Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Golgotterath.
Ever does oblivion whisper deceit to time, flattening afternoons into heartbeats, stretching blinks into mornings. Malowebi awoke as from death. It felt like watches had passed, or even more, the rolling of the days, the tumble of years. But mere instants had passed in sooth.
He hung as before, his hair bound to a warrior’s girdle. He could see his crazed prison mirrored in the soggomant as before, the ovoid smears of the Decapitants strung from the hip of a …
A statue?
Tall before the black depths. Bearded in the antique manner. Helmless, with hair braided across his nape, wearing what seemed an elaborate robe …
The pillar of salt that was the Aspect-Emperor.
Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
A feeling … thus began the new Years of the Crib. A feeling not known since Far Antiquity, since the weal and woe of the Apocalypse.
It was identical in all souls in all places, be it the rice-paddies of southern Zeum, the humid canal-ways of Invishi, or the looming turrets of Attrempus. Whether alone or in their thousands, Men leapt … then turned to the northern horizon, peering. Wives caught up crying children. Priests trailed mumbling into silence, clutched fetishes in palsied hands. Every soul living caught their breath, their tongue, and hung upon the feeling …
Like falling.
Like a great inhalation of essence from the World.
Not a soul could reckon the feeling in ancient days, at least not initially. Some even dared laugh in wonder, marvel at the absurdity of a horror without object, a knowing with direction only, a passion that moved all souls as one. Only when the first mothers began shrieking could they fathom the significance of what would be called the Boding. All souls recognized it now, at least in those nations celebrating The Holy Sagas as scripture. For the faithful of the Three Seas, the Boding dread was itself dreaded, the thing wives and mothers prayed most ardently against.
And so wailing filled the great fleshpots of the South, the lament of believers confirmed in disaster and unbelievers dismayed, doubly overthrown. Families gathered on the rooftops, made demonstration of their grief. Riot embroiled temples both humble and great, so desperate were souls to entreat and repent. The Hagerna in Sumna, already battered for the quaking wrath of Momus, was set alight, burning above the city it had forever starved. Only the mad took to the streets and alleyways, otherwise, crying out what every heart already shouted. The Boding! Sweet Sejenus, the Boding was upon them!
The Great Ordeal had failed!
Very few heard the mothers shrieking this time, so universally did souls call out their own grief. And those who could hear them, their midwives, found themselves too astounded, too mortified, to minister as a Yatwerian priestess should. No womb-prayers were offered, no name-tiles were cracked and pestled. The condolences, such as those that were given, were distracted, for they, and they alone, could recognize the feeling as one they had suffered before, as a feeling uniquely their own, the anguish of a stillbirth guessed and not yet known. The Bode of legend was their boding, the premonition both of tragedy and the necessity of running tragedy’s course …
The feeling of birthing the dead.
And they wept, knowing that every womb was now a grave, and they had become diggers.
The Death of Birth.
It towered so high over them one had to kneel to apprehend—kneel to see!
The Carapace.
Hanging coal-black above the mobbed terraces of the Oblitus, drawing curtains of dust on vast and invisible rings across the Shigogli. Hanging as it had in so many of the Dreams, only absent the eleven Chorae once affixed to its seams. There! In waking life!
Mog-Pharau.
Obsidian against mountainous gold. The sky groaned and clotted above the Upright Horn, clouds piling outwards and up, obscurity belching obscurity. Bluff winds sent detritus scratching across faces of stone. The first tendrils of black began circling Shigogli.
Mimara had folded about her screaming, her gaze fixed at a deranged tangent, her face quivering for exertion, howling out spit and outrage and incredulity, as if she aired each and every indignity—from flints in her sandal to mad Nonmen kings—she had suffered the seasons previous. Achamian and Esmenet hauled at her, pulled her down the direction of general flight. The babe squalled in the Blessed Empress’s arms. His living, breathing son.
Hundreds, nay, thousands ran with them, Ordealmen bowling between other Ordealmen standing like posts in cement, faces raised in witless confusion, fixed in the aimless rush. It was the same throughout the smoking hulk of Golgotterath. Upon the stranded walls, over the matted dead, the Men of Three Seas cracked as if upon some inner joist, dividing into those too dismayed to yield their ground and those too dismayed to hold it. A filter fell across the sun, made ochre of gold, wax of nimil. The Upright Horn throbbed so deep that only marrow could hear it. Gusts laved them, throwing hair across mouths, flicking grit into eyes. Faces took to grimacing when turned into the gyre. Those upon the heights raised the crotch of their arms in warding.
And it towered over them, a black so deep as to mirror the terror beneath.
The old Wizard sobbed as he hobbled about and over the corpses, spat at the bile. A crazed diversity of shouts scraped the air, cries that washed into ocean surf for sheer numbers. Towering warriors barged about and between them. His leg shrieked. He passed a Cuarweshman wrenching his beard from his bloody jaw. He passed an Ansercan Columnary squatting upon his helm, cackling into his palms and calling out numbers. He passed faces beaten to swollen clefts, and faces without a fleck of blood. He passed faces squinting up as though to gauge the morrow’s weather, and faces breaking … about losses, realizations, limits, all those things peace cannot bring.
He slowed not so much for understanding as recollection.
Mother and daughter swivelled inward in alarm, but his reassurance exploded about an impact from behind, and he found himself gulping air on all fours, staring into the upturned face of a Nonman, cold and flawless as porcelain, propped so as to bestow a drowsy, open-mouthed kiss. And he could feel it, the plummet hanging in the sky above all of them, the fatal fall made incarnate, and he did not despair.
This time it was Mimara exhorting him, begging, tugging on his rancid furs. He did not so much see her as see her stained hands, shaking, fumbling the pouch, spilling the cannibal ash—the Qirri. He fairly gagged for the amount she jammed into his mouth, hacked muck between clenched teeth, reflexively swallowed …
A babe squalled.
He snorted the ash of Nil’giccas from his mustaches. Lightning fell through him in shivers. He reared back on his knees. A Swayali strode out across the emptiness above the panicked terraces, wreathed in golden incandescence. He saw her gaze into the sky. He saw numberless, windblown grains explode into smoke across her Gnostic Wards. He saw that she was Seswatha, beaten and weary, hounded across the back of the World, and so very, very old.
Drusas Achamian did not so much understand as belong.
“Irjulila …” he began chanting, “hispi ki’liris …”
His voice glared across the wrack, and he glimpsed his hermit-wild face reflected in the Quya’s dead gaze, his eyes sparking blue under birdnest brows, his mouth a hole of brilliance in a whitewater beard. He shrugged aside the ministry of small hands, turned his back to the Bode, hobbled out beyond the wrecked battlements of the Ninth Riser. Wind flailed his eyes, his skin. He looked out over the surging channels of Men, out beyond the revolving shrouds of grey and black, and saw the Horde’s grotesque rim closing upon Golgotterath once again …
And he thought, Yes … I have been here before.
His voice cracked the ribs of the horizon.
“Flee! Flee, Sons of Men!”
And for a heartbeat all the beleaguered and begrimed faces turned to him, gazed upon the pelt-heaped aspect of the Wizard. His arcane shout fell upon them as Heaven’s own Rod. Those already fleeing surged, while those yet loathe to run crumbled into the tide of their brothers. What had been erosion suddenly became a landslide, currents of men loosed within packed masses, spilling out and down, splashing into pitched battle across a descending array of blockages. Within heartbeats, castaway shields scaled the visible ground.
“The Second Apocalypse!”
He looked back to the astonished faces of the women he loved, saw their beauty flinch for the thunderclap that was his shining voice, the calamity that was his black declaration.
“The Second Apocalypse is upon us!”
And from the heights of the Oblitus, it seemed the ground moved backwards, so vast was the exodus to escape it.
Still floating, Drusas Achamian reached for Esmenet, who deftly joined him upon the phantom plate, slipping one hand about his waist, while holding her wailing grandson tight to her breast with the other. He turned to Mimara, grinned as Seswatha had always grinned in the twilight of ruin, a smile that only intimates of doom know, souls stripped to the bald fact of love.
She gawked at him, shrugged about a sob. How? her look did not so much ask as ache. How could this happen?
The Upright Horn towered, seized frost from the empty heart of the sky, a bulk that forever plucked the instinct to cringe. The Great Ordeal drained from the cracked black bowl that was Golgotterath, spilled toward the east. The winds crossed some threshold of violence, and Esmenet buried her face in the old Wizard’s pelted shoulder.
Mimara, for mad reasons all her own, endured the pinprick lashing, glared at the father of her child, weeping freely, asking how … Sweet Seju …
Why?
Achamian extended his hand. “Please,” he called across the bloating roar.
There is knowledge in our manner, ways to prove that utterly elude the apparent sunlight of speech. Sorcery does not exhaust the miracles of the voice: with one word, it seemed, he had demonstrated to her what tomes of disputation could never do.
Apocalypse was his birthright.
Horror yawed above them, a light that struck only souls. She pawed at her tears in fury, withdrew the pouch bearing her two Chorae, the one that had saved them in the bowel of Cil-Aujas, and the one she had looted from Kosoter’s corpse at Sauglish. In a single motion, she pulled the thread about her head and cast the pouch out over the void of the Oblitus. No eye followed their descent into the wrack and panic. Her last proof against him.
Anasûrimbor Mimara stepped teetering to the brink, then took his sorcerous hand.
The Aspect-Emperor was dead.
Never had Malowebi been so immobile, so windless within. To be bodiless and still is to cease to exist.
Memory retrieved him, hoisted him on the back of images across indeterminate cavities. Ajokli—the Four-Horned Brother!—not simply here, but inhabiting Anasûrimbor Kellhus. The clawing implications, the retching terror, the soundless shrieks, the intimation of slaughtered futures …
And then the little boy had appeared, Anasûrimbor Kelmomas … there he was, scampering between the skin-spies nailed to the floor by their Chorae …
Malowebi assumed, according to his terror, that the boy belonged to Ajokli … One of the Hundred stood manifest before him! Of course the boy was his!
Except that he wasn’t.
“He can’t see me either!” the little boy chortled.
The geyser of incandescence that housed the Grinning God’s visage sputtered …
The four remaining Mutilated watched with disfigured fascination. Aurax grovelled.
The glare vanished from the shoulders, leaving only Anasûrimbor Kellhus, blinking as any mortal man, swaying, peering at his youngest son …
“K-Kel? How di—”
The nearest skin-spy clapped the Chorae in its palm about his ankle.
And the Aspect-Emperor was no more.
“See!” the child gurgled, squealing for preposterous joy. “I told you! I told you! They can’t see me! The Gods! The Gods can’t see me!”
Unable to think, Malowebi witnessed, watched it all in golden reflection, how the Mutilated seized a begging Kelmomas, first with sorcery, then with hands lacking five fingers, how the child had wailed and kicked and shrieked, realizing he had traded one tyrant for four. Malowebi glimpsed the flutter of small limbs as the Dûnyain thrust him into the great black sarcophagus, heard the porcine shrieks of bodily violations, the heartbreak of his blubbering, his whimpering cries, as the great face of the Carapace closed upon its ancient seal …
“Mu-mu-mum-meee …”
He could remember! The Carapace climbing soundlessly upright … The very root of the Horn roaring.
The Aspect-Emperor dead.
Never had Malowebi been so immobile, so windless within.
A vision like straps about your chest.
You see a chip shining black, hanging within the watery distortions pulsing about the remaining Horn. You see the dust devils have ceased their random scrawl, and now orbit the great black plate of the Shigogli. You see Men spilling like iron filings and grains of quartz, pouring through the very breaches they had wrought mere watches previous. You see Magi like seeds detaching in a different wind, this one blowing not around, but toward you. You see the Horde amassed upon the far line of the Occlusion, following the miracle of its retreat with the cataclysm of its return. You see the pallid stampede chasing the same, second wind.
And you know because you can feel it, the dimple in what Men cannot perceive, an absence beyond the sensible, beyond horror. You know the Whirlwind walks.
The No-God has returned.
“You must do something!”
You scream this, but your father stands stationary, like a statue, you would think, were it not for the way his immobility raved. Indifference, bottomless indifference, combined with an umbrage that could humble Gods. Your father’s grudge could not be more personal, more clotted with the blood and hair of human outrage, and yet, somehow, it remains apiece with the spectacle before them.
Tsurumah … Mursiris …. Mog-Pharau!
“What?” you cry scathing. “The great King-of-Tribes stands witless? Undone by the undoing of all things!”
And when your father—your true father—finally turns, you are taken aback, so keen is the edge in his gelid gaze, so murderous. His lips vanish, so wolfish is his sneer. His teeth are too small, too even, too white. And you understand, at last, that you are to this man what your brothers and sisters were to their true father, a lesser light wrapped in a coarser cloth.
He turns to his chieftains, and too much seems to move, as if the countless cat-rib scars were in fact stitches, something binding him to his place. And on a bolt of horror you realize he is no longer a Son of Man, your father. Sin and hatred have cut his soul from his mortal frame, and now Hell suffuses the whole.
“It matters not,” he tells his proud chieftains, “what you see when you look upon this boy. He! He is your King-of-Tribes, now.”
He swivels his gaze, grinning at each many-scarred warrior in turn. You don’t see madness so much as the limits of reason shining in his turquoise eyes.
“Dare not doubt me … Look! Gaze upon me, my cousins, admit what you have always known, what your drunken kinsmen murmur when the fires burn low. Look upon me and know the fell potency of my curse. Dare betray him, blood of my blood, and I shall visit thee!”
The words pinch your heart between thumb and forefinger. He turns his back on all things, it seems, and you stand every bit as astonished as the others and even more confused. Together you watch him, your legendary sire, Cnaiür urs Skiötha, the breaker-of-horses-and-men, descend the inner rim of the Occlusion and walk out alone into vast and distant machinations of doom. You even weep.
Only their terror of your father keeps you alive.
No knowledge runs so deep as knowledge of calamity; no name is more primal—or final. It is what infants wail and homicides rave. It is what old men groan as sight dwindles, and what mothers weep. It is what poets lavish with spit and pearl. Tribulation is our maker, the foe that so hounds us as to craft us like clay. Think on it! Tales of murder would not so enthrall us, were we not the children of survivors.
The Men of the Ordeal could feel it in the crescendo of the winds, the confluence. They could feel it in the groan that tingled through all substance. And they could feel it in the nauseous void pressed against their spine, always there no matter how far they managed to run, the premonition that something … something …
The vast flock of the Aspect-Emperor hobbled and sprinted across the Black Furnace Plain, casting aside weapons, sawing at armour. For many, shock precluded the possibility of emotion, left them little more than automata shambling across the flats. Others wept, bawled and raged as little ones bereft of some childish prize. Still others clenched their jaw against the gibbering extremes, refusing to unlock the passions rocking them.
Sheets of blasting grit soon swept the whole of Shigogli. Blood became black as oil. Grimaces were inked into faces, down to the blackened teeth, so that each was at once wretched and a mummer mocking the wretched. More and more fell to their knees convulsing for the taste.
Thus the Ordealmen fled, ever more obscure, ever more harrowed, a great mob drawn as a comet across the Black Furnace Plain, the infirm and the unlucky trailing the hale and the lucky, all of them running to the encampment they had seen burning. The Horde closed upon Golgotterath behind them, a chitinous rush across all that could be seen. The Whirlwind seized upon the sky-high billowing of the Shroud, began to feed upon it, and rags of blackness began scribbling about Golgotterath and the Upright Horn. An obese funnel climbed from great sweeping skirts of noxious black, obscuring the glint of the Carapace. The roar battered aside all hearing, save …
Howled through the throats of thousands upon thousands of Sranc, a flood inexorably encompassing the interval separating them from the injured and the encumbered. These wretches were doomed—clouds and clots of them stumbling, even crawling through the trampled dust. The Witches and the Schoolmen, the only souls that could hope to save them, had leapt so far ahead they could no longer be seen.
Those Ordealmen at the fore of the rout called out in dismay, and stopped in the smoking ruins of their encampment. Climbing echelons of them were transfixed for the image of the Whirlwind about the Horn, gouging the Shroud from the Horde to the Vault of Heaven. They could not move. The encampment was not so much a vestige of home, the illusion of security that comes with familiarity, as a point requiring decision, and no one knew where they should go or what they should do. And so was each refugee undone by the indecision he found awaiting him. The bands of congestion grew deeper across the encampment’s scrag perimeter.
“Run!” a sorcerous voice cracked—the same voice that had chased them from Golgotterath. “For the Occlusion!”
And rolling eyes found a figure, fur-bedecked and hermit-wild, hanging above the fugitive fields. The Holy Tutor …
The Wizard.
“Run for your lives!”
Once, when Cnaiür was a child, a whirlwind had roared through the Utemot encampment, its shoulders in the clouds, yaksh, cattle, and lives swirling like skirts about its feet. He had watched it from a distance, wailing, clutching his father’s rigid waist. Then it had vanished, like sand settling in water. He could remember his father running through the hail to assist his kinsmen. He could remember beginning to follow, then stumbling to a halt, transfixed by the vista before him as though the scale of the transformation had dwarfed his eyes’ ability to believe. The great rambling web of tracks, pens, and yaksh had been utterly rewritten, as though some mountain-tall child had drawn sweeping circles with a stick. Horror had replaced familiarity, but order had replaced order.
This was a different whirlwind.
And he was no longer that child.
He was of the People, one who had so eaten of the Land as to become the Land. He was a Chieftain of the People, one who had put so many souls to dirt as to confound numbers! He was a King of the Chieftains, a descendant of Ûthgai who smashed ancient-old Kyraneas as pottery; and of Horiötha, who burned Imperial Cenei as a pyre. Their blood was his blood! Their bones were his bones! Utemot, the most wild and holy of the many tribes of the People.
Cnaiür urs Skiötha strode down the slopes and out across the flats heedless of the refugee masses parting about him. He stared only at it as he walked, his long knife in hand, cutting away his own armour and clothing piece by piece, revealing the horrendous sum of what he had taken from the World, the thousand sons and daughters violated, the thousand hearts stopped, the thousand eyes blinded. Finally he pressed his blade down his hairless pubis, and sliced away his loincloth, baring his manhood to the sting. And so he walked, a solitary man, naked save for the swazond grilling his limbs and torso, numberless totems of those murdered and not merely killed.
The wind scoured his striate skin, wricked his black mane. Existence was caterwaul and thunder, darkness and obscurity, vast discharges of brilliance high above, and whipping, knifing obscurities below. Existence turned upon and against the cyclopean gyre, corruption whipping blurred about glimpses of the Upright Horn.
Squinting against the maelstrom, he plunged forward. Smoke coiled from his swazond like blood from gills in rushing waters.
“KELLHUS!” he roared in no human voice, a shout that cracked the Horde’s howl, that struck dust from open air.
The Whirlwind continued to feed upon the Shroud, rending and inhaling, ripping it from its roots in the Horde, spinning it into the great bulbous pillar. The creatures were almost upon him.
“I COME TO YOU AS HATE!”
Ordealmen continued to materialize in their hundreds from the shrouded tracts before him, all of them wounded or bearing wounded, all of them monkey-grimacing, faces toppling out of the maelstrom, each as bright as any now, any here, each a silvery angle on Creation.
“AS OUTRAGE AND HEART-CRACKING HUNGER!” he roared in no human voice.
A Shrial Knight emerged from the whipping murk, his white surcoat reduced to violet rags, standing at the side of a body already duned for immobility and wind. The sky had become a tortured wheel, inner rending outer, and the man hung upon the image as though straining to read, his lips moving. Beyond him, where all was shadows, the scabrous masses engulfed all, imploding about each and every flailing Ordealman. Whether heedless or oblivious, the Knight-of-the-Tusk stood motionless as the inhuman avalanche surged toward him.
Cnaiür urs Skiötha laughed as the first white-skinned figures fell hacking upon him, laughed as the screaming fish-white masses loped toward his laughing. thousands upon raving thousands. He laughed and spat.
“MY BREAST HAS BECOME AN OVEN, MY HEART A BLINDING COAL!”
All the World thronged with shrieking forms, white where not soiled black, a vast wave that swallowed all the survivors hobbling before it, transforming each into flowers of shaking savagery as the masses swept onward. The Whirlwind soared beyond, a monstrous fat-bellied funnel, rising distinct from great smoking sheets.
“MY THOUGHTS BURN AS OIL AND FLAX! TOO FAST! TOO FAR!”
Naked and unarmed, Cnaiür urs Skiötha, the most-violent-of-all-men, strode laughing into the Horde of Mog-Pharau …
And it parted … not for the smoke steaming from his numberless swazond, nor for the crimson glow poisoning his turquoise eyes, nor even for the shadowy presentiment of four horns rising about his head. The creatures did not so much veer from his infernal path as did the Horde itself. The abominations screeched and streamed and gesticulated as before, only in the spaces about him.
Cnaiür urs Skiötha laughed and sneered and spat fire.
“ANASÛRIMBOR!” he roared in no human voice. “HEAR ME, DECEIVER!”
Upon his every step a screaming transit opened before him, and so he walked between the Horde, an entity unseen, striding ground trammelled trackless.
The winds began chewing his naked skin.
“I SHALL HAVE MY OWN PORTION! MY OWN PRIZE!”
And it was mad to see so many iterations of one thing, let alone a thing so obscene as Sranc, fields of them, plains, unnatural teeth gnashing, beauteous faces sphinctering—fields upon fields of them!
The barbarian laughed, stood untouched amid great, wheeling shoals of the beasts. He spat fire upon them, laughed more as the creatures kicked and were ruthlessly trampled.
“YOU SHALL SUFFER AS NO SON OF MAN BEFORE YOU!” he boomed to the black funnelling heavens, his eyes now spikes of crimson brilliance.
And in the heart of the Whirlwind he glimpsed rumours of it, the black shining jewel. He leaned back to face the heights, scarred arms askew, corded and smoking.
“A THING FOREVER PASSED AS MORSELS IN THE PIT!”
The winds had become abrasion; blood began weeping from his swazond. Smoke fluted from a thousand slits across his body.
The No-God walked … walked to him.
“ANASÛRIMBOR!” he roared, his voice bestial with fury. “REVEAL THYSELF TO ME!”
A million throats answered.
TELL ME …
The Whirlwind blotted all Creation before him, blowing bodies outward and sucking bodies up as it advanced. A million blasting needles sheared the scars from his skin, leaving his windward surfaces striped in living fire. And they roiled like burning grease within him, the indignities he had suffered, the grudges and grievances he bore! Such a toll as only murder could redeem!
“SHOW THYSELF SO THAT I MIGHT STRIKE THEE!”
Skin pealed back from tissue, sloughed as parchment. Bleeding was struck into mist.
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
Even as it blinded the wind laid bare, exposing structures, devouring them, displaying the lurid layers beneath. With Hell’s own eyes, Cnaiür urs Skiötha peered up into the void and saw … nothing.
“REVEAL! REVEAL THYSELF!”
Flesh disintegrated. A vicious black climbed over all things, grew numb.
WHAT AM I?
Awe is the heart aimed at all horizons.
Awe is how we belong to what beggars our conception.
Awe redeems the vacancy of our imperium, lets us hope and hate as our fathers had hoped and hated, to strive for what the honest heart can comprehend. Awe dares souls to swell beyond the horizon, to shrug away the demented iterations, to believe in what cannot be seen. It calls on us to be what we were and what we remain: Men who can kill for the tale’s sake.
So we might dwell in the husk of ancient certainty unto the end of our bloodless days.
So we might tremble at beauty, numb to truth.
Noxious fumes roped the last remaining light, blackening the face of Heaven, and the roar waxed louder, though pain alone betrayed as much, and the Horde came before the Whirlwind, an oceanic flood of iron, flint, and claw. Ordealmen vanished in scrambling thousands beneath the surge, spurring those toiling ahead, the clouds hobbling through the gutted encampment, condensing into pitched chaos at the Seven Passes. The obscene multitudes rushed the slopes below, loped shrieking, howling, phalluses bent and pinked across their sunken bellies, and the Sons of Men threw back their heads, their mouths pits in their beards, their looks shining and hopeless, eyes that mirrored the flailing that is the final recourse of all blooded things. The threshing edge heaved up. Over. As hornets on honey, Sranc caged them in convulsive thrusting. Punctures welled and spouted. Skulls fractured, and faces bulged like pillows …
Ere Hell opened and Death came swirling down.
The Horde came before the Whirlwind, aye, a deluge swamping the inner foundations of the Occlusion, and the Ordealmen began trampling their brothers, so frantically did they force the backs before them. All the guises of anguish and lunacy lunged motionless about them, faces, all of them slicked, pinched into the shapes of overthrown souls; here an Ingraul with finger bones knotted through his longbeard, his upper teeth missing; and there a splint-armoured Karyoti swaying like a sunflower with the crush and careen, lampblack running his cheeks into his plaited beard, brown eyes peering out across the continent, so that he might smile upon his children in their uncle’s garden, giggling when they should be napping.
The Horde rose up, flurries become packed masses, waves swallowing wrack of tents and baggage, waves that abruptly burned in geometric cages of light …
A motley band of Witches and Schoolmen hung pinned above the passes, voices gravel for abuse, singing sorcery brilliant in proportion to the murk, dispensations small as silver needles beneath the black immensity of the Whirlwind, yet sparking as beacons across the Shigogli all the same, illuminating countless raving white faces, numbers like the sands about the sea.
The Ordealmen trapped in the gullies of the Occlusion rejoiced, loosed a cry that could be seen if not heard, and some dared turn to exult in the spectacle of masses convulsing afire.
But the Sranc came before the Whirlwind, and the Horde, which would have shovelled itself howling into such Gnostic furnaces before, fell still … utterly still … leaving only the cyclone booming about vacancy.
The Shroud was inhaled from the depravities, league after league, revealing a million godlike faces impassive beneath overarching cataclysm.
The Sons of Men traded their cheers for stupefied wonder.
Mog-Pharau, the Whirlwind, walked, robed in tempest, crowned in lightning, and the Horde shrieked forward, terrifying for the singularity of its animating will. The Schoolmen resumed coughing and crying out their songs, disgorging fires, spinning lattices, and watched appalled as the abominations leapt into their phosphorescent ministries en masse, running heedless of torment, faltering only for gruesome incapacity. They advanced as a continuous, pestilential surge, flinging themselves into thrashing heaps of char and tallow, fires that grew ever fatter, ever more liquid. The Schoolmen traded warnings, retreated to what seemed more secure positions, unaware that thousands of Chorae had been scooped from the wrack of Golgotterath and cast with all violence forward, again and again, passing as a cloud through the body of the Horde, until taken up in slings at the foot of the Occlusion.
The surprise was all but complete. The sorcerous lights—and the scenes of riot they struck from the hip of blindness—disappeared across the Black Furnace Plain. The flesh of kings and their captains lay spilled as treasure and splendour at the feet of the Derived, meat for their rapacious hungers.
So did the Great Ordeal of Anasûrimbor Kellhus perish in salt and butchery.