Location: Fubar
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Spring
The King Den felt like home to The Royal Steward as Ramssee sat ensconced in his favorite wingback chair taking in the smells of the chamber – old leather, woodsmoke, and the cloyingly sweet vapor of expensive liquors. It was a room designed for the quiet exercise of power, lined with shelves of ancient, silver-bound ledgers and hung with tapestries depicting the early triumphs of the Fubar line—triumphs that felt increasingly like ancient history.
As Ramsse gazed in the hearth, the firelight danced off the emerald silk of his robes. He was a striking, predatory figure; his skin possessed a faint, serpentine shimmer, and his features were sharp, almost avian in their precision. Tonight, his eyes were different. Ever since the Akkanian Lamp had found its way into his possession, a faint, unnatural amber glow simmered in his pupils—the first outward sign of Dagaal’s Black Magic beginning to weave its way through his mind. My pawn pictured himself a creature of absolute control, and this evening, he had been enjoying the silent, rhythmic pulse of his own growing authority.
That was, until the door burst open.
The young king stumbled into the room, his royal circlet lopsided and his silk tunic damp with a frantic, un-kingly sweat. Behind him, the Chief Doctor of Fubar looked as though he had aged a decade in a single afternoon. This was the same man who had discovered the “complications” with Lynsy Finch—the mess Ramssee had been forced to clean up.
The Steward’s first impulse was to roar for the guards and have them both thrown into the moat for ruining his peace. However, as he rose, he noticed the medic was so scared that the surgical tools in his leather bag rattled with a frantic clink-clink-clink that sounded like teeth chattering in the dark. Before the Steward could draw a breath to curse them, a deluge of panicked gibberish erupted from them both – their voices overlapping in a senseless cacophony that filled the Den with the stench of impending ruin.
“Just what are you saying, man?” Ramssee snapped, his goblet clicking sharply as he set it on a side table. His gaze fixed on the medic, searching him for lies.
Before the doctor could find his voice, Diked panicked. He paced the rug with frantic, uneven steps, his breath coming in shallow hitches. “What if it’s the plague of Akka?” his voice rising to a shrill peak. “Oh, maybe my father was right! Maybe we should have never opened up that evil grave—”
“ENOUGH!”
Ramssee didn’t move like a man; he moved like a striking cobra. In a blur of silk and fury, he was across the room. His hand caught Diked in a vicious backhand that sent the King sprawling to the floor. Ramssee’s fangs flashed in the candlelight, his lip curling in a snarl that was more beast than Steward.
“Shut up, you sniveling whelp!” he roared.
On the floor, Diked clutched his welted cheek, whimpering into the carpet. The doctor backed toward the door, his face the picture of pure, primitive terror. He had just witnessed the Royal Steward strike the Sovereign—an act of high treason that turned the room into a death trap for any witness.
“Come here, leech!” Ramssee commanded, his voice a low, vibrating hiss. When the man hesitated, Ramssee’s eyes flared with a sudden, hypnotic intensity—the magical power of his <Persuasion> I’d gifted him at birth. “I said, COME HERE!”
The physician approached as if walking toward a gallows, drawn by a force he couldn’t resist. Ramssee reached out, his fingers sinking into the soft flesh of the man’s neck. “Your life is a flickering candle, doctor. Tell me about these miners. Tell me why you’ve brought this rot into my den.”
“Thr-three workers, Sire,” the medic gasped, his eyes bulging as he fought for air. “Brothers. They were the first into the Deepest Depths… the throne room of the Drokka King. Two weeks ago. The day the seals were broken.”
“Could it have just been the flu?” Ramssee questioned, his grip tightening.
“No, sire,” the doctor advised, his voice a haunted rasp. “I don’t believe this was any yearly bug. For listen to their deteriorations! When I first came to call on them earlier this week, all three were in the same room. Their skins were pale and saggy—as if barely hanging on their bones. Yet their bellies were bloated and seemed filled to the point of bursting. Too, they bled from their fingers. And their tongues remained dry, engorged, and cracked, despite whatever liquids we did give them.”
“What happened next?” The Steward asked, his voice deathly quiet.
“I knew not what to do!” The man continued, his face contorting with the memory. “I had ne’er witnessed this type of disease before. If not for my oath, I would have left that forsaken family as quickly as possible. Yet, my station gave me the fortitude to stay.” He paused, his eyes glazing over. “Oh, the horror, the horror! The brothers did grow worse by the candlemark. Their cheeks began to sag into their faces, their hair fell out in clumps, and oh, oh, their eyes did turn to jelly and slush!” He buried his face in his hands, trying to ward off the sight.
Ramssee felt a cold prickle at the base of his neck. Jelly and slush. He remembered the legends of why the dwarves had truly abandoned the Akka—bedtime tales meant to scare children that suddenly felt very, very real. He shook the doctor back to reality. “How did they die?”
“They bled!” the doctor shrieked. “They bled from every orifice! Every pore! When the last drop seeped out, they were left as naught but withered husks over a pile of disconnected bones!”
The room went silent, save for the crackle of the fire. Even Ramssee blanched, his mind racing through the political fallout. The medic knew too much. If word of a “Husking Sickness” reached the commoners, the riots would burn Fubar to the ground before Ramssee could place a crown on his own head. Then, the “Ol’ Black Magic” whispered a solution through the haze of his thoughts.
In a sudden, violent explosion of movement, Ramssee lunged. He didn’t use a blade; he used the gifts of his lineage. He savaged his fangs into the doctor’s neck, a sickening, wet tear echoing through the room as he ripped out the man’s throat.
The doctor hit the floor in a heap, his lifeforce staining the fine Skarra Bree rug a deep, spreading crimson.
Ramssee turned on Diked, his chin stained with the same dark red. The King shrieked, scrambling backward on his hands and knees, kicking away from his advisor. “No! Please, Ramssee!”
“Oh, shut up,” Ramssee spat, wiping his mouth with a monogrammed silk kerchief. “I’m not going to kill you, Diked. I still need a face for the coins. But that man is dead because of your panic. Had you kept your mouth shut, I might have let him live. But how could I let a man go forth who believed in a plague?”
Ramssee began to pace, stepping casually over the cooling corpse. His mind was weaving a lie, a beautiful, poisonous web. “Recall that the leech said these men had been working in the throne room of the Drokka King. That’s a restricted area, yet they went there the very first day of the mine’s re-opening; so, it’s likely they had been planning to poach the treasure and had been plotting their crime all winter.”
He pondered, piecing the narrative together. “First, you shall immediately RE-decree that NO ONE is to enter that area. Hmmm… Perhaps this ‘virus’ still has some residual lingering contacts in that room.” He paced the floor again, stepping over the body once more. “Yes, if we can restrict access, we might contain it. Then, we will keep the matter hush-hush. But what to say? Ah, I’ve got it—we will spread the word that the royal doctor determined the men had eaten wild, subterranean mushrooms. Poisonous fungi that caused a flesh-eating disease! We will warn the miners of this dangerous—but very avoidable—threat. We will even form a team of ‘Mushroom Warders’ to scout the caves and remove any fungi they find.”
Ramssee smiled, genuinely proud of his ingenuity. “Yes, that is a good plan. It will have to do.”
“But… what if more get sick?” Diked asked, his voice trembling like a child’s.
Ramssee stopped. He looked at the heavy oak door, then back at the broken King. The fear was there, buried deep in his own gut, but he masked it with a sneer. “That will NOT happen. You have enough to worry about, Diked. The walls are high. The gates are shut. And now, the doctor has met with a ‘tragic accident.’”
He walked to the door and signaled the guards. With the effortless poise of a practiced liar, he explained that the medic had gone mad, attacking the King in a fit of lunacy. Ramssee, the “loyal” Steward, had been forced to slay the man to protect his Sovereign.
[As I watched these events through the Eye of Seraphiel, I chuckled to myself – my pawn had acted exactly as I’d expected he would. By killing the doctor and continuing to delve the mins, Ramssee hadn’t stopped the plague. He had merely concentrated it. He was building a pressure cooker of death beneath his feet, and he was too busy dreaming of crowns to hear the bones rattling in the deep].
The Red Weeping at the Gate
Although I had not used Dagaal to create the Akka Plague of the Fifth Age, that didn’t stop me from using the magic of my bones now to ‘amplify’ the effects of the curse I’d laid upon the mortals of that region. As the Spring continued to bloom around the flat earth, I spent my days relaxing in bed with The Eye—watching a comedy of errors unfold in Fubar.
I particularly enjoyed one mid-afternoon at the start of the third month of Spring as a small band of riders—the “Royal Guard”—streaked across the scrubland and towards the city’s gates, with a mob of bloodthirsty sick peasants trying to tear them apart. At the pack’s center was King Diked, his face a mask of terror. He was returning from what was supposed to be a perfunctory meeting with the nobles of western Orkney that was arranged by his Steward to further ‘secure’ his throne. Not only had that meeting not gone as smoothly as Ramssee had assured him it would, but far worse was Diked’s present situation.
Earlier that morning, still too far from the safety of his raised walls, Diked’s party had come across the first bad sign that something was amiss: a traveler lying dead in a ditch. His soldiers whispered of the Grey Beast and the king put on an air of confidence—claiming there was nothing to fear from the beast—and secretly thinking to himself that he’d have a word with Kaoz to quell his passion.
“He’s just a dead peasant,” the King had stammered, his eyes darting toward the horizon. “Move on!”
Yet a short while later they passed a hovel that made them all pause—too close to the road a farmer and his wife were standing like wraiths in the sun. Diked looked in horror at how their skin hung in grey, translucent folds; their bellies were distended, and their eyes were the color of curdled milk. The woman held a child—a small girl, bloated and weeping blood from her ears.
“Diked the Doomed!” the farmer spat, his voice a rattling rasp that sounded like dry husks rubbing together.
“Those people are sick!” Diked’s voice was a frantic, high-pitched whine. “Destroy them before it gets us too!”
The King’s men swooped down from their mounts, their steel flashing in the spring sun. The farmer tried to raise a gnarled hand in defense, but a broadsword severed it at the wrist before he could even grunt. He fell into the muck, his “blood”—a thin, yellowish ichor—spraying the boots of the soldiers. The woman didn’t even try to run; she simply clutched the dying child tighter, her cracked lips moving in a silent prayer to gods that had long ago turned their backs on Orkney. A single, downward thrust through her chest silenced the girl’s wailing and the mother’s prayer in one go.
The soldiers moved with a desperate violence, as if they could kill the disease by hacking these poor serfs. One of the soldiers laughed as he wiped his gore-slicked blade directly onto his sleeve, smearing the infected grume across his skin in a dark, oily streak.
Diked watched the butchery through a haze of nausea. He didn’t offer a word of mercy, nor did he offer a prayer. He only saw the threat to his own skin. “Burn the hovel!” he shrieked, already turning his horse away. “Burn it all and let the smoke carry the rot away from us! We must reach the gates before the sun sets!”
He spurred his mount into a gallop, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He didn’t look back to see the black smoke rising behind him, nor did he notice that the wind was blowing the soot—and the spores—directly into the path of his retreating guard.
It only got worse for Diked and his men after that. As they neared the capital’s border, the landscape didn’t just change; it decayed.
The first village had been a haunting prelude—a mob of serfs trailing the royal train like a funeral wake. They hadn’t sought to stop the progress of the King’s men, but where jubilant cheers should have been was instead the rhythmic, wet cough of the infected—a collective rattling of the dying who used their final breaths to wheeze curses at the monarch who had brought a plague upon them by looting the dwarves’ gold.
By the second village, the “sticky” reality of the plague turned into a visceral nightmare. Dead and dying serfs littered the main road like discarded grain. Men and women who had once tilled the very fields that filled the palace larder now stumbled forward with a jerky, rhythmic gait, their motor functions failing as the Red Weeping ate their nerves. Diked watched in mounting bile as their skin turned the color of wet ash, hanging in translucent folds that swayed with every spasming step. The sound they made was a low thrum of misery—a collective moan that seemed to bypass the ears and settle directly in the marrow. Many were already “weeping,” blood seeping from their tear ducts and ears, painting their gaunt faces in a grotesque, crimson warpaint.
“Don’t let them close on us!” the lead guard screamed, his voice cracking as his horse stumbled on a patch of loose shale. “Keep the formation! Protect the King’s flank!”
But these peasants weren’t just whining; they were hunting. They brandished rusted scythes, heavy flails, and even simple shards of jagged slate, but their greatest weapon was the very air they exhaled—a miasmic fog of spores and rot that trailed behind them like a funeral shroud, turning the bright spring afternoon into a grey, suffocating twilight.
The attack came with a sudden, discordant shriek. A group of infected laborers lunged from the tall grass, their movements a frantic, bone-rattling blur. One particularly bloated man, his eyes already turned to jelly, threw himself bodily under the hooves of a guard’s mount. The horse let out a high-pitched neigh as its legs tangled in the mass of sagging limbs. With a sickening thud, the beast went down, pinning the soldier’s leg beneath its heaving flank.
“Help me!” the guard cried, reaching out a hand toward Diked.
But the mob was on him in an instant. They clawed at the screaming guard, their cracked fingers seeking the gaps in his armor. Diked watched, frozen, as a woman with no hair and a distended belly leaned over the guard’s face, her mouth open in a silent scream, exhaling a thick, yellow cloud of spores directly into his gasping mouth. The guard’s screams turned into a wet, gurgling sound almost instantly.
“Leave him!” Diked shrieked, kicking his own horse into a frantic gallop. “Keep moving! To the gates!”
He didn’t look back as the sounds of the struggle were swallowed by the thrum of the mob. His heart was a hammer against his ribs, and his mind was a single, white-hot thought: The walls. If I can just get behind the walls, the world can rot and I will be safe.
As they finally neared the capital, the trickles of unrest became a flood of terror. Every village was a hornet’s nest, stirred to a stinging frenzy by the fever. Diked, desperate to reach the palace, ordered his sigil-bearer to cast down the royal flag—that proud, gold-threaded banner that now felt like a target painted on his back. They muffled their faces with travel-stained cloaks and threw drab wool over their glinting armor, trying to look like nothing more than a band of panicked merchants.
He was a fool. The people didn’t need a silken flag to recognize the stench of the man who had traded their lives for the treasures of the mines. By the time the silhouette of Fubar’s Grand Entry loomed through the haze, the King was down to six men. Behind them, a sea of feverish peasants converged—hundreds of them, a shifting mass of grey skin and weeping eyes, swinging rusted scythes and heavy axes smeared with the gore of the Husking Sickness. Diked and his men pushed their mounts to the absolute limits of equine endurance. The horses, smelling the unnatural decay on the wind, rolled their eyes back until only the whites showed, their hooves thundering against the dry earth in a desperate, uneven rhythm that sounded like a heart about to burst.
“Faster, damn you! Faster!” Diked’s thoughts were a jagged, high-pitched loop of hysteria. A phantom itch prickled in his own tear ducts—a terrifying, dry heat that made him want to claw his own eyes out. “If they touch me, I’m a husk. If a single drop of that yellow filth lands on my skin, I’m as dead as the farmer.”
Now within earshot of the massive stone towers, the commander of the guards leaned over his horse’s mane, his voice a raw, desperate howl. “Open the gates! Open the gates!”
High above, the sentries on the battlements looked down with white-knuckled fear. They saw a cloud of dust, a handful of riders, and a nightmare following in their wake.
“Where is the King’s Standard?” the Warden yelled down, his hand hovering over the release lever. “Identify yourselves!”
“It IS me, King DIKED!” the King shrieked, throwing back his cloak to reveal the tarnished gold of his circlet. His voice cracked with the strain of his terror. “Open the gates or I’ll have your heads on the pikes by sunset!”
The iron portcullis began its slow, agonizingly ascent. <Click-click-click-click-click>
The sound was too slow. To Diked, every click was a second stolen by the grave. Before the iron teeth had even cleared the height of a man’s waist, he jumped from his heaving horse and scurried under the gate like a panicked rat. He scrambled into the dark, stone entrance tunnel, his boots slipping on the grit as he raced toward the inner barrier at the other end.
Behind him, the nightmare breached the threshold. A handful of the mob, driven by a frenzied strength, crawled under the rising gate, their grey fingers grasping at the King’s heels. One of the royal guards, seeing his sovereign about to be overtaken, leaped from his saddle and charged into the tunnel as well. With a roar, he grabbed the intruders by their rags, hurling them backward to keep them from reaching the escaping king.
Diked didn’t look back. He made it through the inner archway, staggering into the light of the first courtyard, safe—for a heartbeat.
“Drop the portcullis!” Diked raged at the warden above, his face contorted. “On both sides! Now!”
The warden hesitated, his eyes widening as he looked at the riders still outside. “But Sire, your men! The commander!”
“DROP IT!”
<WHOOOOOSH! SLAM!>
The massive iron grates crashed down. The guard who had just saved the King was now trapped inside the dark entrance tunnel, locked in with the very peasants he had pulled away. Outside the walls, the commander and the remaining guards continued to battle with the angry mob, not yet realizing their King had just bolted the doors against them.
“You must protect me!” Diked wailed, backing away from the gate even as he abandoned his defenders to the swarm.
Then, looking up at the guards atop the murder holes, he gave the final, merciless order. Immediately, tubs of boiling oil were tipped through the ceiling apertures. The screams that followed were a bubbling, hissing chorus of agony—a wet, sizzling sound that signaled the first successful test of Fubar’s new defenses. The peasants inside the tunnel were cooked in their own rags, and the guard who had stood his ground was silenced forever in that scalding heat.
Diked fled toward his palace, his breath coming in ragged gasps, convinced he had escaped the curse. He didn’t stay to see the warden ignore the King’s cowardice and re-open the outer gates to save the surviving guards. A second, bloodier battle then followed, as the soldiers at the gates slaughtered the mob that tried to storm the breach, their swords rising and falling until the entryway was a charnel house.
Diked had survived the mob, but he had just murdered the last shred of his men’s devotion.
“The walls are closed, little King,” I whispered from my bed of silk, feeling the Bone Dagger vibrate with the death-cries echoing through The Eye of Seraphiel that showed me this scene. “But you’ve made a fatal mistake. You’ve locked the plague inside with you—and you’ve given the only men left to defend you a very good reason to open the doors for the wolves when they finally come for you.”
The Apocrypha of Azazel 