The Slidecrown Sundering
Cross the Water
Prelude to Alliance
(Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3)
The handful of tzaangors — a mix of enlightened & skyfires — upon their magnificent, floating discs, followed the bat-winged horror as it lurched through the skies with a speed that belied its cumbersome mass. Of course, they could still have outpaced it with little difficulty, each of them knew with surety. In part, that was simple confidence in their mounts, for none who had ridden one could possibly doubt the celerity of a disc of Tzeentch.
Mostly, though, the reasons for their certainty were the visions Our Burning Saviour blessed them with. In the kaleidoscopic array of potential futures that the skyfires beheld, there were those in which this endeavour failed, and they were forced to retreat. In those cases, they saw their patrol easily evading the clutches of the ungainly hulk. As for the enlightened, in the creature’s history, they bore witness to past hunts, and from that could deduce that it was not capable of chasing down anything so agile as their discs.
When she had first spotted its flock, the patrol leader had considered simply falling back and warning her commander, Escarosht the Adamant, that the plague drones of the Fly Lord were not the only threat to their dominance of the skies above the Slidecrown Isles. Then she had considered Escarosht’s recent attempt at negotiating with a band of seraphon. That effort had been unsuccessful, alas, for the reptiles had been too set in their ways to see the benefits of working side-by-side. They had needed to be culled, in the end.
Yet perhaps this band of primitive creatures could be reasoned with, where those others could not? She had enquired that very thing of a skyfire templar, and after a moment’s hesitation, had gotten a nod of assent in reply. It wasn’t a sure thing, she understood, but she had to make the effort. She had always admired the Adamant, and so was keen to follow his example however she could. If that meant reaching out to the unenlightened, and offering them the opportunity to better themselves by serving the will of Our Burning Saviour, then that is what she would do.
To that end, she now followed the hunched bat-thing as it lumbered through the sky. It led her over the forest canopy towards others of its kind, where they circled ponderously at a particular spot above the shore of a nearby lake. It was those others who had first attracted the attention of the templars with their ceaseless screeches. She and her fellows had monitored them from a distance, watching as they screamed with such pitch and volume that their banshee-shrieks dropped birds from the sky.
Even for one such as she, with her heavy, gilded armour, the tzaangor scout was not confident that she could survive such a fearsome attack. Ordinarily, enlightened like herself could scour an opponent’s past to learn all their tricks, and thus counter even the most skilled of fighters… yet how could one block, parry or dodge an assault which consisted of sound alone?
Fortunately, when the four-winged terror had arrived, its lesser kin had finally quietened. That big one had then hauled its bulk through the air towards the templars, and she had advanced to meet it. Alas, the creature seemed able to only howl incoherently, and the enlightened’s heart had fallen, as realisation set in that this wasn’t going to go any better than the Adamant’s first attempt at negotiation.
But then things took an odd turn. The misshapen flyer flapped back the way it had come, but as she turned to depart, she saw the same skyfire she’d questioned earlier shake his head at her, and noticed that the rest of the bat-monsters had yet to resume their awful screeching. Though the mute prophet could not speak, she got his message, loud & clear. Don’t return yet. This isn’t over.
Sure enough, not long after that exchange, the monstrosity returned, and beckoned to her awkwardly with one of its legs. It seemed to be indicating that she should follow. She would have loved to call the rest of her group to join her — would have felt far more secure with fellow templars at her back — but realised that these simple-minded creatures could have felt threatened into attacking by such a move, so instead, she did as she was bid, and flew after it alone.
The hulking horror led her past the others of its kind and down towards the lakeshore, where a pack of similar creatures waited. Like their airborne elite, the foul things below managed to look both pallid and jaundiced at once, were unencumbered by armour — or clothing, come to that — and most had bald pates, though thick tufts of unruly hair sprouted elsewhere on their bodies. The only accoutrements they bore were shards of bone that pierced their foul flesh. Unlike the hulking goliaths above, however, all but one of these ground-bound sort were scrawny in the extreme.
As she descended towards them then, she experienced a moment of doubt, questioning what possible use these miserable wretches could be to so powerful a force as the Templars of Our Burning Saviour. Perhaps this had been a mistake? Yet even as that thought crossed her mind, her blessed visions relayed to her scenes of these misbegotten aberrations tearing into the Plaguefather’s minions with tooth & nail, heedless of their own, inevitable deaths, so focused were they on laying low the rotbringers.
It was almost noble, in a bestial sort of way. She continued descending, though her guide did not, returning to its flock once it became clear she was doing as it had bid her. Soon, her disc hovered just a couple feet above the shallow water, and she stood upon it facing the brute she presumed to be the leader of this landlocked group.
It crouched low on the ground, one of the emaciated kind grooming its matted hair with its fingers. As she watched, the malnourished thing plucked a fat maggot from its leader’s scalp, popped the wriggling grub into its mouth, then began to chew. She felt faintly nauseous.
