The vast flock of the Aspect-Emperor hobbled and sprinted across the Black Furnace Plain, casting aside weapons, sawing at armour. For many, shock precluded the possibility of emotion, left them little more than automata shambling across the flats. Others wept, bawled and raged as little ones bereft of some childish prize. Still others clenched their jaw against the gibbering extremes, refusing to unlock the passions rocking them.
Sheets of blasting grit soon swept the whole of Shigogli. Blood became black as oil. Grimaces were inked into faces, down to the blackened teeth, so that each was at once wretched and a mummer mocking the wretched. More and more fell to their knees convulsing for the taste.
Thus the Ordealmen fled, ever more obscure, ever more harrowed, a great mob drawn as a comet across the Black Furnace Plain, the infirm and the unlucky trailing the hale and the lucky, all of them running to the encampment they had seen burning. The Horde closed upon Golgotterath behind them, a chitinous rush across all that could be seen. The Whirlwind seized upon the sky-high billowing of the Shroud, began to feed upon it, and rags of blackness began scribbling about Golgotterath and the Upright Horn. An obese funnel climbed from great sweeping skirts of noxious black, obscuring the glint of the Carapace. The roar battered aside all hearing, save …
TELL ME …
Howled through the throats of thousands upon thousands of Sranc, a flood inexorably encompassing the interval separating them from the injured and the encumbered. These wretches were doomed—clouds and clots of them stumbling, even crawling through the trampled dust. The Witches and the Schoolmen, the only souls that could hope to save them, had leapt so far ahead they could no longer be seen.
Those Ordealmen at the fore of the rout called out in dismay, and stopped in the smoking ruins of their encampment. Climbing echelons of them were transfixed for the image of the Whirlwind about the Horn, gouging the Shroud from the Horde to the Vault of Heaven. They could not move. The encampment was not so much a vestige of home, the illusion of security that comes with familiarity, as a point requiring decision, and no one knew where they should go or what they should do. And so was each refugee undone by the indecision he found awaiting him. The bands of congestion grew deeper across the encampment’s scrag perimeter.
“Run!” a sorcerous voice cracked—the same voice that had chased them from Golgotterath. “For the Occlusion!”
And rolling eyes found a figure, fur-bedecked and hermit-wild, hanging above the fugitive fields. The Holy Tutor …
The Wizard.
“Run for your lives!”
Once, when Cnaiür was a child, a whirlwind had roared through the Utemot encampment, its shoulders in the clouds, yaksh, cattle, and lives swirling like skirts about its feet. He had watched it from a distance, wailing, clutching his father’s rigid waist. Then it had vanished, like sand settling in water. He could remember his father running through the hail to assist his kinsmen. He could remember beginning to follow, then stumbling to a halt, transfixed by the vista before him as though the scale of the transformation had dwarfed his eyes’ ability to believe. The great rambling web of tracks, pens, and yaksh had been utterly rewritten, as though some mountain-tall child had drawn sweeping circles with a stick. Horror had replaced familiarity, but order had replaced order.
This was a different whirlwind.
And he was no longer that child.
He was of the People, one who had so eaten of the Land as to become the Land. He was a Chieftain of the People, one who had put so many souls to dirt as to confound numbers! He was a King of the Chieftains, a descendant of Ûthgai who smashed ancient-old Kyraneas as pottery; and of Horiötha, who burned Imperial Cenei as a pyre. Their blood was his blood! Their bones were his bones! Utemot, the most wild and holy of the many tribes of the People.
Cnaiür urs Skiötha strode down the slopes and out across the flats heedless of the refugee masses parting about him. He stared only at it as he walked, his long knife in hand, cutting away his own armour and clothing piece by piece, revealing the horrendous sum of what he had taken from the World, the thousand sons and daughters violated, the thousand hearts stopped, the thousand eyes blinded. Finally he pressed his blade down his hairless pubis, and sliced away his loincloth, baring his manhood to the sting. And so he walked, a solitary man, naked save for the swazond grilling his limbs and torso, numberless totems of those murdered and not merely killed.
The wind scoured his striate skin, wricked his black mane. Existence was caterwaul and thunder, darkness and obscurity, vast discharges of brilliance high above, and whipping, knifing obscurities below. Existence turned upon and against the cyclopean gyre, corruption whipping blurred about glimpses of the Upright Horn.
Squinting against the maelstrom, he plunged forward. Smoke coiled from his swazond like blood from gills in rushing waters.
“KELLHUS!” he roared in no human voice, a shout that cracked the Horde’s howl, that struck dust from open air.
The Whirlwind continued to feed upon the Shroud, rending and inhaling, ripping it from its roots in the Horde, spinning it into the great bulbous pillar. The creatures were almost upon him.
“I COME TO YOU AS HATE!”
Ordealmen continued to materialize in their hundreds from the shrouded tracts before him, all of them wounded or bearing wounded, all of them monkey-grimacing, faces toppling out of the maelstrom, each as bright as any now, any here, each a silvery angle on Creation.
“AS OUTRAGE AND HEART-CRACKING HUNGER!” he roared in no human voice.
A Shrial Knight emerged from the whipping murk, his white surcoat reduced to violet rags, standing at the side of a body already duned for immobility and wind. The sky had become a tortured wheel, inner rending outer, and the man hung upon the image as though straining to read, his lips moving. Beyond him, where all was shadows, the scabrous masses engulfed all, imploding about each and every flailing Ordealman. Whether heedless or oblivious, the Knight-of-the-Tusk stood motionless as the inhuman avalanche surged toward him.
Cnaiür urs Skiötha laughed as the first white-skinned figures fell hacking upon him, laughed as the screaming fish-white masses loped toward his laughing. thousands upon raving thousands. He laughed and spat.
“MY BREAST HAS BECOME AN OVEN, MY HEART A BLINDING COAL!”
All the World thronged with shrieking forms, white where not soiled black, a vast wave that swallowed all the survivors hobbling before it, transforming each into flowers of shaking savagery as the masses swept onward. The Whirlwind soared beyond, a monstrous fat-bellied funnel, rising distinct from great smoking sheets.
“MY THOUGHTS BURN AS OIL AND FLAX! TOO FAST! TOO FAR!”
Naked and unarmed, Cnaiür urs Skiötha, the most-violent-of-all-men, strode laughing into the Horde of Mog-Pharau …
And it parted … not for the smoke steaming from his numberless swazond, nor for the crimson glow poisoning his turquoise eyes, nor even for the shadowy presentiment of four horns rising about his head. The creatures did not so much veer from his infernal path as did the Horde itself. The abominations screeched and streamed and gesticulated as before, only in the spaces about him.
Cnaiür urs Skiötha laughed and sneered and spat fire.
“ANASÛRIMBOR!” he roared in no human voice. “HEAR ME, DECEIVER!”
Upon his every step a screaming transit opened before him, and so he walked between the Horde, an entity unseen, striding ground trammelled trackless.
The winds began chewing his naked skin.
“I SHALL HAVE MY OWN PORTION! MY OWN PRIZE!”
And it was mad to see so many iterations of one thing, let alone a thing so obscene as Sranc, fields of them, plains, unnatural teeth gnashing, beauteous faces sphinctering—fields upon fields of them!
The barbarian laughed, stood untouched amid great, wheeling shoals of the beasts. He spat fire upon them, laughed more as the creatures kicked and were ruthlessly trampled.
“YOU SHALL SUFFER AS NO SON OF MAN BEFORE YOU!” he boomed to the black funn
elling heavens, his eyes now spikes of crimson brilliance.
And in the heart of the Whirlwind he glimpsed rumours of it, the black shining jewel. He leaned back to face the heights, scarred arms askew, corded and smoking.
“A THING FOREVER PASSED AS MORSELS IN THE PIT!”
The winds had become abrasion; blood began weeping from his swazond. Smoke fluted from a thousand slits across his body.
The No-God walked … walked to him.
“ANASÛRIMBOR!” he roared, his voice bestial with fury. “REVEAL THYSELF TO ME!”
A million throats answered.
TELL ME …
The Whirlwind blotted all Creation before him, blowing bodies outward and sucking bodies up as it advanced. A million blasting needles sheared the scars from his skin, leaving his windward surfaces striped in living fire. And they roiled like burning grease within him, the indignities he had suffered, the grudges and grievances he bore! Such a toll as only murder could redeem!
“SHOW THYSELF SO THAT I MIGHT STRIKE THEE!”
Skin pealed back from tissue, sloughed as parchment. Bleeding was struck into mist.
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
Even as it blinded the wind laid bare, exposing structures, devouring them, displaying the lurid layers beneath. With Hell’s own eyes, Cnaiür urs Skiötha peered up into the void and saw … nothing.
“REVEAL! REVEAL THYSELF!”
Flesh disintegrated. A vicious black climbed over all things, grew numb.
WHAT AM I?
Awe is the heart aimed at all horizons.
Awe is how we belong to what beggars our conception.
Awe redeems the vacancy of our imperium, lets us hope and hate as our fathers had hoped and hated, to strive for what the honest heart can comprehend. Awe dares souls to swell beyond the horizon, to shrug away the demented iterations, to believe in what cannot be seen. It calls on us to be what we were and what we remain: Men who can kill for the tale’s sake.
So we might dwell in the husk of ancient certainty unto the end of our bloodless days.
So we might tremble at beauty, numb to truth.
Noxious fumes roped the last remaining light, blackening the face of Heaven, and the roar waxed louder, though pain alone betrayed as much, and the Horde came before the Whirlwind, an oceanic flood of iron, flint, and claw. Ordealmen vanished in scrambling thousands beneath the surge, spurring those toiling ahead, the clouds hobbling through the gutted encampment, condensing into pitched chaos at the Seven Passes. The obscene multitudes rushed the slopes below, loped shrieking, howling, phalluses bent and pinked across their sunken bellies, and the Sons of Men threw back their heads, their mouths pits in their beards, their looks shining and hopeless, eyes that mirrored the flailing that is the final recourse of all blooded things. The threshing edge heaved up. Over. As hornets on honey, Sranc caged them in convulsive thrusting. Punctures welled and spouted. Skulls fractured, and faces bulged like pillows …
Ere Hell opened and Death came swirling down.
The Horde came before the Whirlwind, aye, a deluge swamping the inner foundations of the Occlusion, and the Ordealmen began trampling their brothers, so frantically did they force the backs before them. All the guises of anguish and lunacy lunged motionless about them, faces, all of them slicked, pinched into the shapes of overthrown souls; here an Ingraul with finger bones knotted through his longbeard, his upper teeth missing; and there a splint-armoured Karyoti swaying like a sunflower with the crush and careen, lampblack running his cheeks into his plaited beard, brown eyes peering out across the continent, so that he might smile upon his children in their uncle’s garden, giggling when they should be napping.
The Horde rose up, flurries become packed masses, waves swallowing wrack of tents and baggage, waves that abruptly burned in geometric cages of light …
A motley band of Witches and Schoolmen hung pinned above the passes, voices gravel for abuse, singing sorcery brilliant in proportion to the murk, dispensations small as silver needles beneath the black immensity of the Whirlwind, yet sparking as beacons across the Shigogli all the same, illuminating countless raving white faces, numbers like the sands about the sea.
The Ordealmen trapped in the gullies of the Occlusion rejoiced, loosed a cry that could be seen if not heard, and some dared turn to exult in the spectacle of masses convulsing afire.
But the Sranc came before the Whirlwind, and the Horde, which would have shovelled itself howling into such Gnostic furnaces before, fell still … utterly still … leaving only the cyclone booming about vacancy.
The Shroud was inhaled from the depravities, league after league, revealing a million godlike faces impassive beneath overarching cataclysm.
The Sons of Men traded their cheers for stupefied wonder.
Mog-Pharau, the Whirlwind, walked, robed in tempest, crowned in lightning, and the Horde shrieked forward, terrifying for the singularity of its animating will. The Schoolmen resumed coughing and crying out their songs, disgorging fires, spinning lattices, and watched appalled as the abominations leapt into their phosphorescent ministries en masse, running heedless of torment, faltering only for gruesome incapacity. They advanced as a continuous, pestilential surge, flinging themselves into thrashing heaps of char and tallow, fires that grew ever fatter, ever more liquid. The Schoolmen traded warnings, retreated to what seemed more secure positions, unaware that thousands of Chorae had been scooped from the wrack of Golgotterath and cast with all violence forward, again and again, passing as a cloud through the body of the Horde, until taken up in slings at the foot of the Occlusion.
The surprise was all but complete. The sorcerous lights—and the scenes of riot they struck from the hip of blindness—disappeared across the Black Furnace Plain. The flesh of kings and their captains lay spilled as treasure and splendour at the feet of the Derived, meat for their rapacious hungers.
So did the Great Ordeal of Anasûrimbor Kellhus perish in salt and butchery.
APPENDIX
ONE
The Encyclopaedic Glossary
Author’s note:
Steeped in the classics, Inrithi scholars commonly rendered names in their Sheyic form, opting for native forms only in the absence of antique Sheyic analogues. So, for instance, the surname Coithus (which is mentioned twice by Casidas in The Annals of Cenei) is in fact a Sheyic version of the Gallish “Koütha,” and so is rendered as such here. The surname Hoga, on the other hand, has no extant Sheyic form, and so is rendered in the original Tydonni. Kyranean place names (such as Asgilioch, Girgilioth, or Kyudea) are a notable exception.
The vast majority of the following proper names, then, are simply transliterated from their Sheyic (and in some instances Kûniüric) form. They have been translated only where their Sheyic (or Kûniüric) version does likewise. So, for instance, the Ainoni “Ratharutar,” which has the Sheyic form “Retorum Ratas,” is given as “the Scarlet Spires,” the literal meaning of ratas (“red”) and retorum (“towers”). The etymological provenance and translated meaning of place names can be found bracketed at the end of certain entries.
These would be the names as Drusas Achamian knew them.
A
Abbarsallas (4068—4106)—Mimara’s owner during her first five years in Carythusal.
Abenjukala—The classic treatise on benjuka, written anonymously in Near Antiquity. Because of its emphasis on the relation between benjuka and wisdom, many consider it a classic philosophical text as well.
Abskinis—“Groundless-Grave” (Ihrimsû). Vast well plumbing the Upright Horn, where the Consult casts the bodies of those killed in the Golden Room, by the Carapace or otherwise.
Absolute, the—Among the Dûnyain, the state of becoming “unconditioned,” a perfect self-moving soul independent of “what comes before.” See Dûnyain and Conditioning, the.
Abstractions—An epithet for Gnostic sorceries. See Gnosis, the, and Metagnosis, the.
aculmirsi—Literally, “milestone man,” the epithet used by Near-Antique d
ramaturges to describe those who travelled for the sake of travelling.
Adûnyani—“Little Dûnyain” (Kûniüric from Ûmeritic ar’tûnya, or “little truth”). The name taken by the followers assembled by Kellhus in Atrithau.
Aenaratiol—“Smokehorn” (Aujic). The mountain housing the derelict Nonman Mansion of Cil-Aujas.
Aëngelas (4087—4112)—A Werigdan warrior.
Aenkû Aumor—Ancient Meöri fortress that once guarded Kelmeol, capital of the Meöri Empire.
Aenkû Maimor—Ancient Meöri fortress that once guarded Telmeol, now a scalper entrepot called Fatwall.
Aethelarius VI (4062—4132)—(Sheyic form of Athullara) The King of Atrithau, last of the line of Morghund, killed leading his Men against Cnaiür urs Skiotha and his Scylvendi at the Battle of Eels.
Aeviternal Seal—A great, ornamental plaque unique to every Nonman Mansion, typically set behind the king’s throne, widely thought to be the most sacred of their relics. According to the Holy Juurl, the primary scripture of the Nonmen, Imimorûl, who had hacked off his shield arm to create the Nonmen, took Siol, the House Primordial, as his shield against the Starving (sky). As a symbolic “Shield of Imimorûl,” each Seal was thought to be invested, if not imbued, with the essence of its respective Mansion. “Crack the Shield,” an old proverb went, “sunder the Mountain.”
Agabon, Coithus (4124—4132)—Ordealman and youngest son of King Coithus Narnol, among the first to perish on the Great Ordeal’s trek across the Istyuli Plains.
Agansanor—A province of south central Ce Tydonn, noted for the lengthy beards and martial zeal of its sons.
Age of Bronze—Another name for Far Antiquity, during which bronze was the dominant metal technology of Men.
Age of Cenei—The era of Ceneian dominance of the Three Seas, from the conquest of Nilnamesh in 2478 until the Sack of Cenei in 3351. See Ceneian Empire.
Age of Kyraneas—The era of Kyranean dominance of the northwestern Three Seas, beginning with the Kyranean victory at Narakit in 1591, and ending with the Breaking of Mehtsonc in 2154.