Location: The Stax
Timeline: Sixth Age, 47th Year, Spring
Ah, the spring of ’47. A time of rebirth, of new beginnings. For me, it was a time of glorious new plans, a time when my ‘upgraded’ version of Kaoz was finally let loose upon the world. After my… revisions… at The Cauldron, I was supremely confident that the myz wouldn’t stray from the path I had so meticulously laid out for him. I had other projects to attend to, of course, other brilliant schemes to set in motion, but a part of my mind, my most favorite part, was always watching my creations.
For a time I used The Eye of Seraphiel to observe Kaoz as he journeyed. Although I’d let him ‘escape’ The Cauldron, his journey to Akka wasn’t going to be easy. The most direct route would have been for Kaoz to traverse due East through the Northern Wastes – but even at this time of year, that frozen Tundra would have been so difficult, and the travel so slow, that I directed Kaoz to first go south before turning East.
The initial path I’d laid out for him meant Kaoz to get through the foothills of the rugged highlands along the south eastern border of my lands.
The terrain was challenging for most travelers—with the earth broken and jagged, full of sudden dry gulches, narrow ravines, and rocky bluffs—yet for a myz it was child’s play and Kaoz, in his newly-forged form, moved through it with a kind of grim, perfect grace. Crisp breezes, stubborn holdovers of winter, rolled over the hilly wolds of this area, carrying the scent of pine and stone, and Kaoz moved quickly.
He traveled alone, a solitary figure in a vast, empty landscape. No companion, no faithful nitemare to ride. He was neither lonely nor discouraged at his fate. Instead, as was inherent in the nature of the myz, his coldly calculating mind was focused on but one thing: complete the task he had been given… or die trying. His loyalty was no longer a question of choice; it was a matter of fact. A beautiful, brutal fact.
And so it was that, as the moon’s ghastly face cast its pale light over all below; but for the wind, the crackle of an occasional twig, or the shifting of loose rocks, all was silent. All except the heavy breaths of Kaoz as he slept among the sparse woods at the base of a granite hillock. With a rucksack under his head, the myz passed yet another night on his endless journey to the east.
Suddenly, a violent burst within his brain forced him awake.
Kaoz is FREE! the myz’s mind throbbed, a familiar, self-deluding mantra. Although I’d released him from The Cauldron more than a month ago, Kaoz continued to savor his freedom, often reassuring himself that it was the truth.
You shouldn’t be surprised that Kaoz questioned reality; he had, after all, spent a number of months under my ‘care.’ It was during that time that Kaoz not only regularly questioned whether he’d see the light of day again, but more importantly it was then that I’d ‘revised’ the mission Lord Keldar had given him on Kagor. Most importantly, it was then that I’d also helped Kaoz to recognize who his one and only god should be: in this case, that old favorite made-up deity, Baal.
The tortures my Baal persona imposed on Kaoz left the myz scarred. Not just physically, but deep within his psyche. They were scars which I — acting as The Shaitan who was his savior – then pretended to help Kaoz recover from. And to keep a buffer between my true self and my secret plans, I also reminded him that The Shaitan was himself a servant to Baal. Since my Shaitan character whose appearance merely featured my scary-but-not-so-scary Grim Reaper attire, I knew I looked so much less imposing than my Baal persona, therefore I knew Kaoz — whose mind foolishly believed strength always meant power – easily accepted the Shaitan-as-Savior ruse.
It was my Shaitan who had also provided the myz with two tools to aid his journey – extensions of his will and my power. The first was a new broadsword to replace the one he lost at Outpost 69 when my goblins failed to pack it up with his body when they transported his magically inert form to The Cauldron. But that mattered not, for his old sword was a crude instrument anyway – it paled in comparison to the one I gifted him: a magnificent, perfectly balanced broadsword of black-as-night steel. It was heavy, powerful, and its edge honed with a razor’s sharpness that never dulled. I’d also had infused it with a minor magical element, a whisper of power that gave it a faint, almost imperceptible red glow – this was not for show, you see, but instead was a tool of purification – healing the warrior’s wounds upon contact.
His second tool was a dagger, sleek and wicked, crafted from a shard of obsidian my slaves had mined from the heart of a my volcano. Its magic was even more subtle – one that hummed with a cold, hungry energy, a fitting companion for a creature of death like Kaoz.
Now awake, the myz pulled out his dagger and tried to calm himself. Kaoz IS free. Shaitan save Kaoz. Kaoz complete Baal’s mission… and make others feel pain too.As he waited for the sun to rise, the myz not only vowed to retrieve The Grim from Akka, but also looked forward to the opportunity to get his hands on the humans in Orkney, thinking of all the ways he planned to murder the men and defile their women.
After coming out of the foothills, Kaoz next had to make his way through the Uxix Bogs – overflowing at this time of year and no easy task.
What’s that? You don’t know about The Bogs?
Tucked away like a festering boil between the southeastern foothills of the Cauldron and the more renowned horror of the Stax, the Uxix Bogs were a testament to the fact that even a backwater can hold its own special brand of evil. It was a place that most would avoid without a thought, but it held a lesson I wanted Kaoz to learn and thus I’d commanded him to take a route through them.
When he first entered Uxix, Kaoz only saw a swamp. He smelt the stagnant water and saw the thick, green scum on its surface, but wasn’t worried. He’d been in worse conditions in his life. Almost immediately though, he heard the chirping of insects and the croaking of frogs, but again, brushed off these sounds and naught but nuisances.
What Kaoz didn’t realize was that the evil of the Uxix Bogs wasn’t a loud, screaming terror (that would come later in The Stax). Instead the Uxix was a quiet, insidious evil. The kind of place that killed with a gentle, suffocating touch. Kaoz didn’t understand that the air was deceptively cool, but it carried a creeping paralysis that threatened to numb his muscles and dull the mind. The ground, a thick, peat-like muck, quickly began to pull at the feet of the giant myz. It became a chore just to move forward and that first day of his journey felt like a week by the end – a constant, slow effort draining the strength from his body.
Good thing, no monsters. Kaoz grumbled as he trudged along in a false sense of security.
Poor Kaoz – he was correct that there were no grand monsters here, no hulking brutes waiting to charge him, but he didn’t know that the monsters of the Uxix Bogs were small, numerous, and far more cunning. He quickly discovered his mistake.
His first challenge – the Swamp Ticks. Not the simple parasites you mortals know today. No, these were my own little creations. Tiny, fist-sized things, with carapaces as hard as stone and barbed legs that could pierce even the toughest hides – including a myz. They traveled in swarms, a low, buzzing cloud that could descend without warning. They were attracted by body heat and the smell of fear.
“Arg!” Kaoz tried to ward off a swarm that came for him, yet he was forced to endure more than thousand tiny bites, a thousand pinpricks of agony. The memory of it still brings a smile to my face. The image of him, the great warrior, swatting at a cloud of buzzing parasites, his face a mask of frustration and growing fatigue. His broadsword, of course, was useless against this tiny menace. And his bare hands weren’t working much either. The mighty warrior nearly felt his strength ebbing away, his muscles failing. He might well have sunk slowly into the bog, a final meal for the mire – but then he remembered the dagger I gave him when I released him from The Cauldron.
“Shaitan’s Magic.” Kaoz pulled out the smaller blade – and saved his life.
Although the myz didn’t remember the specific magic I’d infused it, that didn’t matter. For the dagger carried a spell called <The Scent of the Grave>. Although it didn’t affect the bearer of the blade, to enemies – even small creatures of the bog, it was effective. Ticks were parasites that hunted by scent and heat, yet the dagger mimicked the smell of ancient death—a scent so profound and so final that the Swamp Ticks, driven by their instinct to feed, were utterly repelled by it. Immediately, my magic created a small, mobile bubble of safety around Kaoz, rendering him invisible to the ticks’ senses and forcing them to keep their distance.
So, you see, the dagger I gave Kaoz was not a weapon for killing so much as it was a tool for preservation. I knew he’d face the ticks in the bogs but I had no interest in seeing Kaoz exhausted by a thousand tiny, insignificant foes. I wanted him to save his strength for the grander challenges ahead – but I wanted him to figure things on his own – which he did.
As he made camp later that night on a small patch of somewhat dry ground, and was pulling out the ticks from his skin with his new favorite dagger, Kaoz’ next challenge appeared – The Glimmer-Worms. They looked like simple earthworms, but they glowed with a soft, ethereal light. Kaoz was strangely mesmerized by them – and he was hungry. He didn’t realize the worms’ glow was a trap, a beckoning beacon in the gloom. To the unwary traveler, the Glimmer-Worms would lead them towards a barely visible path and into the deepest parts of the bog, where the peat was a quicksand, and the end was a slow, silent surrender to the mud.
“Kaoz eat.” The myz rose up and began to walk towards the glowing worms, but within a few feet he realized his mistake – for he’d sunk up to his knees in the foul bog. Yet the glimmer worms glowed brighter, looked juicier, enticing him more forcefully. But Kaoz resisted.
“Kaoz not hungry.” The myz refocused his mind and after a struggle made it back to his high and dry camp. He’d passed another test.
There were a few more tests the next day, other nuisances in The Uxix, but Kaoz passed these challenges too. He proved to be a good student. He learned that not every challenge was test of brute force. Sometimes, the most dangerous enemy was the one you underestimated. Kaoz was a myz of power and up to this point in his young life, he’d relied on that to overcome his enemies, but the Uxix Bogs demanded a different kind of strength. The Bogs were a crucible for humility. And they also prepared him for the horrors of the Stax, a taste of the exhaustion and creeping dread that would soon become his constant companion.
It was The Stax that almost did Kaoz in.
The Stax was more than just a place; it was a disease. A festering wound upon the world that ached with the memory of a million deaths. To enter its borders was to surrender to despair. Yet the path I’d given him had driven him from The Uxix towards the northeast corner of The Stax. [Even I wasn’t foolish enough to make Kaoz try to cross the entirety of The Stax – no mortal could achieve that feat — but I did want to test Kaoz’ mettle by making him traverse a small potion of this nightmare as he began to make his way East towards Akka].
When he arrived, Kaoz felt the air hang thick and heavy, not with mist, but with the cloying, sweet stench of rotting meat and stagnant water. It clung to his skin, seeped into his lungs, and settled in the very marrow of his bones. A perpetual, sickly-green fog blanketed the ground around him, hiding the countless horrors that lay just beneath the surface. The trees, ancient and skeletal, were not rooted in soil but in a soft, squelching muck, their branches, devoid of leaves, twisted into grotesque, gnarled talons, as if reaching down to snatch at the myz
For a god like me, a being of death and decay, it was a magnificent place. For a myz, a mortal warrior of flesh and bone, The Stax became a living hell.
Yet Kaoz strode into that desolate swamp with the grim determination of a myz who had nothing to lose. My… interrogation had stripped away his arrogance and replaced it with a cold, focused resolve. He no longer walked with a swagger; he moved like a predator in a rival’s hunting ground. Every squelch of his boot in the mire was a betrayal, a sound that seemed to announce his presence to every dark corner of that putrid realm.
Naturally they heard him.
The Skulz – The Morati – were creatures of a beautiful, wretched simplicity. They were the walking dead, the half-humanoid spawn of an unholy union between captured Amorosi elves and the goddess Inanna herself, whom I… encouraged to breed with during the time of The Hidden Histories. The Skulz only desire, their only instinct, was to feed. They did not think, they did not reason, they simply craved flesh. Ages ago, I’d even blessed them with a new ability: they could infect their victims with the same internal disease that kept them half-dead, which meant they could make more of their wretched kind.
And in the Stax, the Skulz were everywhere. Most of them were in a state of hibernation, lying half-buried in the muck, their forms indistinguishable from the rotting logs and discarded carcasses that littered the bog. They were waiting.
The first one came for him on his first night. Kaoz, driven by the relentless ticking clock I had placed in his mind, pushed on until the light began to fade. He found a small mound of earth that promised some stability and was about to settle down when he saw it – a hand, pale and skeletal, rose from the muck just beside a fallen tree trunk. Its fingers twitched, and then, with a wet, sucking sound, the Skulz pulled itself free. The zombie was a ghastly sight, its skin stretched taut over a gaunt frame, its eyes milky and vacant. It was a male, its face still bearing the faint, handsome features of the Amorosi, now twisted into a perpetual rictus of hunger. It moved with an unnatural jerkiness, its limbs twitching and snapping as it lumbered towards him.
Kaoz, his senses on a razor’s edge, did not hesitate. The zombie let out a dry, rattling hiss and lunged. My myz met it not with his fist, but with the broadsword I’d given him. The faint red glow of its blade flared as it cleaved the creature’s head from its shoulders. The weapon’s magic did not merely cut; it seared the necrotic flesh, cauterizing the wound with a sickening sizzle.
Yet even though the severed head fell, the Skulz body did not.
“How?” Kaoz wondered. Yet he had little time to ponder that mystery for the headless creature kept coming, its fingers outstretched, seeking Kaoz’ flesh. The myz’s skin, which I had made harder than a human’s to penetrate, was his primary defense, but the risk of infection was a constant terror. He had to be quick. He swung the broadsword again, a horizontal arc that sliced the zombie’s torso in half.
The pieces, still twitching, finally fell, defeated by the lack of a core. The victory was hollow. Kaoz’ guessed that he had not killed it, merely disabled it. He feared the Skulz hunger would not fade, only await a chance to rise again. [And he was right – had Kaoz waited around, the zombie’s body would have eventually put itself back together. In fact, the only way to completely destroy the ‘life’ of my walking dead was to burn their bones].
Kaoz moved on – sleep would have to wait – his first mission was just to stay alive.
The first night became the second, and the second became the third. The constant, gnawing anxiety was a torment far worse than any physical pain. The Skulz came in twos, then in threes, rising from the fog like malevolent phantoms. He fought them with his broadsword, the magical weapon doing its work. The blade tore through their fragile forms with ease, its heat making their flesh boil and writhe. On occasion, he would use the dagger, a quiet, effective tool. He would use it to sever a tendon, to paralyze a limb, a precise cut that didn’t waste energy and bought him time to get away.
And there were other things that came for him too. The Skulz were merely the most numerous of the Stax’s nightmares. On the fourth night, as he was resting against a petrified tree, Kaoz’ eyes gritty from exhaustion, a new sound came to him. A low, wet hiss that was not human. It came from the shadows. A creature, half-serpent, half-lizard, with a gaping maw filled with razor-sharp teeth. It was a Slith, a bottom-feeder of the Stax, and over the centuries the reptile had become a hunter of the walking dead – and anything else it could sink its teeth into. Its eyes, luminous and predatory, soon fixed on Kaoz.
That was a different kind of fight. The Slith was not a mindless, shambling horror. It was a creature of cunning and speed. It darted forward, its serpentine body weaving through the gloom. Kaoz met its charge, his broadsword ready. He dodged a snap of its jaws and grappled with its scaly hide. Its skin was tougher than the Skulz, and its muscles coiled with a powerful, living strength. He took a bite on the arm, a glancing blow, but the teeth tore at his myz skin, leaving a deep gash. Kaoz let out a roar of fury, a sound that was pure, unadulterated rage, and brought the broadsword down on the creature’s neck. The blade sliced through the tough hide, killing the Slith.
“Heal!” Kaoz’ quickly used the magic of his sword to cauterized his own wound.
Then he knew had to move again for Kaoz’ feared the scent of all that blood would attract more monsters. Again, he fought the urge to rest, to close his eyes for just a moment – for he knew that sleep in the Stax was a death sentence.
The myz, for all his brutish simplicity, was magnificent. He was a creature of my making, and he was proving his worth. He soon learned to use the very horrors of the Stax against themselves. When a large pack of Skulz surrounded him, their numbers overwhelming, he led them in a chase. He ran, luring them, until they ran headlong into a nest of Sliths. The ensuing carnage, a battle between a mindless hunger and a predatory cunning, was a sight to behold. It gave him just enough time to slip away, to continue his harrowing journey.
Night after night, the cycle repeated.
Fight, run, endure.
The hunger in his stomach was a dull ache, but the hunger in the Skulz was a physical presence, an audible gnawing that followed him wherever he went. He learned to recognize their hiss, their shambling gait. He learned to feel their presence in the sudden, eerie silence. He was, in a way, becoming one of them.
A hunter in a land of the dead.
After untold nights like this, I could feel his exhaustion, his desperation. I could feel the thin thread of his sanity beginning to fray. But it did not snap. The fear of failure, the memory of his punishment, the drive to prove himself worthy of a second chance… it was all I had hoped for.
On the tenth day, he finally saw it. The far northeastern bank of the Stax. The light, a sickly yellow at first, began to brighten into a golden hope. Kaoz’ pushed on, his body a symphony of pain and fatigue, every muscle screaming in protest. The air, though still foul, was lighter. The silence was less oppressive. The Skulz’s hisses were suddenly a distant memory. He had done it. He had passed through the gate of my hell and emerged on the other side.
He stumbled onto solid ground, a gasp of pure relief escaping his lips. His clothes were in tatters, his body covered in bruises and countless scrapes, but his skin, that resilient creation of mine, was unbroken. No bite had pierced his flesh. No infection had taken hold. He was exhausted, but he was whole.
I watched him from my sanctuary, a small smile playing on my lips. My masterpiece. He had endured. He had proven his worth. The trials of the Cauldron had tempered him. The horrors of the Uxix and Stax had forged him into something more than a warrior. He was now a survivor. A creature of will and endurance.
And now, the real work could begin. I had given him a future to fight for, but it was a future that served my will. I had tested him, and he had passed. He had no idea that I was simply raising him for a greater purpose. And I couldn’t wait for him to get started.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 