Bylaws of Babel

by Karmic Acumen

Nimrod of Babel has certain objections to how the galaxy is run, so he becomes the Eleventh Primarch. Very briefly. (Warhammer Fantasy / 40K Fusion)

7. Iddina Did Much More with Less

A/N: thanks to one backgroundnoise for the speech about chaos. And to TWT for a certain character's clever and succinct way with words, even if I think Fat Thor is an abomination that should never have been conceived.

Above all, credit to one Devon Eriksen, from whom I adapted most of the speech.

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Chapter 5: Iddina Did Much More with Less

"-. Valnir .-"

The journey back to Norsca was divine damnation. The Graelings' vitkir said it was the gods being displeased with their cowardice, but nobody believed them. Even Valbrand didn't. Instead, the Graeling king killed one of the shamans every day that the fleet continued to suffer the sea's fury. That didn't help either.

When the shadow of Stromfels himself appeared beneath the waters, Valnir knew they were done for well before the gushing waves threw him overboard.

Only a miracle saved them. A literal miracle borne forth on holy hymn. Valnir didn't know the words, but he heard them. There underwater he heard them, and because of that he stopped struggling to swim, thinking he had already drowned. He thought it was the voice of the White Dove come to show pity on him from the other side. He only rose back to the surface because the water lifted him. The sea itself reversed course and spared him. Whatever that song was, whoever sang it, it made Stromfels himself… change his mind.

Enough of their ships managed to survive that the Crow Tribe wasn't dependent on the Graelings for transport home. But they were too damaged and their men too injured and lessened to prevent encirclement, especially when having to make haste on account of the Bjornlings breathing down their back. When King Valbrand conveyed to Valnir an invitation to set anchor with them and participate in the homecoming revelry, everyone knew what was really going on.

They mean to kill us and keep our ships and plunder, Valnir thought with a hand over his chest where the White Dove's feather rested under his tunic, keeping away the hollowness inside. I could make them work for it. Winning was out of the question, the encirclement was ably done. Also, the Crow's Tribe had been few compared to the Graelings from the start, tribes up in the Chaos Wastes were closer to what passed for a Clan down in Norsca. We'll sink and drown, but they won't get any of our stuff either if we scuttle ourselves.

"They think they're clever," Gautaz muttered from where he stood nearby, using whatever spells he had to snoop afar. "They plan to make nice with us, host and feast us and follow guest right to the letter, up until we're before their precious Monolith. The land there technically doesn't belong to anyone but the gods, so mortal guest right won't rule anymore."

"They think to make us the first sacrifices," Olaf said grimly. "They can't expect to make the Hound happy with mere slaves, even fighting ones."

"Specially with how pissed he is right now," Valnir grunted. "And we're foreigners. Perfect enemy for a failed king to rally his waning support against. Valbrand really doesn't want to face challengers right now."

"The other Valbrand was pretty strong," Olaf admitted grudgingly. "Seeing him and his cronies all fall to the tribe's wimp must've spooked him, never mind the rest of that disaster."

"Got any spells to help us get away, vitki?"

"Some for men, none for ships. Mine are the lores of spirits and shadows, those among us with power over the elements died to the sea's fury."

Stromfels didn't look kindly on mortals who tried to contest his claim over the storm. "So we either all die now, or play along in the hopes of turning this around on land."

"Unless someone else has a better idea?" Olaf wondered.

"Ask them," Valnir decided. "Tell the other chiefs, they can vote on it."

The vote fell on the side of playing along until they were on land. Guest right would at least buy them time.

Since he was not an entirely dumb fuck, King Valbrand didn't make a spectacle of it, never mind treat them as guests of honor. This meant Valnir didn't get close enough to shank the cunt before they partook of meat and mead.

It was looking like they would have to go through the entire fakery, up until they reached Graelholm. The warriors marched through the gates, bellowing the songs of their valour all the way to the Great Hall, watched by the hunters, elders, and all the other non-warriors left in the tribe. Valnir and his own men didn't have to sing along on account of their songs being too different, so they were the only ones who noticed how wary and awkward everyone was.

He had cause to feel dismay as well, as the inner layout of the town unfolded the further in they walked. Graelholm was as hard to assail as it was to escape from, it was built on an island between the two biggest arms of the Grael river mouth, but that wasn't the end of it. The King's Hall was built on an elevated high rise too, surrounded by a thick wooden stockade with its own towers and gatehouse. It was practically a hill fort inside a bigger hill fort. The granary was in there too, meaning the king a very strong grip on the settlement by controlling the supply of food, especially during the winter.

As the warriors entered the great hall, their songs and chants trailed off in astonishment. When Valbrand finally followed, the last to enter the Hall as was tradition, he wasn't met by any marauders roaring his name, but stunned silence.

Stunned silence, and a boy seated upon his throne.

"Valbrand False Faith," the boy brazenly spoke. "You stand accused of being a right cunt."

Even the king stopped to stare at the sheer audacity he was facing. But only for that one moment, before his ragged composure after everything that led to this point finally shattered.

With a roar of outrage belonging to one whose nerves finally snapped, Valbrand stomped over to the throne, grabbed the boy by the throat and stumbled in place when he tried to lift him. The boy didn't budge an inch. Didn't seem to notice Valbrand try to strangle him either.

But the boy did reach up, languidly, to pinch the tip of Valbrand's thumb.

The King's roars of rage turned to pain, before the fury redoubled and he wrenched free, grabbed his weapon and swung down with his axe in a murderous strike.

Impossibly, the boy caught it between the same thumb and finger. Then he squeezed. Even as the axe's profane runes came alight, he squeezed tighter. When Valbrand tried to wrench the axe free, it barely even trembled as the boy kept squeezing the edge-

The runic axe, forged by the chaos dwarfs of the western Dark Lands, shattered to pieces under the force of a little boy's tiny pinch.

Suddenly loose, King Valbrand toppled arse over heels all the way to the bottom of the throne's steps.

The boy caught one of the bigger shards and flicked it with those same two digits before Valbrand was half-way back to his feet.

It went through his eye and out his skull.

The corpse collapsed.

The holes steamed, as did the shard where it stuck in the Great Hall's floor.

Everyone stared.

The boy on the throne passed a sweeping look over them all. "My name is Nimrod, lately of the Mammoth Riders." An axe shard that had embedded in the ceiling fell at that right moment. He caught it and began to spin it over his knuckles. "Is anyone going to contest my claim?"

It was phrased as if to refer just to his claim about the king being a cunt, but it was about more than that. By the way every Graeling man there glanced at the Chieftain of the Mammoth Riders, everyone knew that too.

Nobody spoke. Everyone waited for the Mammoth Rider chief to say something.

He didn't.

Like everyone else, he stared at the boy-hero on the throne haloed by the skylight, and the fleeting image that overlaid reality whenever Valnir waited to blink a tad bit too long. A mirage of an ivory tower stretching infinitely down into shadow and up into the sky.

That image – a tower unending, could it be-?

Finally, one voice called Nimrod's name. Then another. Then more. A spear struck the ground, then another, then feet, shields slammed against the ground, they mixed with the bellows and the roars. Valnir understood well why, with how it looked. After thirteen harsh years of Silence, harder and harder raids, after the most ruinous venture Norscans had seen in generations that almost saw one of the seven foremost tribes wiped out at sea, the Gods had seen fit to send them a hero. Like right out of a saga, endowed with godlike might from an early age, they had a hero and his name was Nimrod, Nimrod, Nimrod – "Nimrod, Nimrod, Nimrod, Nim-!"

"-rod, Nimrod, Nimrod, NIMROD SAYS TO SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

At the boy's angry outburst, the warriors trailed off in confusion.

"Honourless rats, look at you cheering my name for murdering your king in broad daylight. That's all it takes to win your loyalty, are you all mad?"

A wave of disbelieving and muttered discontent went through everyone.

"What's that?" The boy snapped. "Mighty warriors mumbling like frightened little girls? If you've something to say, speak up!"

No one spoke up. They were still too shocked.

King Valbrand continued to bleed out on the ground.

"So much for Norscan pride."

With a tsk, the boy hopped off the throne and walked down from the platform, grabbed Valbrand's corpse by the hair and dragged the huge body as he walked between and past the bunch of them, all the way out the great hall's doors. Forget strength, he shouldn't have had the weight to drag that huge body along, but he did just that, and he showed no strain.

Everyone parted before him. No one impeded his path.

The boy only stopped in the central square. There, he dumped the bleeding corpse at his feet and waited for the lot of them to file out. They surrounded him, and behind them came all the non-warriors of the clan that had been so skittish before, but the boy showed no concern at the threat.

"The raids have failed!" The boy shouted for everyone in Graelholm to hear, there in the middle of the great square. "And now your king is dead at my hand, and it was as easy as this."

CRUNCH

Nimrod stomped Valbrand's head into gross paste.

"I suppose war is what comes next, right?" His foot left bloody prints behind him as he walked in a circle around the ruined body. "To war with the first snowfalls of winter, breaking the restful silence of villages all over Norsca with the bellows of your warhorns and battle-cries. You have to go to war with neighbouring tribes in order to seize the resources you need to survive, isn't that right? That's the Norscan way, say the vitkir, on behalf of their lying masters that are the only creatures in existence more wanton and worthless than yourselves."

Some shaman or other went to say or do something, only for sharp thorns to burst out of his skin all over his body. He, and two others who'd been about to do something about the boy's blasphemy, fell down in screaming heaps of blood.

There had been no move on the boy's part, and no incantation. Valnir's witchsight didn't show him weave any working either.

"There's another," Gautaz' voice sounded only in Valnir's ear. "A grey mist stalking among us like a ghost, I can barely make it out but the spell came from that."

More Graeling fakery, but that doesn't account for the boy's impossible strength-

"There we go, lost one king and you're already out to kill the new one. Of course you would, your only criteria for kingship is whether he'll let you eat, drink, rape and kill. If anyone dares to try something else up here, you torment and murder him so you can go back to eat, drink, rape and kill some more. And so you inevitably run out of everything, every year because none of you work for anything you have. You'd sooner steal from someone else because you have nothing of your own except the lust and hunger of animals. Look at you, even now you'd sooner let a child solve all your problems, rather than think that maybe, just maybe, you're overdue a change after thirteen long years."

The way people stirred this time in the crowd was different, and not because it wasn't just warriors anymore. With the king suddenly dead and the warriors thunderstruck by the boy's impossible might, everyone else was tossing glances and mutters now. In the wake of the returning raid, the rest of the town's dwellers had followed them into the inner ring fort, and they were scowling and muttering aplenty now. Not just at them, but the vitkir who'd lied to them for all this time. All the time before too, but now they didn't have the power to back it up anymore.

Thirteen long years was a lot of time to rethink your whole way of life.

Why the Grealings hadn't killed off the old guard by now, Valnir didn't understand. Killing the sorcerer that had previously held his tribe in thrall had been the first thing he did, right there in his dark fortress-

"But I can already see the bullheaded outrage, I hear your grinding teeth." The boy's voice was the very essence of mockery. "Come and fight me, then, for this one day I'll accept any challenge, no matter how bold or sad. Before that though-"

Suddenly, Nimrod slammed his foot down on the ground.

The ground erupted upwards in a long trench all the way back to the Great Hall's entrance, knocking everyone on the way down and aside amidst shouts and screams. Valnir himself had to catch his footing, he and his were nearest to the entrance, which was why he also missed the rock flying in the wake of the trench until he heard the squeak and thump.

There, in the shadow cast by the door, a skaven rat toppled over dead, the round rock stuck in its crushed skull.

Fuck, those things are here?!

"There's no real difference between that thing and you." The boy's voice sent more than one man's head to swinging, not just his brazen insult but the lack of concern about what that thing's presence meant. "Oh, you don't like hearing that either? Come and challenge me over that too. I'll even wait for you to prepare yourselves. One by one, in groups, all at once, it makes no difference to me. But it will make all the difference to you. On that note, I best make sure no one else has to pay the price when you inevitably cheat." With a sudden, mighty leap, the boy jumped from the center of the main square all the way to the roof of the gatehouse of the wall, Hound's teeth-!

A great circle of fire burst into existence then, just inside the wall of the ring fort. The flames were hot, thick and bright, and they trapped everyone inside.

"Khargash!" "Fuck!" "Crow's Breath!" "Treachery-!"

"I'll be waiting for a minimum of three but no more than six turns of the hourglass!" The boy shouted from the rooftop. "And if you don't show up, I'll come back. And I won't leave again until all that's left of the Graelings is the cautionary tale of a people who insisted on living like animals, so they were all put down like animals."

"You little shit!" "You little rat!" "You brat, come down here and say that!"

"Your jeers mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer!" With a last huff of contempt, the boy turned away and jumped down from gatehouse roof and out of sight.

The ensuing bravado was as worthless as their attempts to get out. One, two, five, ten men, they tried to get out, fast or slow, bold or sly, they all died screaming. Whatever fire that was, it was murderous and it was sticky. A normal flame you could just jump through. Even with no space to land between the blaze and the wall, there were places to hop and climb, clothes slow to catch flame, even ropes when a couple of clever lads got the idea to use the hangman's noose to swing off. None of it worked, the flames caught and didn't go out even when the poor saps rolled in mud and water.

The vitkir tried to dispel the fire, but it only slowed down the blaze for a moment before it resurged just as strong. Finally, a couple of those who had good enough floating cantrips managed to hover a few lads far enough over the flames to get out. They didn't come back.

Why do this? Valnir wondered. There was no way the Graelings weren't going to meet his challenge, why trap us like this?

And how did the spell work? So strong, and for so long?

The angry futility of their plight sent the Graelings into an uproar. Possessed, they called the boy. A changeling, a vampire spawn, a sorcerer gone and fallen afoul of his own spell of false immortality, he meant to sustain his unnatural youth with their own lives. Even a malformed elf they called him. A daemon, nay, a false prophet sent by the false gods of the weak south to lead them astray at the worst time!

Valnir took the opportunity to muscle his way closer to the ring of fire. Gazed on it with his second sight. The spell – waves and ripples of bright red converged and fed into themselves at points along the base of the fire. It made no sense, rare was the spell that lasted this long, never mind so strong or so massive in scope. The ring fort was so large it could fit the entire Crow's Tribe settlement inside, and all these people – it wasn't just the warriors here, lots more had followed them in, there had to be thousands in this one place, but the ring of fire was wide enough to encircle all of them.

By chance, he saw one of the ignition points wink out, only for another to take its place just a foot's distance.

"Spell anchors of some kind?" Valnir muttered discreetly into his hand, so that only those close by who mattered could hear him. "No?"

"Must be," his vitki was never comfortable admitting to ignorance, a holdover from when he was still apprentice to their very late and unlamented sorcerer tyrant. "He surely did something to prepare this ahead of time."

"We could try digging?" Olaf mumbled. "Under, or target the things somehow, maybe shift them out of formation?"

"Don't give them any ideas."

Alas, the Graelings caught onto it soon enough too. Not long after, their vitkir were combining their spells to dispel anchors one by one. They only stayed off for a moment before reigniting. The others had a bit better luck, men were using what they could to dig up dirt and try to smother the flame, at least enough to open a gap through. Eventually they did, though they got another surprise when the gate proved jammed and the stairs up to the walls collapsed under them, the boy had sabotaged those too. They had to use ropes and grapple hooks to scale over the walls one by one.

Since they couldn't make the Graelings' lives difficult by playing dumb anymore, Valnir and his men made their own passage over the fire and climbed out a different way.

When they finally got out, they found the lads who'd been floated out earlier, beaten up and tied up. They also learned why the kid had gone to such trouble to only trap them in there. What the boy had meant when he said no one else would pay the price.

In the time their whole fighting force had been trapped, the boy and whoever may or may not be helping him had staged a slave revolt. Successfully.

All the thralls they'd caught on the raid had broken out and stolen away with the same ships that had brought them over, along with four in five of the slaves the Graelings already had here. Of the ships that had still been seaworthy, the number had been reduced by a third. And because the ones stolen were among the few still seaworthy, those ships also happened to be loaded with the most plunder.

The Graelings won't survive this, Valnir thought in disbelief. They can't.

He was astonished that any thralls had stayed behind. Why didn't they run? Their children among the Graelings? They cared so much about them?

Or maybe the boy had needed to practice his speech beforehand, and some of the people here already believed in a better tomorrow. Even the slaves.

Most of the Crow Tribe's own ships had miraculously been left alone. It was beyond suspicious. Despite that, Valnir still wanted to gather his people and escape in the confusion. But…

Nimrod, lately of the Mammoth Riders, the boy had called himself. It was the name of the son of that poor sap that ruined their campaign. The other Valbrand had wasted no opportunity to mock and humiliate that man, and picking on his family was certainly part of that. If that was true, then what would the boy do if he found out Valnir had his father's keepsake?

What would he do if Valnir left without returning it?

Valnir had never agonized so much over a decision, but the thought of surrendering the feather filled him with utter dread. In his distraction, he ended up back at the fort. He ended up standing there, to the side, surrounded by his warriors, watching more and more people escape the fire trap through the few, tiny gaps. Eventually, someone made a knotted rope for easier climbing, allowing the women and children to also start climbing over the stockade. That the wooden thing hadn't caught fire was something Valnir might also call a small miracle, if he wasn't so sure the spell was that way by design.

The panicked frenzy proved to have been unnecessary in the end. Exactly two hours after it went up, the ring of fire winked out just as abruptly. Left behind were meandering black fumes, scorched ground, and the smell of brimstone.

The gates were now open, so the people inside practically stampeded out. Valnir and his men stayed out of the way for that whole mess too. Out last were the late Valbrand's bondsmen, who'd helped the rest escape where they could, and carried the late king's body back into the hall for the women to prepare for a sea burning.

The peons aren't the only ones that boy's words reached, it seems.

One of Valnir's warriors hadn't made it out with them before. He rejoined them now, with a kerchief bundled up in his hand, carefully and loosely folded around a small dusting of ash. Valnir accepted it. Mixed with the ash there was a… charm, he supposed? It was shaped like a strange tube on a stick, with a barrel thing mid-way through. The whole thing was barely as large as his pinky finger. Valnir spotted what looked like flame patterns on the side of the tube before the last dregs of magic dissipated and the thing broke down to charcoal powder.

"A talisman?" Gautaz muttered in disbelief, barely remembering to keep his voice down. "A throwaway magic item? And made of mere charcoal, this makes no sense, enchanted objects don't change material requirements just because the spell is poor, what kind of skill – what time did it – there must have been hundreds of these things fueling that witchflame, this is ridiculous! What in the Pit are we dealing with here?"

After all that happened on the raid, and now here, Valnir thought he might have some idea.

Since they could, technically, be said to still be under guest right, Valnir and his men joined the late king's bondsmen on their trip down and out of the town to the meeting place.

They were the first ones there, but many more followed, until near a thousand men had come out to meet the boy in armed battle. After them, despite the scare they'd just endured, came the non-warriors in even greater numbers. Whatever else Norscans were, they were many compared to the tribes up in the Wastes. Valnir thought he might have envied them, if he could feel strongly enough to being with.

They found the boy being attended by a vitki Valnir was completely unfamiliar with, and playing with a baby griffon than no one had seen until that moment. He was also lounging on a throne made of flour sacks, of all things.

To Valnir's second sight, the boy was an aurora of kaleidoscopic light, changing from one color to another every other second, more or less. There wasn't any regularity, like it was just an idle tick. Or busywork. There were eight colors, but many more mixed hues, and whatever rhyme or reason there was to his channeling, neither Valnir nor Gautaz could divine it. His vitki definitely understood more than Valnir did though, or he wouldn't have become so thunderstruck.

"It's impossible," Gautaz muttered, almost blind to the waking world as he stared at- "It's impossible, it's happening right in front of me but I can't believe it. No man can channel more than one color and live, that's why we need the spirits to aid us – but he's cycling through all of them like it's nothing at all! And it's not dhar – but now it is, and isn't – no man can do this, no man, no man-"

"But a god might?"

Valnir's comment snapped Gautaz out of his fit. "… Maybe a herald?"

For being the one who acknowledge it first, back on Sartosa, the vitki seemed slow in actually believing the boy's true nature. Or his mind refused to make that connection? Maybe Valnir was the one who was wrong? "What about a daemon?"

"That boy is no creature of chaos, the Warp's own spasms calm where he is near, even the worst of its spume only fuels the shine of those sacred patterns – his very spirit is made of perfect shapes and radiant symbols backlighting an eight-fold constellation."

Even that constellation didn't seem to stay the same. "You can see it clear now?"

"Whatever he's doing, he does not care about keeping his power secret anymore."

Lot of other people seemed to agree too. Bunch of the surviving vitkir of the Graelings were huddled off to plot, over on the far side. Valnir should probably be worried about that, but the boy wasn't so he wasn't either. It sounded mad, it was mad, but there it was.

The boy didn't acknowledge them until three hours had passed exactly. He spent that time playing with his small griffon. Only when the time was up did he send the griffon over to be carried off by his minion.

"What – it can't be, Hrami?! Hrami, is that you?" The Mammoth Rider chief bellowed when he finally got to the front, and not entirely by his own volition at that. "You traitor! Is this what you've been reduced to, the great vitki now a thrall to a thrall's son? Weakling son of a weakling runt! And not just that, but so pathetic a sprog that he spent his whole life needing a thrall to protect him from other children?"

"They're dead," the boy replied instead, though he didn't even look at the man. "I killed them like my father killed their fathers. Fed them to that manticore you kept kissing Valbrand's arse about too, every time he warned anyone away from killing it before his son was ready to do it, never mind the problems it caused everyone."

"I'll-"

"Do nothing."

"What's that?!" Knut jeered as any follower of Kharnath did before a fight, but Valnir heard the undercurrent of bravado and desperation. The man feared to fight, but he couldn't run either, and he knew better now than to expect the Blood God to empower the Norscans on sheer nerve anymore. "You boast about fighting armies but you're too scared to accept my challenge?"

"Outlaws aren't entitled to challenging anyone. The Mammoth Rider clan is forfeit. You are nothing, leader of no one, and for all that you have done as chief, you are proscribed. You are unfit for anything save to serve as a lesson. But if you insist, I'm more than willing to see to that right now."

"We'll see about that!"

"No," the unarmed boy said calmly as the man charged him with axe raised high, backed by a dozen of his best. "You won't."

Thirteen strikes found home, and none of them drew blood.

In return, Knut's six bondsmen were promptly slaughtered with their own weapons, and their screams barely had time to sound as Knut's own began, and didn't stop.

"Knut of the Mammoth Riders, you stand accused." In a scene more horrifying than any blood raven Valnir had ever seen, a boy that looked no older than twelve winters broke all four limbs of his own clan chief, then pulled out a knife, red-hot, and got to work. "Of theft, of pillaging, of torture, of murder, of rape, and of aiding and abetting all of these things. Upon me. And my father. And my mother. For all the thirteen years since I was born into this world."

First the man's scalp, then his ears, then his nose, then the boy gouged out Knut's eyes with his bare fingers, then the hot knife came back to chop off the man's feet and hands one finger at a time, and then the stumps too. The sounds – the screams – they sounded like slaughtering a live pig, but louder. It smelled like it too, like pork cooked over a spit. In hell.

The boy wasn't slow, but he didn't rush either. And when the ruin of a once proud marauder chieftain was left sobbing and unable to even beg in agony at the boy's feet because he had no tongue, the boy's spirit shifted to a shimmering green, and a wave of life went into the man. Just enough so he wouldn't die.

Just enough that he wouldn't be granted the mercy of unconsciousness.

"Put him on the side of the road, right there next to the inner gate," Nimrod ordered his vitki. "I want everyone to see him."

Spirits save us from the hero scorned.

The boy's vitki looked just as disturbed as the rest of them, but he obeyed. Dragged the moaning, weeping mess of a former human back the way they'd all come. No one impeded his path, if only to see the dreadful sight gone from their eyes and hearing as fast as possible.

Nimrod faced the stricken crowd then. "What will it be, then? Will you face me like men, or like animals?"

Even the Graeling's bravest fighters didn't dare step forward after what they'd just witnessed.

"I am not cruel by nature. If you challenge me fairly, I'll fight you fairly."

Valnir, damn him, completely believed him.

"And if we fight unfairly?" Asked one of the jarls, a greybeard that had been chief bondsman to Valbrand's predecessor once upon a time, and the oldest warrior in the Graeling tribe before he lost half his right arm to Stromfels' fury. "How will we even know?"

"If you come at me unfairly, I'll fight just as unfairly. If you come at me with poison, I'll feed you to the worms. If you come at me in the dark, no one will find your bodies. Or you can leave."

There was ripple of abject disbelief.

"It can be today, tomorrow, or any other time. I won't even stop you. If you decide a different tribe suits your need better, I won't even declare you traitors or outlaws for it. I suppose you could decide to raise other like-minded malcontents into an army, but if you come to challenge me at the head of a warhost later, all the better. That way one or the other can get rid of their enemies all at once, and no else need suffer. None of that underhanded skullduggery nonsense. I'd still win, but that sort of game is never anything else than tiresome disgrace."

No one believed him, but they wanted to. Oh, how they wanted to, and it wasn't just about proof of might anymore. The boy hadn't called them out on grounds of weakness, but of honor.

The one-handed greybeard stepped forward then, and did his best.

He lost of course.

But Nimrod was gentle, nothing like what he'd done to his chieftain before. He met the man with the same kind of weapon in hand, and matched him blow for blow until the greybeard tired himself out, instead of causing hurt. It was a long, drawn-out thing, but it didn't feel mocking or cruel. The fight only ended when the greybeard couldn't hold his sword anymore. The boy's last block rattled his whole arm so hard that his grip failed completely, and the jolt and the weariness sent him to his knees.

"What's your name, old man?"

"Angan." The greybeard was a mess of sweat and huffing breath, but he managed to gasp. "Of the Groven."

Until they choose a non-crippled replacement mayb-

"Angan. Delight," the boy's manner… it turned kind, and it didn't look fake or mad as Valnir had dreaded. "Do you feel you've lived up to that name?"

"No, Noble One."

"Why?"

"The gods are cruel. Their whims decide our fates. We huddle to one, hoping that they will protect us from the others, but they never do. They laugh as we struggle, and thirst for our suffering. So it was for me, and my three sons and four daughters. I've no legacy to leave behind now, never mind a happy one."

"You just did."

If even Valnir felt moved at hearing that, it was impossible for the old man to not be.

"Go rest there, and stay close. It's not safe for you to go back." The boy turned his hard stare to the onlookers. "Not yet."

Valbrand's bondsmen went next. Maybe because of pride. Maybe they'd really liked the royal cunt. Or maybe the boy's words had hit them where it hurt and they didn't want to seem like cowards or oathbreakers. Perhaps they even thought Khorne would welcome them if they made a good show. Maybe some still deluded themselves into thinking they'd enjoy his afterlife.

Or maybe their hearts were moved by the boy's actions too, if not his words. Just a little. Whatever their reasons, they stepped forward to issue challenge one by one.

They lost too. A lot faster, Nimrod didn't stay on pure defense this time.

"Chaos, as you know it today, hasn't been around all that long in the grand scheme of things, barely a few thousand years."

The boy spoke almost idly, in between utterly crushing his challengers one after another.

"The Ruinous Powers were born, one only needs to look to the fact they themselves compare each other by age to see the evidence of that, Slaanesh being the youngest of them all."

He also acknowledged their honor and bravery, and didn't leave any of them with crippling harm.

"This tells us many things, and above them all this: the Warp doesn't need to be a nightmarish hellscape filled with countless daemons. We know this because we know there was a time when it wasn't. Your own poems and songs recall that age. Something made the Warp this way, which means that something can make it stop being this way."

A pair of twins attacked together next. Nimrod didn't cripple the both of them for life, only for the next year. Their argument that they counted as the same body was not received well in the aftermath, even as the boy continued to speak glorious blasphemy.

"Now I want you to imagine the Immaterium as more than just a chaotic hellscape, I want you to imagine it as the collective subconscious, the Sea of Souls for every race in this world and beyond."

One, two, three, fifteen, thirty, the boy beat every fighter one by one. Some hoped he'd eventually tire out and they'd get lucky, but that became less and less true with every battle fought, and every challenger spared. Once upon a time, Norscan marauders and their aspirants would bray and foam at the mouth, offended at the insult that they weren't worth an honorable death. There were still some like that, the boy even gave them their wish in the case of the maddest of the bunch, but nowhere close to the numbers back on Sartosa.

"In such an environment the Chaos Gods shouldn't exist, cannot exist, they are an aberration, a disease, a cancer. Bloodlust, Decay, Manipulation, Excess, imagine if a plague gained self-awareness and you might begin to have some idea of what those things truly are."

"Crow's spit," Valnir breathed, things he didn't dare believe now impossible to deny even by the most hopeless of all men. "It is him."

Finally, one of the jarls couldn't take it anymore and he snapped. He charged at the lead of a dozen warriors, howling madly and flail swinging wide, his eyes glowing with the red light of someone who'd just given himself fully to Kharnath.

The flail shattered two arms of his own men and sliced one's throat open before the spiked ball was contemptibly backhanded into the ground. Nimrod grabbed the chain, yanked hard enough to make the jarl topple forward, and skewered the man's chest with his bare hand as he fell. The man's heart was still beating when he ripped it out.

The bondsmen froze where they stumbled.

The jarl fell dead.

The boy tossed the bloody heart in the direction of his minions, where the small griffon jumped out of the man's arms to pick and nibble it with relish.

Finally, the tide broke. The late jarl's warriors dropped their weapons, stepped back and knelt down, eyes pointed at the ground.

For a breath, the boy's glare made it look like he would execute them as they deserved.

Instead, the boy tuned into the Green magic, and healed the shattered arms and mangled throat of the three who'd fallen at their leader's hands. After that, he just stood there, calm and patient, until the men who surrendered helped their fellows up and retreated, looking over their shoulders repeatedly in disbelief. And something more besides.

"Tzeentch isn't hope," the small god said when no one new stepped up. "He can't be hope, or I wouldn't be here. Hope existed before him and it will exist after, slaying him won't destroy hope any more than lancing a tumor would destroy the organ it's attached itself to, and the same goes for Nurgle, Slaanesh, don't even get me started on Khorne's-"

The Blood God roared through Valnir's mouth, a braying, gurgling scream of bloody savagery that tore its way into the world through his throat, and all others. Suddenly he didn't know his own name, or the name of his siblings, or the sound of the voices of his kin and his battle brothers. The rage of the Blood God came from all directions at once, it was outside and inside and nowhere and everywhere. Valnir didn't think to lurch out of line, didn't order his legs to run, he didn't tell his mouth to scream the Hound's chant. But he did all of that anyway, charged forward, his gigantic flail digging a deep groove behind him as the spiked head caught in the earth, making him stumble as the White Dove's feather pulsed against his chest, snowmelt on his skin and just as worthless, only the quarry mattered, only the killing, only the Hound's hunger for pain and carnage and "Blood for the Blood god, skulls for the sk-!"

~dhRti~

The mind-shearing spell was utterly undone by that one word of power and Valnir stumbled mid-charge, falling to his knees and then his face as those charging from behind trampled him in their broken rush.

What – that – magic?!

The shamans – Graeling vitkir, it must be – they – they got into his head, even the sorcerer back home hadn't managed – his head – it pounded with agonized fullness, like his very self had been ripped out and then violently shoved back in place… his chest – the yawning pit was frothing with the angry futility of the hopelessly enslaved, was this what thralls felt like all the time-?

"Dhaos Zeen Nurgh Slaa Khar Leth!"

Valnir's blood lurched in his veins, like it wanted to rip its way out. Barely pushing the other writhing bodies off of him, he squinted around and saw the place where the Graeling vitkir had collected, far on the other side of the fallow field. He couldn't see them, just a tall, solid wall of stone grown straight out the earth around where they'd last been – where they still were.

"Dhaos Zeen Nurgh Slaa Khar Neth!"

From inside the bulwark came loud chanting in guttural Dark Speech, and all around the stone were the fallen bodies of hundreds of Graeling men, women and children, their blood seeing up and over the wall to fuel the conjuration being worked inside, even more were dying every moment-

"Dhaos Zeen Leth Nurgh Neth Slaa Khar Ksy!"

Dozens of voices, their spell – their own tribe – they had no thralls, not enough to – the Noble One had taken their thralls so the only thing they could sacrifice to the Ruinous Power was their own people, if he and his had been any closer-

"Dhaos Tzeeneth Nurgleth Slaaneth Kharneth Ksy Rhan'k'adanra!"

With the sound of ten thousand nails scraping overcast iron, the incantation tore a rift into the Realm of Chaos right where Nimrod stood.

The world itself seemed to twist gruesomely, the colors of witchery were swallowed by the purple, green and red, the colors of the world itself started to bleed, daemons of all sorts squirmed their way into the world everywhere he saw – chaos spawn, horrors of blue and pink, bearers of plague, hounds and bloodletters screaming for war, the blood – Valnir's – it boiled and – his ears, they roared with the Crow's chiding and the Eagle's shriek and the Hound's fury and the Shornal's lust for pain beyond pain-

"Final – battle!" the last word in the incantation rendered itself in common speech on Valnir's tongue, almost without his will. "Twilight of the Gods – but not the Four – the others – that means – they're true – and doomed – no more? What – agh!"

"Fate – is broken!" Gautaz frenzied wildly, blindly, madly from nearby. "Styrbjorn, Valnir, Haargroth, Haargroth, Haargroth become! The skeins must weave anew! Abhor the Final Renovation, Frashokereti cannot pass, the Saoshyant must die! The End must be assured at any cost, even to the Great Four themselves, the Gods command-!"

~yathArtha~

With a resounding word that rattled Valnir's soul, the doors of the Infinite Tower slammed hard in the face of the four greater daemons on the other side before they had chance to stick their fingers through, and the rift was unmade in an instant, unmaking the throng of fiends as quickly as they'd come.

The upset was so sudden that Valnir could do nothing but lie there, staring vacantly as the sky became blue again, and the flour sacks that the boy god had been lounging upon flew into view above the earthen bulwark of the traitorous shamans to – why were they-?

The sacks burst apart, spewing a thick white cloud that filled the inside of the wall, and upwards from it like a plume of crushed limestone just as a bolt of flame struck it dead center.

Valnir's consciousness was annihilated in a deafening wave of crushing obliteration.

"-. .-"

Awareness returned slowly, pained and staggered, with wool in his skull and a dull whine in his ears that refused to fade. The air was so thick with dust that his eyes stung and he choked when he tried to breathe. His hearing returned even slower, and only told him that everyone else was in the same predicament as him. If not for his witchsight, he wouldn't have even known which way to turn – to crawl.

Mercifully, a much gentler dust devil swept over them all. Round and round it went, gathering up the worst of the scum and ash in the air, and taking it away so they could see, hear and breathe again.

Painstakingly, Valnir climbed to his knees and looked around in a daze. All but the most distant of people were on the ground, and even those were shaking or crying, the back ranks made mainly of women, children, addled simpletons only kept by those with not enough thralls to their name. The dead… were shockingly few, save for the place where the earthen bulwark had been. There were no words coming from there anymore, no weaves being channeled, no vitkir left to work their treacherous revenge, and no wall. Only red smears that had once been humans. The shamans, and their apprentices, and whatever broken thralls they'd still had to their name, all turned to paste and pieces.

The earth, the rock – the bulwark itself was gone, only chunks of stone and earth left as evidence that it ever existed, scattered all over the field in pieces no bigger than a fist.

Such a mighty blow, so far and wide, an army killer if that wall hadn't contained the worst of the blast…

Even that djinn down south didn't wreak such destruction, not so swiftly, not all at once, not with…

A tiny spark. Flour? What kind of spell even was that?

A dry thump drew his attention, and everyone else's to the center of the field of wounded and broken men, where the Noble One had just dumped his last sack of flour and sat down with a huff. Finally, after all that, for the first time since Valnir had set eyes on him, the little god looked tired.

Not a lot, but some…

"Hunger for blood, disease and rot, schemes upon schemes, and unending lust," the boy grunted as he took a moment or three to compose himself, but he wasn't speaking to any of them. "We'll pass you like the piles of shit you are."

They Will Pass, They Will Pass, They Will Pass.

The chant seemed to come not just from Valnir's memory, but also from the pendant hung around his neck.

Because that was apparently enough respite, the boy god stood back up and…

Joined his lone vitki in using the green magic to heal them. Everyone. Even after the multitudes that the shamans had sacrificed to tear a gate into the realm of chaos, however they did it, thousands of Graelings still remained. Those directly harmed were merely in the hundreds, some dead, some not, but all were stricken, shellshocked, a broken people if Valnir had ever seen one. Especially in those spots where the creatures of plague had spewed their filth. Even the most skeptical and belligerent hadn't expected their spiritual leaders to betray them so utterly and completely. Watching them right now, Valnir saw no difference in their faces or their voices to the hundreds of daughters and wives of his enemies that he had taken as slaves, over the course of his life.

The sight had never moved him before… but nothing else had either. The yawning void in his chest had allowed no feeling besides despair, until the White Dove's grace. By all understanding of sense, Valnir himself should have been put down a long time ago. To be able to appreciate anything again, this… wasn't near as bad a trade as being turned into a sacrifice against his will, by people who didn't appreciate bonds even with those who'd bled on the same ground.

The more he looked around, though, the more he wondered how long he'd really been out of it. There were groans of pain, and sobs, and lost wits… but rare and scattered, in the grand scheme. Mere leftovers. Whatever chaos had unfolded after the attempt by the last shamans to inflict one last ruin, it seemed to have already run its full course. There was barely any hate left around him, or rage, or fear. Only the shellshock and grief of broken spirits of a people whose highest beliefs and values had completely betrayed them.

"What if I told you this isn't the Norscan way at all?"

What?

"I know your poems, and your songs." The boy spoke from where he sat on… some man's shield. His voice was carried by magic to all ears, but made no mystery that he was weary after… he slammed the door in the Gods' face. "Even the best of them only speak of your forebears as simple people, who went around dressed in skins with nothing but stone and wood to their names. They say it's good that you left their ways behind. They don't mention their bravery, or their honor, or their might. They don't speak of how your ancestors journeyed across the world, each of them facing and overcoming more hardship than this entire tribe faces in a whole generation."

Nimrod scoured everyone in his line of sight with a tired glare. He should have looked comically small surrounded by every able-bodied man in a hundred miles, and their women and children too. But nobody was in a state to judge anymore, and nobody laughed.

"The Four have twisted your traditions, and why wouldn't they? Your forebears denied them as the liars and parasites they are. When lesser men kissed the dirt at the feet of Be'lakor the Damned, the real men took their wives and children and animals, loaded them up in their log boats, and sailed those death traps clean across the Sea of Chaos to saner, worthier lands. Those are your ancestors. They are who you spring from, why there are humans in Norsca at all, or anywhere else. Always they walked further to stay that one step ahead of the madness, and so they colonized the entire surface of the world."

Even tired there was fire in the lad, and of more than one kind. The flames of brazen courage, and a much realer one that made him glow like a furnace to Valnir's second sight, even as muddled and aching as he was.

"They knew what was important, they made lasting meaning, they learned every possible skill they could, and made friends you still benefit from to this day, by being good and generous. And they were, to the last, stronger than all of you. Those farmers and shepherds your skalds dismiss as things well rid of, they slew the same beasts and daemons you contend with today without magic armors and weapons. Just wood and stone and pure, raw grit. Those are the people whose crafts and traditions you cast away, in favor of braying idols who take more than they give a hundred times over."

The tyrant-sorcerer back home – he'd spat some choice mockery around those lines too, before Valnir bashed his teeth down his throat. Mocked them for being slaves – bondsmen! The word, the bastard said bondsman was the word they used for thrall back in the day. Valnir thought he was lying, but if he wasn't, when had the meaning changed? What had changed it? Bondsmen – the word for the chief's greatest and most loyal battle brothers, why-?

The Hound, Valnir realized. If we swear by Kharnath – to Kharnath – wouldn't that make our greatest warriors into his slaves, one and all?

"The worst part is that deep down you all know this. You know that your lives aren't supposed to be like this. It's all there, in the same songs. The rhymes and chants of the skalds aren't actually supposed to be dark and sinister. They aren't supposed to be twisted lessons about how hopeless it is to defy the Ruinous Powers. They're only supposed to start that way. The details may be complex, but the pattern is simple: the clan, the tribe, Norsca itself is torn apart by famine and monsters and multi-sided debauched power struggles. Things are bad because they are kept bad by those who've sold you to the beasts of ruin. In the background, subtle hints of the true, treacherous and vile nature of the otherworldly threat of the Gods of Chaos. All of it ignored by the warring factions, who scoff and dismiss it at the behest of false vitkir, who've long since abandoned their true ancestors spirits to bind their souls to daemons."

With an ungraceful lurch, Nimrod got up from his temporary respite, beat what flour he could off his trousers, and rejoined his vitki in going around to heal everyone.

"Enter the hero: a great leader emerges to unite the degenerate factions into an unambiguously good force, to shove the laughter of thirsting gods back down their throats. Fight the unambiguously evil threat to all life and rebuild the unambiguously good and virtuous civilization. Full transition, in the end, back to the shining glory of your ancestors, played straight rather than subverted. Heroism triumphant, humanity triumphant, realm unified in peace and prosperity, bring out the skalds to compose a new hymn!"

Valnir thought he was beyond the reach of rousing speeches, but the White Dove's boon must have made him a sap. Around him, the reactions of many were far more pronounced. It wasn't just in the women or children, or even the hunters always left behind to keep the towns supplied while the real fighters earned all the glory. The hardest struck were the youngest warriors. And the oldest.

And him.

"Were the saga to be completed thus, completed as it wants to be completed, as it yearns to be completed, every dark, gritty, knavish moment would be fully justified. Every stanza and verse filled with thugs and villains and no virtue at all would be fully justified. Because they would merely serve to emphasize the rarity of heroes, and the need for them and their virtues. Because they would make the arrival of a true hero that much more satisfying when, late but not too late, he arrives."

The boy… he… wasn't talking about just himself, was he?

"Your tradition doesn't want to be a denial of your ancestors at all. It doesn't even want to be a denial of the other men in the world, never mind their ways. It wants to be a path out of darkness and into that same light. It wants to be a study in how virtue, however easy it is to tarnish its shine, beauty and good, is the one and only worthwhile way to live, even in this grim and dark, broken mess of a world. This is what the ancestors knew the true way to be. What the skalds know it to be. This is what you, all of you, know it needs to be. But you can't even fathom it. Can't embody it. You can't even imagine enough to make up stories about it anymore. Do you know why?"

Nimrod bound the last tourniquet a tad more viciously than normal, and glared at anyone and everyone in sight.

"Because every last one of you is a yob, and a fop!"

A wave of confused, stricken bewilderment rushed through the people, and dismay and heartbreak of all things, but nobody dared rebuff his words, even if just because they didn't wish to become the next smear on the ground.

"The yob's motivational core is envy, and his one underlying rule is 'thou shalt not be better than me.' The fop's single guiding principle is 'whatever makes me feel pleasure right now is good, and whatever makes me feel bad right now is evil.' Take these together, and you get you sorry lot – less men and more animals, a herd of beastmen without the horns, except afflicted with an even bigger disdain of common sense."

A child started crying. Nimrod glared in his direction, and then back at the rest of them. It was more terrifying than it had any right to be from such a small person, but even when those contemptuous eyes passed over him… Valnir didn't feel at all in danger.

"Heroes are the best of us. So of course you lot, whose underlying motivation is envy, would feel bad and inadequate every time one of them appears to stop your raid and toss you back into the sea. Yobs, fops and yobbish fops tend not to want to believe in heroes and heroism. This, too, is in your chants and verses. The more recent the song or poem, the less you have the hero saving people and defeating evil and rebuilding civilization. Only the Imperial or Bretonnian or what have you gets to do that, and only so the song can mock him. The Norscan is all about killing people, raping people, raping and killing people, killing and raping them dead, and finally becoming a daemon as if he wasn't already animal enough. Usually so he can kill the aforementioned, actual hero standing against him. The skalds and their 'heroes' go one step further, actually, they do their best to convince themselves – and you – that anything which appears good is secretly evil, and that anyone who makes you feel or look bad is obviously evil themselves, no matter that any arguments to that effect are always nonsense you completely made up."

The boy stopped next to two men who couldn't stand anymore because of a broken spine and two broken legs. Nearby, a third was slowly bleeding out from the side. Once again without word or gesture, green light enveloped them, mending their wounds and saving them to be worthless cunts another day.

"So when you see a true hero, you tend to call him a fool and a weakling. Granted, when you see a fool or a weakling you also call him a fool and a weakling, but that's just coincidence because you'll call everyone and everything who isn't you a fool and a weakling. Because you want to feel morally superior to them. The only way you can admit that someone possesses any virtue at all, is if you can feel superior to him in some other way. And so your skalds portray the true hero as naïve and hence doomed to failure. Because he doesn't pursue the most efficient path to raping and killing and stealing what you're too weak and foolish to make yourselves. Because he isn't so spineless as to dance to the laughter of thirsting gods, like you all do. And yes-"

Without warning, Nimrod spun on his heels and threw a spiked ball torn off of some flail.

It shot across the field of wounded and bounced off the shadow of the biggest man nearby able to stand upright. The shadow toppled over with a shocked, faint squeak, spraying blood everywhere.

Shit, another skaven! How many of them are there, we can't stay here like this, we're too exposed, we have to-!

"This is why you hate the men of Empire so much, and Brettonia, Tilea, Araby, Cathay or what-have-you – because if they are the weak and stupid, then you don't have to acknowledge that the one creature in the world you most resemble is precisely this rat."

Despite everything, Valnir thought there would be outbursts. There weren't.

"There's no real difference between this thing and you. In your world, like in the world of these rats, virtue must be a sham or a weakness, because then your own bad character is wisdom and enlightenment instead of just lack of moral virtue. If all the humans in the world other than you are frauds or suckers, then you're smart for seeing through the 'lie' of virtue. If, however, virtue is real and true heroes do sometimes succeed, and they do make the world a better and brighter place, then you lot are just foul, lazy, deluded fucks who don't want to work for anything you have, because you only ever want to plunder those who put the actual work in, never satisfied even when you're covered in it up to the neck."

The griffon pranced up from… wherever it had been and bounced over to rub its head against the boy's legs. The boy turned his attention to it, and Valnir felt something like pressure lift from him, physical and not physical. He hadn't noticed it before, but now that he thought back, it had steadily grown with every word the boy had spoken. He almost swayed where he stood at the sudden relief. A lot of men did, all around him.

With a weary sigh, the boy stroked the griffon's head and sent it on its way to nibble on the ratman.

"To be human rather than rats, you would need to have an awakening of virtue. First you would need to develop a sense of integrity, a desire to follow in the footsteps of your betters even when no one can or will punish you for not doing so. You would then have to develop a sense of humility, because to acknowledge that someone is a better person than you are, you first have to admit to yourself that there is such a thing. That people can be better, and that trying to be better is an actual worthy goal, not just the act of falling for a trick meant only to control you."

The boy made a full turn in place, glaring at crying children, cowed women, and the tall, mighty men unable to muster enough courage to challenge anything the boy was saying anymore. Perhaps it was still all because the proof of the boy's might was too great and they didn't want to become the next smear on the ground… but Valnir didn't think so.

He was from the Wastes. If he saw the sense in everything the small god was saying, there was no way Norscans, who had it so much better than them, wouldn't have enough sense for the same.

He's disgusted with us, Valnir thought grimly. He holds us in complete contempt… But then why-?

Abruptly, the boy turned on his heel, walked over to where the griffon was picking at the rat's corpse, and hurled the carcass so hard that it flew all the way across the field where there was nothing but bare ground in a hundred yards, and no other living thing for any of their curses of sicknesses to spread.

The boy went back to healing after that, completely uncaring of the confusion and bewilderment and feeling of 'is that it?' that built up and simmered and boiled everywhere in his wake.

Finally, confoundingly, Valnir got his turn. The healing spell felt… weighty, but not harsh, somehow, despite the godchild's claims of sheer disdain.

No, Valnir realized. Not disdain. Disappointment.

He understood everyone else's quiet tension and their shame a lot better then.

The boy didn't move on. Even though there were still others in pain, he stood there. Stood and watched Valnir as the vitki – Hrami – continued to see to the rest.

Feeling awkward and strangely exposed despite having come in full gear, Valnir stood up. He towered over the boy like this, but he really didn't feel it. His great flail was lost somewhere, but even knowing it was bigger than his tall stature, or the long legacy of murdered men and monsters it possessed, he doubted it would make a difference to his sudden dread. He sat back down so he wouldn't feel like a fake.

Was his… respite coming to an end?

The boy didn't say anything.

Valnir didn't know what he'd expected, but he knew what the godchild was waiting for.

Slowly, reluctantly, feeling like he was dooming himself to eternal damnation, Valnir unlaced the collar of his tunic and reached inside. His grip locked around the charm, as desperate to clutch onto that feather as he was desperate not to damage it. He didn't know how he got his arm to move again, how he moved the other one to lift the cord over his head. But when the lantern charm was off, and the feather removed from his skin to dangle freely in the air, Valnir experienced the utter certainty that he would not see the day's end. He would kill himself first. He couldn't go back to feeling like this all the time. Not now, not anymore, not again.

With a tight, hollow chest, and shaking arms, Valnir held out to the Noble One his possession.

The boy grabbed the chain.

Valnir didn't let go. He couldn't. His hands – they refused – they… He could bargain. He should bargain, he had to, if the boy was honest about what all he'd said – if a god could be kind…

He didn't know why, but that thought finally gave him the strength to let go.

It didn't change anything, he felt just as dead and as hopeless and-

Nimrod took the charm, put the lantern on a chain around his own neck, and gave the feather back.

Valnir froze, disbelieving.

"You did not presume to bargain with what is mine, so I will not bargain with what is hers."

Valnir wrenched the feather back. Clutched it at his chest with arms shaking, almost as hard as his lungs rattled in him, hunched over it with all the desperation of the accursed, the White Dove – her mercy – so mighty and so cruel, reduced him to – the shamans were ri-

"I know your plight, Valnir of the Crow Tribe," the boy said when – Valnir – he was coiled so tight he trembled, his eyes – they burned, there were tears flowing down and down- "Do you?"

I don't, he thought hollowly, but could only shake his head. The words wouldn't form. His mouth felt dry, and his throat stiff. I was cursed from birth, but I don't know how and I don't know why.

The boy put his hand on Valnir's forehead and – the fire – no, it wasn't red, it was gold – golden magic passed through him like a rickety stain scraper, and in its wake came the amber flame, melting the snow and coaxing fresh shoots out of soil. He didn't know why he was thinking about farming all of a sudden, but the yawning void in him seemed to gain a shape. An outline.

An outer limit.

The despair – he saw its boundary. It receded. All the things that brought joy to everyone but him – it was like his soul, or his mind suddenly, finally understood why. Agreed. He was – he couldn't breathe fast enough-

"The pineal gland – the knot at the core of your brain that regulates dreams and visions – and feelings – it tends to calcify if unused, and it doesn't register as an injury. With this your witchsight should be smoother now, at least, and you should have the sense."

"Fuck witchsight," Valnir finally managed to utter through a thick throat. "It's done me no good."

"The opposite is true, I'm afraid. You need more magic in your life, not less."

What? "You – know what's wrong with me?"

"I do now. You were born to Shyish, the Amethyst Wind, the Aethyric embodiment of the certainty of the passage of time. Endings, death, entropy. Some call it the embodiment of mortal dread, the trepidation felt when faced with the unknown and the fear that self-aware life feels towards death and its own ending-"

"I'm not afraid of death!" Valnir snapped. At a god. The mortification he – the joy – the happiness – he was going insane-

"Maybe so, but the Amethyst wind has been telling you precisely what Nurgle will do to you after death, every moment of your life."

That… made no sense. "I don't hold with the crow – or any of them!" It was why he'd been able to defy the tyrant-sorcerer at all, he had no prior oaths to exploit- "I didn't pledge to no gods, I've been very careful about that." It was blasphemy to admit such a thing, especially for a chief up in the Wastes but that was why he was out here looking-

"Your parents then," the boy's certainty was like an icicle through Valnir's spine. "Even they can't give souls that aren't theirs, but they can give their children's bodies before the soul is fully nestled. Nurgle has had you since your mother's womb. His mark is here," the boy laid his hand over Valnir's heart. "Like a worm, inside your lung, so that it's only whole when you breathe just so."

His chest lurched, drawing air without his say, and that breath made his despair surge back as if it had never waned. "Fuck," Valnir shuddered. "Then – the yawning pit-"

"You sense your inevitable death, and with it the torment destined for you for 'failing' to live up to the god who chose you."

The horrible revelation. The boy god, his sympathy – his pity – if it was weakness, why did it feel so heavy?

"Do you want me to remove it?"

"… What?"

"Nurgle's Mark," the boy said as if swapping mead horns. "Do you want me to remove it?"

"Yes!" He scrambled to clutch the boy's open hand, he hadn't thought he'd be able to pry his grip loose of the feather but- "Please!" What was he saying, it was madness, such a thing – to steal from one of the Four themselves, even if he can do it, the price-

"Sorry about this, then."

"Wha-"

But the boy had already used his distraction to drive a long pin through Valnir's ear, and for the second time in the same day the man lost consciousness.

He woke up all at once this time, to the sight of the boy tossing away a huge chunk of rotting green flesh, and the feeling of air on his heart and in his lung that didn't get there the proper way. He looked down at – no skin – no flesh, and half his ribs missing, shit-

"Sorry about this," the vitki – Hrami – said with chagrin on his face. "Had to choose between outpacing the rot or keeping you comfortable."

Watching an entire missing chunk of his chest regrow was a thoroughly disconcerting experience, but the only thing on Valnir's mind after he was released from paralysis was to check that he still had the feather. He did. It had been clenched tight in his fist the whole time. Valnir was horrified that he might have damaged it, but it was good as new. Of course it was, a god's boon wasn't so easy to harm.

The vitki – Hrami looked awkward but understanding.

The boy looked sympathetic too, even as he joined his shaman in healing him the rest of the way.

Finally, Valnir was whole again and the boy backed off.

Valnir caught his wrist. Clung to it as he pushed himself off the ground. A man held a god's hand near his heart – his soul – the pit of despair inside – it was still there, but buried by fresh ground. Like… like a grave…But not his.

Not anymore.

"Praise the Lord of Marad," Valnir kissed the boy's hand, face wet with shameful tears. "Praise the Lord in the Tower, He who has slain the Eye."

A rumbling uproar around him belatedly reminded Valnir that they weren't alone – damnations! He shouldn't have said that, the boy must have a reason for not declaring himself, what had he done-?

"Don't start gushing just yet," the New God freed his hand and poked Valnir in the forehead as if his divine nature hadn't just been proclaimed to the world against his wishes. "I'm not asking for worship, just so we're clear."

He couldn't believe what he'd just heard. "You – you're not?" He wasn't?

The bewilderment from everyone else was so heavy that it was nearly a physical feeling.

"If someone asks you for worship, that means he needs it more than you do. That's not a god, it's a tick."

The tense standoff was broken by startled laughter. More than one man. And more than one woman. They sounded shocked, outright hysterical. And, for better or worse, they set off and were set off in turn by a child, whose own laugh picked up in volume before it suddenly began to move further and further away. A woman was desperately trying to hush whoever it was, surely the mother, but it didn't work. Not fast enough. It just got other children to join in, or laugh at the sight running past.

Nimrod smiled at the sound, just for a fleeting moment, but didn't turn to look. "In any case, you still need to train, enough to gain some control to suppress that feedback at least. You don't have to be depressed, but you have to learn magic. I'll teach you, if you want."

This feeling – astonishment? Or gratefulness, so intense… Were all feelings like this, making him want to cry like a-

"Unless you'd rather not?"

"I –" I do – I need – I want- "I – have an obligation-"

"To your clan, yes. That's not a problem, now that your third eye works fully I can just visit to teach you in astral form. I'd honestly much rather you bring your people down here though, it's literal murder on the soul up there, but I know it's not easy to leave home, even a bad one."

Valnir stared. He couldn't understand what was happening. This boy, this creature – this god who held them in contempt had healed him, freed him from horror and despair of a lifetime, who'd saved his soul at no price paid, who'd saved them all from the fury of the angry sea god… somehow still didn't think that was enough kindness? "I – can't presume-"

"Come now, haven't you heard? There's a vacancy. A clan just went extinct, don't you know. Prime real estate too, rich forest, defensible bulwarks, fertile land just waiting for someone to finally appreciate it." The boy pat Valnir on the shoulder before finally turning to walk away. "Think about it."

Valnir didn't know how long he knelt there, eyes fixed on the ground, hand on his chest, barely keeping his breath under control as his feelings… made themselves felt for the first time ever. He didn't know what he looked like to Olaf. To Gautaz, and the rest – his men. Brought lower than ever, kneeling in the dirt with tear tracks down his face, what must they think of him?

"Back straight, chief," Olaf murmured, kneeling next to him to prop their shoulders together so Valnir… didn't go and outright collapse from the shakes that now wracked him. "You can collapse later, we'll put up a tent."

He'd been worried for nothing, he – he felt relief – he knew what relief felt like – so strong from so little – life – being alive – euphoria – how had he lived so long without all this?

By the time he finally came out the other side of the first fit of jitters in his life, the sun was casting its beams right in his face. He was facing the west, and it blinded his eyes… but the feeling of its warmth on his face felt new and miraculous now, just like the bed of verdant grass underneath him. The field hadn't been so nice before, it was grey and yellow and drab. The green magic – why couldn't he have been born with that instead?

The White Dove's feather pulsed warmly in his hand.

That's right, he did have some of that now, didn't he? And some bright magic too.

He brought the token to his lips, and didn't look at Gautaz when the vitki sat on his other side and gave him a strip of leather and a clasp. He fixed the feather to it and hung it around his neck, hidden under his clothes right on his skin. He'll never take it off after this.

At long last, Valnir felt strong enough to stand up again. Not strong enough to face his men after his breakdown, though, so he looked ahead to… everyone else. Stood there watching until the last wounded were seen to. Jarl Angan even had his limb regrown good as new, despite humblingly earnest protests not to waste such a miracle on a useless old man like him. And it was a waste, the boy either couldn't or wouldn't do the same for everyone else with a crippling condition. Same for Hrami. At least, not right now. In any other situation Valnir might have wondered what that meant. If it was evidence of the godchild's limits, his weakness, or if Nimrod the Noble put limits on his goodwill after all.

But Valnir didn't wonder. He didn't feel the need to. He didn't… feel like it was anything to worry about.

Finally, Nimrod stretched and readied to leave.

Only, he didn't make for the town.

He turned the opposite way instead, after giving the lot of them a single backwards glance.

"Those men among you with the will to change this world, follow me. The rest of you, don't fret. There will be plenty of coward's work too, from this point on."

Harsh, Valnir thought, unlike the nothing at all he would have felt every time before. Guess pity's also part of the package.

Those words. 'Follow me.' It was even more obvious double speak that the first time. Valnir knew that, but he didn't mind it.

He wasn't the first to follow, that was Hrami. Not the high priest of their new god as they'd expected, but a wizard.

He wasn't the second either, Jarl Angan got that honor. As well he should, he'd wagered his life against the possibility of excruciating torture, in order to make or break the Godchild's overtures before he had the chance to torment anyone else the way he'd done Knut, had he been that sort. Valnir could have done the same if he had to, on behalf of his own tribe and kin, but it wouldn't have been courage. You can't have courage when you're actively wishing for the release of death. Even the kind preceded by the worst torture. That he only felt that way because he was ignorant of what was really waiting on the other side wasn't an excuse, it was just him being uppish and foolish. A yob. And a fop.

He didn't go third. He'd gotten lost in his own head and missed his chance, a whole bunch of men set off by the time he remembered himself, damn. He'd thought he felt embarrassment before, but his cheeks really burned this time.

"The others voted," Olaf told him, because he'd apparently attributed Valnir's hesitance a much loftier motive. "We want to stay. Well, move everyone here, if it's true that we can."

"Alright," Valnir nodded and finally started walking. "Better not fall behind then."

The Noble One led them all the way to the Monolith of Katam. There, he made them dig pits and trenches. A lot of pits and trenches, from where they pulled out a whole bunch of sacks of some dark, brimstone-smelling powder, and several crates of lanterns made of stone that looked identical to the one Valnir had worn around his neck.

"My original plan," Nimrod explained when Angan asked, igniting a tiny pinch of the powder. It exploded with a loud crack. "I was going to let you all do your regular routine, then just as the shamans started sacrificing the thralls, I would have blown all of you up. The lanterns would have saved the souls of those who didn't want the Four to eat them, but that was all I was willing to do. Hrami convinced me to change my mind."

Everyone looked upon the wizard with new eyes after that, and were extremely careful when handling the huge sacks of the substance. If Nimrod had this – if he'd used some of this instead of flour on the shamans, and then whatever spell he used on top of that, to magnify it on that scale…

We… don't need to fear armies anymore, do we?

At least until others learned to do the same thing. Then what? More death? How strange, that he had a problem with it now. Even if just for the simple reason that he could.

It was near midnight when they were finished, their work lit by the lights of those same stone lanterns they had dug up, hung from tall poles in a grid all over the grounds. They definitely weren't normal lanterns, no more than the little charm one had been, but whatever intuition came with the purple magic told Valnir their power had nothing to do with the living. Just as Nimrod told them.

After they dug everything up, Nimrod directed them to distribute a couple of sacks into smaller pouches, and directed them where and how to plant it all around and over the Monolith of Katam that had apparently been central to Graeling rituals for hundreds of generations. Valnir thought it was to be a symbolic break from the past, or at least the recent past that Nimrod wanted them to set aside in favor of the old one. Older one.

It was that, but also more.

When the powder exploded and the monolith shattered, they discovered that the black structure had been raised around a much different, older standing stone. It was of unknown make, but Valnir recognized the feeling – the magic was in tatters, faint dregs left of what had been a flood long ago, but similar to what he'd felt in that Chaos Fortress where he'd slain the sorcerer. The bastard had been leeching off something too, but they never found it, and then they had to run from the swarm of demon locusts that the fucker had primed his death to fuel the summoning of.

This stone – it had been messed with too. Dented, chipped, the symbols on it damaged or altered by many different hands. There was a hole in it even, where a skull was stuffed. It shone with profane colors in the other world, and behind its glowing eyes there was a mad mind screaming-

~Cira Jara Hata!~

With those three words shouted in God tongue, the standing stone seemed to age in reverse. The damage, the alteration, the even older damage that had allowed those alterations in the first place, all of it… reverted. Not instantly, not even quickly, and it visibly put some sort of strain on their new little god. But whatever it was, he endured it all the way through. Even had the presence of mind to intercept the flying skull, when the refilled hole spat him out. He stuffed it in a bag, wrapped in a magic sheet to keep it quiet.

When everything was over, the stone looked… like a dry squash.

But when Valnir beheld it with his witchsight, it glowed so brightly that he thought he'd never be able to see again, with either eyes.

He thought that would be the end of it. They had a king, their king was a god, and their god-king had given them work to do, which they'd done. Rather easy work too, even if it wasn't technically fit for warriors. As tests of loyalty went, it had been far too light in Valnir's opinion, but it wasn't his place to judge.

As it turned out, he was correct. That hadn't been their test of loyalty, it had been the shared misery of drudgework for the purpose of bonding, and only incidentally.

The loyalty test was reserved for three people – Hrami, Angan, and Valnir himself. When the stone had been repaired, Nimrod used a spell to dig a deep hole in the ground, warded it in all manner of different ways, and called them inside to explain exactly what it was.

A Waystone. A rune-carved menhir crafted in ancient times by the elves, to channel and redirect the Winds of Magic through an entire network of such artefacts, and eventually out of the world through the Great Vortex on the Isle of the Dead in Ulthuan. That stone, and the others like it, collected and expelled all the excess chaos matter spilling into the world through the northern gates – just the one now, thanks to their newborn god. They were what ended the Great Catastrophe. They were the reason why the world wasn't swimming in daemons, and the mortal races didn't live as slaves and food for those monsters.

It was enough to make anyone rethink everything they thought they knew, and it didn't end there. There was more to it, Valnir was sure, if only because he didn't think their little god, even such a kind one as this, would just entrust such knowledge immediately without duress, to people he'd known for only half a day.

Something was coming, and it didn't take a genius to guess what, given all they knew of happenings near and far. The issue of supply shortage remained as well, and likely not just for the Graelings.

But Nimrod didn't go into it, so none of them asked either.

Days later, when he and his warriors were boarding their ships to go and ferry the first batch of their people while Nimrod did… whatever he meant to do with the leftovers of clan Mammoth Rider, Valnir felt a great distant working of magic erupt far to the west. He didn't know how far, he had the sense now but he didn't know how to interpret it that well yet. But it had to be something big, if he could see it with his witchsight from all the way over there.

It seemed to die down just as fast, but Valnir felt oddly certain that it was just the precursor to something. Or… a backwards echo of something about to happen? The purple magic had some strong feelings about whatever it was. A shame he couldn't understand what they were any better than that.

Valnir slapped his chestplate a few times to get his blood moving again, waved one last goodbye because you don't not do that when your god comes down to see you off, and grabbed the wheel. "Cast off!"

Whatever it was, the Noble One most surely had it well in hand.

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Narrative Developments

Eununcia (i.e. Sanskrit)

dhRti = self-command.

yathArtha= accordant with reality (yes, Sanskrit has a specific word just for this)

Cira Jara Hata = Time Wear Undone

Narrative Expenses

1200 CP – 300 (yath – Ar – tha) – 800 (Veil Degradation) = 100 CP

100 CP + 600 (additional word count) – 600 (Ci-ra Ja-ra Ha-ta) = 100 CP

Narrative Gains

Waystone (~400 CP equivalent asset)

Cursed Knowledge Repository (Antagonistic): Skull of Katam (~100 CP)

Rare Uncommon Unit: Jarl Angan (200 ~100 CP)

Elite Unit: Valnir the Reaper (~300 CP)

New status and title: King of the Graelings (~1400+ CP equivalent minimum)

New vassal sub-faction: Tribe of the Crow (new name pending) (~400 CP equivalent minimum)

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Next chapter is available on P treon (karmicacumen), Ko-fi (karmicacumen) and Subscribestar (karmic-acumen), along with advance chapters The Unified Theorem (Warcraft), and Everything, Everywhere, one Thing at a Time (Harry Potter Multicross).