3.5 The Supreme Overlord

Part III: The Plague
Chapter 5: Supreme Overlord
Location: Kagor
Timeline: Sixth Age of Substance, 46th Year, Spring

<RRRRRRRRRR-BOOM-BOom-Boom-boom…>

The skies over Kagor roiled black, clouds swirling in a staccato dance as thunder echoed off the jagged crags of the Kasteele Mountains, a sound like the war drums of an ancient god. The air was thick with the scent of ozone, a sharp tang that bit at the throat, while the barren landscape below shimmered with oppressive heat. <Ka-CRACK!> Heat lightning ripped through the sky, its searing tear illuminating the desolate terrain during yet another spring storm. Like most weather events on this forsaken island, this one brought no rain, and with nothing to cool the rising temperatures, the cracked, desert-like expanse received no relief. For most creatures on the flat earth, the harsh conditions of Kagor were nigh uninhabitable, a place where death awaited around every turn—or the closest thing the myz warriors had to a home, a cruel irony I’m grateful you’ll never have to experience firsthand.

At the base of the Kasteele Mountains, on the central eastern coast of Kagor, the weather was even more ferocious. Here, lightning strikes often touched ground, ripping gashes in the dusty carpet of the cracked landscape, leaving behind smoldering scars that glowed faintly in the darkness. The Kasteele Mountains had sprung violently into existence when the planet Terra was ruptured by the God of War, Gwar—whom the myz called Zar—bursting forth into your world at the direction of Baal-Zebub, a cataclysm that left the island’s jagged backbone as a testament to his destructive arrival. The mountains formed a semblance of a buffer against the turbulent waves of the Stormy Seas to the east, where the ocean ever revolted against the devastating memory of Zar’s entry, its churning waters making the shipping lanes unnavigable to all but the most skilled—or foolhardy—of sailors. The sea roared with a ceaseless fury, its waves crashing against the basalt cliffs with a sound like the screams of the damned, the spray mingling with the ash that perpetually dusted the air.

Beneath these dark clouds, there boldly stood a massive kastle, its walls unfazed by the elements of nature. Known by all as Zar’s Keep, it was a fortress of stark, unyielding strength, carved from the same black basalt stone that formed the island’s rugged spine. Devoid of architectural beauty, Zar’s Keep was nothing if not solid, a simple block-like structure that Gwar had proclaimed “impenetrable”—a claim I found laughable, though I’ll spare you my full critique of his lackluster design. The kastle was outfitted with countless iron bars and grates, their overdone presence a testament to Gwar’s desperation to impress, a moat of fire that flickered with a garish orange glow—an ostentatious cry for attention—and a 30-foot tall, 10-inch thick, double-walled steel entry gate that required three brutz to open, a feature that seemed more cumbersome than impressive. Yet for all its supposed glory, Zar’s Keep was not the home of that evil deity. Shortly after finishing it, Gwar had paid me a visit to boast of his accomplishment, but when he sensed my lack of impression and later witnessed the luxury I enjoyed at Nektar’s Cauldron, he complained that his home lacked the creature comforts mine had. He soon abandoned Zar’s Keep, building himself a new palace atop the highest peak of the tallest mountain on Kagor—an equally poor effort, if you ask me.

Instead, this kastle was now the abode of a mortal, and while he wasn’t as powerful as Gwar, for a short time in the history of your world, he was perhaps just as feared. Legends abounded throughout TerraVerde about the cruelty and ruthlessness of Keldar, mighty ruler of the myz, the first to claim the title of Supreme Overlord of the West. For decades, Lord Keldar had controlled Kagor, expanding the structure of The Keep from the small abode Zar had built into a sprawling fortress sufficient to house his royal guards—made up of other myz—and countless human slaves captured from Gor and Kra. As the Overlord’s span of power grew, so too did his advisory ranks, an ever-growing workforce with one singular function: to protect Keldar against the threat of rebellion and keep him on the throne. Revolt among the myz ranks was the central theme of their history on Kagor, a cycle of betrayal and bloodshed that Keldar himself had exploited to rise to power, making his precautions a necessity in this land of constant strife.

You may recall that I partnered with (read: used) my colleagues Gwar and Inanna to create the race of myz during the time of Hacktor Derkillez’ War of The Ghast. Though the myz worshipped Zar as their god—an insult I let stand to avoid hearing Gwar whine about it, since we both knew the truth—it was I who masterminded their anatomy, deliberately crafting them to be the most fearsome warriors on the planet. If united, none could withstand their onslaught in battle, for the myz spent their entire lives either in combat or preparing for it, making them quite literally killing machines. However, I may have dialed up their traits a bit too extremely—greed, excessive passion, and an inability to control their base emotions made them formidable in war but disastrous in diplomacy, leaving them completely feared yet utterly shunned by every other race on the flat earth. The myz were a paradox of my own design: unstoppable in battle, yet perpetually fractured by their own nature.

Keldar, of course, knew all this, which is why he not only surrounded himself with an army but also kept his person guarded at all times by a small group of Shock Troops—the best of the myz knights, hand-picked by the Supreme Overlord himself. Since he’d announced the position two decades past, gladiators from throughout Kagor had shown an eagerness to join Keldar’s special forces, many testing their skills at Zar’s legendary training grounds, The Killing Fields. On the hot, stony plains south of Zar’s Keep, where the air shimmered with heat and the ground was stained a deep crimson from the blood of countless combatants, Keldar would watch from a basalt throne carved with jagged runes, his piercing gaze assessing each warrior. If he thought a knight might be worthy, he commanded they be put to The Tests; if the soldier passed—or rather, survived—they were added to the elite guards. If not, they were unmercifully used as a sparring partner by the Shock Troops until they were eventually killed, their broken bodies tossed over the cliffs into the Stormy Seas, the waves swallowing them with a roar. The myz held no tolerance for failure on the battlefield, a brutal ethos instilled by Zar himself.

It was my rival Zar who had encouraged ‘his’ myz to combat one another to weed out the weak, a practice I must give him credit for—it was one of his better ideas. Zar had also established The Killing Fields, that wide black pit in the land where the blood of gladiator combatants had run freely for so long that the stony ground was now a permanent shade of crimson, a macabre testament to the myz’s relentless violence. It was Zar, too, who had goaded the strongest factions in myz society into constantly warring with each other, claiming he wanted a mighty ruler to emerge—a Supreme Overlord who could unite Kagor, Gor, and Kra under his reign, making the lands west of the Rhokkis unconquerable. I knew all about Zar nee Gwar’s plan, of course, but I never allowed it to happen—there was no way I would let anyone gain that much power so near my kingdom, and I may have played a role in some of the behind-the-scenes chaos, though those are tales we don’t have time for now.

Ever since the myz had migrated to Kagor after The War of the Ghast, various knights had strived to unite the island, yet few had succeeded. More often than not, two or three myz laid claim to the Overlord of Kagor title, eventually meeting at The Killing Fields to settle the score, their battles a spectacle of blood and fury under the storm-wracked skies. Though a single winner sometimes wrote his name in the history books, the reign of any myz king never lasted long—assassination and anarchy were the far more common rulers of Kagor. Of those who had managed to rule the island, none before Keldar had succeeded in holding any land on the mainland, a feat hindered by the myz’s own self-destructive tendencies. One of the main repercussions of their endless power struggles was that myz-on-myz violence killed more of their kind than anything else, a cycle of brutality that left their numbers perpetually diminished.

Compounding this was the myz’s limited ability to procreate. There were no female myz, so they could only reproduce, in a fashion, with human partners—typically slaves from Gor. Unfortunately, most human women didn’t survive a single encounter with a myz, the only form of sexual intercourse the myz knew being a violent act of rape, and only one in a hundred women ever became pregnant. Of those who did give birth, 100% died in childbirth, the brutality of a myz child’s emergence from the womb a gruesome explosion reminiscent of Zar’s violent ‘birth’ onto Terra. The offspring produced were not true myz but a watered-down version of the species—still stronger and more aggressive than other races on TerraVerde, but lacking the ‘It’ factor of a full-fledged myz knight, relegating them to the lowest ranks of myz culture. If you must know, there was only one way to produce a genuine myz—a genetic code I kept to myself, producing more only when I needed them, which hadn’t been often.

Yet Keldar’s reign had been different. Not only had he achieved complete dominance over Kagor, but he’d also secured a firm grip on the mainland—an expansion of power never accomplished before. Imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that all this had happened while I was in Illusia. The fact that Keldar now claimed rule over Gor, The Dim Wood Forest, and even Kra—lands right outside my doorstep—was not something I appreciated, and I planned to do something about it when the time was right. I’ll admit, I broke a few things (and a few heads) when I first heard about it, the rage coursing through me like the hellfire that sustained me, but after I calmed down, I vowed to file the insult away and find a way to use it to my advantage until the time for payback was right.

So why did Lord Keldar succeed where his predecessors had failed? And more importantly, why am I spending so much time telling you about him? Like I always say, everyone has a role to perform in the Great Play of Life, and since I was the director of that masterpiece on your planet, it just so happened that I had a role that urgently needed to be filled—and Overlord Keldar seemed to be just the chap for the job. Even though I had my hands full with many projects, the challenge of cracking the nut that was Keldar excited me too much to pass up, especially because I really did need someone like him for my most important project: retrieving The Grim.

I’ll admit I’d never heard of Keldar until recently, having been stuck in Illusia for most of the past century, so everything I learned about him was second-hand intelligence. According to my spies, Keldar had seized the myz throne shortly after Gwar’s Last Great War—a failed military venture initiated by Gwar in my absence, which you’ll learn more about later. It seems that, although Gwar had brought his myz to the battlefields in The Stax and Pennal, for whatever reason, he never allowed them to engage in battle, leaving the dirty work to the Derkka armies. As a result, when the war ended, during the long journey back to Kagor, Keldar—a relative unknown—recognized an opportunity and created a movement. With Gwar gone to Ur, Keldar secretly rallied supporters to his cause, using the lengthy passage home to eliminate most of his rivals. By the time they arrived back in Kagor, no other faction was powerful enough to withstand the dominance of Keldar’s crew. Within three years after the end of The Last Great War, Keldar had laid claim to the title of Overlord of Kagor and occupied Zar’s Keep, his banner—a crimson skull on a black field—flying high above the fortress, a grim symbol of his reign.

With the blood of his brethren on his hands, Keldar’s thirst for power only grew. Don’t get me wrong—he murdered a lot of myz; anyone he suspected of less than total allegiance was decapitated by the Supreme Overlord himself, their heads stuck on poles and shoved into the grounds surrounding The Killing Fields, adding to the macabre ambiance of that crimson-stained pit. But what struck me as unique about Keldar was that he didn’t just murder everyone—he used people, and that’s what intrigued me about him. He used them in ways that both accomplished his goals and eliminated them as rivals. Early in his reign, he sent his most hungry—and thus most threatening—myz to the lands across the Stormy Seas, commanding them to establish smaller fiefdoms for themselves under his rule. Of note, Keldar required each myz to establish his own kingdom without help from another myz, a rule that prevented his potential rivals from joining ranks, at least overtly. This also forced each myz to recruit—or rather, enslave—their own army of humans from Gor, the lands occupied by the peoples of the Derk clans. Recall that Gor was that “land flowing with milk and honey” promised to Kane and his sons Derk and Drok by the false god Baal, settled by the Derk nearly a millennium past. The Derk clans had previously enslaved the Drokka, an event that led to the hatred between their groups and later to Hacktor Derkillez’ War of The Ghast, making it bitterly ironic that the Derkka were now becoming slaves themselves. Karma is a harsh mistress, after all.

Keldar required that these myz succeed in their quest or perish in the attempt, a motivation that proved effective. Despite their small numbers, Keldar’s myz and the human slave armies they built conquered all the lands west of the Rhokkis in short order, their banners casting long shadows over the conquered territories, the cries of the enslaved echoing across the mainland. My spies also reported that Keldar had developed his own intelligence network—the first person besides myself and Inanna to do so. It was fairly effective, though its effectiveness relied more on the threat of fear than the subtle methods my spies employed. Since torture has historically never been the most reliable way of extracting truly accurate information, I knew Keldar’s spies had a long way to go, and I could easily ‘feed’ them information from various sources whenever I needed to. The sole focus of Keldar’s covert operations was to report on potential threats to his throne, a rather pedestrian goal in my eyes. If any report showed a potential threat—such as a myz coordinating efforts with another—Keldar had the ruler brought back to Kagor in chains, where he would personally execute them, their blood staining the basalt floors of Zar’s Keep, their screams a warning to others.

Keldar’s expansion strategy, paired with his intelligence network, worked. It not only gave him an outlet to exile potential detractors to a life of minor power and solitary existence but also kept them under the watchful eye of his spies. Thus, Keldar became the first myz to reign on the mainland, taking the title of Supreme Overlord of The West just five years prior to my return from Illusia, a feat that fulfilled Gwar’s vision—a fact I found downright sickening. It gave him the power of life or death over all the peoples west of the Rhokkii Mountains, a dominion that cast a shadow perilously close to my own.

Though I didn’t necessarily like seeing a mortal wield so much power, especially so near my home, I knew a beautiful plan when I saw one. When my spies detailed all this to me, I realized Keldar was a rather exceptional myz—someone I could use as my pawn if I had him on my side. It was now time to see just how intelligent Overlord Keldar really was. Given all his success, given his far-reaching reign, would he be foolish enough to think his might could compare with mine? In short, would Keldar do my bidding if I called upon him?

The storm outside raged on, its lightning casting jagged shadows across Zar’s Keep, as I contemplated my next move, the air crackling with the promise of a new, dangerous game and I couldn’t wait to play!