Location: The Northern Passage
Timeline: Sixth Age, 52nd Year, Autumn to Winter
The journey from the smoldering ruins of Monthaven to the frozen iron gates of Fubar was a trek through despair. It’s one thing to suffer a sudden, violent tragedy; it’s quite another to endure the slow, grinding erosion of the soul that comes with being a captive to a Myz. Remember Kaoz wasn’t not a common soldier; he was a connoisseur of the macabre – exactly as I’d created him to be. As I write this chapter now in my Apocrypha, I took a voyeuristic pleasure in the cruelty of Kaoz’s work. My minion didn’t just want to deliver his prisoners to King Diked, he wanted to make them suffer first. It would have been a beautiful story to write – had it not been for the unexpected interference of another god along the way.
The Macabre Jailor
The fires of the Finch Estate licked up, turning the night into a blurred, orange hell, as Kaoz led his warhorse away from the devastation. Across the back of his massive mount, he’d draped his two prisoners like common sacks of grain. Lynsy was conscious but limp, her mind reeling as she stared back at her world being engulfed flames. Her maid Tiffania hung beside her, her head lolling with every heavy step of the horse; her body broken when she dared to strike the giant with a brass candlestick as she’d tried to defend her mistress. Lynsy heard Tiffania’s breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches, and gagged at the smell of her maid’s blood mingling with the horse’s sweat.
The myz quickly reached the barn—one of the few structures he had spared in his earlier assault. With a brutal lack of ceremony, Kaoz hauled the women from the saddle, dropping them into the muck of one of the pens – a mutilated horse against the far wall. Tiffania let out a muffled groan of agony as her bruised ribs met the hard earth and the side of the bloody carcass, but at least she was alive.
“Stay,” Kaoz commanded, his voice making the rafters tremble.
Lynsy scrambled to her knees, her white silk nightgown now a rag of soot, mud, and blood. She knelt protectively in front of Tiffania. “She can’t! You’ve hurt her… please, she needs Doc Ben!”
Kaoz’s answer was a mirthless snarl. After locking the pen, he turned toward the back of the barn and hauled out a heavy, iron-rimmed grain wagon. It was a sturdy but ugly thing, built to endure the rock-strewn passes of the north. From a wooden peg, he snatched a mass of heavy, rusted chains—lengths of iron usually reserved for anchoring the stable’s heavy winch.
After hitching the cart to his own horse, the myz retrieved the girls from the stable – he seized Lynsy by the arm, his grip like a stone vice, and threw her into the wagon bed. Moments later he threw the unconscious Tiffania in as well.
“Please!” Lynsy’s voice finally broke through the stupor of her terror. “My father… let me go to him! He’s still inside!”
“Ashes,” the Myz rumbled as he hoisted up chains and a hammer. “Fubar owns you now.”
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The sound of Kaoz’s hammer and chains securing them to the cart was the final punctuation of the girls life as free women. Working with a grim, practiced speed, the Myz looped the cold iron around their ankles, using heavy pins to secure them to the floor of the wagon.
“Diked waits.” The giant snarled as he left to mount his horse.
Moments later the wagon began to move, the sudden movement sending a jolt of pain through their tethered limbs. Tiffania, her body purpled by the Myz’s earlier assault was shivering and weeping in the corner of the wagon bed. Lynsy rushed to her side. The rich maiden, a girl who had never known a day of labor, whose soft hands had only ever touched fine linens—now found herself crawling across the splintered wood to her servant’s side. With a trembling jaw and fingers that bled from the rough wood of the cart, Lynsy began to tear the fine silk from her own sleeves. She used the expensive fabric to bind the gash on Tiffania’s head, whispering desperate, frantic prayers into the girl’s ear.
“Shh, Tiff… I’m here. We’re together,” Lynsy choked out, her voice a fragile thread as the wagon began to roll over the estate grounds.
Behind them, the home she had known her entire life was now a pillar of black smoke. Ahead, the dark road was unknown – but Lynsy knew it carried nothing good.
Days later, as the wagon creaked towards the border of the northern Pennal region, it began to leave the warmth of civilization behind for a landscape that seemed to be dying in sympathy with the prisoners. The late autumn countryside was a skeletal waste of grey and brown; the trees, stripped of their leaves by the Great Gale, stood like charred ribs against a bruised sky. The wind didn’t just blow; it shrieked through the gaps in the wagon’s slats, carrying the smell of wet earth and woodland rot.
As Lynsy feared, the journey north was a descent into a waking nightmare, a slow-motion parade of horror where time was measured only by the rattling of chains and the screams of Koaz’s many victims. The Myz was an angry, silent jailor who treated his captives with less regard than his warhorse pulling the cart. But it was his “leisure” that truly haunted them.
Kaoz took a savage, artistic pleasure in the evil of the road. The Pennal highway, usually a vein of trade, became a trap for the unwary. Every traveler they crossed—be it a lonely peddler trying to beat the winter, a family traveling in another wagon, or a stray hunter—all met a fate that defied the mercy of death. For Kaoz did not just kill; he disassembled his victims like a butcher.
To the visceral horror of the girls, he would return to the wagon not just with stolen supplies, but wearing the grisly trophies of his sport. One afternoon, after a brief, screaming silence in the woods, he climbed back onto the driver’s bench wearing a cap fashioned from a victim’s scalp, the hair still matted with fresh gore. Another time, he draped a necklace of human ears around his thick, dusky neck, leaning back to ensure the girls saw every jagged edge. He did it simply to watch the light of sanity flicker and die in Lynsy’s eyes – for the maid was becoming of special ‘interest’ to him.
At night, the horror took on a more intimate, suffocating shape. By the heat of a guttering fire that cast long, monstrous shadows against the trees, Kaoz would cook. The acrid, sweet-heavy scent of roasting flesh filled the wagon, making Lynsy and Tiffania gag until they dry-heaved.
“Eat,” Kaoz rasped, holding out a charred, unrecognizable morsel on the tip of his dagger.
The first time this happened, driven by a hollow, hungry agony in their bellies, the girls had accepted the charred meat Kaoz offered. They had wept with a brief, shameful relief as they swallowed—until Tiffania’s fingers brushed a small, silver ring still embedded in the gristle of a joint. The realization of what they were eating hit them like a physical blow. The wagon was quickly filled with the sound of their violent retching, their bodies trying to purge the desecration.
After that night, both women refused the giant’s “offerings” – although Kaoz continued to enjoy taunting them with his meals. Yet the monster soon discovered that his victims’ hunger was causing them to waste away and that was a problem. He knew he had to deliver Lynsy alive, so begrudgingly, he eventually began to toss them them the meager supplies he stripped from his victims: a heel of stale, moldy bread, a handful of dried apples, a skin of soured wine. But he only ever gave enough for one.
Lynsy, the girl who had once sent back plates of pheasant if the sauce was too rich, now used her teeth to tear a moldy crust into two equal halves. She fed Tiffania first, her fingers trembling.
“Mannah, Son of Light… Meree, Mother of Mercy… look down upon us,” Lynsy whispered in their stinking prison, her voice a dry crackle. She clutched the silver locket of Emcorae until the metal bit into her palm. “Please… Emcorae… find me. Find us.”
But then as she looked at the massive back of their jailor, a darker thought poisoned her prayer. Even if you found me, Em… what could you do? She had seen Kaoz walk through fire; she had seen him snap iron like dry wood. She had seen him kill countless strong men and guards. What could her young lover do against such a mountain of hate?
At night, the air became thick with a different kind of tension. Kaoz would sit by the fire, his black-void eyes fixed on Lynsy with a lecherous intensity that felt like a crawling hand upon her skin. Lynsy knew it wasn’t the look of a guardian, but instead the leer of a predator. It was the silent promise of a darkness even deeper than the Fubar dungeons. Tiffania saw it too and despite her broken ribs, the maid would try to pull Lynsy behind her – but the chains were short, and the Myz’s gaze was inescapable.
King’s prize, Kaoz thought as his eyes roamed Lynsy’s body. Soft. Sweet. Diked weak. Lynsy Kaoz’ vessel. His pent up frustrations soon became a physical heat. To keep himself from claiming the maiden right there in the mud of the road, the Myz would rise and stalk into the darkness of the woods. Often, the girls would hear a distant, muffled scream, the sound of breaking bone, or worst of all the terrified cries of an unfortunate woman being abused—the latter a surrogate for the pleasures Kaoz wanted take from Diked’s fiance. When the Myz returned, drenched in fresh blood but with somewhat satisfied heaves, his hunger for Lynsy was thankfully, but only temporarily, buried under a layer of gore.
“He’s looking at me again, Tiff,” Lynsy whimpered one night, huddled under a blood-stained fur. “He looks at me like… like I’m…his.”
“Don’t look, Mistress,” Tiffania whispered, her voice weak but recovering. “Close your eyes. Imagine the green trees of Arbola. Imagine Emcorae. He’s coming for us. We’ll all be together again soon.
But the green felt like a dream from another life. Here, there was only the grey skin of the Myz, the smell of smoke and death, and the terrifying, escalating weight of Kaoz’s gaze—a promise of a violation that was merely a matter of time. The road to Fubar was not just a path; it was a slow stripping away of the girls’ humanity, leaving them as nothing more than prey in the hands of a monster who was losing his own personal battle of will – would they reach Fubar first or would Kaoz take his prize?
The Visitation of the Lust-Queen
They’d passed into Orkeny’s southern march. One evening, the wagon rattled into a clearing of dead pines, their skeletal branches clawing at a sky where the moon hung like a jagged shard of ice. The world here felt thin, a place of freezing shadows and silence so profound it seemed to hum.
Inside the wagon, amidst the scent of unwashed bodies, moldy hay, and the tang of the cold metal chains, the girls languished – their hopes nearly gone. After Kaoz had cooked his macabre meal, he again began looking at Lynsy in the cart. As the moon rose high over the flat earth, the monster’s gaze fixed on Emcorae’s lover with a singular, terrifying focus. At last, a decision made in his mind, Kaoz rose from the fire and move towards the wagon.
reached for the hem of her soiled silk nightgown.
“Diked not here,” Kaoz’ voice a guttural rasp that made the girls’ blood turn to ice as he reached a meaty paw into the cart, grasping for the hem of Lynsy’s soiled gown. “Kaoz take.”
Lynsy tried backing into the corner of the cart, the rusted iron of her shackles clashing against the wood, her eyes wide with a realization more horrific than death. She clutched her silver locket, her lips moving in a silent, frantic prayer to Meree, the Mother of Mercy. Tiffania tried to lunge forward, but a quick backhanded strike from the Myz sent her reeling into the dirty hay.
Yet just as the giant’s hand closed around Lynsy’s arm, the atmosphere…fractured.
The smell of rot and winter was annihilated, replaced instantly by the cloying, suffocating scent of saffron, musk, and wild honey. A warmth that was not of fire but of an excited fever rippled through the clearing, causing the sap of the dead pines to weep and boil against the bark.
Inanna, the Goddess of Lust, stepped out of the swirling purple mists. She was a vision of gold and poison—her skin the color of burnished bronze, her eyes two glowing amethysts that promised ecstasy and annihilation in equal measure. She was draped in silks so fine they were nearly transparent, and jewelry made of bone and emeralds rattled against her hips with every swaying step.
She ignored the girls entirely, looking through them as if they weren’t even there – for her gaze was fixed solely on her champion. “Kaoz,” she purred, her voice a melodic vibration that seemed to reach inside the Myz’s very marrow. “Your hunger is great, but why feast on scraps when a Queen is before you?”
The giant froze, his grip on Lynsy loosening. The predatory lust he had felt for the merchant’s daughter was instantly diverted, subsumed by the overwhelming, divine presence of his goddess. Was it the prayers of the desperate girls that had summoned her? Had Mannah or Meree reached across the celestial divide to protect Lynsy’s innocence by offering a distraction of cosmic proportions? Or did Inanna simply sense the simmering rebellion in her “King-to-be” and move to reclaim her property? The answer was lost in the shrieking wind.
What followed next is hardly worth describing – but suffice it to say that the girls were forced to witness a scene that defied mortal comprehension and shattered their remaining sanity. Chained and helpless, they could not look away as the goddess seduced the giant. It was a union of stone and shadow, a horrific display of divine carnality that lasted until the pre-dawn hours. The sounds were not human—they were the sounds of monsters grinding together, a ritual of lust so intense that the ground around the wagon scorched and blackened.
Yet Inanna’s touch was not without consequence – just like their earlier encounters, she claimed Kaoz’s body and soul in a way that left the Myz a mortal wreck. When the first grey light of morning touched the clearing, the goddess vanished as if she were a dream made of smoke. Kaoz was left collapsed by the dying embers of the fire—a husk of a creature. His dusky grey skin was pale, his black-void eyes clouded and staring at nothing. He lay there, spent and broken, unable to move or speak.
That’s when Lynsy and Tiffania realised – for the first time since they had left Monthaven, the monster was vulnerable!
The Illusion of Hope
As the dawn sun rose high into the sky, the silence of the clearing was broken only by the whistling wind and the heavy, rattling breath of the fallen Myz. Kaoz lay like a toppled monument near the blackened circle of the spent fire, his skin grey as ash, his mind still lost in the labyrinth of Inanna’s divine touch.
Inside the wagon, the desperation of the captives reached a fever pitch, fueled by the terrifying realization that the monster might wake at any moment. The air still hung heavy with the cloying, supernatural scent of Inanna’s visit—a perfume of lilies that felt like a shroud. Lynsy’s fingers were a gruesome sight; the skin had been worn down to the white of the bone as she clawed at the iron collar bolted to the floorboards. She wasn’t just fighting for her life; she was fighting to scrub the memory of the goddess’s laughter from her mind.
“I can’t… I can’t breathe in here anymore, Tiff,” Lynsy whispered, her voice a jagged rasp of hysteria. “If he wakes up and touches me after… after that… I’ll die. I’ll just die.”
Tiffania, leaning her head against the rough wood, eyes glassy with fever, grabbed Lynsy’s bloodied hand. “The bolt, Mistress. Look. The ice has gotten into the rust.”
Yet try though they might, their efforts were for naught. Exhausted they were forced to take turns working for their freedom – all the while fearing Kaoz might awake. Fortunately for the prisoners, luck was with them – for the monster was still incapacitated. On the second day of the Myz’s divine stupor, they found their miracle: that heavy iron bolt that Tiffania had pointed out, a pin corroded by the roads and weakened by the constant, violent jolting of the trek, had begun to shear. A thin, hairline fracture winked at them in the moonlight.
“Tiff… Tiffania, help me,” Lynsy hissed, her voice a dry rattle of urgency. “On three. We have to be silent. If the chain rattles too loud, the horse will neigh. If the horse neighs, he might wake.”
“I don’t have the strength, Lyns,” Tiffania whimpered, her bruised ribs flaring with every breath.
“You have to! Do you want to reach Fubar? Do you want to see what he does to us there?” Lynsy’s eyes were wild, two dark pits of desperation. She seized Tiffania’s shoulder, pulling her close. “We pull together. For us.. Pull!“
Together, the two women threw the entire weight of their starved, trembling bodies against the iron. They braced their feet against the sideboards, their muscles screaming in protest, their heartbeats thundering like war drums in their ears. The salt of their sweat blinded them, stinging the raw wounds on their wrists.
“Again!” Lynsy exhaled, a sound of pure agony. “He’s moving… I saw his hand twitch! Pull!“
They gave one final, bone-deep heave, their souls poured into a single moment of resistance. With a jagged, metallic snap that sounded like a lightning strike in the quiet clearing, the bolt gave way. The chain went limp. For a heartbeat, they simply breathed, staring at the freed iron as if it were a holy relic. The silence of the woods pressed in, heavy and expectant, as they realized the door to the cage was finally, bloodily open.
The silence that followed was terrifying. They waited, frozen, staring at the unmoving mountain of muscle by the fire. Yet Kaoz didn’t stir.
With bloodied fingers and trembling limbs, they unlooped the heavy chains. For the first time in over a moon, the weight was gone, though the ghost of the iron still burned around their ankles. They didn’t speak; they didn’t dare. They lowered themselves over the side of the wagon, their bare feet hitting the frozen earth like a death sentence.
Then they ran!
They stumbled through the mud of the forest, the blood-stained furs of the Myz’s victims they were clothed with now billowing behind them like the wings of scavengers. Every step was a battle against the elements. The late autumn air tore at their lungs, and the jagged undergrowth sliced their feet, leaving a trail of crimson droplets in the loam. But the hope—the wild, intoxicating rising of hope—was a fire in their veins.
“Look!” Tiffania gasped, pointing a shaking hand toward the horizon.
They had reached the crest of a jagged ridge. Below them, nestled in a valley of dark pines, were the distant, flickering orange lights of a border town – Freedom!
It was a but outpost of civilization, but it was a place of warmth, and men. Their salvation in sight. They were sobbing, clutching each other, a hysterical laughter bubbling up in Lynsy’s throat. She could almost taste the bread; she could almost feel the warmth of a hearth that wasn’t fueled by the dead.
“We made it,” Lynsy whispered, her eyes bright with tears. “Emcorae… Father… we made it.”
They began to scramble down the slope, their pace quickening, their hearts hammering against their ribs with the rhythm of victory. Sadly that’s when their gods betrayed them.
When they passed the next hill down, Kaoz was waiting behind a stand of trees. As he stepped out, his wild black hair whipped in the wing and his black eyes were alive with a terrifying glee. He’d let them escape. He’d tracked them like a cat with a pair of wounded mice just to see how far their hope could carry them before he snapped the line.
“Why run?” he hissed, the sound a jagged tear in the silence.
He didn’t rush at them. He didn’t need to. The girls’ hopes dashed, they both fainted at the cruel mercy of fate. Kaoz ‘ hand closed around Lynsy’s throat, lifting her off her feet until her toes kicked uselessly at the air. He leaned in, his razor-teeth inches from her ear, his breath a plume of cold mist
“My doll?” He then turned his gaze to the shivering Tiffania, who had fallen to her knees in the snow. “King waits. Kaoz bored.
As he dragged the girls away by their arms, their feels left a muddy furrow – the path of their failed salvation. The lights of the town stayed behind them, mocking and distant, as the darkness of the north finally claimed them for good.
The Iron Gates of Fubar
The wagon finally crested the last black ridge of the Northern Range. Below them lay Fubar, a city that looked less like a capital and more like a scab on the face of the earth. It was now the winter of the 52nd Year, the air had turned into a whetting stone, sharp enough to draw blood from the lungs with every breath.
The prisoners’ cart rolled forward, the iron-rimmed wheels shrieking as they hit the cobblestones of the Dead Man’s Pass. Ahead, the jagged iron portcullis of the city stood like the bared teeth of a titan. As they passed beneath the archway, the temperature seemed to drop another ten degrees, the stone walls sweating a thick, black frost. The sky above was a flat, unfeeling grey, a vaulted ceiling of slate that offered no hint of a sun, and the wind carried the suffocating scent of coal smoke, scorched fat, and ancient, damp stone.
Lynsy looked out the back of the wagon, her fingers—blackened by frostbite and filth—clutching the wood for one last look at the world. What she saw paralyzed her.
Fubar was a labyrinth of despair. The dark, brooding towers of King Diked’s palace rose like a cluster of tombs against the horizon, their narrow windows glowing with a sickly, guttering orange light. There were no trees here, no green boughs of Arbola, no bright village walls of Monthaven. There was only the oppressive weight.
“Tiffania,” Lynsy croaked, turning back to the shadows of the wagon. “Tiff, look. We’re… we’re here.”
But Tiffania did not move. The maid sat slumped against the iron winch, her eyes open but vacant, staring at a point somewhere beyond the wood and the stone.
Kaoz pulled the warhorse to a halt in the shadow of the palace’s secondary gate. He hopped down, his massive frame casting a shadow that seemed to swallow the wagon whole. He reached inside, the rusted chains clinking with a final, rhythmic finality as he tightened the shackles of his ‘delivery.’
“Out,” he commanded, his voice a low, satisfied rumble.
As the guards of Fubar—men with faces as hard and grey as the stone they served—approached to take the chains, Lynsy felt a coldness that had nothing to do with the winter. She realized then that the evil devastation of her home, the fires, and the screams of the villagers had been a mercy compared to the absolute, suffocating silence that awaited her here.
All hope was gone. The merchant’s daughter, once the jewel of the Pennal region, was led away to darkness. She had arrived at the end of all things, a captive of the dark, while the iron gates of Fubar slammed shut with a sound that echoed like a tomb being sealed.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 