[Warpworld] Ch 16 – A Trail towards the North Pole!

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            Felegost the Reborn scowled at the scene before him. The scouts ranging cautiously ahead had reported the findings back to him, but it was not until he had ridden closer and seen it with his own eyes that he truly believed what they had told him.

            The Many-Pathed One attracted men with ambition, after all, and that included even the scouts he had to send out.

            But it was plain their limited perspectives were true. Something huge had come off and down that mountainside, something at least three hundred paces wide. The plowed trail, like some massive sled, was unmistakable, leveling the snow in its path, and long dark smears showed where jutting spurs of black rock had been sheared off cleanly and smoothly, as if wiped aside.

            When it reached the timberline, however, there was no such white smoothness. There was a charred path, crushed and blazed right through the twisted yet hardy trees of the north, leaving not a stump intact on the land, only a rapidly-whitening path of ash that proceeded inexorably towards the north as it reached the foot of the mountain and continued on.

            His knights stirred somewhat uneasily as they stared at the trail of blackened soil, wondering what could have made it... and moreover, what kind of magic was used to raise the green sprouts now emerging here and there from the black and seared ash.

            Whatever and whoever was responsible for this had slaughtered Margrix’s warband of Klaw, wiped out elite scouts, servants, and raiders, and even disposed of a Greater Demon, the Spell Weaver Kgilixiglot, so thoroughly that Felegost had been unable to resummon him, a disquieting development.

            And now, this charred path led north.

            His scouting Harpies were already on the way, buttressed by several shrieks of Warprays milling about. They seemed to have found something discomfiting in the air, by the way they were reacting, vacillating about in a less-than-predatory manner above him.

            A trail of fire over a thousand feet across...!

            “Whatever power is doing this, it is meant to be mine!” he growled, clenching his gauntlet so the pink and blue Warpfire of jRaztl boiled out, barely restrained by his will. This was a test by his god, to see if he had the power to claim it, and he knew that it had to be his to realize his dreams!

            He pointed imperiously north, and his warhost of over three thousand fervent Northmen, savage marauders, cultists of jRaztl, and reaving knight-schemers of the God of Change turned and headed after whatever had left this mighty trail.  

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            Felegost the Reborn watched the hooves of his advance elements start to spark with unnatural, misting white flames as they rode over the seared ash of the landscape... until Sar Kollig, who rode the largest, scale-hided, split-horned, fire-hooved, and most mutated warhorse, shouted as suddenly those misty white flames exploded over his mount.

            The horse began to scream in terror, and the knight hurriedly threw himself from the saddle... only for the white fires to immediately explode up around him, as if drawn out of the black ash by the magical shielding around him, surrounding him in a sudden walking inferno.

            Felegost bellowed, “Get off of the ash!” with supernatural loudness, driving his own steel-hided buffalo mount off to the side after looking down and verifying that those flames were much too large around his own steed’s hooves. 

            The entire Warhost hastily turned and rode for the nearest edge of the ash, leaving the kicking, screaming horse to writhe about, while Sar Kollig ran for the edge of the field on foot, grimly enduring the white fires licking at his gleaming armor and leaving it dull, lifeless, and heavy.

            He was the last one to get off the ash, clawing at the chaos armor that was popping and crinkling as it separated itself from him, tearing it loose and a swathe of unwhite flames with it when he threw it away.

            Each piece of armor became the center of a small but intense white fire, mists spreading out from each piece as it was devoured, rusted away, and crumbled, forming little white spots on the black ash... among the many other white spots left behind by trampling hooves.

            Swearing men hurriedly dismounted to check the hooves of their mounts, Felegost even swinging down to do the same on his great snorting bull.

            There were pits and erosion on the hooves and shoes of his great bovine mount, eating into feet that could crumple helms and the skulls within them with equal aplomb. Little white wisps were clinging to the metallic body of his mount, and he couldn’t beat them out with his hand, instead resorting to using his furred cloak to wipe them away.

            Sar Kollig, his gods-granted armor completely stripped off from him, his handsome face looking as if parts of it had crumbled off, exited the ash... looked down, and kept right on moving as whiteness burned around his feet.

            Everyone watched the flickers of whiteness following him from the ground, eyes widening, and they pulled further away from the blackness.

            Felegost swung back into the saddle of Aerismur and guided him along until the misty white fires from the ground were gone.

            Ground that was suspiciously clear of ground cover, he abruptly noticed, a fact hidden by the numbers of men riding ahead of him.

            And there was the division, as clear as a knife if you were looking for it. Unbroken snow, but the scrub of the wastes in all their subtle panoply of colors and earth tones still sticking through, where they had not been previously.

            Felegost lined up at the edge of the area, now a hundred yards outside the edge of the black ash. He looked back, and saw the angle of the effect was razor-straight, and slowly converged right down to the edge of the black ash. Ahead of them, it slowly kept diverging, growing, extending out farther and farther away from the trail, as if the effects were growing...

            He swung down one more time, crouching down to bat away the soiled snow on the ground around a hole where a stand of scrub must once have stood.

            Where the plants had been was instead a lumpy depression with absolutely nothing inside it to indicate anything had ever grown there.

            Felegost felt a sudden pang of unease pass through him. He stood up, and watched Sar Kollig’s mighty steed, the envy of his fellow knight-schemers, finally fall down, its lower legs actually shattering and falling to ash as its flesh fell Burning from its body like white ash, crashing to the ground, final kicks stilling as the white fires shot out of its eyes, mouth, and nostrils.

            The powerful Chaos Steed Burned away with unnatural speed, almost as if it was a demon, instead of merely a mutated mortal beast. Everyone watched it crumble down to nothingness over the span of merely a few minutes, until all that was left was a pile of white ash, a circle of white in the middle of the black ash, and mists crawling over ground which finally sank into the ground and went away.

            For just a moment, Felegost had a vision, a feeling surge through him.

            It was like that field of black ash and the plant-swept ground about it was hungry, it was looking at him as something delectable, and its appetite for him was boundless!

            He jerked in place, something noticed by everyone around him, startling as it was. It was unseemly for an image of strength, but he had long learned to trust his instincts, and they were screaming at him to stay away from that unwhite fire.

            “Set up the braziers and the sacrifices. I need to commune with the master!” he snarled. “Have the Riders see what they can, but they are not to engage, and to retreat if they are attacked! I would know exactly what we follow!” As he turned Aerismur, he looked down at the horrid countenance of Sar Kollig, the tall and brawny warrior looking even more dangerous with his unnaturally white scars and lack of his armor, whose bits were fading away as quickly as had his mount. “You will attend with me. We shall see what the Master thinks of this white fire...”

            And wherever it came from, it was growing.

            Felegost whipped his head around suddenly, staring north, the action enough to send everyone around him looking in the same direction.

            “It is heading north!” He couldn’t keep the disbelief out of his voice. “Into the heart of Chaos?!”

            The smarter men clenched at their swords as they realized the implications, one by one.

            Was its appetite so great that it dared feast upon the lands of Chaos and defy the Warp Gods themselves?!

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            The warband following me had hurriedly set up camp and was engaged in some urgent rituals of some sort, Feature reported, studying them from across the miles. They’d been galloping along the Warpeater’s backtrail, stirring up the vivus in the soil and whipping it to life with the Warp energy exuding off of them, until one of the strongest and less-controlled mutant mounts, probably something with flaming hooves or something, had set it off.

            That they hadn’t continued following was amusing, especially as the Domain of the Pyramid beneath me continued to grow.

            It was out to a full mile already, feasting on the raw Warp energies in the air, which were swirling back to the altar at the peak of this thing and into the heart of the Pyramid, enhancing the Domain and expanding it continuously, about a couple feet in radius a minute right now, and actually picking up speed as we headed for the murky, stormy area on the horizon.

            It was going to take several more days to get there, but that was fine. I was patient, and the weather didn’t bother me. Indeed, the worse it was, the better it was, since all the weather was Warp-driven, shattered against the Domain, and made it a pretty pleasant ride, while outside the Pyramid’s Domain it could be a shrieking shitstorm of wild, malevolent, and mutating magic that any interested parties would be taking shelter from.

            The Warp gods weren’t going to see it coming without having actual living eyes on it, which was probably going to confuse the beejezus out of them. Mortals being able to conceal themselves from gods was just not something supposed to happen, especially at this scale.

            I considered what they might do to forestall this, and really wasn’t too worried. There were a couple things, sure enough, but all the standard tools weren’t going to work.

            They should know of vivus, even if they’d buried knowledge of it on this world. The very fact the Archmage had given it to us was proof it existed elsewhere, and they had likely run into it before.

            The hunger of the Warp was, in the end, just a pale reflection of the hunger of the mortal realm! Their little private realm of whatever was aching to be eaten by the Prime Material Plane, which was ever so much bigger and vaster, and vivus was the stuff that did the eating for the Prime.

            Conversely, vivus was also the stuff that reinforced the Veil and kept other Realms and their nibbling tendencies away from the Prime. While the Land didn’t mind a feast, it preferred they kept to their own shit and the flows of life and death stayed unimpeded.

            But, if they insisted, the Land was always hungry... and now it was beginning to finally wake up, perhaps take a look around, and not like what was happening.

            “Listen up, boys,” I told Feature, well up into the sky and watching everything happening clear to the horizon, and Ices, who leaned in with all their heads. “There’s several ways the Warp Gods might get something in here to actually fight with... and I can’t discount the fact that some totally off-their-rockers neutral party might get it up their asses that I can’t be allowed to do this and will try to interfere, thinking they know better than anyone else and that what I’m doing cannot be permitted...”

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