Its thoughts, once sharp and precise, now spun about a wobbling axis of rage and agony. Were it to rest for even a moment it feared it would simply cease to exist, its energy scattered to the far reaches of the world. Even now, precious fragments of memory and personality crumbled and were lost.
“Diplomacy is not the victory of negotiation, but the failure of war,” it muttered to itself. Shards of the life it once lived cascaded through its mind. It saw great halls lit with a thousand candle chandeliers, the light refracting off minutely faceted crystal goblets so thin they sang with just the exhalation of breath. It recalled a map skillfully made by jewelers using the finest gems and metals. It reached out a hand, grasping at something that wasn’t there.
The hand closed in a tight fist and it dug deep into the agony and found white, piercing pain and clung to it while the rest of its mind spiraled faster and faster into madness.
The creature felt a new emotion take hold, one more powerful than its rage or its suffering-revenge. “Talk loudly so that your opponent doesn’t hear the assassin creeping up from behind,” it said, seeing waiters in crisp white jackets moving silently behind a line of high-back chairs. A single flash of a knife and a guest’s soup would grow cold. It laughed, hoping it would soon settle the score with the soldier that had usurped it. Rakkes howled as it laughed and the creature became aware of the growing pack of rakkes surrounding it as it moved across the sand. Hundreds now followed it. The simple beasts looked to it for guidance. More and more rakkes joined as they moved in a northerly direction.
“Diplomacy buys time until the army is in place,” it said, looking around at the ancient creatures brought back to life in order to wreak havoc.
The creature smiled, revealing a row of black teeth hoary with frost. The rakkes had picked up a scent and were hunting.
This was an army. Nothing as skilled or precise as the soldiers it had once directed through its efforts at the negotiating table, but these things knew how to kill, and the time for diplomacy was over.
Distant memories of diplomatic missions broke through the whirling chaos of its mind. Armies were often used as leverage, forcing the enemy to concede without blood ever being spilled. It was a quaint notion, and one the creature no longer understood. Its only reason for living, in fact the only thing keeping it alive, was the need to wreak terrible vengeance on those that had wronged it.
The pack picked up its pace and began growling in low, guttural tones to each other. Prey had been spotted. The creature pushed itself forward until it took its rightful position at the head of the pack, its pace unnaturally quick as it scurried across the frozen desert. Its eyes, now frozen orbs of black ice, pivoted within its head with a grating noise of granite on glass. Pain flared in its skull as pure light, and it stumbled before regaining its footing. Forcing its head up, it peered into the darkness. Three hundred yards away a group of three wagons pulled by teams of camels rolled slowly along a caravan path. The creature waited, hoping. A moment later, a column of marching soldiers appeared out of the swirling gloom following the wagons.
It would have its revenge, and the rakkes would feed.
Finding control in its pain, the creature wrapped itself tight around its desire to kill. Rakkes slunk away from it as it began to hum with an eerie vibration.
The creature considered ordering the rakkes to spare its usurper, but there would be no need. Its power was great, too strong for any rakkes to defeat. That task would fall to the former Emissary, and it welcomed it.
The rakkes gave full throat to their howls. They stomped the ground and beat their chests. Hackles rose and eyes slitted as their world squeezed down into a single red-hazed need.
The rakkes raced across the snow-covered sand. All along the column shouts and cries rang out. Camels started and tried to flee as their drivers vainly attempted to keep them under control. The soldiers stopped where they were and began to frantically ram charges into their muskets as the rakkes closed to within two hundred yards. The first shots split the night in a ragged, undisciplined burst. Hot yellow tongues of flames illuminated the hasty line of defense as the column made its stand. Here and there a rakke tumbled and fell, a head shattered, a heart holed, but for every rakke brought down dozens more came after it.
A more controlled volley slashed through the forward ranks of the rakkes at a hundred yards, scything down over a dozen. The surviving rakkes only howled louder and leaped over their dead. Fresher meat was only a short distance away.
The creature looked everywhere for the oath-bound soldier that had stolen its place. It tried to marshal its senses enough to search for it, but the smell of blood was in the air and the rising crescendo of the rakke pack overpowered everything until it, too, was consumed with the need to rend flesh.
Cries and shouts rose above the charging rakkes as the men of the column saw their fate moments away. In a feat of arms made possible by sheer desperation they managed one more volley as the rakkes crossed the last ten yards. Rakkes tumbled at their feet in a spray of blood and flesh and bone fragments, their fur smoldering from the burning gunpowder.
And then the rakkes were upon them.
Screams rose and then cut off abruptly as claw and fang made short work of the flesh before them. A few soldiers used their muskets as clubs in one last attempt to cling to life, but their effort only added seconds. Any man who turned and ran was borne down by claws in his back and felt the hot, fetid breath of a rakke in its ear as the beast’s fangs bit down on its neck.
“. . mercy. .”
The creature turned, searching for the source of the plea. It spotted a bloody figure a few feet away half buried under the carnage. Part of a gnawed rib cage obscured its view. It strode over and blasted the carrion to pieces. It looked down. The dead were a mix of elves and men. It began lifting and tossing the bodies aside as if they were no more than pieces of wet, dripping cloth. In its haste to get to the survivor it tore arms from sockets and spilled innards in sickening heaps until finally it found a dwarf. It reached down and grabbed the dwarf by its beard and pulled it from the pile.
Frost began to sparkle along the dwarf’s beard as it struggled to breathe. One eye was closed, and it was missing an arm. The wet socket where its shoulder used to be froze over in a black, crackling mess and the dwarf cried out in pain. The creature looked past it to one of the overturned wagons. Artifacts lay spilled in the snow, the gold and gems going unnoticed by the rampaging rakkes. Something about this triggered a memory in it. Library. Kaman Rhal.
The dwarf motioned with its one good arm toward its throat and the creature released its grasp, letting it fall to the desert floor. Rakkes moved in to finish it off, but the creature hissed and kept them at bay.
“My. . my name is Griz Jahrfel, I am a merchant. .”
The creature searched what little memory remained and realized its mistake.
The dwarf shook his head. “No. Some of the elves used to be, but not anymore. They work. . they work for me now,” he said, his voice breaking into sobs.
The creature conjured a spear of black ice and stabbed it into the fleshy thigh of the dwarf, who began screaming.
