Lord of the Mountain Roads
Chapter II: Bloodshade
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The Shades, they said, were even more cruel and cold than other Dark Elves. They hunted Druchii like wolves hunted does in their inhospitable mountain lands, blinded the women and kept them as slaves, and slaughtered the men to eat their flesh. They practiced rituals old and forgotten by the city-dwellers. They left their newborn children outside their tents on a midwinter night to see if they could survive alone in the frost. The Shades were monsters, even for Druchii standards.
The Autarii, they said, were the wild clans of Nagarythe who refused to stay in the newly founded cities after the Druchii came into the lands of their exile. They went away, men and women and children, to live in the mountains, where there is only ice, and black pines, and death.
The Autarii, they said, were the true nobles of Clar Karond, betrayed by their subordinates who stole their lands and their birthright. They had been fighting against Chaos in the mountains, forgot their true nature and never came back to chase away the usurpers; but till now the ruling families of the City of the Ships shivered in their nightmares, fearing their return.
The Shades, they said, were fast and silent, and skilled in reading tracks. They were scouts, spies and skirmishers, and they were a deadly attack force in forests, swamps and rocky landscapes where other regiments were in disadvantage. They were hired by armies of Dreadlords, and they fought for the Witchking in Ulthuan.
The Shades, they said, can lead your through the wild terrains safely or kill you from the shadows. They watched over the gates to the subterranean seas, and they kept the memory of ancient graves and mausoleums of the long gone ancestors, guarding sacred places that all other Druchii have long since forgotten.
He did guard a grave indeed. No one was allowed to set foot in his forever frozen realm.
The leader of the barbarians fell backwards, gurgling. The others saw the bolt that had pierced his throat, and looked around, alarmed, but not in panic. Some of them began searching for the shooter, running to the rocks and looking behind trees, slow, awkward, shouting and speaking all the time, they language cutting his ears like a badly ground knife. He aimed, calmly, and another bolt whistled through the air. Another human collapsed on the frozen ground.
Now they finally had the idea to look into the direction where the bolt came from. They saw nothing. His hood was dark green, his robe dark brown, and his face was hidden by a black shawl; he was practically invisible in the crown of the pine. It was dark, and his elven eyes saw everything, while their human blindness left them helpless. Their torches were useless – they made their eyes even more unused to the night. He had wound his legs around its trunk, keeping his torso up with his stomach muscles, since the branches to unstable to sit on. The heavy and clumsy humans probably couldn't even imagine that someone could hide in a tree like that. But nevertheless, he stilled his breath, not moving a finger width, waiting for their gazes to move on.
And they did. They walked on. It was snowing again, and he heard them curse. They couldn't find his tracks under the new layer of snow – and they wouldn't be able to see the grave.
But even though it would stay hidden from them, they tried to desecrate it with their stinking presence.
Slowly, he loaded more bolts into the repeater crossbow. And aimed again. Three quick shots, three men slain.
Finally they understood that they needed cover, running towards the cave entrance that lead to a well hidden inside the mountain. More bolts traveled from the quiver into the loading mechanism. He felt content that they had ran into the trap, but he didn't smile.
He hadn't smiled for more than two year now.
He heard them scream as they stumbled over the ropes and fell onto the sharpened rocks placed strategically all over the floor of the cave, hardly visible before you fell face first onto them. The last five ones who had not broken their skulls on the stone ran out again, and he let bolts rain down on them till they ran no more.
He pulled his cloak closer, tucking it into his belts so it would not disturb his descent, and swiftly climbed down. As soon as his feet touched the ground, he drew his sword and his dagger and strode over to the barbarians. Not all of them were dead yet, and one of them tried to grab his ankle as he stepped over him. His blade struck downwards, with a precise, short movement, and the hand gripping his leg went weak, the tendons severed. He walked from one to the other, cutting through their throats or crushing their spines with one blow of the sword.
At dawn, he was at last sure that none of the human scum had survived. The winter sun was not visible yet, but from behind the Blackspines, it cast yellow shine onto the snow-covered mountain tops. The clouds that had brought snow in the night were now empty of their burden, light gray stripes upon the sky quickly growing pale.
He drank at the well and wiped his blades clean with a garish cloak of one of the dead enemies. Another day began, a day of restless wandering and of thoughts echoing in his mind with distant pain.
Like every morning, he went to greet his family.
His path lead him up into the mountains. Soon, the trees became scarce and crippled, old bony fingers trying to grasp the painfully light-blue sky. The terrain was steeper, craggier, but his pace never changed. He knew this place by heart. Leaping from rock to rock, he continued his way, higher and higher.
Powdery snow had covered the surface of the ice. The scarred and ragged rocks were smoothed out here, from the mountain top to the small plateau on which he now stood, under which the black rock began again. A glacier, frozen blood of the Blackspines, placed lower on the flank of the mountain than the rest of its white crown.
He crouched down and wiped away the snow, his hand not feeling the cold.
The ice of the glacier was clear as crystal. Like many things created through magical intervention it had characteristics more defined, more extreme than its natural counterpart.
Beneath the glassy surface, she looked at him with dark eyes wide with terror, her black hair pressed against one side of her face, her mouth open in an attempt to breathe.
"Good morning, blood of my heart," he whispered.
They had fought against beastmen, foul creatures of Chaos. He had been the Urhan's firstborn son. When the old man fell, slain in that unholy war, he became the new Urhan, the new ruler of the clan. But even with his more cunning and less proud leadership, they could not succeed against an ever growing horde.
It was then that the sorcerer appeared on a black winged creature, summoned from doom and destruction, and offered help. The only thing he asked in return was that the Urhan would serve him. For seventy years.
He had seen no other chance. He agreed. The sorcerer hid in a cave and worked on a ritual for days, and he took all the blinded and mute slaves of the Autarii as sacrifices for gods he would not tell the name of. On the third night he emerged again, and from the cave streamed forth a current of pale and purple-skinned abominations and slithering monsters. The newborn demonic army breached the wall of beastman bodies, engulfed their camps, slashed and ate through their defenses.
The beastmen had fled, and he kept his promise. He gave the amulet which marked his leadership to his younger brother. He kissed his wife on her lips and her brow. He spoke one more time to his sons and his daughter. And he went with the sorcerer and followed him for seventy years.
He had not thought about the consequences of the wretched help that the sorcerer provided.
The army summoned from the darkest pits of other worlds was not gone after it had devoured the beastmen. It had come to stay.
His people had lived without him, and he would never learn if they missed him or cursed him. For seventy years, he had only thought about returning to his clan. When he returned, he found them all frozen in the glacier.
The demonic army had grown; now humans were joining it, barbarians with hearts impure and lustful. He found the encampment just the day after his other discovery, and he caught human after human, skinning them alive, till he found one who knew what happened to his kin.
The human had told him everything before the Shade granted him the mercy of death.
The Autarii didn't tolerate Chaos. They tried to drive the unnatural creatures away. But they had no success. The barbarians, led and taught by demonic champions and the slender nightmares with purple and pale skin, defeated the clan and forced them to move further up into the mountains.
Still, the terrain was well-known to the Shades, and they brought terrible losses upon the enemy. For decades, they fought. For decades, the enemy army, despite being harvested by the Autarii, grew in number and strength, like a storm gathering. For decades, the Autarii guarded the passes between the highest peaks and chased the Chaos patrols away from their new, smaller, territory.
At last, when the Chaos forces saw that they couldn't annihilate the Autarii with sheer strength, they had used magic.
Their sorcerers summoned an avalanche. It thundered down the mountain and engulfed the whole clan, and another spell turned the snow into a glacier, speeding up the natural process and freezing the Shades into their eternal grave.
He came back just a year after the catastrophe had happened.
Now he fought the whole army alone, and guarded his dead. None of the enemies he had met had survived so far, and no one knew that he lived here.
He climbed up the glacier, his feet and hands sliding on the ice, but in some places he had driven sharpened logs or knives into the ice to serve as ladders. He looked into the faces of his sons and his daughter. They had become adults in the time that he had not seen them, but he still recognized them. His eldest son wore the amulet. He had was the Urhan now, probably after his uncle's death. He felt a tiny spark of pride.
He greeted them all, his family and his clan, and then slid down again, leaning against the glacier, divided by the ice from the beautiful elf woman that had born his children. He imagined her calling his name.
After two years alone, he sometimes had trouble remembering it.
He searched in the snow on the plateau between the rocks on the edge of the plateau where the glacier ended and finally found the tent of human hide, the small iron cauldron, the logs of wood, the clay tinder container, flint and steel.
When the fire burned, he sat down on the folded tent, took a pipe out of his backpack and filled it with dried herbs from a leather pouch. He lighted it with a burning piece of bark and inhaled deeply.
Ruathac, he thought. My name is Ruathac.
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