, he hadn’t counted on Agrotha dropping three tons of rock on him in an ambush.

“… dog of War. How does it feel to know that your life belong to a scion of Famine?” Agrotha’s words finally cleared the swirling mess in William’s mind and started making sense. He tried to spit defiantly into Agrotha’s looming face, but the action failed halfway through and a mixture of molten blood and saliva sizzled down the charred wreckage of William’s face. Agrotha wheezed a quiet, hissing laugh and slid his singed finger down the spittle’s warm trail.

A wave of enervation poured out from the trail where the deprath touched him. William’s neck jerked under the creature’s influence, dancing like a marionette struck by lightning. William forced his jaw to clamp down on the scream that was threatening to tear loose from his throat. Agrotha knew what he was doing to William, but the revenant didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of hearing it.

Soon enough Agrotha relented, pulling his hand away from William. He sat back on the pile of rocks, dry skin scraping on itself like rough sandpaper. Sunken eyes roamed over William’s face and shattered body, cold calculation in them. William’s thrashing stopped the moment Agrotha’s draining touch left him, and he immediately felt his regenerative powers working to restore his lost energy. He sagged, his burning eyes lolling away from the withered creature, staring into the distance.

William wasn’t sure just how long it would take Agrotha to realize that he was more than just a demonic warrior. To see that the crushing injuries he’d suffered from the falling rocks were twisting themselves back into shape. What would the famine beast do then, he wondered? Would it keep him trapped here as a renewable source of energy? A trapped hunk of livestock to be drained to the point of nothingness and then allowed to refill himself only to be drained again? William was strong, but even at his full strength and given preparation he didn’t think he could life the three tons of rock pinning him long or high enough to escape. Was he going to be able to escape this time?

The haft of William’s obsidian warscythe came into focus, only a foot away. He’d instinctively managed to keep hold of the weapon as the rocks had tumbled down on him only to drop it at the last moment. Fortunately it hadn’t fallen too far from him. But, William despaired, even if he got ahold of the weapon he wouldn’t have the leverage to properly fight with it and the deprath’s anti-magic aura would its energy just as the creature’s touch had done to him. Agrotha noticed that William’s eyes had focused and followed the revenant’s burning gaze.

“Of course a dog of the war horseman would seek to die with its weapon in hand,” the deprath hissed delightedly. It slithered from its sitting position and snaked over to the fallen warscythe. “Too bad, too bad, that the dog will die without it, eh? What sort of punishment awaits one who fails their master in such a spectacular fashion, hmm?”

“Let’s find out shall we, dog of war.”

Agrotha bent to pick up the weapon, singed hand stretching down to retrieve it while the other four rubbed together eagerly. William watched impassively as that dried fingers closed around the weapon’s hilt near the razor-sharp blade. A flash of green energy sparked along the weapon’s length as Agrotha picked it up, a bemused look came on his face. Somehow, the ancient weapon was resisting the deprath’s anti-magic aura.

“What is this?” Agrotha hissed, thrusting the crackling blade at William. In a flash of insight, William realized that the magic within the blade was stronger than Agrotha, a magic that allowed the warscythe’s black blade to cut through anything. Despite the knowledge that he could feel the shattered bones in his arm grinding on one another, William forced himself to reach out and grab hold of the warscythe’s smooth haft. The pain was blinding, causing a white-hot knife to stab stars into his eyes from the wrong side of his eyelids. There was nothing he could do to stop the screams this time, and his scream of tortured pain echoed off the splintered rocks atop him.

William moved as fast as his injuries would allow him, pushing through the pain with a speed that caught Agrotha off guard. Already shaken by the weapon’s resistance to its powers, the deprath failed to react in time as William’s shattered hand closed over the living stone of the warscythe’s haft and jerked the weapon down. The crackling energies of the surged into the blade as it slid effortlessly through three of Agrotha’s limbs and a sizable portion of the deprath’s withered torso. Congealed yellow fluid spurted from the wounds, splashing stickily across William’s exposed upper chest. It stumbled back several feet in an attempt to flee from the unexpected assault, but the damage was already done. Agrotha tumbled wordlessly to the rocky, hard-packed soil and died.

William didn’t stop with the deprath, however. With his remaining strength he held the warscythe’s enchantment in place and finished the dark blade’s arc, slicing cleanly through the rocks piled atop him. He didn’t stop until his arm’s motion was arrested by his own body. The scream faded from his lips as William collapsed into a panting, blood covered heap. It would be some time before his body healed enough for him to move any further, but William was alright with that now.

‘I’m nobody’s dog,” he said to the dead Agrotha, though the words came out as half a gasping cry. Then, mercifully, William passed out.