DEVON THORMANE CONTINUES HIS SEARCH; FOR HIS HAMMER, AND FOR FREDERICK LONGSHORE.
Fighting his way across the landscape, Thormane felled his enemies by the hundreds, turning the sands red with their blood. Piling the bodies to knee level, he waded through their mass, a battlefield of lost souls, littering it with the mutilated corpses of grobles and dranghouls alike.
This proved to be no easy task, for no sooner had he charged into battle had he found himself braving a sea of lesser foes to be met by packs of Manticores, who came prowling out from behind boulders and burst forth from the bone formations of their long dead giant ancestors. Their razor sharp claws tore at him while their stabbing tails skewered the air, attempts to impale him sailing wide, but no less deadly.
The fighting was so thick that Thormane lost all sense of time and direction, and it seemed to him that he was being herded towards something, somewhere. A primal hive mind was at work here, behind the scenes, in communication with the Manticores. Thormane could recognize it in the movements of the beasts, their sporadic attacks shifting, re-aligning, their formation in constant flux yet somehow artfully cohesive.
He had seen this kind of phenomena before, fighting against other monsters in the Crucible pits. This was no different. The Manticores were being directed, their Alpha surely somewhere close at hand. They were forcing him towards it. Thormane vented his frustration on the Grobles, who were emboldened by the presence of their beastkin, skulking close enough to draw blood. A reaching thrust sent one Grobles skull exploding outwards, which cowed the others.
The push continued. He did not fight against the current- he would need that energy to face whatever lay in waiting. Instead, he let the wall of beasts pressure him closer to the Alpha. Mogara was its name, though Thormane did not know it at that time. He would discover this fact later, after suffering grievous wounds.
As the battle heightened, its stage moving across the waste in furious bloody tendrils, the air filled with throaty cries and bestial grunts, and he fought on. As he reached the peak of the hill he saw it- a hulking Manticore with muscled skin the color of dried blood, torn by stripes of yellow. Its maw was big enough to swallow his torso whole. Battering the weaker minions away, he prepared himself for death. It would come, either for him or for the Alpha.
The Alpha wasted no time on preparations, its anticipation of this fight had kindled as it waited for its minions to send Thormane quarreling up the hill into its thirsty claws. By the time hed reached the peak, its bloodlust had become a fiery inferno. It dashed into action, reaving the air with fierce sweeping displays of aggression, the sun catching on its talons, glinting speckles of taunting doom…
…only to be brought to a crunching halt by Thormanes makeshift shield. Swipe after swipe, he deflected the blows, each one more brutal than the last. The talons slowly began to shred at the wood- he could not risk losing his only baricade, and stepped forward unexpectedly, slamming it into the beasts hideous face, dead center. Mogara loosed a howling cry and reared up on its hind legs, swiping madly in a flurry of blows before dropping down on its haunches and preparing to pounce or skewer.
As the battle raged on, some nearby Dranghoul bounded over to join the fray, eager to spill the blood of human and Manticore alike. Thormane had thought the Briarthorns were tough, but the Dranghouls were far worse- these monsters were more resilient, and wore armor, wielding brutal weaponry and an unparalleled bloodlust. Thormane whipped at them with the jagged poisoned spiked of his makeshift club in between his blunt ramming attacks to Mogara’s face, smashing the skulls of the now insignificant groble foolish enough to wander into the fray.
A few well placed strikes of his club had the Dranghoul moving sluggishly, the contaminants working their way through the beasts bloodstream. While the Dranghoul floundered, Thormane was free to bring his full focus onto Mogara, who was now possessed by battle-fury. It bounded over and clamped its iron jaws down upon Thormane’s leg. The pain was excruciating, but Thormane knew he must endure it- were he to drop his defenses, the beasts would surely tear him apart.
Struggling across the hilly peak, he wrestled with the beast before wrenching his leg free, trying to put some distance between them, Mogara’s claws wildly slashing in an attempt to snare him. Blood poured from Thormane’s wounds, and he scrambled to regain composure following the devastating wounds.
The Alpha had dogged him long enough, and it was time he ended this. Thormane inched back, up the hill, fending off Mogaras savage blows one after another until he could inch back no further. His back was now up against a large rock formation and he had little room to work with, but he had the high ground and in an opportune moment just as Mogara hunkered down to pounce, Thormane slammed his heel down on the top of the monster’s undefended head, feeling its skull crumble apart with jagged snaps and pops.
Thormane exhaled, and leaned back against the rock, holding his side where Mogara had dealt him a near mortal wound. The beast let out a repulsive low whine and he watched it roll away down the hill, limbs limp, the life leaving its body. It tumbled into the Dranghoul, who was by this time recovering from the poisonous strike Thormane had dealt it earlier. The Dranghoul, nearly knocked over by the unexpected corpose that came wheeling down the hill, knocked it away and loosed a bloodcurdling roar. Thormane understood the roar for what it was- he needed to leave, now. It was calling to its beastkin- signaling them.
Gripping his side, Thormane broke into a light jog- He would need to put some distance between the Dranghoul and himself if he wanted to bandage his wounds properly. Diligent in his task, he managed to outpace the Dranghoul, but not its cries. It was not long before he heard more Grobles and Dranghouls in the distance, matching their beastkin clarion call. This was bad. If he got pinned down and swarmed by these foes while he was injured and out in the open he would be overrun in mere moments. He needed to get to a more defensible location.
It didnt take long for Thormane’s jog to turn into a brisk walk. He was re-tracing his steps through the Pine Barrens and into the Shaded Basin, grateful not to have to face the Briarthorn once more, when his walk began to slowly become a stagger. Holding his hand out against the nearby rocky cover, he looked down and saw his lower abdomen and right leg were soaked in blood- his blood. He needed to stop the bleeding, and fast.
Sticking his neck out around the rock, he searched the horizon for signs of a suitable place to hunker down and bind his open wounds. There was what appeared to be an old fort- sturdy enough to provide decent cover- cover enough to weather the storm of scions that now hunted him. The bad new was, it looked as though he’d have to fight through them to reach safety, no matter which direction he went. Might as well head for the more suitable destination, then.
The battle cries were no longer noise, no longer some external part of the world, easily separated from the bodies they originated from. No. They had become enmeshed within the fiber of all, an adhesive to the writhing mass of bloody organics, the tornado of limbs and barbed teeth, Thormane jostled through its corpulent form lashing out at anything that moved. He had learned how to generate the noise. All he need do was swing his barbed club and shoulder his shield around, and it would spew into the atmosphere, heralded by a crimson tide.
Throngs of the enemy had met him in a tsunami of swords and cinders as he approached the massive structure, led by an eager Dranghoul who had rushed forward, grappling Thormane with one arm whilst attempting to spear him using the crude weaponry attached to his free arm. As Thormane fought the beast off, he had suffered many hits from the horde frothing around the edges of the Dranghoul at its vanguard. His body was numb and raw, pink and brown and black and blue all over from absorbing impacts and enduring cuts and stabs, his smithing armor singed from burns.
The Groble tribe of the Emberclan was indigenous to this region, and it just so happened that they were shared inhabitants of the fort alongside the Dranghoul. “Lovely” Thormane had thought when his breastplate had absorbed the first of many shots fired from their flaming guns. By now he could no longer distinguish burn from cut, and cut from bruise. His entire body was wracked in pain, and yet he fought onward, surely driven by some otherworldly source of power, for any mortal man would have fallen after being mauled by Mogara. Yet here he was, wading through the battle like a walking pillar of rusting iron, bringing crushing poisonous death to his foes.
When the Dranghoul fell, Thormane figured he would be spared some relief- only cannon fodder remained besides, these Grobles, their numerous presence the most threatening thing about them. As he fought his way further he passed beneath the hold’s main gate …into a courtyard bristling with more Grobles and Dranghoul.
Thormane knew his mistake as soon as he saw not only were they superior in numbers, but tactical positioning as well, for they had the sense to station their ranged fighters on the high ground, where they were free to rain death down upon him. Realizing his folly, Thormane turned his assault aside abruptly, causing the ebb and flow of the battle to squeeze around him like a snake through thick mud. He pried for freedom, thrusting club and shield before him and pushing away hard, spreading his arms apart to part the veil of combatants before him. A fast glance showed his exit had been cut-off, an entire squad of fresh enemies rushed in under the arches of the hold’s entrance and barred his path.
Just then a blade struck him under his chestplate, a lucky strike from somewhere behind him or to his right. It was hard to know. A second blade shot out of a heap of clutching arms, slitting the wrist open on one of them before finding purchase in Thormanes bicep. He shouted out in pain, his arm no longer having the strength to force the wall of fighting bodies apart. Drawing his arms back abruptly, the Grobles were unable to compensate for the sudden loss of support and fell into eachother, arms and legs flailing violently to regain their balance but failing to do so without their weapons gripped in the hands, half of them fell to friendly fire within seconds.
With the horde stunned and shocked at Thormane’s resolve, many of them scattered-Their Dranghoul captains no longer breathing and their confidence soaked away like the blood of the slain beasts in the dirt. Thormane charged on, into the hold, headstrong and determined, his battle-fury in full swing, bloodied but unbowed, and eager to dispatch those in his path
Now delirious from all the blood loss, Thormane fought with the last ounces of his strength. He understood his life was at an end, he would die here in this dungeon, his life the price of his foolish notion that there might have been safety within.
The beast towered over him, each strike drawing more blood. Its blades seemed to absorb it, transfusing it into the creature and empowering it with more and more furious attacks… However, Thormane’s contaminated club had taken its toll, and it wasnt long before the monstrous fiend began to lose its balance, stumbling and staggering into the walls and sending small debris falling from the rooftops. It was in a moment like this that Thormane sent his last consious ounce of strength into his final blows
The beasts chest broke open with a flash, its intestines pouring out, thick as boa constrictors, decomposing and dissolving, the effects of the contaminents from Thormane’s bludgeon at work. It stumbled, and fell backwards. Thormane watched in shocked disbelief, the creature dying before his eyes was the largest and most deadly he had ever faced.
And then it all went black. Thormane collapsed, unconscious from the strain of the continued battle…
