***Content warning: gore***
It had followed them beyond death. Beyond the reforging of mind and body. Through the obliteration of all that once made them human, the curse of their homeland still lingered. The longing sickness, the dysphoract, the crimson blight, all names for the same wasting curse that had taken hold of the legion. The Curse of Alagadda.
Dyros was perhaps the last soul to remember the origins of that terrible soul sickness. To most in the legion, the constant bloody gnawing at their essence and the sanguinary promise of release was all they had ever known. So many times had their bodies and minds been shattered and reforged, they had lost all memory of their life in Ithicus. But not Dyros. The second scion of that noble house had a perfect recollection of their life before undeath. They remembered, in the early days of the Age of Chaos, the desperate battles against the servants of the Dark Gods as they lost mile after mile of their homeland. The first time the Ambassador of the thrice-damned land of Alagadda arrived at their father’s court, promising salvation from the barbarian hordes. They could recall with terrible clarity the decline of their people, as hunger and madness drove them to acts of savage butchery first against the invaders, and then each other. They were there when the first Asylums were built, where the cursed were corralled and kept out of sight. They could still feel the cold sharpness of the knife that had peeled away their skin during the rite of excoriation, punishment for attempting to end their father’s madness through regicide.
Dyros’ reverie was broken by a hard rapping on the door. “Enter,” baid the Liege of the Pyric Legion, doing their best to compose themselves. Two legionaries entered the small study. The first was a slightly built construct, carrying himself with a pronounced hunch from several centuries of sitting at a desk. His bones were stained with specks of black ink from the scribe’s quill, and fastened to his ossified frame were dozens of books and scrolls. This was Heka, chronicler of the legion and one of the few legionaries not pulled from the land of Ithicus. Behind him, hulked a towering brute of bone. Standing almost twice the size of most legionaries, Kos was a being that demanded fear and respect. The High Executioner of the legion, it was responsible for carrying out the legion’s justice by culling those who fully succumbed to the curse.
“My liege,” said Heka, kneeling before Dyros deferentially. “I come bearing dark tidings.” Dyros noted that Kos made no such motion of fealty, only standing there with its arms crossed. As High Executioner, it technically stood outside of the military chain of command and thus was not subservient to Dyros, but the obvious disrespect of its betters still irked the Liege.
“Rise, Master of Scrolls,” replied Dyros, pointedly ignoring the brute Kos. “What news do you bring?’’
“We, meaning the High Executioner and myself, have uncovered a dire threat to the legion,” said Heka, bones rattling against the stone floors of Dyros’ study as he got back to his feet. “A terrible cabal that venerates the curse that afflicts our legion.”
Dyros nodded grimly. It was not uncommon for packs of those who had degenerated under the weight of the curse to form blood cults and enclaves of flesh to sate their unholy urges. “Then why have they not been dealt with?” Asked Dyros, directing the question pointedly at Kos. “It is not like you to pass up a chance for slaughter, or have you lost your appetite for death?”
A moment of tense silence passed, as the two ossiarchs glared daggers at each other. “Well,” said Heka meekly, breaking the uncomfortable tension that hung in the room. “This particular case is a bit more… Delicate. We suspect that the leader of this particular group is a ranking member of legion command.”
This revelation shocked Dyros to say the least. It was no secret that none from Ithicus were safe from the curse, even Dyros themselves knew the terrible longing for flesh. This was the reason they had brought in an outsider like Heka into their ranks, one who would be free of the curse to chronicle their story. But for one of their leaders to fall so far as to form one of these debased cults was unthinkable. “Who?” asked Dyros. “Who betrays the legion so flagrantly?”
“Priad Kataphros,” rasped Kos, finally daining to speak. It spoke the name as a rattling hiss, like air escaping a dying man’s punctured lungs.
Dyros knew Kataphros well. She was a priestess of Nagash, the spiritual leader of the legion. Even after the disgrace at the battle of Sokar, when the legion was exiled to the far underworld of Sedh and labeled as honorless Parrah, Kataphros had kept faith in the Great Necromancer a core tenant of the legion. She was responsible for rallying the troops, for reminding them that they owed their existence and their obedience to Nagash. It was through her authority that the legionaries did not question the structure and hierarchy of the legion. If she was truly lost to the curse, there was no telling how many others she could drag down with her.
“Are you sure of this?” asked Dyros. “If your suspicions are incorrect and we take action against her, the consequences would be dire for the legion.” Dyros knew, but was unwilling to admit, that much of their power stemmed from the authority conferred by the representative of Nagash. As Parrah, exiled from the Ossiarch Empire, there was little else that reinforced Dyros’ authority over the legion. Taking action against Kataphros could lead to a schism within the legion that could shatter it forever.
“With the greatest respect my liege,” replied Heka. “The consequences will be far worse if we do not act. Already she has damned countless legionaries with her blasphemy. Should we not stop her soon, she may be able to seize the legion from you by force.”
Dyros weighed the options and was forced to conclude that the chronicler was right. The risk of action was far preferable to the certainty of inaction. “Kos,” said Dyros, turning to face the High Executioner. “Gather your enforcers and meet me in the marshaling yard. We have work to do.”
“With pleasure my lord,” replied Kos, a sick pleasure creeping into its voice.
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Dyros matched ahead of a full cohort of the Pyric legion. Thanks to Heka’s information, they knew where the traitorous legionaries would meet to conduct their gory rites. The plan was simple: Surround the cursed and overwhelm them with their numbers. None would escape the legion’s justice this night.
As they reached the traitor’s hideout, Dyros found it to be a network of tunnels built into the side of a jagged cliff. Dividing the cohort into smaller formations, Dyros led them into the fetid darkness of the tunnels, hoping to flush out the degenerates into the waiting spears of the legion. Accompanying them was Kos and a small contingent of their elite enforcers. While Dyros detested the hulking brute, they could not deny that it was a capable fighter. Carrying a great axe as tall as a legionary, Kos had reaped many of the cursed with that weapon, reducing them to their constituent parts with sadistic glee before leaving the remains to the boneshapers.
As Dyros plunged deeper and deeper into the tunnels, the cloying smell of rot and blood began to press in all around them. The unholy stench triggered a deep hatred within them, directed both at the cursed who reveled in it and themself who was tempted by it. Steadying their resolve, Dyros took a final turn in the passageway and found the meeting ground of the cursed.
The cavern was a charnel pit, a bloody abattoir of rotting meat and flensed skin. It was the nature of the curse for those afflicted to become fixated on the flesh of the living. It manifested in different ways, with each idiosyncrasy on morbid display within the caverns before Dyros. Some of the cursed took gruesome gobbets of flesh in their clawed hands, shoveling them down their boney gullet for them to drop sickeningly into the cavity of their ribs and back onto the floor. Some draped the flayed flesh upon their skeletal frames, the still bloody skin flapping unnaturally with the movement of the construct beneath. And in the center of the chamber, standing atop a mound of still bloody bones, stood Priad Kataphros. Draped in a bloody shroud of flesh, her boney death mask was covered by the roughly cut face of a screaming human. Gore dripped from the bloody raiments as she ranted blasphemous nonsense about the power within the flesh, her ravings punctuated with wet rasps as meat fell from her bloody jaws.
Dyros could not breathe from the ghastly horror of it. Their stomach churned with disgust, and their hands grew clammy with fear. Then a more profound terror gripped them. They had no lungs with which to breathe, the cavity where their stomach once was had been empty for millennia, and their ossified hands were as dry as dust. This sense of dysphoria, the feeling of impure flesh where there was only perfect bone was in itself a sign of the curse. But even as the screaming monster of dysphoria pressed in on their conscious mind, another sensation began to burn inside them. Rage. As they focused on it, the crackling fires of fury drowned out all else and they marched into the room with blade drawn.
###
The fight was short but brutal, with the discipline of the legionaries winning out over the mindless savagery of the cursed. It would take days for the tunnels to be fully cleansed of their taint, but Dyros was confident in the ability of their legionaries. As Kos’ enforcers dragged the broken bodies of the cursed back for reforging, Dyros wondered how much longer before the ranks of the cursed outnumbered the ranks of the legion. Even the process of purifying the bodies and souls of the cursed was growing less effective. Centuries ago, it might take decades before a newly formed legionary fully succumbed to the influence of the curse. Now, it might only take weeks before they revert to a flesh-starved beast. A more permanent solution must be found if the legion was to survive.
