86th of Ashan 722
Continued from here
The rumbling of the wagon nearly lulled Lorogh to sleep several times, but he found he could not sleep very well at all after the violence that had unfolded just a few trials prior. Doing damage to structures from a distance, demolition, and big blasts of explosives was one thing. But when it came to inflicting damage up close, with a sharp blade? That was something entirely different. It was not as romantic, heroic, or glorious as the tales told it to be. There was a downright grittiness and dirt to it. When one could smell the release of one's opponent's bowels as they shoved the blade into their gullet. Blood pooling on the snow, so red, so dark. Lorogh shuddered to remember the aftermath.
It wasn't often that the cadouri was given to reconsidering a course he'd taken, fully aware of what his choice had meant. But had he been fully aware? Had he been sold a bill of goods that failed the sniff test? Had he been deceived? He decided he didn't like much the reality of war, so much as the idea of improving a civilizations technological prospects. He could be a happy warrior, far behind enemy lines, but it rarely worked out that way in reality. Sooner or later, one had to face down a hairy barbarian raider in close personal combat, whether you manned a siege weapon or not.
The spectre of the raider that Lorogh had killed haunted him everytime he shut his eyes. As he did now. He saw him rising again from the snows, resurrected by some feat of dark necromancy. Lorogh stood to attention, feeling very small before the raider, who'd somehow grown to giant proportions. Lorogh's fingers wound their way around the grip of his arming sword, as he held his shield held before his face. His ears peeled backward, and his brow deepened in anticipation of the violence to come.
A row of soldiers sprung up before Lorogh' reinforcing him with their aid. But they were swept away by a swipe of the gargantuan raider's flail. Lorogh's hand tightened around his sword, as he drew it from its scabbard, and roared his adopted battlecry, "EEEEEK!"
One had to trust that it sounded more fearsome in reality than on paper. It was his battlecry, though, and he could have no other.
So wading into the carnage left in the wake of the giant's flail, Lorogh leapt into action, jumping and bounding from one end over the other. The flail head knocked away his shield easily, carrying it beyond his reach, leaving him only with a sword. The sword he used well, better than he had any recollection of skillfulness before this instance. Skeletons rose from the corpses of the comrades that had fallen, and he cut through them as readily as if they were now part of the raider force.
His silvery blade flashed through the bones and grisle of their animated corpses. They tried to grapple with the cadouri, but he was too quick for them, and too stout in his defense. For every grasp of their ghoulish hands, he rewarded them with a flash of steel. Their ichor and blood dripped from the freshly raised corpses as he dismembered their limbs, their necks, their digits.
He could feel the earth shake beneath him, as more rose from the ages of dead past. A rumbling that felt much like the turbulence the wagon had gone through in the snowy roads leading northward. There were times when he felt momentum shifting his body one way or the other, and butterflies fluttered through his stomach at the motion. But otherwise he was able to maintain his discipline and standing on the field of battle.
As for the raiders' marrows that he was raising, he ignored the resemblance, however, instead focusing his martial prowess against the hordes of skeletal undead. Marrow after marrow assaulted him, some of their limbs fashioned into weapons of their own. He engaged one of them, with bone-like swords for arms. Catching it low on the blade of its swordarm, yet the other blade got through his defenses, and managed to nick him in the side, pricking him beneath the hauberk.
Lorogh hissed at the landed hit, disengaging from the swordarm by cutting it off entirely, and then shoving his sword into the marrow's ribcage, then slicing upward with a leap, cutting it into bits of bone as he turned into a veritable whirlwind of bone-grinding fury.
More marrows rose or seemed to with every one he dispatched. The dead were without number, it seemed, and all of those who'd died in battlefields past seemed intent on bringing this Imperial soldier to heel, if not to the grave with them. His sword was the only thing standing between himself and an early grave.
The Giant raider meanwhile stood over them all, seeming like a puppet master of a small theater of marionettes. Otherwise he made no effort to impede the battle that Lorogh was fighting against his little minions. Lorogh's silvery blade flashed this way and that, and bone chips went flying. He cut two at a time, cleaving through several an then turning to knock the next off of its balance. The tip of his sword crunched through many a skull that night.
Before long, however, even the tireless warrior grew low on stamina. Lorogh felt his sword arm shivering with exertions, his muscles aching for rest and relief. As he almost began succumbing to the fatigue, he thought of Saoire's Dream, of the turtles, and imagined he was defending them as much as he was the Empire. This gave him a second wind he needed, filling his sinews with refreshed vigor.
Lorogh felt near five feet tall at this point, and whirled like a dervish with his sword. The blade turned and spun like a rotary blade, cutting through bone and putrid flesh alike as if he were clearing the grass of a green lawn. The bones parted against his silvery sword, turning into shards of shrapnel. Eventually, however, all good battles came to an end, and so it was when the shards of bone left strewn about suddenly came to life. Their sharpness forged in the violence unleashed against them, they all careened for the position of Lorogh, stabbing him from a thousand different angles.
Lorogh shuddered as each bone shard pierced his hauberk, digging their way into his flesh. He could already feel his control slipping away, as the necromantic giant that controlled them all began playing with him, as if he were their new puppet. Lorogh danced a strange dance then, almost as if he existed only for the amusement of the necromantic overlord. The dance was not like that which he'd been engaged in just prior. It was more of a merry jig, which he danced along with the rest of hte marrows, which continued to rise from the snowy fields all around.
Music began to play from somewhere in the distance, an understated whistle and whine that called to his bones to move.
It was around this time that Lorogh woke up.
He was startled awake by the shaking of one of his fellow soldiers, and the sudden stoppage of the wagon he was riding upon. "Lorogh! We've arrived. It's time to dig the ice moat, says Sergeant..."
Lorogh grunted as he rose from his prone state, and saw the darkness all around them. It was night-time, or else dawn. Possibly not the best time to be digging ice out for a moat, or some other defensible position. In fact, moats in the Winter Reach were not very common at all, given that the snowfall often rendered their defenseiveness moot. But he obeyed the orders of his Sergeant, as ever. Perhaps engaging in some menial task would purge the memories of blood and carnage from his mind, as he went forward to set up the defensive position for the village they were defending.
He could only hope that such horrors as weighed upon his mind would pass in time. For the time that was now, he could grab a shovel, and daydream about being back at his workshop, with no battles to fight and no blood to shed.
Perhaps he wasn't cut out for a soldier's life afterall? Or perhaps he'd get used to the whole killing part of it. He didn't like killing men, he decided. Monsters were much better targets, as were fixed fortifications. He could only hope that the lines held from now on, and he wasn't made to fight blooded soldiers again...
Anyway, there would be time enough for worrying later. For now, he endured the cold and dug trenches with the rest of the men.
