Apostles of Doom

He smiled in appreciation of Vordek’s skill at slicing off the heads of the vampyrs. The sight caused his dream to jump to Visteroth, a rather dark and forbidding planet orbiting Erdnalla 3. Visteroth had been a world much like Nysegard, overwhelmed by Unlife. However, over thousands of years, the orc clans there had been able to adapt, creating through very risky trial and error, a genetic vaccine against the Unlife.

Unfortunately, not many survived vaccination, but those that did were immune to the predations of the Unlife, as were their descendants. There had been a few unforeseen side effects, of course. The Deathstealer and Soulwrecker clans were both very tall and thin for orcs and were also extremely pale, a dusky gray pallor that was frankly a bit off-putting to most other orcs. That paleness, along with their nearly fluorescent red eyes and deadly hand-to-hand fighting skills, made them some of the most feared warriors in their galaxy after they had driven the Unlife from their world.

Of course, Tom reflected in his dream, it was not just their fighting skills. For some reason, Loki (a vision of the jötunn-god laughing and drinking across the table from Tom came to mind) had speculated that it was related to the mana involved in the Unlife defense. The genetically modified orcs were far more sensitive to animus and mana than most orcs. Nearly all of them possessed strong animage skills of some form or the other. Naturally, being orcs, most of these animages focused on combat-related skills such as body mastery, cell mastery, kinetomastery, spatiomastery and temporamastery. Tom chuckled darkly to himself. And yes, a few of them had branched out and were skilled at telemastery and Mind Reaving; that could be very handy.

In his dream, Tom shook his head suddenly, wondering how he knew all this and where it had come from. But then he chided himself; when you had been around as long as he had been, you were bound to accumulate a lot of information. What? Sixteen or seventeen years? Tom asked himself in the dream. This dream, and he suddenly realized it was a dream, made very little sense. He shook his dream head harder. This caused his physical head to shake, and one of his horns snagged against the headboard, waking him up. What a crazy dream! he thought to himself before falling back to sleep, this time with only scattered thoughts of Unlife mixed in with disjointed conversations with his friends.

Fort Murgatroid: DOA + 6, Early Third Period

Teragdor stood in the doorway to the southwestern tower of Fort Murgatroid, watching the reconstruction work. It had taken a full day for Stevos to negotiate assistance, but he had managed it. Yesterday, they had returned to Fort Murgatroid, where they had welcomed multiple saints from both Tierhallon and Torholden to the fort.

They had left before dawn and ridden to Fort Murgatroid, where they planned to summon the saints by performing rituals that would allow the saints to find them. Stevos had brought a set of marching drums and a trumpet. He had shown Teragdor the beat he would need to play on the drums while he himself would sound the trumpet.

Teragdor smiled at the memory of the dawn summoning. He had belted the drums on, and felt filled with pride as upon them he began to bang, even as the setting of Uropia turned red as blood with the morning light of Fierd and Stevos’s trumpet sounded its call. Answering the call, Torean’s horsemen began to ride. With Fierd’s fire beginning to blaze, the stars began to fade from the dawn sky.

Teragdor had lost himself in the music. It stretched across the planes, beckoning the forces of Tiernon and Torean. To think he, Teragdor, had been in the musical number when the saints went marching in to Fort Murgatroid!

There were a dozen saints of Tiernon, and another dozen of Torean. They had quickly organized and began scouring the building and grounds with cleansing and purification spells for both Torean and Tiernon. A team of horses had brought a wagon with rune-inscribed stones that would be used to construct two runic gateways. One would go to a monastery of Torean, where a team of human carpenters and masons would join them; the other gateway would open to a quarry in New Etonia, where they would get stone. Teragdor knew very little of runic gateways, but had never heard of one that could span such a distance. He supposed it was quite literally miraculous.

The saints, apparently, did not actually need to sleep, so they had been working all night. To say he felt in awe would be more than an understatement. This morning there were scaffolds all over the fort, masons and carpenters scrambling up and down ladders and hauling materials. There were probably two dozen masons and as many carpenters.