Death After Death

When the orcs saw their opponents delay, they roared with bloodlust and charged instead. That was the way they were; they smelled weakness and fear the way that a shark might smell blood, and after what had just happened, there was definitely blood in the water.

Simon was less concerned about the line of green eight-foot-tall warriors than he was about the talisman-bedecked warlock who was grinning behind them. Still, he waited, just for the right moment, and as soon as the monster raised its hand skyward and opened its mouth to channel the lightning again, he acted.

“Gervuul Vrazig,” he muttered. Greater lighting. He hated the idea of using a greater word in a life where he planned on sticking around for a while, but he needed what came next to be more than a little showy, and the other way to do that was with more power.

The lightning came down for the orc almost instantly. He didn’t fling it at his enemies, though. Instead, he stood there convulsing with his hand held skyward as the energy radiated through his body and the warlock’s clothing burst into flames.

None of that dissipated the energy enough to stop it from arcing outward through most of the rest of the group, though. Purple lightning sprayed in a wide arc that bounced and rebounded several times before coming to ground. It was enough of a fireworks show that half of the group was reduced almost instantly into twitching meat, and the other half paused to look around in confusion. It probably would have been enough to reach more of Simon’s own men and turn their swords into lightning rods if the lingering effects of his protection spell hadn’t dissuaded it.

Still, this was what he wanted, and he ordered his men to charge and reclaim the momentum. No one disobeyed, and they moved forward as an armored wave while he paused to catch his breath. A greater word took more out of him than it used to. Does that put me in my forties or my fifties? He wondered. I can’t be that old yet, can I?

It didn’t matter. By the time he reached the fight, most of the fighting was done. One man was maimed, and Simon doubted he’d be able to save the arm, but everyone else was fine, and the green blood of the enemy soaked the ground. If there weren’t two men already dead from the dark magic the shaman unleashed, he would have called it an ideal scenario. As it was, though, the loss of three warriors was just enough to dampen his mood.

“In the name of the pits below, what was that?” one man said once the fighting was done.

“It was witchcraft, is what it was, but where would a monster like that learn such a thing? It had no soul to trade to the devils for their power!” another answered.

Simon said nothing. He just listened and largely agreed with what he was hearing. The truth was, it was an excellent question, and he didn’t have a good answer for it. Where would a goblin learn a word of power? Where would an orc? Was someone teaching them these things? Did the word just happen to be similar to another word in their language? Did they even have a language?

That gave him pause. He could understand every language in the world, couldn’t he? Had he ever heard them make a noise that he’d understood, or—

“What do you think, boss,” one of the soldiers asked, snapping Simon out of his reverie. “I mean, sir.”

Simon shook his head to clear the cobwebs and focus. “I think that whatever dark powers that thing bargained for were too much for it, and just like all evil things, when it tried to wield them against us, it only succeeded in destroying itself and everyone around it.”

Everyone nodded at that as if they were wise words, but really, Simon was only repeating what he’d heard old men say when they were in their cups. Magic was entirely controllable with a focused mind, but that wasn’t something he could ever explain to anyone else.

So he didn’t. He just babbled on about how they all needed to be wary of the darkness and that the orcs were likely in league with the devils below, even if he had no idea how that would even happen. After all, there was no way that they could summon a devil, could they? It was a complicated undertaking.

The longer Simon talked, the more questions built up in his mind, though, and finally, he decided they had to keep going after they’d buried the bodies. “What about Miken,” Jak asked. “He ain’t going to be doin’ much fighten with his arm like that.”

“We’ll drop him off at the next village we come across,” Simon promised. Until then, the man could ride one of the supply donkeys.

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There were no more villages, though. Not this far out. They ended up amputating the arm above the elbow the following day, and Simon used a word of minor healing to make sure that much would heal clean, at least. With infinite power, he might have been able to mend the hopelessly mangled arm, but he could feel himself slowly running down, and no matter how great the temptation was to borrow a cup of life force from his neighbor, he had no wish to walk down that road again right now.

Despite the misgivings of his men, they trudged on up into the bleak foothills where orcs usually came from. Several times, they saw one or two out hunting, but those were dispatched easily enough with a cloud of crossbow bolts. With this many men, Orcs were only dangerous in crowds or when they took you by surprise.

This far off the beaten path, both things were possible. Hell, they were probable. So, they took their time as the slopes steepened, and boulders that might hide the enemy became more common on the rocky ground.

Still, they never found the large villages of greenskins that Simon feared they would. Instead, they eventually came across some half-collapsed ruins that looked less Greco-Roman and more Mesopotamian, with monolithic architecture and bas reliefs that had been all but obliterated by the sands of time.

He spent some time studying the place but couldn’t decide if it was a tomb or a temple. Simon found what might have been the remains of a summoning circle on the floor in one of the still-standing buildings, but he had no idea if the symbols that had been used were real or nonsense because they were smudged so badly.

It was only in a deeper room, past the rotting corpses of humans that had obviously been used in some sort of sacrificial ritual, that he found true words of power written in blood. They weren’t written by human hands, though. Instead, they were daubed on the walls with wide orcish fingers. Simon often had trouble telling what language something was written in when he read it, but in this case, he was immediately certain that this was nothing he’d seen before. It certainly wasn’t human.

More than anything, in that moment, Simon wanted to pull out his mirror and scan this into it for further study later. He’d found something. He didn’t know what it was, but it felt like a loose thread just waiting to be pulled.

The men holding torches with him would think very dimly of such a plan, though. So, instead, he read through the words quickly while he pretended to wrinkle his nose in disgust.

“What is this filth?” Simon asked no one in particular.

He knew what it was, though. He just didn’t know why it was. ‘RUINFLOWS across the land, no matter what she says, that’s the PLAN.’

He ordered his men to obliterate it from existence with their torches, but not before he committed the words of power hidden within the graffiti to memory. However, it took him a moment to understand some of the more important aspects of them.

The first was that Ruin was the word for lightning. It was still spelled Vrazig, but somehow, in this language and with these letters, he read it differently. The second was that for so long, he’d thought that he didn’t know the word for water, but he’d had it the whole time. He thought that initially, he’d learned a new word for water, but it wasn’t. It was just Zyvon, the problematic word for transfer, that occasionally haunted his dreams.

Only the word Celdura was new, and its meaning was harder to tease out. The way it was used meant plan, quite literally, but as they walked out of the cursed room, he considered what it might be used for. Was it used to dictate what was going to happen next, like it had something to do with fate? Maybe it referred to plans like schematics, and it had something to do with magic, magical items, and summoning circles.

He wasn’t sure, though. In the end, all he could say was that he felt like it was somehow the opposite of ruin, which very clearly meant decay now in addition to lightning in his mind. It was hard to say quite how that association had happened, but it was there now. Did that make Celdura order as well? That didn’t sound right to him, but it was hard to say exactly why. More experimentation would be required.

Regardless of who wrote that message or who it was meant for, eventually, he was forced to set these matters aside. No matter how much he wanted to explore them, obsessing over foul runes with a bunch of illiterate mercenaries would get him strange looks at the very least, and they might well get him gutted.

Going this far into the hinterlands with such a small group had not been popular. So, even though he knew this was far from resolved, he declared victory and told the men they were going home.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that those foul words and sacrifices were the source of the greenskin’s power,” he declared, acting like he meant it. They were probably related, but he doubted the orcs could read any more than his men could. “But now those are gone, and the kingdom is once again safe.”

There were a few scattered cheers at that, but even those who stayed quiet were glad to be going back. Being out here without reinforcements was a great way to get taken by surprise and surrounded. While Simon would gladly unleash hell to save his men, they didn’t know that. So, their respect and obedience only went so far.

Still, the way home was less eventful than the way there. Miken survived, but they only found a single orc hunter on the way back to more civilized lands, where they found only hospitality once they started to tell stories about black magic and the struggles against the orc menace.

Simon was happy to let this particular legend grow as large as they wanted it to. He spent his time pondering the strange words they’d found on the wall all the way back to Crowvar.