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(Zengh): The sun has slipped from its crest and now rides lower and lower in the sky, shafts of light streaming like golden tears of the stars, blinding arrows, from betwixt the crags of the shadowy ridge. Silhouetted there, the mountains provide ample shade for the monster-men whose camps are nestled in between stone formations. Smoke rises in gray, bleak columns toward the heavens, each barely stirred by the feeble wind that smellsof rotting flesh, refuse, burning skin and smoldering hair. The din of flies humming is a high-pitched, droning overtone to the metronome of drums beating and the bass and tenor undercurrent of vocalisations, a song barbaric, beautiful and terrible.
A sacrifice has just been made. From a crude scaffolding dangles the remains of a nude young woman strung up by her ankles, her midsection split open, her entrails stuffed into her mouth and wrapped around her arms. On either side of her, twisted and contorted into a travesty of the human form, hang the bodies of children, their bare muscle shimmering with gelatinous, slowly melting fat and subcutaneous tissue. The foul religious ceremony continues on uninterrupted, for who would dare to crawl into the lion's den?
({TheMarchofGoldenIron}): Sweat beads upon the tanned brow of Khund Thenssen, the swarthy scout commander; fingers clench upon the rock that blocks the sight of him from the foe. He is sprawled like a dying lizard, arms splayed out and back lowered; his belly to the ground; but he can see them over the stone, where they have been strung up and left for the crows. The song confirms what the men of Temuria had long suspected; that these madmen were driven by zealotry, not mindless savagery. With the horrific image still burning into the back of his eyes the scout commander turns his face away, back down to the eyes of his men, who cannot see from where they are crouched. He does not speak, but stretches his hand behind him, and folds two fingers down about the central pair.
The men acknowledge silently, and begin to withdraw further down the slope. They must circle around, now - they must find a clear view of the enemy so they may estimate their number.
(Zengh): Horrifyingly enough, the madmen have not strung these poor, unfortunate souls up to be left for the crows. Oh, no, they are not that merciful. Indeed, a murder of the black carrion birds has begun to settle on the trees, cawing and crowing, but they are as powerless as the corpses themselves are, hanging limply over beds of coals and tinder. Flames lick at what has been left behind, charring muscle and searing skin that has not been removed.
One of those who appears to be a priest, a man draped in robes of blood-stained rawhide and fur, his head covered in the skull of a deer, antlers rising high, painted a glaring orange-yellow in the firelight, steps forward. With a curved instrument, what looks to be a sharpened rib bone taken from some unknown creature, in his hand, he approaches the tragic scene. Then, he does what would have, at one time and in some other place, been unthinkable. With a sickening, wet sound of slowly severed connective tissue, he jaggedly carves a chunk of flesh from the woman's breast, then bears the quivering meat aloft in the palm of his hand. The men surrounding continue to pound upon their drums and sing their prayer song, even as the master of ceremonies takes a bite from from the grisly feast.
({TheMarchofGoldenIron}): As the men creep away, one of them passes a gap in which he can see what is happening; his eyes widen in horror, his brows trembling; at the sight of the brutalised woman's corpse being further defiled, at the cannibal feast in the name of some terrible god, the Temurian slowly begins to break. Would that his companions had kept their eyes on him! Would that they had taken note of the clench of his fingers, at the tightening of his jaw and the bearing of his teeth. But the thickset soldier's horror has become fury. And he creeps away from his commander, hiding closer to the conflict...
While Khund himself leads the rest of the men - there are twenty in all, though five watch the place where the horses are hidden - in a wide, careful circle, higher onto the ridge; that they might gaze down and observe the main encampment of their terrible foe.
(Zengh): The drums have become an echoing, reverberating mockery of a pulse, a heartbeat which pumps no blood save for the illusionary gouts of which they are bathed in. Several of the barbarians have taken to dancing wildly, bone beans chinking and rattling as they, painted in powdery white and ebon-black to resemble living skeletons, step in synchronicity and lift their hands to the sky before the makeshift altar with a collective cry in some garbled, tribal tongue. As this happens, those who are not manning instruments or continuing with the droning chant strafe forward, forming an inner circle surrounding the horrid festivity. The priest has, by now, removed some of the internal organs of the larger body hanging from the scaffold. The half-cooked, still bleeding heart and liver now rest draped in his long fingered, long nailed hands.
Even as bile and other fluids stain his robe further, he strides about the inner circle, bidding each member to take a mouthful - others are consumed so that they may live to serve their god for another day.
({TheMarchofGoldenIron}): Fate has a cruel way of leading men astray. This soldier, Ajans, cannot tear his eyes from the sight, and the smell, of what takes place before him; his feet are drawn onward, and his hand to his short, Temurian composite bow. While his fellows circle higher, unaware he has left them, his trembling fingers nock an arrow to the string without looking; for he cannot look anywhere but at the spectacle of violence and desecration. While Khund Thenssen himself leads the scouting party to the ridge and stares down, over the encampment, judging its size and imagining that those other fires, those many fires, hold camps roughly the same in size...
Ajans, driven by a madness of just vengeance, draws the string and lifts the bow before his face. Now, he has forgotten his companions, forgotten the safety of his own life; forgotten their mission. He does not think of what will happen next; of what his action will spawn.
Every war begins with a single shot.
This one is loosed with a hiss toward the eye of the damned priest.
(Zengh): The barbarian warriors, one by one, receive their hunk of meat in an eerie but sickening, literal parallel to the Christian paradigm of the sacraments. One by one, as if wilting, those who do not sing or beat on percussion intstruments bow, ducking their heads down and settling their hands upon the ground as though beasts of the forest or something very, very much worse. The dancers, like starving, rabid dogs,
have begun to tear into the two smaller, twisted bundles of children on either side of the defiled woman's corpse. Ajans's bowstring is pulled taut. The earth itself seems to tremble, although that could simply be the song's accelerating, deepening rhythm vibrating the air and the ground like an earthquake. The Temurian looses his arrow, swift and just. The crows that had settled in the trees surrounding the camp explode forth in a flutter of feathery wings that darken the sky, eclipsing the remaining rays of the sun. A wet crack and a sudden halt to the tremoring drums signal the beginning of the end.
The priest stands stock-still for a moment, the wooden shaft fired upon him now jutting from betwixt his brows. It pierced through even his deerskull helm, and now the wound begins to weep. Of a sudden, he crumples into a boneless heap. The alarum has been sounded. The savages, outraged at the death of their holy man, quickly disperse for their weapons -- spears and stolen swords, caked with the grime of misuse, flash dully into the oncoming night.
({TheMarchofGoldenIron}): Up on the ridge, Khund's sharp ears catch something terribly amiss. His eyes narrow and his breath stills; his mind searches for what seems to be suddenly absent from the scene - he turns slowly, eyes widening. The drums have stopped. And one of his men is missing. "Sabi....ensid..." He turns to the other men with him and gives a sharp whisper, as they creep down to see what has caused it - and sight Ajans just before they hear him give a wild cry and draw his sword, readying to die honourably for his country. Khund gives a sharp intake of breath; his order is given and the men draw their bows - knowing now that the game is up.
The cry from Ajans' lips becomes a call to arms, and he braces himself for the onrushing enemy; though his companions curse his name beneath their breath, knowing nothing of the madness that had driven him to reveal them, if only to -end- that travesty and punish its instigators.