Skwish, a Shake witch
Prologue
The Elder Warren Of Kurald Emurlahn, The Age Of Sundering
In a landscape torn with grief, the carcasses of six dragons lay strewn in a ragged row reaching a thousand or more paces across the plain, flesh split apart, broken bones jutting, jaws gaping and eyes brittle-dry. Where their blood had spilled out onto the ground wraiths had gathered like flies to sap and were now ensnared, the ghosts writhing and voicing hollow cries of despair, as the blood darkened, fusing with the lifeless soil; and, when at last the substance grew indurate, hardening into glassy stone, those ghosts were doomed to an eternity trapped within that murky prison.
The naked creature that traversed the rough path formed by the fallen dragons was a match to their mass, yet bound to the earth, and it walked on two bowed legs, the thighs thick as thousand-year-old trees. The width of its shoulders was equal to the length of a Tartheno Toblakai’s height; from a thick neck hidden beneath a mane of glossy black hair, the frontal portion of the head was thrust forward-brow, cheekbones and jaw, and its deep-set eyes revealing black pupils surrounded in opalescent white. The huge arms were disproportionately long, the enormous hands almost scraping the ground. Its breasts were large, pendulous and pale. As it strode past the battered, rotting carcasses, the motion of its gait was strangely fluid, not at all lumbering, and each limb was revealed to possess extra joints.
Skin the hue of sun-bleached bone, darkening to veined red at the ends of the creature’s arms, bruises surrounding the knuckles, a latticework of cracked flesh exposing the bone here and there. The hands had seen damage, the result of delivering devastating blows.
It paused to tilt its head, upward, and watched as three dragons sailed the air high amidst the roiling clouds, appearing then disappearing in the smoke of the dying realm.
The earthbound creature’s hands twitched, and a low growl emerged from deep in its throat.
After a long moment, it resumed its journey.
Beyond the last of the dead dragons, to a place where rose a ridge of hills, the largest of these cleft through as if a giant claw had gouged out the heart of the rise, and in that crevasse raged a rent, a tear in space that bled power in nacreous streams. The malice of that energy was evident in the manner in which it devoured the sides of the fissure, eating like acid into the rocks and boulders of the ancient berm.
The rent would soon close, and the one who had last passed through had sought to seal the gate behind him. But such healing could never be done in haste, and this wound bled anew.
Ignoring the virulence pouring from the rent, the creature strode closer. At the threshold it paused again and turned to look back the way it had come.
Draconean blood hardening into stone, horizontal sheets of the substance, already beginning to separate from the surrounding earth, to lift up on edge, forming strange, disarticulated walls. Some then began sinking, vanishing from this realm. Falling through world after world. To reappear, finally, solid and impermeable, in other realms, depending on the blood’s aspect, and these were laws that could not be challenged. Starvald Demelain, the blood of dragons and the death of blood.
In the distance behind the creature, Kurald Emurlahn, the Realm of Shadows, the first realm born of the conjoining of Dark and Light, convulsed in its death-throes. Far away, the civil wars still raged on, whilst in other areas the fragmenting had already begun, vast sections of this world’s fabric torn away, disconnected and lost and abandoned-to either heal round themselves, or die. Yet interlopers still arrived here, like scavengers gathered round a fallen leviathan, eagerly tearing free their own private pieces of the realm. Destroying each other in fierce battles over the scraps.
It had not been imagined-by anyone-that an entire realm could die in such a manner. That the vicious acts of its inhabitants could destroy… everything. Worlds live on, had been the belief-the assumption-regardless of the activities of those who dwelt upon them. Torn flesh heals, the sky clears, and something new crawls from the briny muck.
But not this time.
Too many powers, too many betrayals, too vast and all-consuming the crimes.
The creature faced the gate once more.
Then Kilmandaros, the Elder Goddess, strode through.
The ruined K’Chain Che’Malle demesne after the fall of Silchas Ruin
Trees were exploding in the bitter cold that descended like a shroud, invisible yet palpable, upon this racked, devastated forest.
Gothos had no difficulty following the path of the battle, the successive clashes of two Elder Gods warring with the Soletaken dragon, and as the Jaghut traversed its mangled length he brought with him the brutal chill of Omtose Phellack, the Warren of Ice. Sealing the deal, as you asked of me, Mael. Locking the truth in place, to make it more than memory. Until the day that witnesses the shattering of Omtose Phellack itself. Gothos wondered, idly, if there had ever been a time when he believed that such a shattering would not come to pass. That the Jaghut, in all their perfected brilliance, were unique, triumphant in eternal domination. A civilization immortal, when all others were doomed.
Well, it was possible. He had once believed that all of existence was under the benign control of a caring omnipotence, after all. And crickets exist to sing us to sleep, too. There was no telling what other foolishness might have crept into his young, naive brain all those millennia ago.
No longer, of course. Things end. Species die out. Faith in anything else was a conceit, the product of unchained ego, the curse of supreme self-importance.
So what do I now believe?
He would not permit himself a melodramatic laugh in answer to that question. What was the point? There was no-one nearby who might appreciate it. Including himself. Yes, I am cursed to live with my own company.
It’s a private curse.
The best kind.
He ascended a broken, fractured rise, some violent uplift of bedrock, where a vast fissure had opened, its vertical sides already glistening with frost when Gothos came to the edge and looked down. Somewhere in the darkness below, two voices were raised in argument.
Gothos smiled.
He opened his warren, made use of a sliver of power to fashion a slow, controlled descent towards the gloomy base of the crevasse.
As Gothos neared, the two voices ceased, leaving only a rasping, hissing sound, pulsating-the drawing of breath on waves of pain-and the Jaghut heard the slithering of scales on stone, slightly off to one side.
He alighted atop broken shards of rock, a few paces from where stood Mael, and, ten paces beyond him, the huge form of Kilmandaros, her skin vaguely luminescent-in a sickly sort of way-standing with hands closed into fists, a belligerent cast to her brutal mien.
Scabandari, the Soletaken dragon, had been driven into a hollow in the cliff-side and now crouched, splintered ribs no doubt making every breath an ordeal of agony. One wing was shattered, half torn away. A hind limb was clearly broken, bones punched through flesh. Its flight was at an end.
The two Elders were now eyeing Gothos, who strode forward, then spoke. ‘I am always delighted,’ he said, ‘when a betrayer is in turn betrayed. In this instance, betrayed by his own stupidity. Which is even more delightful.’
Mael, Elder God of the Seas, asked, ‘The Ritual… are you done, Gothos?’
‘More or less.’ The Jaghut fixed his gaze on Kilmandaros. ‘Elder Goddess. Your children in this realm have lost their way.’
The huge bestial woman shrugged, and said in a faint, melodic voice, ‘They’re always losing their way, Jaghut.’
‘Well, why don’t you do something about it?’
