Location: Kagor
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year
Two years is, as I believe I have already made abundantly clear, very little time at all to a creature such as myself. And so it was that I spent the better part of them exactly as a freshly liberated god ought: running my empire, ignoring my enemies, and enjoying a confidence I had, by this point, entirely convinced myself I’d earned twice over. The Firmament had been a false start. The Grim remained my true target, and I had two competent little schemes already spinning in its pursuit. What more, I ask you, was there to worry about?
Rather a lot, as it turned out. But I did not know that yet, and ignorance, I have found, is a considerably more comfortable state to narrate from than the alternative.
The first reports reached me the way most inconvenient truths do: quietly, at the edges of my attention. A Derkka overseer from the western foothills — not the same hapless creature as before, though cut from remarkably similar cloth — came scrabbling into my throne room with word of trouble at Rhokki Pass. Doubled patrols. Agitated goblin clans. A restlessness among my own western creations that felt, even secondhand, like something more deliberate than the ordinary background snarling of Derkka life.
I did not dismiss it outright this time. I’d like to claim that as evidence of hard-won wisdom, though I suspect it had rather more to do with the lingering, uncomfortable memory of the last occasion I’d waved off a similar report and lived to regret it for several chapters running. Instead, I decided to do what any properly resourceful deity does when he wants information without the tedium of gathering it himself: I went looking for someone I’d already sent to gather it for me.
The Eye of the Hunter
I retrieved the Eye of Seraphiel from where it rested in my library, that same crystalline orb I’d carried off the corpse of a dying lumenarc’s ambition long before your kind had names for the things you’d one day worship, and settled into my chair with the particular satisfaction of a man about to confirm his own competence. I want to be precise, for those of you who have not followed my history closely enough to remember the Eye’s true nature: it does not show me what a creature sees, not directly. It shows me threads — the fate-lines of a person’s existence, laid bare and traceable across whatever span of time I care to examine. I had used it, ages past, to watch fourteen years of Hacktor Derkillez’s schemes unfold in a single sitting. I intended, on this occasion, to use it for something considerably more modest: a quick look at how my hunter-soul had been faring near Gwar’s Aerie these past two years, expecting nothing more dramatic than confirmation of quiet, competent surveillance.
I found the thread easily enough — it still carried the faint, particular signature of Dagaal’s temper, that borrowed silver sheen I’d pressed into it back in my library, a fortnight and a lifetime ago. I pulled at it, and the room around me dissolved into the familiar swirling vortex of moments the Eye conjures when it has a proper story to tell.
The story it told me was not the one I’d expected.
My hunter had gone north, exactly as instructed, and found Gwar’s Aerie — quiet. Not merely absent-master quiet, the ordinary hush of a lord away on some errand, but wrong quiet, the kind that suggested no one occupied that fortress with any confidence of when its master might return. I could feel, even through the Eye’s distant threading of the moment, how little my hunter had cared for that silence — a battlefield ghost, however tempered, knows the particular dread of a god’s empty seat better than most, and he did not linger in it longer than duty demanded.
A patient soul does not simply give up when his assignment proves unreachable, and mine, true to the temperament I’d selected him for, had done precisely what I’d have done in his position: adapted. Gwar’s Aerie sits, as it happens, atop the very same island where another key player lived – Keldar and his myz. Rather than return to me empty-handed, my soul spy began the long descent from that lonely mountain peak toward the only other authority worth his attention.
I want to be honest about what that descent cost him, because I don’t believe a soul as steady as his frightens easily, and the Eye’s thread made plain that this one did. Kagor is myz country from its highest peak to its blackest shore, and a ghost drifting uninvited through it feels that fact in a way no living trespasser quite could — patrols of black-armored knights moving between outposts with a discipline no goblin horde could match, the distant, carrying roar of something dying badly at the Killing Fields reaching him long before the fields themselves came into view. He was, I gathered from the shape of the thread, rather more afraid picking his way down that mountain than he had been standing empty-eyed in Gwar’s own abandoned hall at its summit. Fear, it seems, does not require a body to feel it acutely, only the good sense to recognize what it’s looking at.
Zar’s Keep.
The vision the Eye showed me next is one I’ll admit I watched with considerably more attention than I’d budgeted for that afternoon, because I have not set so much as a glance upon that miserable island since the days I first tested Keldar’s mettle, and I confess I’d rather let my memory of The Supreme Overlord grow comfortably out of date.
Time had not aged Keldar or his fortress into anything resembling comfortable.
As I watched my soul spy’s activity through The Eye, I saw that Gwar’s abandoned kastle, expanded now into something considerably grander and considerably more terrible than the modest abode Gwar had first thrown up and then promptly abandoned in a fit of pique over its lack of creature comforts. My hunter’s thread carried him first through an outer hall I did not expect and found myself, against my better judgment, rather moved by — a long gallery lined with crude stone likenesses, offerings of bone and blackened steel piled at their feet, and I did not need the Eye to tell me whose faces those first two statues wore. Uruk’s, hammer raised, jaw set in that same fanged grin I remembered from a war fought so long ago your kind has forgotten it ever happened. Sizor’s, twin blades crossed, pale eyes rendered in chips of quartz that caught what little light reached that hall and threw it back like something still watching.
They were not alone in that gallery, I noted, and felt a small, unexpected swell of something like pride at the company they kept. Further down the hall stood a squat, brutal likeness I took, from the twin axes crossed at its feet, to be Ghrock the Skullsplitter, a knight I vaguely recalled Keldar’s own generation had raised to legend during some purge or other I hadn’t troubled myself to follow closely. Beside him, a taller figure rendered mid-stride, spear leveled, its plinth crowded with the rusted collars of a hundred broken slave-chains — Vessa, the stonework named him, in the blocky Gut script the myz favor for anything meant to last, and I confess I hadn’t the faintest idea who he’d been in life, only that someone on that island had thought him worth remembering in granite. A fourth statue stood apart from the rest, deliberately so, its face hacked away entirely, offerings of spoiled meat and broken swords heaped before it in a manner that read less like reverence than warning — some fallen champion whose name the myz had apparently decided was better forgotten than honored, though the fear of him plainly hadn’t faded along with it.
The myz had made a shrine of their own history out of that gallery, it seemed, heroes and cautionary tales alike, and I confess there was something rather satisfying in knowing my old handiwork — Uruk and Sizor chief among them, but hardly the whole of it — was still being worshipped on that miserable island, however crudely, long after the mortals who’d fought beside them had turned to dust. Basalt walls, scorched black from a century of belching fire pits, rose beyond that gallery into a ceiling lost somewhere above the smoke.
Moving on, the soul spy eventually conquered his own fears and made his way to Keldar.
The Overlord
The air in the throne room shimmered with heat despite whatever storm was, as always seemed to be the case on that wretched island, raging outside. And upon a rough-hewn wooden throne that scorned every ounce of the ostentation I myself favor, sat Keldar.
I want you to understand what my hunter’s soul was looking at, because I do not think the word “fearsome” does it proper justice, and I have used that word rather liberally across the whole of this Apocrypha. Keldar had, if anything, grown larger in the years since I’d last set my attention upon him — a giant even among myz, and myz are not a modest race to begin with, standing better than seven feet and carrying more than five-and-twenty stone of muscle even on his lesser knights. Keldar dwarfed them all. He sat shirtless upon that unadorned throne, his dusky gray chest bare and scarred, muscle rippling beneath skin that had clearly stopped a great many blades over the years without once giving proper ground. The silver broadsword I’d once cursed at Gwar’s idiot request — the Bloodthirst blade, the one that drank a little more of its wielder’s sanity with every enemy it swallowed — leaned against the throne within easy reach, its enchanted glow banked low but unmistakably present. Two ranks of his Shock Troops stood sentry at the great doors, black-armored, obsidian-eyed, each one a killer bred for nothing else across an entire lifetime, and beyond the Keep’s walls, I knew without needing the vision to show me, the Killing Fields still stretched their crimson-stained acres, still fed on whatever fresh gladiator blood the myz saw fit to spill upon them that season.
Even I — and I want that “even I” understood as the genuine admission it is — felt the old, familiar prickle of professional respect looking upon that scene. I had built the myz to be the most fearsome warriors this world has ever produced, and Keldar remained, after everything, the single finest proof of concept my Life Labs had ever turned out.
My hunter, watching from whatever unseen corner of that throne room a clever, well-tempered ghost could manage to occupy, felt something rather less like respect and rather more like the naked, animal terror any mortal soul — myz-forged or otherwise — has every right to feel in that creature’s presence. I could sense it even secondhand, filtered through the Eye’s distant, threadbare accounting: a cold, prey-deep dread that had nothing to do with any danger Keldar could actually pose to something already dead, and everything to do with the sheer, overwhelming fact of him. My spy, watching Keldar gnaw the femur of some freshly slaughtered beast with blood running unchecked down that massive gray chin, apparently still found room to be afraid.
“—and that, my lord, is the whole of what we know,” one of Keldar’s Derkka advisors was saying, his voice pitched somewhere between deference and outright terror, “the western clans grow restless, Overlord. Skirmishes along the pass. Talk of — of visions, sire, of voices in the old shrines that weren’t there before. And it’s stirred up trouble in the old Borg territories too — those Kra clans never did settle proper after his death, and now they’re using the unrest as cover to test your patience again.”
Keldar did not look up from his meal. “Borg dead,” he growled, low. “Borg’s rabble know place. Test Keldar, they join Borg. In ground.”
“Of — of course, Overlord.”
“Visions.” Keldar repeated the word slow, like it tasted worse than the meat in his teeth.
“Confused ones, Overlord. Contradictory. The shrine-keepers can’t agree what they’ve heard, only that they’ve heard something, and it’s got half of Kra’s clan-heads talking of omens.” The advisor swallowed audibly. “Some blame it on Rhokki stirring in his mountain. Others say it’s something else entirely.”
I sat forward in my own chair, a fate-thread away, with an interest that had very little left to do with idle curiosity.
Keldar finally looked up. His obsidian eyes, small and glittering in that vast slab of a face, swept the throne room with the particular boredom of a ruler who has heard a great many reports of unrest and grown thoroughly tired of every last one of them. “Superstition,” he grunted. “Not Keldar’s problem. Tell pass captains: goblins want fight over ghost stories, let them fight. No army for shrine-keeper dreams.” He tossed the gnawed femur to one of his hounds — I use the term loosely, for whatever creature scrambled to catch it was considerably larger and considerably less canine than the word generally implies — and added, almost as an afterthought, in a mutter I doubt he intended his advisors to properly hear, “Zar should mind own creatures. Not leave mess for Keldar.”
The vision guttered there, my hunter’s thread having apparently exhausted whatever further attention that scene warranted. I knew my spy would return to The Cauldron soon and we could debrief further, but for now I let the Eye’s swirl fade back into the familiar quiet of my own library.
I sat with what I’d seen for rather longer than I care to admit.
Voices in the old shrines that weren’t there before. Confused. Contradictory. The shrine-keepers unable to agree on what they’d heard. That was not the language of a god’s ordinary silence being mistaken for consent, the small, private negligence I’d already half-prepared myself to confess to. That was the language of something actively, clumsily tampering with a signal that ought to have carried only my own voice, or none at all.
And Keldar’s parting mutter — would that Zar concerned himself with his own creatures — told me something I found rather more unsettling than the tampering itself. Whatever Gwar had been doing these past months, or years, he had not been doing it here. Not openly. Not in a way his own supposed subjects could account for.
Watching was no longer sufficient. I needed answers only Keldar himself could give me, and I needed them delivered by my own hand rather than filtered through a hunter’s borrowed courage and the Eye’s patient threads.
I rose from my chair, gathered the full weight of my old theatrical instincts about me — robes black enough to swallow torchlight, the hollow-socketed skull I favor for occasions requiring precisely this flavor of dread — and reached across the strait toward Kagor, toward a mortal I had once tested and found, grudgingly, worthy of my continued attention.
A Visit
Keldar’s private chambers had not improved with age, I noted, appearing within them a heartbeat later — the same stark basalt walls, the same single guttering torch, the same faint reek of smoke and old blood that seemed to cling to every surface on that entire miserable island. He was seated on the edge of his bed of furs when I manifested, that absurd silver sword propped within arm’s reach even in what passed, for him, as a private moment.
He was on his feet and reaching for the blade before my second word had finished echoing off his walls.
“Peace, Overlord,” I said, allowing my voice its full range of hollow, whispering menace, the temperature in the room dropping fast enough that his own breath began fogging in the torchlight. “I’ve not come to test you again. Not today.”
Keldar’s hand did not leave the sword’s grip, though he did, I noted with some satisfaction, stop short of actually drawing it. Whatever else the years had done to him, they had not dulled the animal instinct that had carried him to the top of a mountain of his own brethren’s corpses. “Shaitan,” he said, and there was real wariness in it, though I’ll grant him this much credit: no outright panic. “Long time.” Then, before I’d so much as chosen my next words, he squared his shoulders and added, “Shaitan want report. The ten. Sent out. Long ago.”
I confess this rather threw me off my own rhythm. I had come with a single question burning in my mind, and Keldar, apparently, had decided he already knew precisely why I’d come, and would rather discharge that particular debt on his own terms than stand about waiting for me to demand it. There was, beneath the wariness, something almost like irritation in him — the particular impatience of a busy ruler who would like his unwelcome visitor gone as swiftly as possible, and had evidently concluded the fastest route to that end was simply to hand over whatever tribute he imagined I’d come to collect.
“Go on, Overlord,” I said, deciding — with some private impatience of my own — that the fastest way to the question I actually wanted answered was to let him finish the one he’d already resolved to answer.
“Kaoz. Sizor. No word. Years now.” Keldar’s mouth twisted, something between contempt and grudging respect. “Best of the ten. Both gone quiet same season. Keldar not know where. Not know why.” He did not, of course, know what I knew — that one had gone north into the Dim Wood and further still, chasing a fate I’d woven for him myself, and that the other’s road had bent toward Ramos and a mistress considerably more dangerous than any Overlord. I kept my hollow face very still and said nothing to correct him.
“Six more,” Keldar continued, counting on thick gray fingers as though the tally still cost him some effort. “Dead. Swamps took two. Drokka blades took one at Rhokki foothills, fool wandered too close to the Pass alone. Rest — sickness, storms, the sea. No glory in it. Just gone.”
“That is eight,” I said, mostly to move him along. “You sent ten.”
“One more never left Kagor waters. Ship broke on the rocks first week.” A shrug, indifferent to the memory. “Bad omen. Should have known then.”
“And the last?”
Something in Keldar’s face went colder, more satisfied, the particular pleasure of a ruler recalling a judgment he still stood behind. “Skarn,” he said. “Only one to come home. Two years gone, then he come crawling back to Kagor with empty hands and worse excuses. Told Keldar the mainland beat him. Told Keldar he learned nothing worth the telling.” Keldar’s jaw set. “Keldar don’t keep failures. Killing Fields took him. Head’s still on the pole, if Shaitan wants to see.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, with rather less interest than the report plainly warranted, and rather more impatience than I meant to let show. I had, once, made no small production of my stake in those ten myz. I could see, even in the poor light of that torchlit chamber, that Keldar noticed the difference.
Something shifted behind his obsidian eyes — not fear this time, something closer to calculation. A creature does not survive as long as Keldar had survived on that throne without developing a fine instinct for when a story doesn’t quite match the teller. He said nothing of it directly, but I watched him file the discrepancy away regardless, the way I imagine he filed away every small inconsistency among his own advisors, right up until the day it became useful to remember. I noted it too, in that moment, and — I will admit this plainly, since I have promised you plainness — decided it did not matter. Let the Overlord wonder. What could a mortal, however shrewd, actually do with a god’s passing inattention?
I have had cause, since, to regret how little I weighed that question.
“Now,” I said, before he could dwell on it any further, “I have a question of my own, Overlord, and I’d rather not leave here without an answer to it. I understand there is trouble in your kingdom. Voices in old shrines. Shrine-keepers who cannot agree on what they’ve heard. Unrest along the Rhokki Pass that has your own advisors using words like omen.” I paused. “That sounds, to my ear, rather like a kingdom no longer entirely yours.”
Something flickered behind Keldar’s obsidian eyes — not quite fear, not quite anger, something closer to the particular resentment of a proud creature reminded of a weakness he’d rather not have named aloud. “Superstition,” he grunted, echoing his own dismissal from the throne room, though with rather less conviction now that it was me asking. “Peasant nonsense. Means nothing.”
“Does it.” I let that sit as well. Keldar, to his credit, did not fill the silence with more bluster than the moment could bear — he simply waited, tense, his grip still white-knuckled on that ridiculous sword. I decided, on balance, that the direct approach would serve me better than further circling. “I find myself curious, Overlord, why an Overlord who commands the most fearsome army on this flat earth cannot account for strange voices troubling his own shrine-keepers. Where has your god been, that such things might slip past his notice?”
I watched the question land exactly where I’d intended it to.
Keldar’s jaw worked for a moment before he answered, and when he did, there was something almost sullen beneath the wariness — the particular resentment of a subject who has been made to feel his master’s absence more keenly than he’d like an outsider to know. “Zar comes, Zar goes. Always so.” He stopped himself, visibly, and I watched him weigh how much a proud Overlord ought to admit to the immortal currently freezing the air in his bedchamber.
“But,” I prompted, softly.
“Stranger now,” Keldar admitted, the words coming grudgingly, as though each one cost him something. “Longer gone. And when he come back—” Another hesitation. “Not himself. Snapping at nothing. Gone somewhere, won’t say where. Comes back different. Keldar not ask. Wise Overlord don’t ask his god where he been.” His obsidian eyes narrowed, some of his usual bravado creeping back in now that the confession was out. “Why Shaitan care where Zar wanders? Shaitan don’t care about ten myz. Shaitan care about this.”
I did not care for how neatly he’d assembled that observation. “I care,” I said, allowing an edge into my voice that had rather less performance behind it than I would have liked, “that your kingdom is troubled, Overlord, and that trouble on my doorstep reflects poorly on creatures I built to be considerably more competent than this.” I let my hollow gaze bore into him a moment longer, savoring the way even a giant among giants could not quite keep himself from leaning back from it, though I noted — and did not enjoy noting — that the retreat came a fraction slower than it had the first time. “See to your pass. Quiet your shrine-keepers, however you must. And should your absent god return with more of his usual strangeness, I’d take it as a personal courtesy if word of it found its way to me.”
“And if Keldar tell Zar you asked?”
It was, I’ll admit, a fair question, and rather more perceptive than I generally credit Keldar for managing. I let my smile show — what little of it a skull can properly convey — and said, “Then you may tell him whatever you like, Overlord. I’ve never once hidden my interest in his affairs. He’d expect nothing less of me.” Which was true enough to satisfy the question as asked, if not the suspicion underneath it, and I watched the tension in his shoulders ease only partway — not the full, familiar relaxation of an old rivalry reasserting itself, but something more guarded, more watchful, the look of a creature who has decided to keep turning a puzzle over long after the conversation that raised it has ended.
I withdrew before he could ask anything further clever, and told myself, with considerably more confidence than the moment had actually earned, that it didn’t matter what a mortal Overlord chose to wonder about in the privacy of his own suspicious mind.
I returned to my own library considerably more troubled than I’d left it, and considerably less inclined to credit my own recent run of confidence than I had been that same morning.
Voices in old shrines. Confused. Contradictory. Something had been tampering with signals that ought to have carried only my own voice, and doing it clumsily enough that even simple Derkka shrine-keepers could sense the seams. Longer absences. Not himself. Gone somewhere he won’t speak of. Gwar — vanishing, returning strange, and leaving chaos in his wake that his own subjects couldn’t properly explain.
I thought, uncomfortably, of my own priesthood. Of the Nave. Of a certain Well I had not troubled to check on in rather longer than I ought to admit.
It was time, I decided, to go find out for myself precisely what had been happening in my own name while I wasn’t watching.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 