The Isle of the Fell

VII - The Tragedy of Coriolus Gnaeus Part II

2296: The Fall of Aelum

Gnaeus and his remaining six hundred arrived at the Fellic city of Aelum. Tarnished, and the refugees they were, they saw an island of light ahead of them, and gladly stayed there. The Fellic city that had ordained Gnaeus remained somewhat wholesome, although slightly damaged by his bitter war. The civilization remained, but it was not true civilization, for it was made in the image of Tharizdun, although that image was far from perfect due to his small, decaying presence, yet still it was not civilization, as it was a complex of natural order. There were attempts at abolishing crime, which was dealt mostly by excommunication, and the absence of physical goods influencing the game of power, henceforth there was always a struggle for power based on influence and intelligence. Yet, the orcish designs of Tharizdun were not perfect, and both the orc(including ogre and goblinoid) and demonic designs were built for war, mostly only war.

Because of the death of Cathulk-Kas, Gnaeus became King(or Chieftain) of Aelum. At this time, the Fellic Duchies had not been developed, and so he was not given the title of Duke. For a few months, there was a time of relative peace, as Fellic advances failed to penetrate and more defenses were laid, and the legions of Second Rome resupplied themselves.

Nonetheless, Nepos began the Redemption Campaign. Once fully able to commit to an offense, he did so. Its goals were brutal and unyielding, and as a harsh prelude any orc-goblins within the controlled areas were slain. It was oppressive, and one may have even used the outdated word 'evil', which lost its meaning in such times, yet it was necessary to brace the minds of the Second Roman Empire for what was yet to come.

Once Gnaeus had recovered a suitable host, he was prepared to resume the siege of Rome. Despite Nepos' return, victory was still inevitable. The rate of the orcs and demons surpassed the rates men could be drafted. They were only dysfunctional because of their disunity. And now, unified, with a single ruler uniting them, as well as their target being so close and proximate ... it was perfection.

Yet, despite the immense favorability that Gnaeus had with him, he was not prepared for what was to come. Magic surrounded the Fell, divination and abjuration clouded the ability to to successfully attack in the dark forests, where direwolves hid, where trees turned to twig blights and assaulted camps, there was nothing but chaos in an invasion. But against all odds, Nepos had Aelum within his sights, and he knew it would fall.

He knew he had to win, and had to win soon, for if he did not, Rome would fall once the endless waves of Gnaeus were stirred once more. And so he derived, from the archived designs before the Great War, a genetic template known as the Nephilim. They were beings of incredible strength, with an average height of six and a half feet, and able to carry nine hundred pounds of pure weight. Their frames healed quickly once broken, so as when an injured man could not fight for several months, a Nephilim could return in three weeks. And so, chosen from the citizens of the Second Roman Empire, eight thousand were drafted by the Formatae Iustita, walking on a street, then kidnapped.

In Aelum, the Bugbear captain Magur Gurthag of Gnaeus' council reported strange movements near Aelum. Strangely, there seemed to be a fire brewing, as if an invasion force from Rome had already begun. And so, in the darkest dungeons of Aelum, prisoners were found and retrained, and laborers were selected.

It would be worth briefly mentioning the infrastructure of the Fell. Demons did not usually live in the material realm, but existed from portals that opened randomly within the Fellic cities and sometimes outside that were spawned by fear(usually in worship), the most primal of all emotion, which they dwelled frequently in but did not stay, and these portals were linked to the Realm of Tharizdun, which was a great primordial mess, and no mortal could look at it without suffering from insanity. It was there that the laws of physics twisted, and cockroaches manifested from shoes and tentacles squirmed from fingers. In fact, it was widely believed that no matter how horrible the demons looked, there were monstrosities far worse in the great chaos, but they could not be summoned, as their existence contradicted natural law too much. The Realm of Tharizdun was now stagnant and uncontrolled, for in the past, the designs were chosen for their optimality, and now, with Tharizdun's diminishing, there was chaos and stagnation, for the designs of the animals had not changed, and some of them, the designs of cattle and livestock, and even fallen to Man. Yet even then, somewhere, somehow, the dark lord remained, despite him weakening.

And although, constantly assaulted Arripan's host and the separate band of Nephilims were by direwolves, demons, and orc warbands, they persisted, and did not yield, no matter how costly things became, for the orcs were too attached to their axes and lands, and so refused to burn them.

The man leading the Nephilim was named Aurelius Majorian. He was a blunt, brutal man, and the power of the Nephilim-gene forging had enhanced his violent past as a bodyguard. He stood, ready for blood, and vigilant, with the red and gold banners of his eight thousand giants with him.

Arripan's army stood at the other side of Aelum, readied and in formation, split into cohorts. Ahead of them marched walls of stone and steel, separated as an island by broad bridges of stone. The walls looked imposing, great, and terrible. Fires dotted and bloomed along the top, and the stone was eigengrau and sinister to the army that opposed it. On the bridges lay icons of blasphemous past champions and demons of Tharizdun, which had been slain at one point or another, and some of himself, vile faces which had to be sacked and destroyed.

From Bugbear Captain Magur Gurthag, who guarded the plaza of the city, there was brightness and camaraderie. Merchants traded and sold exotic goods they found, or relics of humanity, as well as the arcane weapons of Tharizdun's past. Spell scrolls, magic swords and axes, guns, refrigerators, there was half of everything, and a very small amount of it all. A few tired legionnaires bargained with a hobgoblin for ceramics. Everything in the city was beautiful, the streets were clean and not filled with dung, each step had the security and minimalism of concrete, but concrete formed in a way stone or gravel was; it seemed natural. The fires of security dotted the wall like stars and were blue, and the runes depicted heroes of the past, who had achieved ideals all should look up to, and the primordial himself, Tharizdun.

Nepos was far away. He sat on a marble chair as a senator, and all of them headed him. On his head was an invisible laurel wreath, and an imaginary leather jacket. He sat there, his arms on the sides of his chair, blazing with cold vision. And through Arripan, iron arrows of progression were shot.

Gnaeus lacked the requisite army to engage in a field battle, for Arripan's men had replenished themselves already, and the aftereffects of Nepos' coming remained; there were too many of them. He sent eight hundred hobgoblin riflemen to attack and retreat again, but the artillery fire only caused some loss. He was told the amounts of forces he had: there were eight thousand acting as guards, as well as a single legion, there was an estimated amount of Psionic influence to cause perhaps five thousand more demons to appear, and there were ten thousand conscripts who were simply given weapons and told to fight. His armies lay elsewhere, in the hills and forests where they were trained, and other, more military cities, for this was one of trade and politics. As it was tremendously nonoptimal to sustain a large armed force directly on the city, he had chosen not to, as he thought Nepos had no reason to believe that Aelum was his capital anyway, and did not know how Nepos had recovered even more quickly than he had, when Rome was stricken with plague and poverty. He then realized it: tired men disliked being tired, and so one last push, one last campaign for them, and they would carry it to the very end. He had heard of the Formatae Iustita; it must have played some role in motivating them.

At the very least, he realized, this was not a brilliant tactical victory for Arripan. It was not going to end well. Arripan, with some fifty thousand men, split into three, and each of them stormed the bridges and gates that delved above a large, thick river-moat. Across the bridges they marched, and Gnaeus thought it was suicidal, for he only had to collapse the bridges and all would be lost for Arripan. Yet was quickly seen that he did not have the sufficient forces to do so: the guards dropped to robotic gargoyles, and although winged demons came in aid, enough time had been bought for the mechanisms to be clogged through Imperial wizards and Arcane Scipios, and thus the defense of the bridges failed. The demons descended as unearthly beasts of fear, from the formless chaos, but their ranks were too thin, and the soulless and made were quickly slain by number and the sustaining of Auxiliary shotgun and rifle fire. The walls were then closed in upon, and they were bombed subsequently, the gates shattered. Four thousand Orc-Goblins had the advantage of surprise, but against an armed phoulkon of spear and shield, they were razed, and their blood was used for nothing but painting stones.

Magur Gurthag led an army of conscripts and the remaining militia, yet he was powerless despite his expertise and position as a member of the Aelum council. He saw men collapse through wretched fire, as horses ran and retreated and arrows stuck threw ogres and they fell. But the worst terror was yet to come.

Aurelius Majorian and two thousand Nephilim, men clad in magical, impervious plate of an advanced kind, came, with gun and sword, and began a great carnage. They carried torches too and machines, they were beings of fire, metal, and slaking; they treat a path of iron. They seemed to be giants despite being only half a foot taller than the enemy that was so helpless against them, and then they charged.

It was said a long time ago that knowing was half the battle. Here the other half was expressed, and it was violence. It was the torches that burned down a house, it was the sorrows of a man that made him take up a sword and charge at his oppressors. It was the enemy's ax raining down, like a bolt of lightning, that cut his head off. It was the blood that spilled on the ground, as many more ran or marched, and the head was kicked around, the hair messy and the eyes unfocused, yet with an expression of rage and grief, forgotten. And with all of the violence, the brutality, the carnage, there was only one creed in the field of total war, and that was blood.

Yet somehow, as wars happened again and again, and they usually arose to resolve a conflict, perhaps such wars were necessary, as war was one of the very things humanity had never improved in concept, despite the myriad of different weapons it had developed. And so, although songs were sung of how Gurthag's lieutenant led a hundred men who slew five for each fall whilst cornered by bloodthirsty blades, that was most likely untrue. Those that were craven hid in the dungeons and died of starvation. Those that were brave ran through the remaining exit, for it was the least they could do, which Gnaeus did, for his single legion failed to hold against the bouts of the Nephilim. And so, his survivors fleeing, he fled as well, as did the remaining forces of Magur Gurthag.

He did not know why the gates were so easily penetrated, or how Nepos knew of the importance of the city, but that did not matter now. The remaining fourteen thousand fighters, as well as any civilians who wished to live ran through the gate, and were surrounded by the remaining six thousand Nephilim, and Aurelius Majorian, who had parachuted and so redeployed himself, and with his greatsword ready, which he held in a single hand, commanded a charge upon the tired forces of Coriolus Gnaeus.

The civilian orcs and fallen men served little more than fodder; their unarmored bodies and daggers posed little threat to the fully armored Nephilim. Yet, although fodder they were, they were effective fodder, and the Nephilim failed to penetrate.

It was an absurd scene; tall men clad in plate mail, with huge swords and firearms, carved holes into walls of flesh and retreated, for there were too many of them and fighters still hid. Yet, holes were still holes, and each time a charge and retreat was made, at least five thousand craftsmen, old men, and the injured were were slain, and still a massacre continued. The Nephilim split themselves into two bastions, one from the right and left, so that in order to flee, Gnaeus's company had to pass through them, but that opening ceased once they collided with one another.

Majorian's men thinned the ranks of noncombatants, until most of them were gone, and bodies littered the ground, turning mud brown-red. He stood there, clad in a mask of steel with a V-shaped visor, a mask which had been forged from the hammer and toils of a smith far away, his body in a suit of similar enhanced plate, one hand on a glowing greatsword roughly six feet long, and the other on a large pistol, which pulled life out with its crippled fire, as all firearms were after the Great War.

Fire continued to blaze from the artillery of the Nephilim, and as the Nephilim charged once more, in powered sword and armor, he drew his blade and secondary firearm, the titan pressed forward as a single man, or beyond one, directly at Gurthag, and behind him, Gnaeus, still struggling to sustain a cohort.

Yet soon, fire flickered and rose, and dissipated completely. A titan manifested from dust and flame, and it was him, Cathulk-Kas, for he had returned from the many blades of Arripan. He had, although losing half his strength from death, returned from whatever abyss the demons fell to, towered over Majorian.

From the Nephilim, it was a monster of blue flame, horns of iron that were longer and curved upwards like a bull, and a torso far larger than a man that was purely black. From its waist and wrists hung spiked armor covered in runes, and with it there was a thick black longsword, roughly thirteen feet in length, lit as well with a demonic blue flame which flickered and changed direction, and in the other hand, a blue fire-whip, which slithered and desired slaking in blood.

He was a titan, from one side great and terrible, and from the other, the avenger, the protector, who would smite the fell warlord to his knees. His eyes glowed with a white glare, which radiated with coldness, and his wings spread open, like a large eagle, black with a hue of blue. Majorian, a superhuman, gene-forged and eight feet tall, showcasing the prime evolution of Man, spread his sword and pistol in a stance.

Here he was, Majorian or Cathulk-Kas, against what seemed to be the world. Once Tharizdun had owned greed and ambition, but now they had been taken over by Man. It was unknown what was corruption or ambition; all lines disappeared.

Cathulk-Kas, the balor who was created to be the greatest of them all, who had been killed by the combined might of six hundred men and artillery, and who had returned as the balor of blue flame, raised his wings up and flew high and far above his opponent, and then with his sword and whip pummeled down, with the weight of the world being meaningless to his wrath. Majorian raised his pistol, a master-crafted work, one of dedication and balance, whose sole purpose was to end and pain, and fired several times directly at the balor, yet he was knocked down by the demon's body, and was struck by his whip several times.

Yet he could not continue his assault, for although the pain would have overwhelmed a normal man, the Nephilim, rage consuming him, stuck his blade in Cathulk-Kas' chest, where he became distracted by pain, if only for a moment, and the great demon staggered. Majorian was on his feet again, and steaming with pride, began once more.

From a distance away, Arripan saw Majorian and felt sympathetic for him, but then the pained look on his face was discarded and the emotionless one of a killer, of a machine took place. Arripan saw a visage shred of humanity fall, and then Majorian stabbed at the beast, causing him pain. He, Arripan, feared.

Gnaeus and the others were helpless now without Cathulk-Kas, despite his leadership in the Insurgency, and his campaign against the tyranny of Rome. He felt powerless now, which he was, and knew there was nothing he could do, nothing his men could do, now matter how brilliant he could be.

Majorian shook slightly from the heat of the fire that was beginning to flow into him from attacking a Balor. He began to feel a weakening in the nerves. Yet he refused to give in, despite what began to evolve into an unearthly scorching of pain, for pain was the reminder of his existence, and the bringer of his rage. Cathulk-Kas roared and fire flowed from behind his horns, giving him a plutonic hell-like aura, and knocked and destroyed the pistol of Majorian. Majorian then roared back at him, and gave him a roar of rage and hate and pure anger, anger which was incorruptible and unyielding. Like a beam of fire he raised his arcane Greatsword and shot at him and impaled the demon's black chest, yet Cathulk-Kas spread his wings one last time, and drove his sword into his chest as well. Thus, Cathulk-Kas dissipated once more, but in the shadows, he would return.

And as two forms of blood flowed down to the grass, dirt, and ground, did they mix? They had been spilt by brutal and bitter fighting. And as they flowed, it was never known.

Yet there was no great audience waiting, for as the mud moved and shot upwards, and mythical blades danced savagely, aiming for the combatants fighting with them, the Nephilim had chased the remains of the Fellic refugees into the forest leading northeast, and, after making sure to kill all they could within twenty miles, departed and regrouped. Yet the remaining troops of Arripan and Arripan himself had watched, and they remained, wondering.

2300-2303: Ultimum Cygnus Canticum

Ultimum Cygnus Canticum, the Last Swan Song, or the Last Swan Song Campaign, is considered by many to be the penultimate part of the bloody civil war known as the Isle of the Fell. Gnaeus had been beaten and war-torn; it was clear to him now that he was losing the war.

Arripan observed and led the battles whilst Nepos slowly achieved a cult following in Rome. He was seen as Nepos the Liberator, Nepos the destroyer of the Inquisition, who had saved Rome from the Gnaeus's siege, and who protected the common man from the evils of the vigilante Formatae Iustita. The camaraderie of the poor people overwhelmed traitorous souls, for there was nothing but enthusiastic hooting and shouting, and their lives had improved overall from the actions of Nepos, despite that one of the very reasons they had not risen to the middle class was due to the Formatae Iustita itself, robbing them of potential wealth, yet perhaps thievery was economically sound, for as long as the poorer classes remained poor, they remained desperate for the wages given to them, and as long as they were not too low, would latch onto them and be satisfied, refusing to partake in the intellectual activities of questioning what was heard and seen. Yet even then, riots were commonplace, for anger was a precious resource, and the anger of the mob, if controlled as the Formatae Iustita was, served as a giver of recruits.

Arripan, now the leader of the Nephilim along with his own men, read a journal of Majorian. He had seen him throw it in the fire when he had first seen him, but because of his distrust of the Nephilim, he had ordered it reforged by the adepts of the orders of the Second Roman arcane, called the wizards. He felt a deep dislikement towards the instability of magic and psionics, but felt a greater dislikement for the Nephilim. The mere concept of them was an acid into his tongue. Genetically modified men who were given abilities that ascended Man; they could practically be considered a replacer of Mankind. And these men were told that they could benefit Rome, but only if they believed they had nothing to lose, no one else to turn to, and to forge legions of these men, to Severus Domitian Arripan, seemed unworldly. They were the loners who believed they were at the edge of the world, who believed that the world had betrayed them. Each step they took in their powerful, artificial bodies, each swing of a sword and each kill, meant to them personal glory and valor, as opposed to the feelings of contribution received by the common soldier. He saw this, and imagined a warhost, tearing all they could down in the name of what they believed to be justice. And he shuddered and wished silently, wished that Nepos would purge these post-humans, who did not belong, as the Second Roman Empire was a state of Man. It was a quiet moment for him.

Arripan opened the book and read.

As he read, he lost himself in the present, and as he turned pages and his eyes interpreted text, slowly the images seen by perception became less important, and the paint of reality faded, until a new canvas replaced them, and in this new canvas thunderstorms crackled and rolled.

It was written in English, one of the many languages that were of the Second Roman Empire. Instead of destroying all languages, Caesar opted to cause all of them to become informal, and have Latin the language of formality and power. He was a gruff businessman, a banker of some sort, and had returned from work. It had been roughly eleven. As he was going to depart to rest in a chair and eat his dinner, he was interrupted by his wife and children. Why? Because, as his two child sons looked fearfully at him, in need of a protector, their mother said that there was an insurgency, that they, and this woman called Majorian the name of John. The man known as Majorian looked at her tiredly, and put his hands on his face, covering his eyes. He said, "Alright,", and, although unwilling, agreed to go.

He was not expecting anything, or expecting something deathly unserious, as he knew the mobs of footballers in Britain. He approached the slow, accelerating tide of Gnaeus, uneasy. But the beatings, and the mixture of anger and fear in the crowd overwhelmed him, and so he joined them, wielding a pen-knife in the air. He was still in his business suit, which was of the pre-Great War style, and was still considered formal as it righteously was, a fine instrument in a room of law and business, and his buttons were tarnished, and his tie was flop-side from wind and burned by a torch, and yet, he, a man of British temperament, who enjoyed simplicity, and disliked immensely the cold ice of formality that melted around him as the chaos of natural order and the mob rule became more eminent. Some of the more fit men, who appeared to be armed, shouted, "Freedom to culture! Freedom to religion! Freedom to our lost liberty and freedom to nationhood!", which appeared to be hooted enthusiastically, again, and again. "Freedom to culture! Freedom to religion! Freedom to our lost liberty and freedom to nationhood!" To him, it was amateurish. More joined in this hooting chant of the march of the man who led, who was apparently Coriolus Gnaeus, the Primus Pilus of a VII Canis legion.

They arrived at Palatine Hill. The man of the journal seemed weary now, yet knew there would be time until he could rest again. The man in the front, who led this mob at the foot of Palatine Hill had soon made it apparent that he had a vanguard of legionnaires around him. Majorian or John bumped into an elderly man wearing a toga. By the look of him, he could be a Senator, or an Equestrian, or some other wealthy individual. Yet he was here, wielding a meat knife, raving in his wrinkled skin as much as those who were younger were. And, as if the man who was given to him as Coriolus Gnaeus had ordered them to, the legionnaires attacked the palace. They charged, and were met with ranged fire from Auxiliary. Then they hid behind encampments and artillery followed. The man of the journal watched.

Soldiers were shouting, missiles were pounding, it seemed to be an entirely real and actual war. And so he found his wife, still able to be distinguished from the masses, yet now he had to exert effort in finding her. He had to cut his way through farmers with pitchforks, and smiths with hammers and swords. They looked at him with a cold directness, and once he found his wife, who he had known even before the Great War, he said, "It's time we go."

She hesitated, but took his hand and they departed. The directness became a glare, and for an instant he had caught the attention of perhaps the entire mob, and then an arrow nearly pierced him in the head which had come from the direction of Palatine Hill. When they had walked far enough down an alley attended to by no one, she turned and yelled at him. "Why did you do that? Don't you know-can't you see how this twisted Roman society has bound us, how we now live in a backwards dystopia of savagery, where the old essence of our life has gone?"

He put one hand of his into a pocket, and that hand stayed there. "We need to go back now. I say this not out of fear, but out of percipience. We should return."

They stood nearly adjacent to each other, yet there seemed to be a distance between them that quickly grew larger than two feet.

A part of him wanted to close that distance and put her arms around her. Yet he knew what would happen. She would slap him away, and although they had been bonded for more than twenty years, would dissolve any love between them.

The other part of him wondered why he was even thinking, why he did not act as if by instinct, and why he had not known what to do. Instead, he stood there, motionless.

"You!" The exclamation was followed by a lengthy pause. "The bombs led to the creation of this savagery. And you! Oh! You loan shark and collector of items that most people no longer have anymore, because they were burnt, and became ashes. Ashes! That's why, isn't it?"

The man who would become someone similar, yet far away from what he was now, felt no urge of violence, unlike the portrayals of crime and abuse. He instead put both hands in his pockets and stood straighter, and the darkness of his clothing appeared more eminent. He smiled, as if being complimented for a craft, and thought of a vague something he had forgotten, and then dismissed it. He then said, "That's true."

She yelled at him again and again and then, not looking back, left. He refused to go to lengths to hear words in great detail, for he understood the meaning of such words, and so believed he did not have to hear them. When he returned home, some time later, he saw that everything was gone. His children were not there, she was not there, the closets were empty, as were the storage of food and the amounts of denarii. Alcohol was spilled over the floor, as if to seem he had committed sins of decadence he did not do. He traveled to his office at home, only to find books and papers burned and his chair shattered. His chair that he hold worked on for so long, and the desk which carried work; it had been traumatized by a bludgeoning force that had dismembered its cabinets, leaving them sprawling and broken, and it had cracked, one could see the lighter inside wood being a zigzag bolt in contrast to the old.

His chair. His desk. He tried to find his car, which he still had from the era before the Great War. It was not there. He walked to where he worked, where people saw him or those appointed by him, and were taken advantage of. All windows had been shattered but one, that said his name was a fraud. In the journal Arripan read, someone had impaled the name with a pencil, and had done so violently and more than deliberately, as if out of anger.

The burden of his tie was a boulder on his neck. It was long and heavy, and his legs were giving way until it dragged him down. He was a man who had lost everything. He had always been this way, careful and uneasily taken into by humor, but why, simply because of his belief and lust for power, him being an epitome of domination, who was able to recognize losses and could bend the public eye to his needs when necessary, why did he deserve this to happen to him? Demons could come and kill millions, or they could come and reinstate a democracy, or everyone could speak in Latin-it did not matter to him. It seemed, he realized, that his question answered itself. Yet must every challenger to a knight's quest die and never be remembered, and must all those large and scaley who had hoards of treasure be butchered and stolen from, simply because they had something that was valuable to someone?

Over the coming days, he would do what any man in his situation would do, for they would be desperate and seeking, and anyone of his sentiment had an infinite hold to life, for to them pain was not something to run away from but a reminder that one still existed, and that was all that mattered, for they felt nothing for those that fell before them, from whatever cause. It was contradictory, yet absolute and true: those who feel apathetic are those who are given apathy, and therefore history never stagnates. Yet he refused to believe in that cycle.

When one was in plight, they would seek a solution to their plight, but more importantly they would try to believe that their plight was wrong, and that they were justified. The man wandered, and found he had lost his former position due to his abandoning of the Insurgency, and his joining of it, but even more importantly to him, the destruction of any business he had.

He performed lowly, excising jobs with shame and sadness, believing he could free himself from his imagined pain, pain which existed in the mind, and therefore was real. His tasks failed him. He attempted exercise and meditation to reduce the pain, yet every time, he would rage at himself, yell at himself, and ask him what he was doing and why he was trying to purify himself of something so key to his nature. Hence, he failed.

And so, he sulked once more, without halls of despair, or halls of agony. Those halls did not exist, for suffering was not expansive. There was only pain, and pain, and pain, and then, once hope seemed that it would appear, it would be taken away, ruthlessly, and he would yell why? to it, and he would collapse again, and hope would appear again, only for it to fade and cause him pain.

He was a man inflicted with misery, without and deprived of sympathy. He yelled and lashed out again, and soon, as those who grieved not for others but for themselves knew as they refused to sink or acknowledge their pain, unlike whom they believed were weak-willed and failures, anything that reminded him of his past life pained his veins with venom. He looked at a picture of his family. They were traitors, all of them, who had left him alone. Alone. He tore it to shreds.

Arripan wondered how the man could still bother to write in a journal, when his world, which he had made an uneasy peace with with a wife and family, had removed him and deprived him to a plebeian in a soup line, who could not throw the disgusting broth away because of how it was necessary for his nourishment.

One day, past the siege, the plague, and all which was unnecessary, on the last pages of the journal, the man was approached by a cloaked assailant carrying an anelace and a handkerchief. He held the knife wayside in one hand, and the handkerchief in the other. The man he was to abduct did not see him. He approached, quietly, suddenly, and each slow step seemed longer than the last. Yet, when he was nearly adjacent to the man, he put his items away, and the man who was his objective looked at him.

The man known as John knew of Nepos's ascent to power, and thought of it. The man who was supposed to be his attacker, the bringer of knives and giver of wounds, sat beside him on a barrel of wheat.

"Tell me, traveler, what brings you to such depths; what do you desire?"

He could have been wearing fur skins and wielding a bone-sword on the top of a mountain. It did not matter.

"I don't know where to go anymore. I don't know what to do, to escape the darkness that crashes the ceiling behind me. But I always knew, and still do now. The flesh is weak."

The stranger ahead of him mused, and put his hand to his chin. "And the spirit?"

"Not strong. Not powerful, potent, but wrecked, and destroyed completely. The spirit is no more, it has been tossed away, in a smoldering wreck of a volcano, and what rises from the darkness is being dark and terrible, tall and great, his majesty ascending above all, for each step he takes is one of thunder, and in his eyes there is nothing, nothing but hate."

The cloaked stranger then said, "And you are?"

The man looked at him with yellow eyes of fury that vibrated, and under them bags of sleeplessness. His face was cold, disciplined, and scarred, shattered and reformed, as if he wore an iron mask which had not yet been there.

And he said, "My name is Aurelius Majorian."

And in this act, a glance passed between two individuals. One of them was one who had lived a life of crime and thievery, one that had once been born out of necessity, out of forced deeds, but as he ascended had become one of guile and reward. The other, who had the world taken from him, who was once a liver of luxury, whose money was built from lies of the dishonest, who had fallen because of his true nature, he now lived without his past soul, untaken by demons or other nightmares. The forging shall then begin.

Arripan closed the journal. He remembered the Nephilim now, when the flesh was carved from his chest, stomach, and face, when muscles were electrocuted and reorganized, when wires were placed inside the muscle fibers, when the bones were ripped out and replaced with adamantine, and when the new man woke, reformed and with fury, he fought most the most viciously of them all, for each stroke was to the wounding of his past, until it was lashed at again, and again, until it was gone, and then he, now clad in dark arcane plate, with a greatsword of strength beyond the material, and a stubber of lead and fire, with a scarred and formed face, put a helm of sleek metal on, parallel with the plate he wore, yet it was not fully necessary, for he was already Aurelius Majorian, Legate of the Nephilim.