Izurich
Archetype Zero
Lord Zee
Cyclone
and
Kalmar
A step shook the ground, crushing dozens of trees under a pitiless iron heel. Then another. And another. A long trail of vast patches of trampled vegetation stretched back to the very coastline, now distant beyond even divine sight.
Flaming eyes swept the green expanse that covered the earth from sight to all sides but that one. All things considered, Narzhak thought, forests were little better than the plainlands he had once found so dull back on the Dragon’s Foot. The various sizes and shapes of the trees were slightly more interesting than nothing but grass as far as he could see, yes, but it took a very short time to see what that variety really counted for. A tree was a tree, as much as that. Small differences in how bent the branches on this or that one were did not change anything worthy of his attention about them. As for everything else that grew under those trees, he could barely even notice it down there. Mushrooms were the best there was, and that said it all.
The things that moved, at least until his foot came down on them, were hardly an improvement. There were different kinds of wolves, to say nothing of all the rest, but none of them did anything more than the trees, as far as he cared. They ate, slept, took up space, that was all. Not once had he seen any do anything else. And those were the best things here, no place left for anything above them! He could have sworn that this corner of Galbar had been lazily left by everyone to overgrow with useless life. Lucky that he had found it now.
Narzhak rotated his head, gazing over the horizon from left to right. To one side, he could see nothing but more forests. He had about had enough of those. To the other, the indistinct shapes of mountains towered in the distance. He did not have high hopes for the mountains either - all of them so far had been nothing but barren rock - but they were a change, and that would have to do for now.
A distant animalistic roar could be heard, followed by what Narzhak would perceive as a light ping! ping! sound directly beneath him.
Looking down, he saw a shaggy, grey, apelike creature, furiously pounding away at his foot, undaunted by his vast size.
This was already much, much better.
Leaning down heavily, he pointed a finger at the strangely ferocious being. Large hooks shaped themselves from its tip, followed by dizzyingly long, thick chains. Moving as though animated with snakelike life, they clawed into and coiled around the beast, which continued to bellow and struggle as though there were nothing unusual - for one like itself - about it.
Narzhak lifted his captive to his eyes. Whatever it was, it clearly improved on everything he had gone over so far. Strength, yes, but also this fury, which he thought he could call ambitious, and… He looked closer. The creature was not bleeding where his hooks had bitten into its thick hide. He pulled one out, and stared: the shallow wound closed under his eyes, and in brief it was almost invisible under the matted fur.
”Wherever you come from, there’s a lot in you,” he mused, more to himself than to the beast, which was less than interested in soliloquy. In a few steps, the mountains had grown much closer. His four gazes scattered over them, eyes ranging over craggy stone faces, far from one another. It did not take him long to spot more of the curious beings - here was one, crouching in ambush over a cliff; there another, more interested in what it was eating than the new mountain standing nearby; and another there, and more…
”And I think I’ll bring it out,” he concluded his earlier thought. ”Hold still.” His eyes converged on the being, and for an instant they blazed crimson. As on command, the creature froze, arms raised in flailing and features painted with outrage.
Hundreds more chained hooks sprouted from Narzhak’s hand, and went to work. They moved quickly, in spasming, yet precise jolts, hurrying before the prodigious healing overtook the ways they cut open into the captive’s body. Skin hardened, bones stretched, black ichor dripped into improvised funnels. Draw the nails out some more, pull the mouth wider, the frame taller. More teeth, less fur, it gets in the way. Make sure the blood seeps well into its belly. Like that.
The god drew most of his hooks back into their fingers and admired his handiwork. The thing he held was taller and leaner than before, long arms ending in matchingly long, viciously sharp claws. Its fur was spread in mangy patches over its stony, almost squamous skin, none reaching higher than the shoulders. The head, after all, should be free to dive into carcasses, and this head was made for just that. It was nothing but mouth, large, wide and toadlike, filled with more teeth than the finest sight could hope to count. Strong teeth they were, too. No bone would stop them, nor any shell. Two squat, rapacious eyes, alight with greed and cunning, surmounted the horrid maw, flattened nostrils barely visible below them.
”You’ll make a perfect ghoul, you will,” Narzhak nodded, his voice brimming with self-satisfaction. The monster stirred, blinked, then snapped its many teeth. Ghoul or no ghoul, there seemed to be only one thing it cared about.
However, its maker was not yet finished. Holding the newly-named ghoul chained upright on one finger, he glared at it again with all four eyes, which were suddenly much brighter than the usual. So much brighter that the whole mountainside was bathed in their orange glow, as though a second, hellish Heliopolis had lit up straight before it. The whole of it, that is, except the spot where the creature’s shadow fell. A strangely large shadow, if one looked at it. It should not have covered the whole peak, or the foot below it, and certainly not the entire mountain range.
The shadow washed over every cave and every crag, and in a moment both it and the glow were gone. So was every one of the hairy, brutish creatures on that side of the massive. Instead of them, a horde of long-clawed, wide-mouthed horrors loped over the rocks, hailing each other with gurgling cries. Some set upon one another, biting and grasping large stones and tree branches the better to smash the enemy’s head in. Others hurried down into the forest or over the passes, in search of easier prey, or, what was harder, but tastier, their former kind. Some few, already busy with something’s meat, did not seem to notice the change at all; at least, until their meals were gone much faster than expected, leaving them with a torturous craving for more.
”This” Narzhak carelessly set down the first ghoul, which minded it less than its sudden appetite, ”is what you call an improvement.”
”No.”
The ghoul, the first of its kind, fell, an arrow punched clean through its eye and out the back of its head.
Kalmar levitated in the air, expression as cold as stone, as he stared down Narzhak. A new arrow was already notched in his bow as he awaited a response.
After his misadventures with Chopstick, he had cleaned himself up, replaced or mended the clothes which had been lost or torn, and then returned to his continent, only to find that some titanic creature had run roughshod over his forests. The destruction had been immense, and for no real reason, and so it had to end. He had followed the trail here. Now, the God of the Hunt floated face to face with the God of Conflict himself.
Heavily, Narzhak swung around to face the much smaller god. ”Hrghm.” His voice had become one of annoyance. Fiery pits large enough to swallow scores of Kalmars many times over blazed with displeasure.
”You’re...” he scraped his jagged chin with a ghastly screeching sound, sifting through what he remembered of his divine family, ”Kalmar, aren’t you? What’s your problem with this? Isn’t it what you’re all about yourself?”
Kalmar glared back. ”My problem is that it is not sustainable. Your ‘improvements’ will be their downfall. At this rate most of the new species will wipe itself out with infighting, but not before killing or driving out all other animals in the area. I don’t just exist to hunt things, I exist to ensure that the hunting can continue. Reverse what you have done,” he demanded.
”Or else what?” Notes of mockery sounded through the giant’s rumbling. ”You’d do better to look closer, and maybe learn from my work. These ghouls” he motioned widely with a finger, sending a whistling breeze towards the mountains, ”don’t have a stable balance, no. That is the point. They’ll find a better one, if they want to last, but that’s far from now. What they have for a start is enough. They’d spread to consume everything, but that same infighting will keep them in check. They’d tear each other to pieces to the last, but there’ll be easier prey to distract them. This way, they’ll keep growing right as much as needed, until they become better.” He glanced sideways with one eye. ”A plan for centuries started in less than a day. Don’t you have any of your own to mind?”
”There is logic to your words,” Kalmar grudgingly conceded, ”yet there was never any need to make them this way to begin with. They were already strong, they already competed with each other, they already faced adversity. I had plans for them and you threw those out of balance. There is no sense in infighting, nor cannibalism - those ultimately make them weaker. The threats that keep them in check should be on the outside, not within.”
”That was not enough.” Jarringly, the deep rumbling ended in a sharp snapping click. ”They needed more. A hunger to drive them, a wit to make them adapt. If all change had to come from outside, we’d be running ourselves out around the whole world. I, for one, have better things to do with my time. Instead, I set the path, and anyone who wants to live will follow it. To get the most out of them, you need to push them from everywhere. That way, even the best will always have a challenge. The greatest one, because it’s just like them.” Narzhak expressively lifted a half-clenched claw. ”Infighting kills off the weak in the breed. The strong become stronger by consuming them. They’ll be fewer, maybe, but better. Besides, numbers won’t be a problem for them anytime soon.” He abruptly gestured to the side. ”And that’s just the ones I found. There’s got to be plenty more of your things further in the mountains.”
In many ways, Narzhak’s philosophy echoed Kalmar’s own. The disagreement was on how to implement it. ”There is truth in what you say. Yet they already had that hunger and that wit, you only drove it into excess. Infighting doesn’t just kill the weak, it also kills the strong.” he paused for a few moments. ”I will watch and observe your creatures. If you are correct, there will be no issue. If you are wrong, then I will remove them,” he stated flatly.
One of the upper fiery eyes narrowed. ”That would defeat the point. If they fail” he laid particular weight on the word ‘they’, ”they’ll be condemned either way. If you suddenly decide they’re not good enough, who’s to say you’re right? I can’t play keeper for everything I leave wherever I go.” He swivelled his head back towards the mountains, half of his eyes remaining fixed on Kalmar. ”And I’m not about to lose my work to your whims. The finest I’ll take with me. You can sit here and learn from the rest.”
Narzhak reached for the plates on his chest with both hands, dug his fingers into the gap where two of them met and pulled. The armoured segments came apart with a groaning, squelching sound, spraying torrents of fetid black blood to all sides.
Something stirred in the shadowy depths of the god’s interior. Slowly, almost agonisingly, a shape began to emerge from the cavernous opening. It began with what looked, at best, like a caricature of a skull, mouthless and stretched into a horned triangular shape. Orbs of molten metal burned in its iron sockets, scorching the black gore the misshapen head was coated in to a filthy crust.
The head was followed by a wide, sturdy back, surmounted by a ridge akin to a bony, ribbed spine. Vast leathery wings tipped with grasping claws emerged alongside the shoulders and latched on to the edges of the gap, pulling the rest of the creature through. Malformed taloned stumps came in the stead of the rear legs, and a barbed, blade-edged tail gave the last push against the iron cage.
The Iron God pushed his armour closed as though nothing unusual were the matter and indicated the ghoul-infested mountainsides to the colossal gargoyle. The monstrosity lowered its body to the ground, glared forward and - waited. It did not wait long, as almost immediately a mass of grey shapes vaulted and rolled down cliffs and out of cave mouths. The ghouls moved quickly, but in an oddly orderly way, without even a stray swipe or gnash at a neighbour’s flank. They clambered over the leviathan’s sides, agile hands finding easy purchase in its uneven skeletal iron hide. As soon as its back was covered with a stony sheen, the monster leapt up on its surprisingly strong legs, beat its wings once, twice, and soared off, leaving bent and cracked trees in its wake.
”There,” Narzhak followed it with his other two eyes, until it was a dark spot among the clouds, ”You can fret less about your forests now. Speaking of those forests, has it ever occurred to you to make them more productive?”
”That is what I have been working on,” Kalmar snarled. ”Now begone.”
”You need to work harder, then,” satisfied with his accomplishments, the Iron God’s mood had rapidly lifted, ”I barely noticed a thing on my way here. I’ll leave you to that.” He moved, slowly and deliberately, to face the east, and lifted a foot for an immense, likely destructive stride. ”So long, what were you again - yes, huntsman.” One step, and his rumbling laughter faded into the distance.
Kalmar watched him leave, frowned and turned away, ruminating on the meeting. The titan would likely return, he realized, and he would need to be ready. Preparations would need to be made. Then there was the matter of this new species - something would need to to keep them in check. That wasn’t even beginning to get into what Chopstick had said to Li’Kalla - he would need to look into that as well.
”Master,” Arryn’s voice cut into his thoughts.
”Arryn?”
”I have news to report, master,” the falcon said, and then relayed the story he had heard from one of the peculiar talking magpies.
When the story ended, Kalmar cursed, throwing his fist into a nearby tree. So many threats, so much to do. Why couldn’t things be simple? ”Find out where Li’Kalla is, and tell me her location,” he ordered.
