Two Sides of the Warp Token Update

2k words

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“This place suck-stinks!” Skyseeker whined, dragging her feet over another hill, the thirteenth one she and the man-thing had crossed since this morning. While she still lagged behind the man-thing, she decided to close in a little more today, if only so she could voice her complaints to him. “No sound, no things! Just stupid grass stuff!”

“What’s the matter with you? Aside from being a Skaven, of course,” the man-thing asked, shielding his eyes as he looked back at her. He had donned his helmet, the one with the ornate red plumes, but even his visor couldn’t fully him from the harsh sunlight. “Tilea is quite a serene place, if a bit humid.”

“Humid!” she echoed, wiping her brow with a paw. Her sweat cascaded over the lenses of her goggles, making her vision fill up with smudges when she rubbed them clean. “Melting into boiling puddle back here-here.”

“How’d you think I feel, carrying this suit around?” he asked, each step chased by the clacking of armour.

Man-thing feel like big stupid idiot, she thought, covering her mouth to stifle a chuckle.

“But I’ll agree with you on the heat,” he continued. “At least back in the Empire you could walk about in your armour without sweating bullets.”

“This… Empire,” she began, the word sounding unnatural on her tongue. “’Reikyland’, yes-yes? It as hot and boring and Tilee-place?”

“Reikland,” he corrected. “And no it’s not, I’d much prefer my homeland over Tilea any day.” He paused at the top of the ridge, staring wistfully into the distance. “The grass there is a shade of green like no other, the land so rich and fertile that the fields of flowers never seem to end. Then you have the many rivers snaking through the foothills, the towering oaks that make up the Reikwald forest… it is a beautiful place.”

“Beautifully boring place!” Skyseeker said, sticking her tongue out in disgust. “Give me deep-dark burrow, much more nice-nice than smelly flowers.”

“Do you even know what a flower is?” He glanced over his shoulder, the two exchanging blank looks. “Thought not, considering you hail from a place literally called Skavenblight.”

He pressed on down the hill, Skyseeker following. At least the downhill parts were easier than the uphill ones, but the journey still remained hot and boring, and it was many long hours later until Skyseeker finally noticed a landmark in the distance, something finally helping to break up the monotonous landscape. Using the zooming function on her goggles, she paused at the next incline, getting a better look at it. She could see the roofs of structures over the next hill, the slanted shelters made from a patchwork of stone tiles, the overhangs supported by wooden poles, the terrain blocking her view from anything lower. She focused on the hillside next, spotting a sprawling carpet of big, spindly plants stretching across the fields far to the left and right, each one as tall as the man-thing, and looking about as dry as her parched throat.

“What that thing?” she demanded, gesturing towards the buildings with a claw. The man-thing followed her hand, shielding his eyes as he peered into the glare.

“Hm, might be a settlement. How’d you spot that so fast?”

“Skyseeker see all!” she replied cryptically, tapping her left eye with a finger.

“Oh, your goggles have some sort of built-in telescope, do they?”

Curses, the man-thing had made her unintentionally point right at her sneaky gadget, his schemes were becoming more dangerous by the minute.

“No they don’t! Stupid man-thing,” she muttered, quickly snapping her attention back to the structures. “Why make settlement in hot-place?”

“How should I know? As good a place to stop and rest as any.” He made to start walking towards it, but Skyseeker bounded ahead of him, spreading her arms out wide to block his path.

“Wait-Wait! What if other stupid man-things there?”

“That’s a very likely assessment,” he replied, crossing his arms. “What of it?”

“Skyseeker can’t fight off whole settlement! We avoid man-things. Much safer, yes-yes.”

“We?” he scoffed. “This isn’t a shared decision, rat, we’re not companions. You,” he added, gesturing a gauntlet at her. “are a straggler and a burden. You’re free to go around if you want, but I’m heading in. Good chance to restock on supplies.”

“Food?” she asked, tilting her head eagerly.

“I… probably shouldn’t have said that,” he sighed, Skyseeker rushing after him as he brushed passed her, the two trudging down the steep hill. “You sure you want to come with?” he asked. “Tilea’s known for its famous rat-catchers, I hear their men can smell a rodent from a league off. Bit of a strange skill, but your aroma’s not exactly subtle.”

“Skyseeker beat Reikyland man-thing,” she said. “Can beat catcher easy-peasy!”

“If you say so.”

-xXx-

The closer they got to the structures, the more her worries about encountering more man-things seemed in vain. These humans loved their walls and right angles, so when Skyseeker began to see crumbled masonry and shattered wooden logs, the slanted roofs of the settlement barely kept aloft by a few stubborn support beams, the more sure she was that the area had been cleared out.

There were only a handful of buildings making up the settlement, the structures clustered together on a relatively flat plateau near the hill’s peak, surrounded on all sides by dried up pastures, filled in with more of those dead plant-things she’d spotted with her goggles. The plants were arranged in a grid pattern, the space between wide enough that she and the man-thing could walk side by side (Skyseeker opting to lag behind at a safe distance all the same). Their arrangement seemed too precise to be natural, Skyseeker using her impeccable deduction skills to theorise the owners of the buildings must have cultivated these plants.

They moved into the strange collection of the decaying plants, like a miniature forest in its own right, Skyseeker stopping to peer up at one. Its trunk was tall and thick, the branching arms winding into the sky, strangely devoid of any leaves. The same could be said for the rest of the odd plants, their roots overgrown with tufts of wildgrass the colour of gold. Only the weeds seemed to be clinging to life, sprouting out of cracks in the spaces between the gridded plants, making what had once been paths uneven and overgrown.

“What are these dead-things?” she asked the man-thing, the armoured creature lifting the branch of another plant as he passed it.

“Look like olive trees to me.”

“Olive?”

“A fruit. Groves like these would thrive in this hot climate, Tilea’s probably full of them.”

“Not so thrivey now-now,” she remarked, seeing drooping branches and wilted bark everywhere she looked. One of the olive trees stood out from the others, this one appearing as though it had been caught in a ratling gun crossfire, all its branches severed off, the trunk bending towards the ground as though a great force had sat atop it. Whoever was in charge of tending them had done a poor job with that particular plant.

They proceeded deeper into the grove, dried twigs crunching beneath her bare feet. The olive trees were tens of rows deep, and it took them a few minutes to reach the settlement proper. There were five buildings in all, each of a different size and shape, arranged in a half circle, with one sitting in their centre.

This latter structure was the most elaborate out of all of them, or at least, it would be if it wasn’t so run down. It was two levels high, the stone walls baked bone-white, columns of bricks supporting the sections of the building that overhung the porches. Small windows protected by shutters broke up the masonry in places, little potted plants draping their leaves over the sills from just inside. The owners probably put them there to add some colour, but now the flora was as wilted as the groves, the nearby stonework stained with mould.

She’d seen the angular roof before, the orange tiles constrasting against the white facades, but what she hadn’t seen from the distance was the gaping hole on the lefthand side of the building. A section of the tiles had caved in, along with the corner wall, the interior filled in with an avalanche of rubble. The damage was confined to that one section alone, as though someone had shot a cannon at the building and then promptly stopped.

“No man-things here,” Skyseeker said, the tension in her chest abating somewhat.

“You don’t think?” the man-thing asked. She didn’t know how to respond to the question, so she took a chance and just nodded, her answer apparently amusing the man-thing. “Abandoned only recently, I’d wager. Groves haven’t completely wilted away, mortar in the walls is still holding. Wonder what happened.”

“Man-things got sick-tired of hot-hot heat,” Skyseeker guessed, watching her quarry move up to the door of the building. Hanging up the entrance was a sign, attached to the overhang by a chain, but half of it was missing, as though someone had taken a weeping blade to the steel.

“Maybe, or someone attacked them,” he muttered, gesturing up at the collapsed roof, Skyseeker admitting he had a point. She watched as he gave the door a tap with his armoured foot, the frame swinging inward with a loud creak. He produced his handgun, stepping through the threshold with the weapon raised, Skyseeker hurrying after him. Purely because being inside felt safer to her, and not because the grove was creeping her out or anything of the like.

They emerged into a strange room full of odd contraptions, with wires running across the length of the ceiling, dozens of implements dangling from the threads. There was a device not unlike a warpstone forge in one corner, flanked by countertops that were overflowing with strange, circular implements with nozzles and handles. Liquid containers of some kind? Sunshine bled in through a filthy window to the right, illuminating the scene, hundreds of little specks of dust occupying the stretching ray of light.

There was another door built into the wall to one side, the man-thing walking over and pulling the handle. Inside was a shallow space lined of shelves, with leather bags ranging from the size of her torso to her hand resting upon them.

“That food?” she asked, peering around his hip curiously.

“In a sense,” he answered, lifting one of the smaller bags. To her horror, he upended the little pouch, a grainy, white substance falling to the floor. “Nothing but salt and flour in here. Don’t eat it,” he warned, Skyseeker pausing with her tongue pressed against the pad of her finger. “Not unless you want to die of dehydration. Besides, it’s been sitting here in the heat for who knows how long, doubt even your stomach couldn’t handle rancid flour.”

“Why stupid man-things store not-food?” she asked, the man-thing moving over to one of the counters, lifting the lid of a pot and peering inside.

“Those are raw ingredients,” he explained. “we use them to make bread, or to preserve food. Whoever drove these people out of here took the rest. Might have been Skaven. Oh, but, there’s no rat droppings, couldn’t have been your kind.”

“No warp-burns on walls either,” she added. “ratling guns always miss-miss.”

He gave her a questioning look, then shrugged, moving into one of the adjacent rooms. When it was clear the whole place had been picked over, they retreated back outside, the man-thing leading the way over to one of the other buildings. This one was in an even worse state of disrepair. The entire eastern wall had caved in, as though a warp-bomb had been detonated right beside it. The structure was built in the vague shape of an oval, thick brambles coursing up the first few layers brickwork like wooden fingers, the structure capped with a domed roof, or at least three quarters of a roof. It was larger than the previous building, but not nearly as elaborate, no windows or attempted decorations at all, it looked rather functional.

“Someone really wanted to get into the mill,” the man-thing murmured, pacing in front of the giant breach, the interior obstructed by the mound of rubble.

“Mill?” she repeated. It seemed every other thing he said was some new word.

“Big house-sized toll farmsteaders use to process their harvests. You want food, this’ll be the place to look, though the damage to this wall here is troubling.”

“Too hungry to be troubled,” Skyseeker said, dashing in front of the man-thing, gripping the loose stones for purchase as she scaled the obstruction. A few tumbles later, and she was inside. The first thing she noticed was the smell, a sour and rancid stench that made her nose sting and her throat burn. She’d smelled a lot of putrid things in her life, but this one was easily the most intense, Skyseeker gagging into her hand as though she’d just caught the plague.

“What’s going on in there?” she heard the man-thing ask, the creature appearing at the top of the rubble a moment later. She didn’t need to answer him, the stench hitting him like a slap to the face, the man-thing waving his gauntlets to try and dissipate the stench.

Covering her face with her cloak, she examined the interior once she was confident she wouldn’t vomit. There were giant barrels stacked up against the curved walls, one of them toppled over thanks to the cascading rubble, most of it submerged beneath the loose bricks. Each one was large enough she could have fit inside one with room to spare.