Blood for the Brood

There weren’t always dragons in the valley.

Tales told by campfire crackle say the Worm Vishradaan burrowed through the sky while the first men of clay slept in the valley below, and Gods long-since dead grew ever fatter on lakes of wine and ripe harvest fields in the Haven Plane.

Vishradaan let the sky run red with blood, and out of the wounds and the fire crawled the dragons, falling like black stars upon earth and stone. They flooded towns with smoke and huts with inferno, and the clay men hardened, their insides filled with dark magic that bound them to new masters while others were left tending to their wounds.

The dragons killed Vishradaan, his corpse left to rot under ice and snow. Their forces set to work pillaging the Valley of the World of precious stones that glowed green in even the dimmest of lights. From Thaite to the Sea Wall their Three-Eyed banner flew with marching fire, and when they reached the city of the Prescur the walls melted to rivers of stone as the Worm Wizards boiled in their keeps.

After a century, the legions left for their worlds beyond the festering sky. Every thousand years since then they’ve returned to remind those below of the strength of their shadow.

Jeremiah only knew the peace in between, and he was the Eldest. Long ago, in days when his legs were spry and his hair full, he thought he’d seen one, far down the valley and high above the tall trees. A majestic shock of smoke and wings that warped sunlight. But the wake of its shadow was long, and the forests shuddered beneath it.

In recent years, he’d never had seen a dragon even if it landed upon the steps of the Ancorr. His eyes grew poorer by the day. The deep lilac that his mother used to ogle was nearly all grey.

He had the Bloodfelt. He’d be dead soon.

The library boy helped him out of bed. He returning with tea and porridge a little while later; toast had become too painful only a week ago. He sucked at the bowl through gapped teeth, staring down at the back-and-forth thrush of markets and maidens. The liveliness of early-morning commerce and the intake of dew-filled air trapped outside his window.

“To the flames with them all,” he muttered, and shoved an empty bowl into the library boy’s arms. His face was small, perpetually puzzled. Jeremiah imagined that he’d gawked like that years ago.

“Pardon, sir.”

“Nothing, Jake.” He said, turning back to the window, “I’ll be down soon.”

“It’s Artur, sir.”

Jake had been his attendant nearly a decade before. Before the Omens took him in the last red winter. The next one would be soon, and he took small comfort in the fact that part of him still hoped this boy would live through it. Even if he’d be turned to stone in the frozen wastes beyond Thaite well before then.

“Sorry, Artur,” he tried to smile but winced instead, “Tomorrow, if I forget again, I give you permission to throw my bowl back at me.”

The boy chuckled, a warm, real laugh. Only the ones that didn’t understand laughed at his jokes anymore. Really laughed. Everyone else only pretended to out of guilt or pity.

To the flames with all those ones, Artur.

*

It was midday by the time he'd staggered down the tower steps, praying to Gods long dead to make that first descent the hardest part. He met the sea of faces waiting outside his door with sweat dripping down his face, half held up by Artur. The small boys head poked out from below his arm.

A few nodded, less smiled. Most stared past him, over him, anywhere but his rash-circled eyes. The crowd parted along his path, guarding his way up to the Ancorr. The stones were loose with last night’s rain, more than once some half-horrified Witness had to catch him before he skidded into the mud. Every time he wished the fool would drop him, maybe let his skull crack against a pebble.

Four men in dark purple cloaks and masks that looked like crow skulls loomed over the lowest steps. Their breaths rattled like bones piled.

Gently, Artur slipped away from underneath him, and the crows wrapped their gaunt fingers around his arms. They dragged him step by step until the plateau and tossed his weak frame into the group of sick souls perched against the obelisk.

Each of them held their tongue. As crows with brushes painted their cold, cracked skin. Crows with ceramic pots sprayed red powder over leaking gashes. Women with dark hair and fiery eyes uttered draconic chants in low tones. A burly man clad in leather and warring tattoos took a ceremonial knife from an altar of black glass and sliced a deep ravine across Jeremiah’s palm, wiping the already clotted blood against the centre stone.

He started to cry, to the surprise of no one but himself. Everyone cries, but he hadn’t thought he had the energy left, to feel anything except hatred for the Witnesses who stood staring from the edge of the plateau.

You’ll be here before long, he felt like screaming, but the words only seemed lost on the crowd. No one truly understood. Even he hadn’t until now. Instead, he cried more. Wailing maybe, he couldn’t tell, but they still wouldn’t look at him. Not really.

When the last man’s blood was let, he started laughing. Shrill, painful giggling that sounded like the slaughtering of pigs. But soon the man next to him had started. They wrapped their arms around each other as if old friends. The Witnesses started to murmur, to shuffle uncomfortably. Before he knew it, Jeremiah was laughing too, hardly able to clutch his stomach hard enough.

One of the dragon women shouted some final curse and they all burst out again. The leather-clad man dragged them off into the Ancorr one by one. Jeremiah howled all the way, as the dark warmth of its interior closed in around him like an unlit furnace. Snaketongue whispers flickered against his ears and the nape of his neck. More men with eyes that shone emerald-green in the shadows loaded them into a coffin with wheels.

The lid slammed shut, and a calm kind of silence descended upon them. Jeremiah couldn’t cry, he didn’t even feel the hatred anymore. He resolved to rot against the wood. They stayed like that the rest of the way.

*

Jeremiah had always found it strange. Taking the ones like him to the Valley North. Instead of killing them, piling them in the dirt, burning them until the smoke towered above the tall trees. A prisoner left to wander could always return or find whatever shelter he could in a village without an Ancorr.

This far North there was no life, nowhere to go. His mother had once told him that even the sun was scared of what waits in the North, that no one ever went up there except the Bloodfelt and stupid little boys.

There’d be no escape.

Him and the others walked only in the direction they’d been sent, and they kept at it for what felt like days. Through barren waste and hurricane winds they wandered, broken bodies crumpling against the frost and ground harder than iron. There was fewer of them now, although he couldn’t remember how many there’d been when they left.

After a while, it was just him and the laughing man, sharing the food and the boots they’d stolen from the bodies of the dead.

“They won’t be needing it no more,” he’d told Jeremiah, a sick grin plastered along his right side.

Jeremiah only nodded and helped him wrestle the coat off the last one, wondering which of the two of them would get to claim the rights to the other’s corpse.

Still kneeling, the laughing man produced a knife from his satchel. Jeremiah stepped back and watched him tear at the dead man’s chest. Blood pooled in jagged rivers that flowed into the snow as he plunged his hands amongst the viscera. He tore out a dripping length of intestine and bit down into it with yellow teeth.

“What are you doing!” Jeremiah screamed through the snow.

He looked confused for a moment, flicking his gaze between bloody hands and rage-filled eyes. “Food ran out a days past didn’t it? We need to eat if we’re going to get there.”

He stumbled forward and grabbed the man’s collar limply. “Get where?”

The laughing man shoved him off, still smiling. Jeremiah would have killed him if he had the energy. If he had the knife.

“Vishradaan. We go to Vishradaan and to the Prescur.” He held a hand out and slid the knife back into his pocket.

Jeremiah shook his head. “Vishradaan is dead. The city of the Prescur ashes.”

“Or so they say,” he sneered.

“Why would they send us there?”

He shrugged. “Couldn’t say. Sounds like a good way to die though, doesn’t it my friend?”

*

The city walls were frozen waterfalls of masonry, the towers beyond warped pillars that scraped the crimson grey cloud-cast. Silence fell over the world as they entered through the Mouth. The winds shuddered to a stop while snow ran away to the South. If not for the laughing man’s rasp of breath, Jeremiah would’ve thought his ears had frozen off in the snow.

“Where do we go from here?”

Bloodshot eyes stared back at Jeremiah. Thick purple veins that hadn’t been there a few days ago extended out from the black bags underneath them. Something other than the Bloodfelt had taken hold.

“Can’t you hear them?”

Jeremiah stepped closer. “Hear who?”

“Keep Ungol. We need to go there.”

“Do you know the way?”

He nodded. “Follow close. Shadows don’t fester idly in the Prescur.”

They stepped through charred rubble and unshapely brick covered in green filament. The streets were abandoned, child’s toys crumpled between broken carts but no bones anywhere. The further they walked the lesser the damage. Foundations became sturdier, architecture richer. Once or twice, Jeremiah had spotted dark shapes shifting behind dirt-covered windows. The laughing man twisted and turned on his feet, muttering nonsense words in ancient languages.

Jeremiah wasn’t sure why he followed him anymore. It seemed the only thing left to do. The last free choice he’d ever make, and it did sound like a better way to go than those damnable stories he’d heard about the final days of the Bloodfelt. Mostly he felt the Keep tugging at him, beckoning him like sirens past the Sea Wall.

They reached the inner rings of the city, where dark towers loomed high above them and oozed seeping vines. Jeremiah could hear them now. A thousand voices. A million. Hissing and cursing like razors against glass. Calling him closer, dragging him forward with invisible chains.

Before they reached the Keep, droves of shrouded figures filled the streets behind them, silently blocking the path back, murmuring amongst themselves. The door was massive, barred by curling metal girders, each plank tattooed with shivering runes. It swung forth, revealing an eery passage that descended deep into the earth. The voices grew louder.

The laughing man walked forward but turned to say something first: “Vishradaan is dead.”

Jeremiah nodded.

Some distance down Jeremiah heard the door slam shut behind them. For a long time, they traipsed further, further down in ever pitcher black, the voices rising in their millions until Jeremiah’s head throbbed.

Eventually a low orange glow appeared at the end of the tunnel, flickering back and forth. The tunnel opened up to a cavernous expanse that stretched for leagues. Calcified stone pillars held up the roof, primitive dwellings carved into the rock walls. At the centre, an iron seal laced with timeless inscriptions covered a pit larger than the Keep above. Great angular chains attached to its frame trailed off into receptacles along the cavern stone.

The laughing man fell to his knees before the seal. Jeremiah stayed standing and the cloaks ushered in behind them, even more appearing from behind shadows in the distance. Their murmurs were uniform now, a single dark chorus.

Other groups of sickly men were herded in through unlit tunnels. Only a few at first but soon dozens, and near a hundred not long after.

A throne of bulbous, sinewy material stood erect on the other side. Upon it sat a figure dressed in extravagant viridescent robes, wearing a crown of curved teeth like Southern blades. His face was gaunt and collapsed, lips sliced back to reveal blackened teeth. But his eyes glowed a vibrant, swirling green that reminded Jeremiah of surface moss eddying under starlight.

“THE VISHNAR KING!” The crowds cried out.

“THE VISHNAR KING!”

“DOWN WITH THE HEAVENS!”

“ASCEND SHALL THE VISHNAR KING!”

The one on the throne lifted a decrepit fist, and the crowd fell silent. He lowered it, and Jeremiah felt his knees buckle beneath him. A creaking, groaning sound filled the chamber. The chains began to recede, the seal shuddered upwards until it hung high above them.

The Bloodfelt were lifted into the air by invisible bindings, bones bent near too far. Jeremiah could see only darkness down below. Slithering, writhing, calling. As they drifted over the open pit the King leaned forward, eyes burning. Jeremiah tried to struggle, but the vice only tightened.

His words seeped deep into the decaying crevices of Jeremiah’s mind: “Meat for the men...” The masses erupted. "Swords for the soldiers..." Iron clanged against iron. "Death to the dragons..." The King arose, taller than any man, his voice booming. "Victory for Vishnar..." The things in the pit wailed and screamed, thrashed and yearned. "Blood for the brood."