Maja of the Heartless Gale

Maja of the Heartless Gale. The woman was named such for the way in which she fought, moving with the speed and ferocity of the deadly north winds, crushing her enemies, caving in their skulls and shattering their bones with blows from a pair of heavy cold iron maces. She was powerfully built, even for a Frost Giant – Rimethure in their own language – with thick muscles born of a life of violence. Her coarse black hair was cut short, her body unadorned with jewellery, trinkets or anything else which would get in the way of combat.

If a person believed that a woman must have an inherent tenderness within her, that she was softer because of her gender, one had only to point to Maja as living proof that a woman could be every bit as brutal as her male counterparts. She had taken her first life at the age of three, when another child had seen fit to take the meat from her plate and found himself with a knife buried in his chest.  Her life had been a maelstrom of battle ever since.

Yet now she stood in her father’s longhouse, cradling a bundle in her arms and looking, for the first time in her life, afraid.

Devilish Business, Scene 1 Sample

Act 1, Scene 1

SETTING: An office in the Ministry of Soul Collection. There are several open cubicles with desks with computers and chairs inside them.

AT RISE: GARY sits at his desk, typing away on an office computer. RACHEL hides behind one of the cubicles.

There is a large hellscape illuminated by red lighting. We can hear the sound of burning and screams. Everywhere else on the stage is dark. Gradually, the sound of screams and fires grows softer and the sound of people talking on telephones and typing on computers begins.

(LIGHTS UP)

(OVERLORD storms out of his office and menaces GARY.)

OVERLORD: Maggot! Where are the forms I demanded you transcribe? If you have failed me, your bloody, mangled corpse will be impaled in the break room as a warning to any who dare to disobey me!

(Unfazed)
GARY: Here you are, Mr. Overlord, I took the liberty of correcting the spelling as well. Bloody has two O’s in it, for the record.

(Looking over the files)
OVERLORD: This is adequate… Now continue your toil, IN SATAN’S UNHOLY NAME!!!

GARY: Will do. If you need anything else, just ask. Oh- by the way, did your wife like the get-well card?

OVERLORD: Mrs. Overlord was grateful for the card… it brightened her day. NOW TOIL MAGGOT!!!

GARY: Uh sir? It’s Gary.

A Dead Man’s Destiny

Unlike some other pieces on here, this one was written for an audience that is already familiar with the character being discussed; Gideon.  It takes place in the same setting as “Bromman Burning”, “Rane and Rala”, and “A Stranger in the Broken Bottle”, and I hope can be enjoyed by people with no prior knowledge of the character.

Somewhere in the northwest of the continent of Ashnar, hidden beneath the ravaged surface of the Deadland, there is a place called the Tomb-City.

Once it had been the sprawling mausoleum under a bustling city, but now the mausoleum was the city, and though it was populated by thousands of residents, not a single breath disturbed its still air.  Within these lightless halls, row upon row of corpses rested in countless compartments, silently waiting for the time they would be called to rise again.  Others worked tirelessly, attending to every need of the vast city.  They were the Mortizeigis, a race of beings neither alive nor dead, who resisted the malign influence of the dark god that had cursed them, and worked to bring order to a chaotic world.

In the city’s most protected depths, safeguarded by magic and a thousand unliving sentinels, was a sealed chamber in which a triumvirate presided. Perched in three ornate thrones set around the room’s centre sat cadavers, so old that were they touched, they might crumple to dust.  Tall, with extended skulls and long, multi-jointed fingers curled like an insect’s, they were unsettlingly alien, even when one did not consider their lifeless consciousness.  They were called the Council of Three, and they guided the fate of every Mortizeigis. Individually, they had no names, for they had long ago transcended the need for such things.

Though not a sound disturbed the silence of the chamber, a serious discussion was underway.

“He is called Gideon,” said the First. Upon her grey brow she wore a tarnished crown.

“He is old,” responded the Second. “Older than he suspects.” Set on its emaciated knees was a tarnished balance.

“And more dangerous,” interjected the Third, “than can be imagined.” Clutched in his withered hands was a notched sword that had long ago seen much use.

It was not voices, but thoughts that travelled through the room, carrying with them the gravity of ten thousand years. It was not often that they discussed a single Mortizeigis, for when three minds must govern thousands, the individual is often lost amidst the many. At present, however, there was one who could, in time, affect them all.

Computer borked, Bromman Burning put on hold

So my computer has sustained liquid damage, and its fate is undetermined. Until then, writing is an unholy chore, and so I’ve put Bromman Burning on hold. Part 3 is almost done though, so once I get back in gear, it shouldn’t be long before it’s out.

Cheers,
Jesse

Bromman Burning; Part 2

I descended the stairs of the Tower, and crossed the courtyard to the palace.  By Khale’s leave, any who had lost their homes to the marauding armies were allowed to set up inside, and so when I threw open the doors of the great hall, a makeshift tent city greeted me.  The place stank of fear and desperation, in addition to the mundane smell of dirty bodies packed together tightly; and sad, weary eyes followed me as I strode in the direction of the Spellguard’s command post.

Spellguards are something unique to the Mageocracy.  They are knights, steeped in as much history and tradition as those for which Trentia is famous; but whereas most of Trentia’s knights are merely martial fighters, with a few able to call on the divine might of the Seven Sovereigns, our knights weave arcane spells and cold steel together.  Armoured in plate, a spellguard holds his blade in one hand and with the other enacts the complex motions required for the magic arts.  He is a soldier that never finds himself at a loss for ways to attack or defend.

As I passed a group of youngsters chatting loudly amongst themselves, one auburn-haired youth broke away from the group and caught up with me.  “Good day, Magister ,” he said smartly, giving a salute.  “Preparations are almost complete, sir.  We are just waiting for the word from the commanders, and the Spellguard will be ready to mobilize.”

The lad, with his muscular physique, vivid green eyes and strong jaw, was vaguely familiar, but I could not place him.  I inclined my head slightly.  “Ah yes, thank you…”

“Kirvin Vorring,” he finished enthusiastically.

His name sparked recollection in me.  “You’re the lad that won the Spellguard tournament!” I exclaimed.  “Khale said that you were the most talented young swordsman he’d seen since…” I trailed off.

The boy’s face lit up with pleasure, and he had to force himself not to smile, instead saying gravely: “You do me too much honour, Magister.”

Sovereigns, how long ago that tournament seemed.  After the increasingly meagre years of war, the grandeur and excesses of that tournament seemed strange; thousands spent on food, entertainment, and gifts to esteemed visitors from all over Ashnar.  I had greatly enjoyed the lavish event, and seeing many friends from our younger days had been fantastic, but… I could not help but wonder, if we’d still had that gold to spend on mercenary warbands and weaponry when the war had begun, how different this conflict might have been.

“…I have trained since then in the Spellguard Academy,” he was saying, his voice full of pride.  “I made the rank of Mage-Commander this morning.”

“What?” I blurted out.  “But you only joined the Spellguard a mere five years ago!  There are men twice your age who have yet to reach the rank of Mage-Commander, men with ten times your experience!”

Bromman Burning; Part 1

I am Rysel Brenson, Magister of the Mageocracy of Khale, and I was there the day that Bromman burned.  I was no stranger to battle; I had seen the Einish Civil War, some fourty years prior, fought in the Battle of Kingsheart and at Payne Ridge; but then I was only a boy, full of lust for honour and glory, wishing only to fight alongside my Prince against the Mad King of the Einish Empire.  Now I was an old man, standing beside that same Prince, watching the advance of an army I was certain would be our end.  Gone was my youthful bravado, gone was the lightning that had once electrified me inside; in its place, I felt only a sick, cold dread in the bottom of my stomach.

The Mageocracy’s military was nothing to scoff at; we had magical superiority over any foe we encountered, supplemented by infantry, cavalry, and siege weapons.  It was not that our enemy was better trained or better equipped; at least half of those who marched against us had never been formally trained in the art of war.  It was their numbers, their relentlessness, and their seemingly single-minded desire to annihilate everything we had.  After the years of relative peace, it had caught us off-guard, and caused those early battles to be such disasters: the Scorched Plains, the Battle of Eddard’s Quarry, and the slaughter in Rubygreen Forest.  A brutal warlord led the hordes; a giant whom they called the Ogre King. The brutish tyrant had inundated us with a sea of enemies – and we were drowning.

We had done what we could to protect the citizens of the city, but our enemies had encircled the capital, cutting off our supply lines and butchering anyone who tried to enter or exit the city.  The Ogre King had taken a hobgoblin warlord named Kilgore the Grim as his strategist and general, and the goblin’s fiendish intellect was evident in their strategy.  Now that they had starved us for many months, they were moving in for the kill.

Atop the Tower of the Watchful Eye in the centre of the city, I stood beside Prince-Magister Khale and looked out over Bromman.  Scarcely visible through the smoke that choked the sky, our city – his city – was dying.

They came by the thousands: phalanxes of hobgoblins marching in lockstep under banners of every colour and description; hordes of orcs, the bestial subhumans of the southern jungles, enslaved and used as fodder in the Ogre King’s conquests; and the ogres, those slow, dim-witted brutes whose only joy was in destruction.  They came, raping and looting, putting buildings to the torch, dragging any they could find out of their homes and doing things to them in the street that made me turn away in horror.  Beside me, Khale Yearwynn watched, his blue eyes cold and furious.

“What are we going to do, Prince-Magister?” I asked, caught somewhere between despair and hope that somehow, somehow, Khale would have an answer.  I had known the man as a friend – and more – for a very long time, but in this hopeless moment, I didn’t want him to be my friend.  I wanted him to be my leader.

Rane and Rala

The Deepslaughter Warband specialized in a very select type of engagement; as their name implied, they spent their time far beneath the ground, killing lots and lots of monsters.  Their most recent mission had been for the Thane of Dalewin, clearing out the clan’s ancestral home of all the tentacled squatters that had taken up residence there during the past hundred years.  It had been slow, agonizing work; going through each dusty room, pitch-dark cavern and flooded passageway, killing every last horror they crossed paths with.  More than a handful of their own soldiers had died in the process, lost to the dark ones, the grimlocks, and those things that shouldn’t even have names.

Two days prior, if you could really count days down here, Rane had seen an enormous floating brain with a beak and barbed tentacles grab a woman not three feet from him chomp down on her head, cracking her skull like she was a chestnut on legs.  And the day before that they’d fought an amorphous cube that swallowed two soldiers before they managed to bring it down; their sorcerer had immolated himself as he was being engulfed, causing a cacophonous explosion that had almost killed them regardless.

But now the hard work was over.  The dwarves had arrived to tidy the place up, repair the damaged defences and prepare the fortress for the thane’s arrival next week.  However, before any of that began, there was to be a feast.  The thane’s cooks had managed to get the centuries old kitchen in working shape, and they were preparing a traditional dwarven meal; something all but the dwarves and hobgoblins found inedible.

The entire fortress was a bustling hive of activity, as the hobgoblins built a great bonfire where the dead would be burned; the thane had agreed beforehand that the warband would be allowed to leave the ashes of the fallen comrades on the battlefield, as was the custom.

Rane Deepslaughter, lieutenant of the warband, was restless.  As was all too often the case during their campaigns, he had scored few killing blows against any enemy of note.  The only ones he had slain on his own had been weak things, hardly worth the effort of smashing them.  So Rane had chosen not to attend the feast, volunteering instead for the skeleton guard they’d assembled to keep any new monsters from sneaking in before the walls were repaired.  He aimed to find some of those monsters, by himself, and slake his thirst for carnage.