Location: Fubar
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Fall
The sun hung low over the northern horizon, a swollen orb bleeding the last of its light into the grey haze of the wastes. For more than a tenday, Emcorae and Nathily had followed the Iron-Haul Trail deep into the fractured heart of Orkney — a land, that had long since forgotten the touch of rain or the song of birds. The earth beneath their horses’ hooves ran the color of dried gore, clinging to fetlocks like a wound that refused to scab over.
Orkney had always been a harsh mistress. Now she was simply a corpse, and Diked’s kingdom the maggots feeding on her.
The rolling steppes that had once whispered with silver-tipped grasses lay choked beneath a powdery blight. Stunted trees stood as silent sentries over ground stripped of its dignity, their limbs twisted like the fingers of drowning men. On either side of the narrow, winding path the earth fell away into lightless canyons where a thick fog pooled — no gentle mountain mist, this, but a suffocating vapor that reeked of soot and the biting stench of a world gone rancid. It clung to their cloaks like the touch of a dead hand.
For Nathily, the land did not merely lie silent; it festered. To an Amorosi, the death of a forest is no mere tragedy of wood and leaf but a wounding of the soul, and the silence of Orkney screamed in her ears — a discordant chorus of everything the King’s madness had already silenced. Every league closer to the capital brought a fresh layer of that oppressive quiet, until it seemed the very air itself had been bled of its vitality.
The trail was no longer a road for honest men. Twice they had pressed themselves flat against cold stone for hours at a stretch, horses’ muzzles held shut with trembling hands, while outriders passed within spitting distance, arguing in low, hungry voices about rations that never seemed to arrive. Once they had led the horses through a stagnant streambed, water black and foul, to slip past a bandit camp strung with wire meant to catch unwary riders — and once, worse still, Nathily had felt a cold, oily presence prickle at the base of her skull – could it really be a Myz quartering the trail like a hound on a scent? Whatever it was, the being was kept from their trail only by a whispered elven cantrip of concealment that Dallegheri had once taught her in passing and which left her hands shaking for an hour afterward.
By the time the pines finally broke to reveal a cluster of wind-gnarled sentinels ahead, both Azoras wore their exhaustion openly — Emcorae’s jaw a permanent ridge of tension, Nathily’s eyes bloodshot from nights that offered more vigilance than sleep. They were moving, I think, through a graveyard that had simply refused to stay buried. Fitting, given what as waiting for them at its heart.
The Witness
It was from behind those blackened pines that the shape lunged, and I’ll grant my Azoras this much credit: exhausted as they were, their instincts held true. Mossflower and Joanne reared in shrill alarm as Emcorae’s katana cleared its sheath and Nathily’s blade rose beside it, both warriors braced for a fight they had no room to flee.
What faced them defied easy sense — a wolfhound of staggering size, coat matted grey-on-grey with trail dust, eyes catching the dying light with a wild, amber intelligence that seemed less feral than frantic, if such a distinction can be made in the space of a heartbeat.
“Stay your hand!” Nathily’s voice cut sharp through the tension. “He isn’t hunting, Emcorae. He’s pleading.”
Emcorae held his blade level but did not press the attack — some old trust in his partner’s gift with wild things stilling his hand even through the haze of his own weariness. The hound stood its ground, trembling so violently that its matted flanks seemed to ripple, less a threat now than a ruin — a monument to a grief too large for four legs to carry.
Nathily dismounted, ignoring Mossflower’s warning snort, and stepped forward with empty palms raised. She reached out not with steel but with the old tethering gift of her people, weaving her spirit toward the fractured mind before her.
The contact nearly threw her back on her heels. A cacophony of anguish met her — a dark, shadowed titan rising out of the earth; the iron-sweet reek of a dwarf’s cooling blood; and beneath it all, the crushing, unbearable weight of a loyalty that had outlived its master.
“Oh, Alyssa,” she whispered, her eyes stinging. “Emcorae — he isn’t mad. He’s a witness.”
“To what,” Emcorae rasped, eyes darting to the canyon shadows, “and will it bring the King’s scouts down on us if we linger to find out?”
“He’s asking for help.” Her voice cracked as she held the fragile thread of the bond, the hound’s ribs showing stark beneath his hide as his chest heaved. “I see them — his friends. Stone and blood. There’s someone left, Em. A survivor. Oh, Em, h’s so scared, so alone.”
For one suspended moment the connection held — the beast’s growl dying into a low, whimpering plea as some scent of Arbola’s deep roots reached him through Nathily’s presence. Then his grief broke past whatever restraint had held it, and he threw back his head in a wail that rolled off the canyon walls like a funeral knell.
That was more than the horses could bear. Mossflower and Joanne thrashed against the narrow trail in blind panic, and every desperate bark the hound loosed in his effort to be understood only deepened their terror.
“We cannot help him!” Emcorae fought to keep Joanne from bolting into the ravine, his voice barely rising above the thunder of hooves. “He’ll draw every scout for ten leagues! Nathily, let’s go!”
The elfess looked back once more, hand outstretched, and watched the hound’s desperate hope curdle into something far worse as he understood her retreat for what it was. His final yelp was no bark at all, but something closer to a sob — the particular, wordless sound of a creature that has just watched its last hope walk away.
“I’m sorry,” Nathily breathed, already swinging up into the saddle as Mossflower turned to flee. “I’m so sorry.”
[Do forgive me a small indulgence here, before we press on. I have watched a great many creatures grieve in my long, illustrious tenure among the living and the damned — men, gods, the occasional dragon who’d grown unwisely fond of a shepherd boy — and I confess even I find something in a dog’s fidelity that puts the loyalty of most mortals, and no small number of Lumenarcs, to shame. Little did the Azoras know, as they fled that mournful howling into the dark, that the debt they’d left unpaid on the Iron-Haul Trail would come looking for them again — and that when it did, it would not come alone].
They rode hard and did not speak of it again, though the sound followed them long after the pass had swallowed it — a phantom weight that settled onto Nathily’s shoulders and did not lift. She kept her gaze fixed ahead through what remained of that ride, but her hands trembled on the reins, and I daresay some small, honest piece of her Amorosi soul stayed behind on that trail, howling with the unfortunate mutt that was lost in the shadows.
The Threshold
As the moon climbed toward its zenith, casting a pale, ghastly light over the valley, they reached the final ridge overlooking Fubar. The city rose from a sea of thick vapor like a tooth of dark stone — and I will say this plainly: it was by now a masterpiece of misery. The worst of the plague had already run its course through these streets, leaving behind not the dying but the calcified stillness of a civilization consumed from within. No bells. No market cries. Only black banners hanging limp from high spires like the folded wings of carrion birds, and walls built — Nathily observed, correctly — not only to keep out enemies, but the dying too.
“The miner’s words were true,” Emcorae said, his voice dropping to a hard, low register as he traced the southeastern line of cliffs with his eyes. “Like Bram said, the walls don’t cover the heights.”
Below them, half-submerged in a stagnant pool of runoff, the iron grates of the palace sewers wept a slow, foul sludge into the ravine, the stench rising to meet them on the night air — waste and ancient corruption in equal measure.
“It’s a descent into the underworld,” Nathily murmured, her posture coiling despite herself. “To crawl through that filth feels like surrendering our light. Are you sure this is the right path to take?”
“We have no choice. It’s the only entry that isn’t a death sentence,” Emcorae said. “The gates are watched. This isn’t.”
Neither of them spoke for a long moment after that — the weight of what came next pressing down harder than either wanted to admit. The horses had to stay behind. Mossflower and Joanne had been their last tether to sanity since Arbola, the last living things that still remembered green canopies and sweet water, and abandoning them here, at the edge of a poisoned city, felt like abandoning the last honest thing left in either of their lives.
Nathily pressed her forehead to Mossflower’s nose and made her a promise she meant with her whole aching heart. “You go back,” she whispered. “You find the Parkway. You wait for us in the gully where we hid the silver gear. We will come for you. I promise it, by the stars of Alyssa.”
Emcorae did the same for Joanne, his usual iron softening, briefly, into something almost tender. “Go on, Jo-Jo. Run. Keep the wind at your back and don’t stop ’til you smell the pines.”
Neither of them meant it as a farewell — only a desperate hope, a prayer that they would meet again once the blood had been spilled and the debt paid. But watching the two noble creatures stand uncertain in the mist as their bridles came free, the terror of the unknown felt, for just a moment, absolute. Then, with a final panicked snort, both horses turned and bolted into the fog, hoofbeats fading into a rhythmic thumping that Orkney’s silence swallowed whole.
Suddenly the two warriors stood alone at the threshold, shorn of their mounts, their armor’s comfort, and — though neither would have said so aloud — a good measure of whatever legacy they’d imagined carrying home from this quest.
“We’re ready,” Emcorae said, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword.
“No,” Nathily corrected, her voice thick with a love she could not confess and a duty she had abandoned everything else to serve. “We’re committed.”
With a heavy, grinding groan, they pried the outer grate free together. The stench that billowed out immediately struck like a physical blow — a cloying heat of old blood and stagnant water that seemed, for a moment, to sap the courage from them both. Neither spoke as they lowered themselves into the black. Once inside, the grate settled shut above them with a final, echoing clang, sealing away the last of the moonlight.
The only way forward was to walk into the belly of the beast. And the further they went, the more they would come to understand that the sewers were, by far, the cleanest part of Fubar.
They had no idea that the true rot was waiting for them inside the finery of the palace.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 