The Slidecrown Sundering
Seize the Crown
Virulent Despair
(Part 1 | Part 2)
The men and women of the huntbands surged over the ruins, toppled columns and crumbled walls proving no impediment to the nimble hunter-warriors. With an almost aelven grace, they raced for the piles of rusted scrap and rotten wood that were the enemy’s crude barricades. Yet their advance did not go unchallenged.
Though the foe appeared — like their own forces — not to make use of cowardly ranged weapons, they were not above calling upon fell magics to aid them. A trio of sorcerers cast streams of filth and globs of pus at the courageous souls who charged their way, each putrescent conjuration bowling over at least one man or woman, and leaving the warrior to writhe in the throes of an agonising death, as one of many horrific ailments tore them apart from within, leaving behind corpses unrecognisably swollen and coated in seeping sores.
Yet the hunter-warriors did not falter, and the first of them to reach the palisades rushed to scale them, heedless of the corroded shards of metal that bit into the bare skin of their hands and feet with enough force to draw blood. For all their bravery, though, few reached the summit of those foul barricades, for as they clambered over festering timber clogged with moulds and muck, virulent plagues entered their bloodstreams through those lacerations.
Most fell victim to their maladies before ever getting the chance to land a blow in honest combat. Those who did manage to assail the foes that awaited them atop those crude ramparts were swiftly cut down by chortling blightkings. It was a dismal sight to behold.
Fortunately, Xochiatlapal had to endure only brief glimpses of the carnage from her bird’s eye view in the sky above. Unfortunately, the reason for this inattentiveness was that she too was hard-pressed.
When first she had spied the enemy airforce, she and her fellow angels of Alarielle had viewed them with contempt, for like their landlocked counterparts, they were cumbersome things, sluggish and corpulent. Yet their initial derision had quickly proven just as foolhardy as the huntbands’ head-on charge. As the rot-fly-riding rotbringers approached, she and her chorus had sung to them, expecting to see the repugnant creatures drop like rocks in the face of their holy hymns.
Instead, though their rancid flesh had pulsed and twitched, buboes bursting and skin sloughing away to reveal the glistening muscle and fat beneath, they had kept coming, proving far more resilient than expected. When battle was joined, she personally faced their leader, a creature professing itself “the Lord of Afflictions”, whilst her colleagues contended with its retinue.
Though she plied her spear with strength and precision, the rusted trident it bore in one gauntleted hand proved her weapon’s match, as time and again, the armoured figure batted aside her thrusts, mocking laughter resounding from within its helm. Even in those few instances where a lunge managed to bypass its guard, more often than not, her weapon’s obsidian point simply skittered off the corroded platemail it adorned itself with.
The same, alas, could not be said for its own attacks. Though she did her best to use her greater manoeuvrability to evade its heavy jabs, her only armour was skin and muscle, which unsurprisingly proved time and again to be insufficient to ward off her foe’s assault. She was soon bleeding from a half-dozen serious wounds, and worse still, she felt as though her every vein and artery was aflame; she had no doubt contracted something from the filthy weapon.
Nor was she alone in faring so poorly. All about her, angels were dropping from the skies, their songs forever silenced. They had a numerical advantage over the airborne rotbringers, yet that seemed to mean almost nothing to their foes, who merrily charged into their midst and set about with corroded scythes as if reaping grain in a field. Blades bit deep into flesh, sometimes even severed limbs, whilst her flock were having scarcely better luck harming their own opponents than she was with the rotbringers’ armour-plated liege.
They had only one advantage over these foes, and though she baulked at the thought of resorting to such an ignominious tactic, another glance below — as she spun to evade a trident thrust — steeled the archangel’s resolve. It was a massacre down there, and whenever another angel fell, a wail of dismay rose from her troops, that sight seeming to do more to dishearten them than the gruesome deaths of their own comrades. Worse still, each time a blightlord plummeted down amongst them, the flabby forms of rider and mount alike burst as would ripe fruit, showering a swathe of hunter-warriors in diseased bodily fluids.
Taking in that loathsome sight, she understood that this assault had become an unmitigated disaster, and could only pray that her husband and children had fared better in the attacks they each were leading. She called out the signal to withdraw, and aside from a few dejected cries, her warriors heeded the command without complaint.
Some of the rotbringers tried to give chase, but their bloated bodies lacked the Yektiktlani’s alacrity, and they soon fell behind. Speed was their only advantage, and they could use it only to withdraw. As she fled from the ruins, the hearty guffaws of the Lord of Afflictions echoed in Xochiatlapal’s head, long after she was out of earshot of the battlefield.
