The Caverns of Kronos

The Feast

     Up on Kronos, young Drusus Konnen was in the old observatory, looking up at the beautiful, shining blue and white hemisphere that was Tharia. He’d spent hours up here since his father had shown it to him, and no matter how long he spent staring at the newly risen fallen world he couldn’t get over the sense of wonder it gave him. So big! So open! So many people! His father had told him that there were places down there where you could walk for days and days without meeting another human being, and that the sky just went up and up for ever. For someone who’d spent his whole life in the crowded, self contained environment of Kronosia, it was simply impossible to imagine.

     By chance, Kronos happened to be passing over the vast continent of Amafryka at the time, and he could see the blank, white expanse of the Shadow covering a large area of the planet. It looked as though one of the Gods had spilled a colossal can of paint over it, except that that simple description couldn’t possibly describe the sense of dread and menace that radiated from it, sending a chill down the boy’s back. He stared at it in nervous fascination, not satisfied by his father’s explanation of it. Knowing somehow, on some primitive, basic level, that it was monstrous and evil and that, even here on Kronos, ten thousand miles above it, he was far, far too close.

     Then he leaned forward as his eye was caught by something he hadn’t noticed before. Spreading out from the centre of the Shadow were a series of concentric rings in which the dead bone white was slightly brighter, more intense, than it was elsewhere. The rings were spreading very slowly, just barely fast enough for their movement to be perceptible, reminding the young boy of the ripples spreading out in the water of his bath when he dropped a cube of scented bath salts into it. His heart skipped madly and his hands became clammy with sweat as he realised that something momentous must have happened down there. Something truly colossal. The dread and fear mounted up in him, making him shiver and breathe in shallow gasps, and he ran out of the room, screaming his father’s name as he tore down the dangerously slippery spiral staircase, no thought in his head except to get back to the comforting security of the moon city.

     By the time Lord Basil and a consignment of guards returned to the observatory, a pale and trembling Drusus dragged reluctantly along behind them, the rings had vanished and the boy received a severe dressing down from his father for wasting his valuable time. And yet, as the young lad looked across at the Shadow again, he could almost imagine that it was slightly larger that it had been before...

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     A column of trogs were making their way through the shoulder high grass of the Endless Plains, just a few miles from the edge of the Shadow, when Algol was devoured by the Shadowbeast. They were one of several trog patrols out of the city of Drak-Host, spying out the positions and movements of the enemy in preparation for the massive trog re-emergence following their disastrous defeat on the plains of Beladrim. The trogs do not take defeat well, and it was a burning shame felt by every one of them that the only part they'd played in the Fourth Shadowwar so far had been a disorganised rout as they'd been driven back to their underground tunnel cities in ignominious defeat. Next time, though, it would be different. Next time it would be the Shads who were routed, and the trogs would gain such a glorious victory that their names would be celebrated in song until the end of time.

     Fandalos Thundergirth, Dallakast of the troop, was the largest of the trogs present, being nearly five feet tall, and he walked with a waddling gait as he swept the grass aside with his powerful arms so that it almost appeared as though he were swimming through it as he opened a wide swath for the other men of his troop to follow. He had a massively powerful body, exceptionally so even by the standards of his race, so that he gave the impression of being broader than he was tall. His neck was a barely perceptible narrowing of the gentle slope of his shoulders that made it difficult to tell where his head stopped and his body began. His great barrel chest was a solid mass of hard muscle, an evolutionary adaptation of his race to thousands of years spent hammering through solid rock, and his arms were so thick around the biceps that they wouldn't hang straight but angled permanently out from his sides as if he were carrying a pair of heavy suitcases.

     He was wearing so much armour that most humans wouldn't have been able to stand up in it, let alone push his way through tall grass for ten hours under the hot suns. His service bars, worn proudly on the breast of his massive breastplate, denoted two hundred years of active campaigning and his multicoloured trophy cords, each commemorating a victory in battle against the evil denizens of the World Below, hung so thick from his helmet that they almost hid his shoulders from view.

     His eyes burned eagerly for battle and he gripped his massive two handed scimitar, ready to use it at any moment if a group of goblins or buglins suddenly sprang out of the long grass, as had happened to other trog patrols over the past weeks and months. It had been nearly a week now since they'd last seen a Shadowsoldier, but the trogs maintained their vigilance. One absent minded moment was all it would take. There could be a thousand of the little buggers watching them right this moment, creeping up carefully so as not to disturb the grass in which they were hiding like mice, grinning toothily in anticipation of more stolen trophy cords to hang from their belts.

     Most of the Shads had long since moved on, though. Most of the fighting was going on in the human lands now. The farmed, built up areas that the trogs made a point of avoiding. Well, if that's where the war is now, then that's where we've got to go, he thought with grim determination. They had another six days before their patrol sweep was complete, but he'd already decided what his report would say and had spent the best part of the day composing it in his head, laying heavy emphasis on the duty they owed to posterity and the honour of their ancestors. The unspoken agreement between humans and trogs that had been in existence since the conclusion of the Domain Wars, that they would avoid each others' territories, the humans keeping to the surface lowlands and the trogs keeping to the mountains and the World Below, had to be set aside, at least for the duration of the Fourth Shadowwar. The trogs had to go to where the fighting was, and if that was in the human kingdoms, he couldn't believe that the humans wouldn't welcome their arrival and assistance.

     He looked out to his left, to where the edge of the Shadow was just visible above the green ocean of waving grass. The menace and dread it radiated was horribly powerful, despite his bluff, trog courage, and he felt himself shivering a little as he stared at it, but a deep, powerful anger began to rise within himself in response, along with self disgust that anything should be able to scare a trog.

     “Ya don't frighten me, ya great black bugger!” he muttered under his breath, addressing the line of looming, ominous darkness on the horizon. “We’re trogs, an’ trogs’re afraid o’ nothing!”

     He spat defiantly at the Shadow, and then laughed as they continued on their way towards the independent city of Basso, a city that had been burned, looted and abandoned by the enemy on their way to Ilandia. Part of their mission was to make sure the city was still empty, that none of the Shadowsoldiers had returned to occupy it, something that Fandalos considered unlikely as the city had almost no strategic importance that he could see.

     Looking straight ahead again, he didn’t see the Shadow as it boiled and reared up like a tidal wave about to hit the shore, as if in reply to his insult. One of the other trogs saw it, though, and cried out a warning, hefting his scimitar as if mere ironwood could fight it off. The other trogs turned and stared, first at him, then following his horrified gaze to the east where the Shadow was growing visibly as it sped towards them at well over a thousand miles an hour. “What in the name o’...” began Fandalos, but it was all he had time for before he was engulfed.

     For a moment they were blind, unable to see anything in the darkness. Even their infravision was useless at first, but as their eyes gradually adapted to the gloom they became aware of a different kind of darkness. A darkness of the soul. It was thanks mainly to their incredible trog resilience, their mental strength, that they survived as long as they did, long enough to know what had happened, but they were now twenty miles inside the suddenly expanded Shadow, so far in that they never had a chance. This far in, it was simply too strong, even for them, and after only a few minutes they felt their sanity dissolving in an ocean of terror, hopelessness and total, total despair…

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     Seven hundred miles away, in one of the quadrangles of what had once been the Imperial Palace of Arnor, the Shadowbeast settled itself comfortably in its pool of slime and gave a loud, self satisfied belch.