Section I: Yhtill Undone
They come, again. The plan was a good one, or so Queen Cassilda thought. She had beseeched Czumneth to assist in her ambition, begging the Abstrusive Court and its hedonistic mistress to join her in her expansionist efforts. Czumneth, seeing the Once-Mortal begging so sweetly, could not easily refuse, and so they found themselves on the battlefield. The ambition, of course, was made manifest in the form of conquest, an expansion of Carcosa’s holdings into one of the true realms, outside of its isolated pocket. The Realm of Light, Hysh, was the Queen’s target, as she did not believe anything less splendid warranted her attention.
Of course, there were those who opposed such a measure – even as the army waited and its goblinoid slaves struggled to construct walls behind it, the foe approached. Huge trolls, troggoths, and other fungal creatures on one side, and gibbering hordes of undead, oblivious to their own state, on the other. It was with a sigh of resignation that Queen Cassilda ordered her retinue, the Queen’s Consorts, forwards into the trolls; there would not be a moment’s peace to build her great works it seemed.
On her right, Czumneth strode forwards imperiously with Helecaraxë, one of her Handmaidens, and the ululating horde of daemonettes that was her coterie. The undead stood before them, and Queen Cassilda felt a surge of hope – the flanks were held, her own by herself and her Consorts, the other by Helecaraxë and her coterie. Czumneth walked like an aloof goddess between them, and Anchyche, another Handmaiden, held her coterie in reserve, advancing more slowly behind the lines. Further back still, the slaves were making good progress…. Everything seemed to be going well!
But her ambition led to her overreach. In a raucous clash of arms, her phalanx smashed into the trolls, to little effect. For every glamoured speartip that punctured troll-flesh, three men were shattered with the massive swings of their great clubs – for every shield that endured the thundering blows, five more splintered. On the right flank, meanwhile, the Daemonettes performed better, Czumneth’s ecstatic exultations of violence driving them into a mad frenzy. They slashed and chopped, bringing down numerous undead monsters, gibbering gleefully as undead fluids splashed like paint upon a canvas… but they could not endure.
The phalanx broke first, the mortals of its porcupine-like formation broken and smashed to fleshy pulp by the huge trolls, with the remainder falling back in disarray towards the walls and the temporary portal to Carcosa that lie within. Cassilda felt everything, her blind eyes watching in dismay as the shattered remains of the phalanx – less than six out of a score – fled. On the right flank, the scything ranks of Daemonettes were met by a horde twice their size of undead creatures. Helecaraxë was overrun before her first blow could land, and the Daemonettes too were swallowed up by the tide. It was disastrous.
Cassilda and Czumneth, side-by-side, had no time to even move as their lines were overrun, quickly finding themselves surrounded. Cassilda and Czumneth returned the onrushing fury blow-for-blow, bellowing in joyous fury and revelling in the violence. Even as Cassilda was pulled down by the Troggoth general, her body broken, her soul was sent screaming back to the Cyrenaic Citadel and laughing in blood-soaked joy. Czumneth, too, eviscerated her way into the horde of ghoulish creatures, her blows even catching a troll and sending it reeling.
But it wasn’t enough. It was never going to be. The crypt horrors which Helecaraxë and her coterie had failed to stop overran Anchyche and her daemonette pack, and the trolls that broke through the phalanx advanced on the walls that the slaves had so hastily built, tearing them down with great bellows.
The expedition ended in ruination, the army broken and castramentations torn from the very ground.
Section II: Rebuke
“Your scalloped tatters must hide Yhtill forever!” Czumneth traced a talon painfully across the strip of torn cloth that Cassilda wore across her useless eyes. She knelt, her tripodal legs bent at the knee – it was more of a squat. Czumneth was furious – the mortals had utterly failed in their task, the Daemons had mostly failed in their task, and what remained of Cassilda’s expansionist ambition was a ruin before it had even been completed.
“Yes, Mistress.” Cassilda’s voice spoke. Among her followers, it held the weight of law, her towering and alien form an eternal reminder of the ascension she had achieved. But here, inside the Cyrenaic Citadel, the voice was an eternal reminder of her mortality, her inferiority, never quite as perfect and sibilant as the voices of those daemons that surrounded her.
“I raised you up because I saw your ambition, Cassilda.” spat Czumneth, her Handmaidens in their own chambers, thankful to be spared her rebuke. The Exalted One spoke the Queen’s name as if it were a curse. “I saw you sacrifice everything, including your own twin sister, in your reckless pursuit of Daemonhood. I like that. It makes me shudder with glee, imagining the pain your Sister and the other mortals must have felt during your first attempted establishment of Yhtill. During your ascension, as they bled and died around you, for you.”
A pause. Czumneth’s glowing yellow eyes closed, her taloned fingers and clawed appendages curling together has her supernaturally beautiful face contorted into an ugly snarl. “But I admired that you accomplished something. And what did your expedition, which you so DELICIOUSLY begged me to help you with, accomplish here?” she asked.
Cassilda’s blind gaze was averted to the floor, her arms hanging crossed in front of her – the mortal hand clenched tight, the scythelike claw dangling limply. “Only defeat, Mistress.”
Czumneth sighed, the capricious and mercurial daemon setting a taloned hand upon Cassilda’s head. It was mothering, but dominant. Gentle, but threatening. “Good. Now you see why I blinded you – blind ambition is a vice and a virtue both. You have much to learn, Queen in Yellow.” she murmured.
Under that touch, Cassilda merely shuddered.
