God of Broken Things

Chapter 21

As the human mind is wont to do in order to protect itself, the razor-edged panic of my nearness to death quickly blunted and began fading to a rusty memory. We are so very talented at fooling ourselves. I took deep, regular breaths. When I calmed down, I sensed I had company. A quiet presence had been waiting outside the tent for what I suspected was quite some time. The Eldest of the ogarim had travelled all the way from its weird black pyramid inside Kil Noth for an audience.

I dressed carefully; every movement an agony. My hands were clumsy and nigh-useless things, one a lump of tainted iron and the other taken by fits of twitching and trembling at the slightest movement. I found it immensely frustrating, especially after enjoying the use of two working hands again, borrowed though they were. It occurred to me that we didn’t realise how much we took things for granted until we lost them. A missing leg or hand would make you look at the entire world differently when a step or a door posed a challenge, and it made tying my gods-damned belt an exercise in choking down anger.

Talking about choking, my mouth was a desert and my belly rumbled angrily – of course, I hadn’t been in this body for a day and a night so I hadn’t actually had anything to eat or drink save whatever Jovian might have poured down my throat, if the mad little Esbanian had even thought of it.

I exited the tent and winced against the afternoon sun, sinking low and red over the half-frozen and shadow-wreathed valley. The looming bulk of the white-furred ogarim was stood waiting right out in the open and my coterie guarding the tent were completely oblivious of either it or myself. The Eldest was in their minds fogging all memory and perception with the casual ease afforded by millennia of practice.

Come with me to a place of power, it thought. I must show you more. You must make an informed choice.

That did not sound good.

I shook my head. I need to warn them about the elder tyrant and Scarrabus queen. Can’t you just quickly dump all I need to know into my brain as you did before?

It exhaled, its breath sharp with the scent of raw onion. They can do nothing until your other humans return. The full understanding of this ancient knowledge is more important and will require a period of reflection. You have time enough to do both.

Its urgency pressed on me like a lead weight, so I nodded my acceptance.

It led me through the camp, past men and women busy preparing wooden stakes, sharpening blades and fletching arrows. Their mood was nervously buoyant – they had no idea it had all gone to shite in the north and our forces were fleeing for their lives. I spotted Secca in her black and white hood and she paused, brow furrowed, eyes scanning across the camp as if for a second she had sensed something was amiss. I thought about passing on a warning of what was happening to the north, but the ogarim warned we would be revealed and delayed. Everything that could be done was already being done. She blinked, shook her head and moved on.

How far away was Eva now? Could I contact her?

I opened myself up and reached out across the valley, speeding north as far as I dared, as far as I could without straining my Gift, but it was a big place and I found no sign of her mind, or any of her wardens. It was as futile as looking for a handful of raindrops causing ripples somewhere on the surface of a lake. Hopefully that meant she would also be safe from that smug shite Abrax-Masud as well.

We took our time climbing a gentle incline above camp. I didn’t think the ogarim kept a relaxed pace out of consideration, and thought it more likely it was never in a habit of rushing anywhere. At the peak of the hill a stone circle had once stood proud, the great slabs worn down by age and element until only stumps remained jutting from the bones of the hill. Nearby lay the crumbling ruins of an ancient temple of human design, the remaining vaulted arches and tumbled granite blocks only hinting at the vastness of some ancient clan’s long-vanished halls and forgotten gods.

The Eldest entered the stone circle and planted its great hairy arse down in the very centre, heedless of the snow. I had to kneel, and even that was an ordeal, the wounds in my back pulling tight. It said nothing and my impatience grew – Eva was out there fighting, fleeing, dying; I didn’t know which.

This is a place of peace and power where the magic sings if you open yourself to it. I got the distinct impression it thought me incapable of that kind of subtlety. Long ago the elders of my race gathered here to share their wisdom. Here we shall wait until the stars emerge and broken Elunnai rises to her fullness.

“No we bloody won’t,” I replied aloud through irritation. “I don’t give a crap about your crusty old traditions. People are dying out there and the enemy is upon us. Why would I care about a gods-damned history lesson? Tell me what you want right now or I’m fucking off to go and do something actually useful.”

A glacial, slow surge of irritation submerged just as slowly back beneath calm waters. So be it.

All of its race’s history opened up before me. War. Ogarim fighting huge towering monstrosities crafted from flesh and bone. Winning. Always winning as their magic eventually overpowered everything and anything the Scarrabus queens could throw at them. The problem was numbers, and the towering guilt and pain of causing such bloodshed. The ogarim were so pitifully few compared to their enemy, and they could not be everywhere at once. The war required nine tenths of their entire population to leave their home realm, with only the very young and a few ancient guardians left behind free from the suffering of war.

Over hundreds of years – not so long to a race of Gifted immortals like the ogarim – realm after realm was cleansed of the Scarrabus presence, until finally they came to a lush tropical world that had been turned into a breeding pit for those vile creatures’ abominations. The ogarim had never seen anything like the scale of it: an entire world’s resources bent towards a single horrific purpose.

The Eldest witnessed this for itself as a youth: a group of ogarim advancing on a great beast rising from the largest of the pits. This beast was formed from the bodies of countless thousands of other creatures, including their own kind captured or killed in the wars. As they had every time before, the ogarim set the unrivalled might of their awesome magic against it, expecting total victory.

I shuddered inside the vision. I knew this creature. It was the Magash Mora, the beast that devoured all magic. It fed on their magic, engulfed the ogarim and absorbed their flesh and Gifts into itself.

The Eldest’s pain was raw despite the passage of millennia. Formed from a seed taken from their god-beast and grown in a pit of flesh and blood.

How did you defeat it? I asked.

We could not. We destroyed that world by pushing it closer to its sun. All life burned.

Sweet Lady Night. They had that kind of power?

Yes. Which is why the Scarrabus desired to possess our flesh at all costs. With our magic they would reign unopposed for all the tomorrows yet to come.

With their greatest breeding pits destroyed, the long war among the Far Realms was all but done and won, and what few Scarrabus remained were scattered and in hiding, slumbering in the deep dark places beneath minor and forgotten realms. Without the Scarrabus their great god-beast was lost, blind and starving in the void between realms. The home of the ogarim – here – was finally safe. Nine tenths of the ogarim race had left their home to wage war in alien worlds, but after centuries of battle only two broken remnants of the nine returned alive, expecting to experience an age of peace and rest, and to rediscover the joy of dancing under the stars with their innocent kin who had never known that abomination called war.

What they found waiting for them was… us. Humans. Broken Ones.

The infested Eldest they left behind to die had mastered their magic and somehow slowed its inevitable death. It had broken free, with only younglings and a few decrepit guardians to oppose it. Ogarim did not kill ogarim, but the Scarrabus had no such compunction. It slew the guardians and used the younglings as raw material in vile flesh-crafting experiments. It broke them apart and bred a lesser form of being, one with a more restricted access to magic that the parasites could safely tolerate. That Scarrabus queen had succeeded in creating their perfect host. And then it had hatched its eggs.

We humans thought ourselves so vitally important and so very unique. We were the rulers of this world, the strongest and most intelligent of beings ever to grace any realm. Hah! It turns out we were made things, mere hosts designed by a perverse Scarrabus mind. The Arcanum and the pompous priests would love learning they were originally naught but tools.

My world rocked only slightly – after all, had the great Archmagus Byzant himself not interfered with my boyish mind to serve his own needs? Had my beloved old mentor and father figure not twisted my personality into this bone-headed sarcastic fool that I was, with an aim to getting me killed before I ever achieved any real power? However, as any parent knows – look at my old friend Charra and her daughter Layla for example – children do not always follow the path their parents lay out for them.

What then? I asked.

Magical war like we had never experienced. Beyond a few other powerful but isolated races pitifully few in number, notably the ravak, what you call daemons lack that connection to the sea of magic. We were exhausted and not prepared for… you, and your enslavers. It felt reluctant to elaborate on its interactions with those ancient humans. But that was not what broke the spirit of the ogarim.

I could suddenly see the second moon in the sky, a baleful red weeping wound that was growing larger with every second that passed. The ogarim’s fear washed over me, never forgotten and never to be diminished. The surviving Scarrabus had called their starving god to our home to eat and to breed more of their disgusting kind.

I gasped aloud from shock. “What did you do?” We chained and twisted our oldest ally, a great and honourable elder spirit, and crafted it into the most dreadful weapon ever forged by our race. We had learned much about death over the course of the war. The ways to burn, to freeze, to burst the blood inside, to call lightning, to drain all the magic of life and to kill the mind… many others you would not understand. All of our skill and power combined into one last great working of magic that claimed most of what was left of our race.

I watched through its eyes as they threw the moon at the godbeast of the Scarrabus. What is now the broken moon, Elunnai, slammed into the red stain in the sky, and the last of their magic exploded through it in mind, and body. A magical apocalypse was unleashed that shattered the moon and turned the night red as blood. The spirits of this realm screamed; most perished.

The Scarrabus shrieked in rage and pain all over the world as their god-beast fell to earth, burning and unconscious, its vast mind a fragmented thing drained of all magic. The elder spirit fell with it, forever chained to the enemy. They slammed through the skin of the world and its fiery blood spewed into the sky.

We had thought to kill it. We failed. It cannot be killed and would rise again in time.

I watched as seasons flickered passed and molten rock solidified into a great plug of black rock, a scab sealing the beast deep below the earth – this then was the birth of my home, Setharis.

What of the infested Eldest? I asked.

The ogarim shrugged. Legend suggests it was slain by its own spirit-bound weapon, turned upon it by a mere human free of

Scarrabus control. I think it did not foresee danger from their own slave race as a possibility.

Their queen on this realm destroyed, the Scarrabus were thrown into disarray until another could be hatched. Much to the parasites’ shock, their tools, their pit-bred hosts, rebelled en masse, and turned magic upon their masters.

This was unexpected, the ogarim commented. Never before had we witnessed a creation of the Scarrabus exercising free will. They had built you too well. Or perhaps it was due to magic affecting your twisted minds. We shall never know for certain.

I had to ask. I had to know, and would likely never get another chance. “The thing, the idea, we call the Worm of Magic – is it real? Is magic alive? Why does it twist us?”

As alive as all life is. Magic is life. You question the changes wrought upon your human minds and bodies, the corruption as your thoughts call it. The Worm of Magic is not at fault. Your bodies are. Your Gifts are not natural, and they still remember that which was ogarim. Magic does not corrupt you – your Gifts flail to blindly fix that which was broken long ago.

A shiver rippled up my spine. Sweet Lady Night…

Indeed. Time marched on and black pyramids and soaring towers rose from the rock of Setharis. We could not kill it so we built a prison, and then the remnants of my people left this realm of pain and regret to find a new home elsewhere. Some few stayed on as wardens, however the task has proven beyond our ability to endure for eternity. The very first gods of Setharis… the hair on the back of my neck rose as I studied the five raising vast towers and found I recognised one of their number: a slender human woman in a silver mask: Lady Night.

Not human. Not ogarim. Its thoughts were filled with shame and abject gratitude. An elder spirit now eternally chained to this place by our magic. Never again will Elunnai watch over us from the night sky with an eye of shining silver. Weep for her broken one, weep as we do.

Tears rolled hot and heavy down my scarred cheeks. With her assistance, the ogarim wardens ripped the half- digested hearts of stars from the belly of the Scarrabus’ godbeast and placed them within their own breasts, granting them inconceivable power. With it came chains that bound them to their captive, most of that power used to keep the thing drained and deep in slumber.

And one of those crystals had only recently been sitting in my coat pocket…

I felt its curiosity piqued at why I had turned down my chance for greater godhood. There is so much more. Let me show you–

I pulled away. “Blah blah blah. I don’t have time for history lessons.” It was all very fascinating, if totally beyond me, and currently pointless. “Why am I here?”

It reeled back, shocked at my shortsighted attitude, though to my mind the sands of time were running far too low to dally with this sort of thing. Your hand, it said. It consumes you. Angharad has foreseen that you will die unless you form a binding pact with the Queen of Winter. Though I have not her foresight, I have seen enough signs of the coming danger to sense the truth in her words. You will die if you do not gain the power of being greater than yourself, and in your failure loose the imprisoned upon all realms once more.

I licked dry lips. “What choices do I have?”

Form the pact. Or all will die.

It abruptly stood and walked away. “Wait! I have more questions.”

Then find one that can offer something other than history.

Snow swirled and it was gone, leaving me alone on a deserted hillside with a wet arse and a sore head. Just… what the fuck had I just seen? I… fuck. How could I even begin to wrap my head around seeing the entire history of my world spread out before me? I had witnessed the birth of my race.

The answer was simple. I couldn’t. I had to ignore it. Prepare to fight. With two useless hands, a dodgy back, and wounds that would take at least another day or two to heal I was no good to anybody. Not without help.

I rubbed my chest, where I still bore silvery scars from my grandmother’s nails. After witnessing the enormity of what would be unleashed if we failed, I had no choice but to bite my tongue and beg her to work that damned ritual again. I supposed that was the whole fucking point of the Eldest’s history lesson, that manipulative hairy arsehole.