As Redmane walked into the darkness, lights sprang into being all around him.

  They were torches on the walls, lit one after another by some spell which sensed his presence in the tomb. They gave off a golden radiance, a stark contrast to the black stone. It illuminated a carved mural on those walls, similar in style to the depictions of Vos at the Abyssal Wells.

  This mural seemed to tell a story.

  It began on the left side of the chamber, with a familiar image. Vos, standing with his weapon and his enslaved parents.

  The next scene depicted a group of men standing, breaking the chains on their ankles, taking up arms to slay their oppressors.

  The following section featured the chained beast. The Lord of Hunger. The freed men were breaking its chain.

  Then the Lord of Hunger went on a rampage, killing and eating indiscriminately. The men who had freed it stood back to witness the chaos and carnage.

  The Lord of Hunger and the champions of the tribes defeated Vos on the field of battle.

  The freedom fighters next unchained the Lady of Plenty.

  She soothed the beast by transforming into a bed of flowers, and the Lord of Hunger fell into a deep sleep upon them.

  The last image showed the freed men erecting this very building, to inter the body of Vos while the Lord of Hunger and the Lady of Plenty slumbered nearby.

  The mural wrapped all the way around the room, from the left wall to the right, and was interrupted by a central staircase stretching down into the dark. Redmane descended that staircase, and as he did so more golden torches flared to life in anticipation of his passing.

  His descent stretched on. Reminiscent of travel through the Abyss, Redmane couldn’t reckon how much time had passed when he reached its end.

  At the bottom of the staircase, the chamber opened into a large tomb. Torches cast their glow across the space, revealing a central sarcophagus. The walls of the tomb bore no decoration, they were stark in their simplicity, focusing all attention on the sarcophagus and its occupant.

  There was no lid. Instead it resembled a bed, albeit a firm one. Upon it rested a tall, gaunt figure wearing the regalia of a ruler; a conical golden crown, wrists and fingers bedecked with gems and jewels, bright golden necklaces draped around its neck.

  In its hands it clutched a giant warhammer, its haft as tall as he was and its squared head almost the width of the figure’s own torso. It was golden and imposing, untarnished despite the passing of centuries or perhaps even millennia.

  The God Breaker.

  Redmane gazed upon it. But he had an uneasy feeling.

  In a moment he understood why.

  “Nnnnnrrhh… Belskaya… Why have ye disturbed my dreaming again…”

  His voice rasped like steel against stone. It had an eerie, hollow timbre, as if it issued from the bottom of a deep cavern.

  “I come for your weapon, Vos,” said Redmane. “Surrender it willingly and you may return to your rest.”

  The eyes of the supine figure snapped open. It tilted its chin, stared unblinkingly at Redmane.

  “You…”

  Vos stiffly sat up, a slow, rigid motion. The sarcophagus creaked under his weight as he swung his legs over the side, feet touching the cold stone floor. Then the sovereign stood to his full height, towering over Redmane, the tip of his crown nearly touching the ceiling. Torchlight flickered across its ancient regalia and the hollows of his cheeks and eye sockets, casting deep shadows.

  The grip of his bony hands tightened upon the haft of the God Breaker.

  “So Belskaya has failed in his task… You are foolish to come here. Father…”

  “You're no son of mine,” said Redmane. “You’re just another monster.”

  Then his eyes widened at how fast Vos shot forward.

  He leapt back to avoid a sweeping blow from that hammer. As it rushed through the space he recently occupied, Redmane could feel the nimbus of force surrounding the head of the God Breaker. Even at a safe distance it sent a chill up his spine. He didn’t have to remember the last two times he’d faced this weapon to know its touch would have consequences.

  All he had to know was that the historical ledger was zero and two, in the God Breaker’s favor.

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  The ground and the walls trembled from the passing of the God Breaker, even though it hadn’t yet struck anything but air. Vos moved with a speed that belied his corpse-like form, hammer blurring as it swung in wide, devastating arcs. Redmane struggled to match the pace, each evasion a narrow escape. The clash of metal against claw echoed in the small room, sparks flying as Redmane parried the warhammer only to be blown back by the next near miss.

  When his claws found purchase on Vos’s leathery flesh, they drew no blood. Nor did the venom of the Manticore take hold. Bloodlust did not stir in his heart. And more vexingly, Flicker did naught but make Vos whip around and strike behind him. His reflexes were fast enough to keep up with the Sicarius’s trick.

  Then the God Breaker struck true.

  The blow took Redmane full in the gut, sent him flying backward at such speed that he seemed to strike the wall of the tomb instantly, his back flat against it, arms and legs out wide.

  Corpus: 5003

  Redmane’s vision swam.

  He was… Little Redmane, right.

  Or was it Kraal. Karal. Sencis Redcap Karalis.

  The Devourer, First Of His Name.

  The pretty girl with the green. She says My Lord. That’s good.

  He had a nagging sense that he should be moving. That something dangerous approached. But he was just too dazed to lift a finger.

  Even as the towering form of Vos, the first Sovereign, loomed over him with his terrible hammer held at the ready.

  Glimpsing the hammer helped him snap out of it. He blinked, shook his head, and the fury returned.

  Roar of the Elder

  Gnosis: 354

  Vos was about to smash Redmane’s skull into paste with an overhead blow of that hammer. Instead the deathless sovereign flinched, gritted his yellowed teeth. His grip on the God Breaker momentarily slackened and Redmane saw his chance to lunge in and even the score.

  Claws struck withered skin, cleaved down to the bone. They slashed again and again, biting deep, a growl punctuating the blur of savagery.

  Vos grunted and shoved Redmane off, swung the God Breaker to force him back, clearing the space between them with its shockwave.

  “You cannot kill me,” he said.

  “I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to take that hammer.”

  “This hammer will reduce you to nothing, as it has before.”

  Vos charged, but Redmane was now acclimated to his speed.

  Abyss Walk

  Gnosis: 329

  He melded into the shadow below his feet.

  But then Vos dove in after him. Shoved him deeper down, made him miss the shadow on the opposite side, and the two of them fell into the Abyss together.

  In the profound darkness, Redmane’s primal fury met Vos’s ancient resolve.

  They fought as they fell, if indeed it could be called falling. Vos, with the God Breaker in his skeletal hands, carved arcs of force into the void with each swing of his weapon, bending the very essence of the Abyss with its power. Redmane, fluid and fierce, moved like a shark through water, evading and countering with savage precision.

  In time they found the floor. The endless night-sea of the Abyss, which mirrored the stars of untold universes overhead with such accuracy that the ripples at their feet were the only way to tell up from down.

  Here, the battle raged on, a silent storm of violence in the void. Each clash of Redmane's claws against the God Breaker sent ripples across the dark waters, distorting the reflected cosmos with every strike and parry. Vos, unyielding, wielded the hammer with a mastery honed over eons, each swing a cataclysm in the form of an arc, threatening to shatter the very fabric of the Abyss.

  Redmane danced around the edges of destruction, his thoughts and movements a blur of desperate precision. He struck at Vos with a ferocity that belied his earlier defeats and his claws sought any flaw in the sovereign's ancient defenses. Of which there were precious few. The sound of their battle, though muffled by the Abyssal waters, was a tempest that could stir the dead to wakefulness.

  And as they fought, the boundary between the physical and the ethereal began to blur, their forms flickering between solidity and shadow. With each passing moment, the intensity of their conflict seemed to draw the attention of the slumbering depths, as if the Abyss had something like a mind and a will of its own, slow to rouse but powerful once awakened.

  Redmane felt it happening. It felt as though he were coming apart at the seams. And not just physically, the contents of his mind felt soft. Malleable. Perhaps whatever had been done to him in the past had been done down here, in this place where the solid and the real were not so solid and real.

  If this deterred of even bothered Vos in the slightest, it did not show on his gaunt, corpse-like face.

  “You must shatter,” said Vos. “Shatter and break apart. Order will prevail. It must prevail. The reign of beasts is long over.”

  “It never ended. The beasts merely put on clothes and gave things names,” said Redmane. Then he grinned as he ducked a swipe of the God Breaker, and added, “You should see the world outside your bedroom today. I find it much improved. The masks have all been torn off.”

  Vos grimaced and set his jaw.

  He swung low, making Redmane jump. A defense he’d seen, which is why he set it up.

  Redmane’s eyes widened as an overhead swing simply appeared in front of his face. Vos moved with such blinding speed that he couldn’t have reacted to it even if he hadn’t been feinted.

  Corpus: 2496

  This time the world didn’t merely spin. It swirled. Everything blurred together.

  He saw all his pasts and futures.

  There were many stories of the Lord of Hunger, many incarnations, and they all had different fates. The God Breaker struck him so hard that he momentarily saw the threads of his life without the blinders of time, like a tree branching off into infinity in every direction.

  The pain of the moment was the pain of all moments. Because there was no before or after, in truth. Everything was happening at the same time.

  He was covering his head, curled in the fetal position as Aric Morholt clubbed him with a cudgel, laughing his little heart out.

  He was surveying the battlefield astride his warhorse, bloody sword in hand.

  He was devouring an entire city and all its occupants, hearing their screams as they fell into his cavernous gullet.

  He was talking with his wife in her favorite garden, when his son appeared with a golden hammer in his hands and murder in his eyes.

  Redmane realized he lay on his back, staring up at the stars of the Abyss, if indeed they were even real stars. When he inhaled, he felt the stab of shattered ribs, and when he coughed, blood sprayed from his mouth.

  Vos, the first Sovereign, his eldest son from a life long past, strode up to him, his feet leaving ripples in the Abyssal water.

  “O, father,” he said, as he put his foot on Redmane’s chest. “You poor, disfigured thing. I shall not attempt to strike you into a useful shape this time, or even a pathetic one. Only now do I see what a grave error that was.”

  He grasped the handle of the God Breaker in both hands, and raised it high overhead.

  “This time, you will disintegrate.”

  PATREON