5.2 Borg

Location: The Dim Wood Forest
Timeline: Sixth Age, 46th Year, Late Fall

I watched Kaoz scamper out of Babel, so eager to put that fetid hole behind him, so convinced he was charting his own course. How perfectly pathetic. I had him right where I wanted him. The road north from Babel, through the vast plains of Kra, was a path I had so carefully crafted. You see, after the Derrka empire fell, I seeded that land with my little projects: myz outposts, mining communities, and a handful of my own… loyal followers. The perfect way to monitor my traveling experiment.

It had taken Kaoz most of autumn to reach the dark, gnarled expanse of Dim Wood Forest. After leaving the flat, loamy fields of Gor, the landscape of Kra became a maddening tapestry of thick, wind-swept wasteland of jagged, rocky hills. Kra was a rugged, unforgiving terrain that would have broken a lesser mortal, but for a myz, it was simply a more interesting challenge – yet Kaoz knew that the rocky wastelands would pale in comparison to The Dim Wood when he finally reached it.

Throughout Gor and Kra, Kaoz had stopped at the military checkpoints, those crude, squatting fortresses that dotted the landscape, or at the desolate mining communities of Kra where the Derrka slaves still scrabbled in the earth for scraps of iron. At each of these miserable little stopovers, Kaoz would talk with the myz knights who Overlord Keldar had stationed there. He would talk of his mission, of his progress, and he would send word back to his beloved Overlord, dutifully confirming his forward momentum.

One such stop was a particularly wretched mining community, nothing more than a few shacks huddled around a jagged scar in the earth. The air tasted of rust and desperation. The myz stationed here looked as weary as the landscape itself. Their armor was chipped, their eyes hollow, their massive bodies covered in a perpetual film of grime.

Kaoz found the knight in charge, a grizzled old veteran named Grol, hunched over a bowl of some foul-smelling stew. Grol’s face was a roadmap of past battles and hardships. He grunted a welcome, a sound that conveyed both respect for Kaoz’s reputation and a profound disinterest in anything that wasn’t food or sleep.

“Kaoz on Keldar mission,” Kaoz announced, his voice booming with a confidence that felt foreign in this place of quiet misery. “Kaoz go north.”

Grol‘s spoon paused halfway to his mouth. His good eye, a deep, weary black, flickered up to meet Kaoz’s. He slowly lowered the spoon back into the bowl.

“North?” he rasped, the words a sandpaper whisper. He shook his head. “No one goes north, brother. The Dim Wood would spell your doom.”

Kaoz’s massive shoulders straightened. “Kaoz go north. Kaoz duty.”

“You’re a myz of few words, eh?” Grol laughed. “Your duty will get you nothing but a cold grave in that forest.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial growl. “Listen to me, knight. My myz and I have seen things come out of that wood. Things that should not be.”

Kaoz scoffed. “Skulz? Demons? Kaoz not afraid.”

“Worse,” Grol said, his voice now a mere breath of sound. “Our own kind. Myz – but twisted. Their bodies…changed. Fused with wood, skin with rot, their minds gone. Led by the creature they call Borg.”

The name hung in the air, a sour, menacing word.

“Borg?” Kaoz demanded.

“Keldar’s enemy. Once his friend. Before your time. During the Last Great War they were a pair of Zar’s generals. Both wanted to be The Overlord. Keldar gained the throne and Borg was a myz on the run ever since. Every myz under Keldar here on the mainland has the same goal – find Borg. Many have sought him but none have ever returned.”

“Where?”

“Last I heard, Borg and his outlaws were stationed deep inside The Dim Wood, but can’t say they’re still there. A few years back, I stopped sending out scouts – got tired of losing all my myz.”

“That it?”

“Well. I’m not sure I believe it but, about a year ago we got a myz who claimed he’d escaped from Borg’s… cult.” Grol shuddered, and for a hardened warrior, that was a telling gesture. “Myz said Borg had only one eye and that was a crystal. That Borg… doesn’t just kill you. He takes you – makes you one of them. They called their camp Outpost 69. Told him he would serve Borg there. The Myz had to rip off his own arms to escape his chains.”

“Where no-arm myz now?” Kaoz was eager to talk with him.

“We killed him.” Grol looked hard at Kaoz. “He was an abomination. He scared my myz with his stories of Borg. He had to go.” Then he tried again, “Change your plans. Go around The Dim Wood. Don’t try to find Outpost 69. Go around – it’s better than becoming a part of Borg’s collection.”

Kaoz stood up, a massive, unyielding pillar of muscle and pride. He clapped a hand on Grol’s shoulder, a gesture that was meant to be reassuring but felt more like a brand of condescension.

“Kaoz have mission,” he stated, his voice a finality. “Monsters run from Kaoz – Borg too!”

And with that, he turned and strode out of the miserable little camp, leaving Grol to stare into his stew, his head shaking slowly in the face of such magnificent, self-serving arrogance.

Koaz moved North – vowing to find Outpost 69 and create his destiny.

---

Ah, the big fool. Kaoz believed himself to be so brave. He mistook a lack of imagination for courage. Kaoz saw only a rival to be defeated. He had no idea he was walking into a trap I had set for him.

The more he traveled north, the more Kaoz would feel… it – the subtle, constant <pull>, a silent whisper in the back of his mind. It was me, of course, a little nudge from the puppet master. He didn’t understand what it was, but he didn’t question it. The myz are driven by their singular, obsessive purpose. They are a one-track mind wrapped in a muscular, gray shell. This “pull” simply fed his resolve. It became his destiny, his sole motivation. He never dallied for long. He was always, always compelled to push forward.

When he finally reached the edge of the Dim Wood, a place the local derkka feared as the “Abode of Whispering Demons,” Kaoz didn’t hesitate. The humans who Kaoz captured in the area called it that because of the predators, of course. Not the beasts with claws and teeth, but the ones with two legs and a thirst for blood. But Kaoz, in his arrogance, was blind to the true danger. As always, fear was not an emotion he was capable of.

He entered the forest, the trees swallowing the last remnants of the afternoon sun. The deeper he ventured, the stronger the <pull>. It was no longer a whisper; it was a thrumming chord in his very soul. The road itself became lost in darkness, the ancient, twisted branches of the trees closing in on him like a cage. Yet he never wavered. Instead, a serene calm settled over him.

I was pleased. I had him.

As he walked, his thoughts began to clear. The simple, brutal mission given to him by Keldar started to seem… insufficient. This not Keldar’s mission, he mused, his mind a perfectly malleable sponge for my influence. This a test from the gods. The truth, or rather, my version of the truth, was dawning on him.

The Shaitan!

That moniker was what all the myz called me – it was their name for The God of Death, a powerful figure in their mythology second only to Zar (their name for Gwar). In their mythology The Shaitan was the evil scientist who helped Zar and Syn (their name for Inanna) create the Myz people. And while all Myz feared their ‘father’ Zar and lusted for their ‘mother’ Syn, all of them were mortally afraid of my Shaitan – for they believed (and rightly so) that I held the very power of creation and death in my hands.

As such, when Kaoz realized that The Shaitan was the source of his intense motivation – he dared not question my motives and he dared not delay.

If Kaoz succeed, The myz surmised, his mind playing out the string of thoughts I so carefully provided, it won’t be Keldar Kaoz serve but Death. And The Shaitan then help Kaoz take down Keldar! But first Kaoz must kill Borg!

Oh, the irony. The sheer, delightful irony. I had given him the ambition to betray the very Overlord he first sought to impress. He, a myz bred for unwavering loyalty, was now entertaining the most treacherous of thoughts.

With these grandiose, delicious ideas swirling in his head, I pulled Kaoz onward. He spent days tracking the rogue myz, following a trail of gnawed bones and the stench of decay, trying to find Outpost 69.

The path led him deep into the petrified heart of the Dim Wood, a place where the trees themselves were monuments to death, their gnarled branches reaching up to a sky they would never touch. He moved with the quiet grace of a creature of the night, his muscles coiled, his senses hyper-attuned. He was looking for a camp, a cluster of tents, maybe a signal fire, something to indicate

But even Kaoz had no idea that Borg’s Outpost was not a camp, but a scar. A festering wound upon the face of my flat earth, a place where reality itself had begun to rot.

He nearly walked past it a dozen times, so perfect was its camouflage. Outpost 69 wasn’t a structure built on the forest floor, but of it. The outpost was a living thing, a cancerous growth of dead, stone-like trees, its perimeter lined with the skeletal remains of men and beasts, their bones fused into the petrified wood itself. The air grew heavy, thick with the scent of unwashed flesh and the metallic tang of dried blood. The shadows themselves seemed to twist and writhe with a malevolent sentience.

As Kaoz finally saw it for what it was, a shiver of… well, not fear, but certainly of disgust ran through him. Outpost 69 was a monument to madness, a living horror show.

As Kaoz boldly invaded their camp, the myz that shambled out to meet him were not the clean-limbed, powerful creatures of my design. These were abominations. Their skin, once a mottled gray, was now covered in weeping pustules and patches of gnarled, bark-like growths. Their eyes, once a deep black, were now cloudy with a milky film of madness. Limbs were twisted at unnatural angles, and some of them had extra appendages, tumors of petrified flesh and bone that writhed with a life of their own. They were a testament to the fact that even my creatures, left to their own devices, could become… unpleasant.

But one of them stood apart from the rest, a hulking monument of flesh and fury. This was Borg.

Oh, Borg. He was a magnificent monster, a symphony of brutality and bad decisions. His body, even larger than Kaoz’s, was a patchwork of scars and crude, metallic additions. A rusted iron plate was fused to his chest, and from it jutted spikes of bone, sharpened to a needle point. His left eye was gone, replaced by a jagged crystal that glowed with an eerie, sickly light. He carried a weapon that was a grotesque reflection of his own nature: a club carved from a solid chunk of petrified wood, studded with the teeth of some long-extinct aquatic beast. It was a vicious, unrefined instrument of death, just like its wielder.

“I am Borg,” he rasped, his voice a low growl of static and fury. “And you are… mine.”

The battle began with a roar and a flurry of motion. The other myz, mindless as they were, rushed at Kaoz like a wave of putrid flesh. He tore through them with a terrible efficiency, a whirlwind of muscle and rage. He snapped a neck with one hand, gutted another with his claws, and used a third as a makeshift shield against a gout of black bile spat by a particularly grotesque specimen. These lesser creatures were nothing but a warm-up, an appetizer before the main course.

Then came Borg. The two titans met in a clash that shook the very forest floor. Borg’s crude club swung in wide, arcing blows, each one capable of crushing bone. Kaoz, however, was all precision and power. He avoided around Borg’s lumbering blows, a deadly ballet of evasion and attack. He landed a brute jab to Borg’s gut, but the iron plate on his chest turned the blow harmlessly aside.

“I am the God of this place!” Borg roared, his crystal eye glowing brighter. “And you are my sacrifice!”

Kaoz’s eyes narrowed. He was beginning to see that this was not a normal fight. Borg’s blows, while powerful, were wild and undisciplined. It was as if something else, some unseen power, was guiding him, making him stronger, more resilient. This was not a test of strength; it was a test of will.

The fight dragged on, a brutal, exhausting exchange. Kaoz took a blow to the shoulder that dislocated it with a sickening pop, but he fought on, ignoring the pain. He ducked under a wide swing of Borg’s club and drove his claws deep into the soft flesh of his opponent’s stomach, tearing through muscle and sinew. Borg grunted in pain, but the wound seemed to heal almost instantly, the putrid flesh knitting itself back together with a repulsive speed.

The realization dawned on Kaoz. This wasn’t a myz he was fighting; it was something like a ghost. A reanimated husk, controlled by something else. The fight wasn’t about winning, but about surviving long enough to figure out how to stop the unstoppable. He saw the crystal embedded in Borg’s eye. A source of power, an amulet, a focus for some dark magic. He would not defeat the body, but the magic within.

With a final, desperate burst of energy, Kaoz dodged a blow that would have caved in his skull and lunged forward. He ignored the gnashing club, the healing wounds, the endless blows. His entire focus was on that single glowing crystal. With a roar of pure, animal rage, he plunged his hand into Borg’s eye socket and tore the crystal from its setting.

The effect was instantaneous. Borg’s body went limp, his limbs twitching, the grotesque growths on his skin shriveling and turning to ash. The light in the crystal faded, and with a final, rattling gasp, the giant creature collapsed, a pile of dead flesh and bone. Kaoz stood over his defeated foe, his chest heaving, his body battered and bleeding, but victorious.

It was, of course, exactly what I wanted. It’s so amusing to watch them fight their way to victory, only to have that victory turn to ash in their mouths.

I materialized then, not as myself, of course. Mortals can’t handle my true form and live to tell about it. I came as the Shaitan, the whispering voice on the wind, the shadow that dances in the corner of your eye.

“A job well done, my champion,” I hissed, my voice a thousand voices all at once, a serpent’s whisper and a dragon’s roar. “You have proven yourself worthy.”

Kaoz looked up, his brow furrowed in confusion. “Who?”

I laughed, a dry, rattling sound that made the ground tremble. “I am your master. Your destiny. And now… your captor.”

I then raised my hands, and with a word, a single, elegant syllable of power, I cast the spell of immobilization. Kaoz’s body, already exhausted from the battle, went rigid. His muscles, moments ago a weapon of destruction, now felt like stone. He was trapped, a living statue, his eyes wide with a mix of shock and betrayal.

And then, I made a sound. A low whistle, like the cry of a bat on a moonless night. And from the shadows, they came. My little Derkka goblins, my slaves. They scurried from their hiding places, their tiny, hunched forms moving with a nervous energy. They carried nets and cords, ready to do my bidding.

“Pack him up,” I commanded, my voice dripping with satisfaction. “And take him to the Cauldron. My work with Kaoz is just beginning. The true test of his loyalty, and my power, awaits him there.”

The little goblins swarmed him, their tiny hands wrapping him in a net of enchanted rope. I watched them work, a small smile playing on my lips. It was a perfect ending. A hero’s victory, followed by a villain’s triumph.

I smiled. My plans were unfolding beautifully. My pawn would soon arrive, to be delivered safely to my doorstep by another of my pawns. Kaoz would soon be mine, body and soul. The torture, the lobotomy, the reprogramming—it was all waiting for him in my Life Labs. His mind, once a blank slate, would now be etched with a single, unshakeable loyalty. A loyalty to The Shaitan over all other gods – only he’d never know that my promises were all lies – at least not until it was too late.