Grimoire:Allies/Iron Lords: Difference between revisions

"[[Bretomart]],” said Jolder.

“Maybe he’s not coming.” This from a thin woman at Perun’s side, the mayor of the crumbling silvery ruins on the plateau behind them. “We didn’t want you wolves here. Lord [[Segoth]] knows that.”

Perun shook her head. “Not gonna happen.”

“Nine, nine hundred, they still gotta come up the pass three at a time.” She cracked her knuckles. “Easy pickins.”

“They won't."

“Well, well,” said Segoth. “The Iron Wolves.”

“Cease your insults,” Saladin barked.  

Perun shot him a surprised look. “That’s an insult? I kinda like ‘Wolves.’”

"Begone, wolves,” Segoth sneered. “These people are mine.”

"Wrong," Radegast retorted. "You abuse the powers the [[Traveler]] has entrusted us.”

“Iron Wolves!” he shouted as his warriors scattered and a cheer went up from the people in the silver ruins. “I will slaughter everyone who has ever sheltered you!"

“Didn’t think you’d have the courage to come back here,” said the Warlord.

“Situational awareness. Not courage. I go where I can do the most good. Thank you for seeing me.” Felwinter’s voice sounded as hollow as his helmet. Citan wanted to knock it clean off the Iron Lord’s bony shoulders. He could do it with a single punch.

“As I recall, you used to have a throne on that Light-forsaken peak, ‘til you joined up with the wolves. You’re the only Warlord I know who held an entire mountain.”

“[[Felwinter Peak]].”

“No one ever calls it that.”

“The Iron Lords do. Though they did ask me to take that throne down.”

Citan’s laugh shook the room. “How is losing territory ever a good thing for a Warlord?” Felwinter folded his hands atop the table. Underneath it, Citan made two fists, a crescent of Light flickering between them.

“Join us and find out,” said the Iron Lord. “Turn your sector over to us. You can still patrol it, of course.”

Citan’s voice lowered. “Of course. You know I’ll refuse.”

“Then we’ll put you down, and take your territory by force. Over and over again if we have to.”

“I invite you to my home after you abandon us, and you come to threaten me?” The Warlord stood, towering over Felwinter.

“To broker peace.” Citan thought that even the voice behind the helmet didn’t believe what it said. The floor shuddered as the Warlord upended the massive table with one hand. It smashed into the opposite wall, as tendrils of Void Light passed through it and coalesced into Felwinter’s leaping form.

But Felwinter’s momentum continued into a knee-lift that smashed into Citan’s head as the larger man reared back to strike. The Warlord fell, the front of his helm shattering. Felwinter landed next to Citan’s prone body.

“Lady Jolder taught me that. I can’t say the Iron Lords haven’t done me any favors,” the voice intoned.  

“You know we’ll burn the world down before we let the Iron Lords rule it,” the larger man gasped, breathing out of his mouth, his face a bloody mess. The [[Void]] Light in Felwinter’s hand snapped—and so did the Warlord’s neck.

“Radegast is scattered. Perun is indecisive. [[Silimar]] wants to build a tower and hide. But they’re going to change the world; no one can stop them,” Felwinter said quietly to the corpse. He parted his coat and drew a bronze shotgun. “Will it be for the better? I don’t know. But they mean to end the fighting, so I don’t have to sleep with my back to the wall every night, Light in my hand. And that’s not nothing.”

“Normally, this is where I ask you to reconsider. Tell you that you should come with me. See how powerful your Light can become. But I know you, Citan. What you do with the land you take, with its people. The other Lords—especially Saladin—might let you walk away. I’m not going to give them the chance.”

Citan’s Ghost sparked into view from above, bringing its eye to bear on its fallen charge. The Warlord emerged from a radiant column, a frenzied shout at his lips.

Felwinter’s shotgun cracked like thunder—once for the Warlord, and again for his Ghost.

"Too brittle. Etherbone’s better. Flexes."

"Bone’s always available as a last resort. Nothing else is."

"If all of you were cut down around me, your Light drained past return, and my own armor was shredded. F’r instance."

"I could hide under your bodies until the threat left. Then I’d make a helmet from all your skulls and a breastplate from your ribs and gloves from your finger bones wrapped around mine."

He died on the structure’s great steps, cut down by an advancing line of [[Archon]]s, and when the stonework fell to cluster bombs.  

He died in the structure’s sprawling shadow and upon its vaunted heights.  

“The better to raise its next incarnation,” he said to those allies who later questioned his madness. As the Fallen charged, Silimar refused to abandon what he’d built, though others retreated to a stronger position. “Go,” he told them. “Save yourselves. I’ll slow them down.”

The enemy came in overwhelming force. A breaking wave of blades and firepower and death. Atop the structure’s central bulwark, Lord Silimar held his ground.  

“Take it if you can, you bastards!” He shouted at the swarming enemy.

Later that night, when Lord Silimar rose again from the ashes, he found Lord Saladin already there and waiting, standing near the place where he’d made his final stand.  

“This structure is doomed,” Saladin said in the darkness. “You must know this.”

“Not doomed,” Silimar said. “Fated, perhaps. Doomed is too strong a word.”

“Use whatever word you like, but there’s another word that applies to this place: indefensible. And yet after each defeat, you rebuild.”

“I seek only to build it more perfectly.”

Lord Saladin shook his head. “Only a fool would raise the same structure again and again.”

“These stones are like us,” Lord Silimar said. “Don’t you see?”

“They knock us down, you and me,” he continued. “But time and again, we rise. Like this place.”

“Eleven times they’ve destroyed what you’ve built,” Saladin said. “Why rebuild what will be knocked down?”

“Because one time they won’t be able to,” Silimar said. “And when that day comes, when this perfect, indefensible structure stays standing, then we’ll know.”

“We’ll know what?”

Lord Silimar looked at his old friend. Then he turned and strode the broken stones, and looked out over the ruins that spread away into the distance. “Then we’ll know it’s safe to build our city to the sky.”

Perun walked up the ship’s gangplank and made straight for Jolder's room. She hit the door controls and stepped inside.

The corners of Perun's mouth twitched. "I came to tell you Rience agreed to the single combat. Guess I don’t need to.”

"We need a second, it's ‘cause you're dead. No one will be calm."

Jolder took a small pot of black liquid and a thin brush out of the chest, then stood in front of the shield and began lining her left eye with kohl. "Who’re they sending?"

Perun ran a hand through her close-cropped hair. "Don’t know yet. Seems... too easy. I were Rience, I'd be thinking about poison, neurojammers... Man like him with nothing to lose, might even target your Ghost."

"Perun." Jolder took the shield from Perun's arms and placed a gauntleted hand on Perun's shoulder. Her eyes flashed between lines of thick black kohl as she smiled. “It’s me.”

Perun sighed, then placed her hand over Jolder's. "True.”

[[Timur]]’s [[Stormtrance]] tears through a gang of Dregs as Felwinter stumbles through the shifting sands behind him, miles inland of what remains of the Arabian Shores.  

“Where are you taking me?” Felwinter rushes to Timur’s side, his eyes jumping focus, anticipating another attack.  

“You seem far too obsessed with these ‘[[Warmind]]s’.” Timur stops and stares into the horizon as if smelling something; not danger, discovery. He draws his fellow Iron Lord close. “Tell me, Felwinter,” he whispers, “what does the word Seraph mean to you?”

Felwinter leans in to whisper back. “Old Earth theology? I know its power well; one can make great use of the traps of faith and its myths.”

“Damn you, [[Exo]]s!” The whisper game abandoned. “Do you even ponder the before? Or that number etched into your ‘flesh’? Do you see yourself in your dreams? Th—”

Timur grabs Felwinter, bringing him back to his feet, and says, “Have you ever wondered what it is that calls to you in that void of memory, where the edge of the past infects your present?” He returns to his game of whispers. “It’s an itch you can’t scratch, isn’t it? Well maybe you can.”

“You think I am one of them? That all Exo are—”

“Lord Felwinter, I know what you are. And you are no Warmind or even one of its puppets. Come. You must see this.” He makes a gesture like he’s casting a spell over the sand. “Follow my footfalls; this area’s rigged with dirty Fallen nonsense.”

Timur continues forward, grasps the brass familiar around his neck, and closes his eyes. A slight hum rises and his trance takes him deep into the sea of shanks, his trusted Lash raised and tearing his path through the darkness. Felwinter is slow to follow, but fast enough to witness Timur’s focus turn shanks by the pack against their Vandal keeper, chasing him back toward the sea.  

“Hmm. Warmind. You are certainly as stubborn as one.”

Felwinter awkwardly pulls himself away and out of Timur’s reach.

“With all respect, Lord Timur, whatever game you are playing with me has gone on far too long. This is just another Dead Zone.”

“Oh, is it?”

Timur directs Felwinter’s eyes toward the eastern horizon, where a building crowned with the initials “[[Clovis Bray (corporation)|C.B.]]” is now in view.

“We all have creators — humans, Exo, Warminds, even those poor [[Awoken]]. Some are just easier to find.”