Exalt the Beast
Sometimes the panic and the rage is too much to bear. Sometimes it is impossible to stare your demon in the face and spit at it, no matter what you might desire, what you might tell yourself, contemplating your lot alone.
Something in Kairon breaks, confronted with so much. Sylfinne is unstoppable. Sylfinne will have him and gut him, fill his head with her goddess, and he will watch as his puppet-self goes on to kill everything he knows.
And he would do it, in the end. Not even he knows his own terrible strength.
But in the chaotic bedlam of noise and blood, of the cut-and-wound, he sinks into darkness. It is the merciful, forgiving kind. It hides him, wraps him up in the selfsame comfort of napping by the hearth under Landregor’s cloak, listening to Sanarisse read him bedtime stories, breathing in the crystalline air of the sky with only Lor Shem to keep him company.
When he loses hold of that inner shadow, that second soul — when he falls — it catches him, and shrouds him up in safety, and arms itself with the unfettered and terrible fires of Will.
It blinks its eyes open to Sylfinne dodging away from the thrashing of a dryad, the wrath of the Shroud wakened far too late. The dragon descending, blasting the hillside apart. A pull, inexorable, leading to some bleak elsewhere.
It looks back into the well of darkness and does not struggle as it passes through.
The cacophony — the roiling sluice of damned souls, swallowing the boy’s body up and spitting it out in someplace dark, and cold. It was full of the same quiet fearful children mustered, hiding from monsters, hiding from imagined shapes beneath the bed. At any moment it could crack open and gasp.
It moved, testing its weight and balance in the darkness, freeing itself of the thin, black-metal lances pinning it in place. An idle thought brushed over them, assessing, as it stood. When another shape in the room roused, gasping, gathering mana to chain the boy that’d appeared, it imagined a sword into its hands and swung, once and cleanly.
It claims the lances with a thought, lifting them up in an orbit, a blunt and silent mockery. It faces the impassible indent of stone delineating the door out of this place, where roam monsters and worse.
It waits.
The thing which now tears apart the World of Darkness does so in a restrained wake, so motivated as it is now by war, singularly focused upon the Tempest, retreating into the boughs of the Black Silent Tree, haunting the ruins of the summery kingdom on the slopes of its high mount.
Word of it has spread, as foretold. It has ripped apart the hunters, the warriors, the sorcerers, though now it has become clear that they are fed to slaughter by greater things. It has been named Hati and Amarok, the Black Wind, the Slaughtering Beast, the Hunting King, the Hound of Ruin, or simply “Glory!”, which cannot be said without blood in the mouth. It has chewed up and spat out every competition.
Do you understand yet, o Tempest?
I am not a thing of magnitudes. I am an answer. I cannot be slain, only delayed; I cannot be contested by creatures such as you. You are doomed.
It cares not for the ripple of its bloodshed, the petty barons of fallow hills or bloody rivers, delicate webs of the push-and-pull obliterated by the presence of savagery. At the fringes, where the Tempest’s call is but a thin whisper, the icon of the Beast roams abroad, exultant. “It falls upon the Black Silent Tree!” they rave. “It will tear it up by the roots and free us all!”
It prowls the shadows cast by the leviathan roots punching into the land, feeding and feeding off of its pestilence. It is a shape understood in the fretting ideations of the hunter, underestimating his quarry and inventing the pack which hunts him.
You must think me alone. Singularly invincible. The might of Man, exalting himself, thinking himself invulnerable. This is not so.
When a blanket is drawn over the stars, it is like the world being clutched in the Beast’s jaws. Look to the horizon, and you will see its teeth. Look down, and you will see the blood.
My pack is every soul that has been devoured by this hungry world.
It breaks from the treeline, where no broken shoots of wood can beat out the world tree’s own thirst for soil and sustenance. It is massive, unstoppable. It is certainty itself.
Are you ready?
