The lone figure's footsteps broke into the dense sand with a sullen 'shumph, shumph, shumph.' Windblown tendrils of the scratchy powder swirled around his leathery tail. He strode a barren plain of white which spread out before towering spires and bluffs of an intruding mountain range. The rugged and imposing artificial cliffs did not belong in his land. They started their invasion sixteen years ago. After the war with the misers from across the ocean was lost, the mountains of the south made their move.
The mountains started slowly, barely noticeable. The man recalled as his footsteps pressed into the wet sand, 'shumph, shumph, shumph'. They began as a small bump that could be easily worked through. His steps plodded, 'shumph, shumph, shumph'. Then they became an outcropping that could be scurted around, 'shumph, shumph, shumph.' They rose to quaint hills that could be scrabbled over, 'shumph, shumph, shumph.' Then they became jagged summits that could be conquered, 'shumph, shumph, shumph'. Finally, they formed imposing cliffs that could only be… 'shumph'… surrendered to.
The man stopped and raised his gaze to the cliffs before him. His eyes were protected from the painful glare of the sand through the slits of his thick plumed helmet. He would not surrender. He would not cower. He would not leave defeated. He drew his glaive.
The mountains had taken his family. They had taken his kingdom. Some said the mountains had even taken his mind. But he would not let them take away his last chance to fight. He would not let the mountains take away his last chance for pride.
He drew a deep breath that filled his lungs with the hot bite of arid air. His chest swelled against his own exposed bulging muscle. He tossed his grey fur cloak back and slammed his glaive against his bare palm. The glaive rang out across the bitter landscape with a harmonic call to the mountains, a call to fight.
The hum of the glaive faded and gave way over the dusty range to the soft hiss of blown sand. The hiss was soon broken by the sound of a 'crump' as a small shadow cracked in the pristine white surrounding him. A burst of sand erupted from the crack as a black object jumped at the man.
He swung his glaive and batted it aside. With a clang, the object tumbled into the sand. It spun around and regarded the man without eyes. It gave him an evil sneer without having a face. The assailant before the man was a black form of charred armour and smooth curves, a strangely constructed vile creature to convey the mountain's tyranny. It lunged at the man, but with a flick of his wrist, he impaled it on his glaive. The evil construct leaked red ichor down his weapon. He dismissively knocked it off with his free hand. The symbol of the mountain's oppression was meaningless without others.
'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump,' Lines and ragged shadows broke out around the man. 'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump,' they surrounded him. Black beings burst out of the sand, casting the man in a haze of white sand as they tore at him. He cleaved the first in half. The second he smashed with his fist. The third crushed with the pummel of his glaive. The fourth tail-whipped, the fifth stabbed, the sixth slashed, the seventh dodged, and the eighth backhanded. The seventh returned only to be batted across the field. They were all meaningless without others… many others.
'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump,' 'crump'…
The drifts around the man erupted as black maligned fiends swarmed him. The man slashed, dodged, parried, evaded, and hacked through the assembling forms. Some scampered to his legs, others lunged at his body, and even others fluttered to gnash at his head. As the man beat them down, his flesh bruised and battered to their pummels and scratches. Each of the black assailants fell to the man's defence in a spray of red liquid. No sound emanated from them as they succumbed to the man's blows.
He knew not how long it took, but eventually, the swarm was slain. The man looked over the lifeless masses strewn about him and the unworldly blood he was covered in. He unclasped his cloak and let it drop to the white and red slush-stained sand.
He stretched his shoulders and took in a satisfied breath. A grim frown formed beneath his helmet, meaningless without many, many, many others.
The ground shook, and the sand parted as a dark mound rose. Its form was an amalgam of shapes like those the man already slew. Blocks and spheres combined with lines and curves to form a head, body, and legs... and fangs and claws. This fiend was not silent like its smaller predecessors. It opened its pointed, gruesome maw to let out a wailing screech into the air. From around the new creation, hundreds of small shadows cracked and rippled out over the sandy desert. Behind the creature, three more amalgams just like it arose from the dune banks; behind those, a mountain began to stir.
The man jabbed his glaive into one of the limp black masses at his feet, letting its blood coat the tip of his weapon. He raised the blade and ran at the shrieking inky form before him. He thrust his glaive into its chest. It howled in pain as it twisted back from the strike.
No matter how hard he tried to ignore the images, to mentally shroud his opponents in shadow and hide their humanity, he could never maintain the delusion. Another swing of his behemoth glaive and he easily sliced through, not an inky shadow, the soft flesh of a young revolutionary. The immense heat permeating from the large weapon cauterized the wound as it was made, denying any blood from dropping onto the field this time. A clean swipe to the side plainly dismembered the enemy, letting them fall lifelessly to the ground.
Even sixteen years later, the mokoi had to bury his emotions deep within himself as he stared at his fallen opponent's vacant, hollow eyes. This was not what he had envisioned when he carried the Mokoi Khan back to its rightful position. He had been promised that the mokoi would no longer have to turn on their own brethren for meagre scraps, that they would stand united in a glorious reckoning against the humans. That Trammel, lush and untamed, was theirs to claim.
Instead, here he stood, without a leader, his hands stained with the blood of his own kind. The betrayal of his Khan's death had shattered everything—fractured the unity of the mokoi, leaving them scattered and faithless. The dream of conquest had crumbled into a nightmare of infighting, his own brothers and sisters now the enemy. The continent had completely collapsed into disarray, an endless war of survival among those who had once stood together as a single, unyielding force, just like it had been before the Khan.
He was a broad, powerful mokoi; his skinless upper-half revealed his bulging muscle in impeccable detail, each fibre of centuries-refined tissue flexing in violent synchronicity. The heavy weight of his serpentine lower half crushed the feeble skeletons of the fallen soldiers he slithered over.
The enemy would try to steer clear of him as much as they could, but few could escape the incredible reach of his terrifying glaive. Its blade stretched far beyond the height of most mokoi, a lethal arc that struck down any who dared venture too close. Coupled with his immense size, he could engage enemies long before they had a chance to close in. On the battlefield, he was an unstoppable machine of visceral devastation, cutting through all who opposed him with ruthless efficiency.
Usually, he would spend most of his time in the war tents strategizing and planning for future encounters, but the expediency with which this theatre needed to close was paramount to reclaiming the Abyss. After hours of tense deliberation, the generals decided he would have to leave the safety of the command tent and join the front lines to 'encourage' the tide of battle.
It took mere moments for his presence to crush the morale of the enemy. The tide of battle, once fierce and chaotic, had already begun to shift, and now it was less about engagement and more about hunting down those who scrambled to escape. His mere arrival turned the battlefield into a slaughterhouse, as the retreating forces were cut down with brutal efficiency. Within hours of his involvement, the field was all but empty, the last remnants of the enemy scattered and broken. The battle was a resounding victory, leaving plenty of time to spare.
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Under any other circumstances, these would have been hailed as stupendous results, a triumph worthy of celebration for the entire war effort. But as the soldiers reveled in their victory, he couldn't find himself as excited as his contemporaries. It was their own people that the soldiers were celebrating having killed, their own family, their own friends.
He had much preferred the simpler days when they were invading the pathetic humans. Now, everything was on hold, the real war stalled by this chaotic civil strife and this absurd Surrogate Revolutionary Army problem, and a problem it was.
He never understood what his Khan saw in Arete. From the beginning, there was something about her that didn't sit right with him—something cold, calculating, and disingenuous. He never trusted her, and, looking back, he knew he'd been right to doubt her loyalty. But he had chosen to trust in the Khan. He had chosen to stay silent, to let the Khan's "special little project" unfold unchecked, believing that his leader knew best. He stood by as Arete received resources, support, and influence—her poisonous tongue corrupting the mokoi army from within.
Now, he was paying the price for his passivity. The Khan was dead, the dream shattered, and Arete, alongside that monstrous White Witch, was defiling the throne. His hesitation had allowed this rot to spread, and he could no longer escape the consequences of his inaction. Every part of him wanted to scream at the loss, but all he could do now was watch as the mokoi's legacy was tarnished beyond repair.
He stared down at the barren land below, his gaze falling on the soulless husks of his people lying dead—his enemies, yes, but still his people. Due to the nature of his weapon, they appeared bloodless, and he sincerely hoped that, at the very least, his strikes had been swift and exact enough that his blows had killed them without pain. It was a small mercy, but the thought that they might have died quickly, without suffering, was the only thing he could hold onto in the face of the devastation he had wrought. Still, deep inside, a cold voice whispered that mercy was a luxury now, and the world no longer allowed for it.
His eyes locked onto the face of one of the fallen, an oblong face marred by a distinctive birthmark that covered the right side. There was something unmistakably familiar about her, but it took him a moment to place it. His mind, worn and aged, searched through a long history of faces, names, and forgotten moments—until it struck him with sharp clarity.
Not long ago, she had fought in his corps, eager and full of promise. A young recruit who had practically leapt at the chance to join the Second Human-Mokoi War as soon as she was of age to enlist, driven by a fierce patriotism.
He remembered seeing her fleetingly at the Rain Theatre one night—her face alight with the fire of a cause she wholeheartedly believed in. He could remember her youthful enthusiasm shining through as she regaled him about her family's failing farm that provided for their village, about her hatred for the lavish lives of the humans. She had despised their comfort, their decadence, and the way they lived while her people struggled.
She stood out so clearly in his memory because he remembered that despite all the disdain and hatred, she wanted not for vengeance. She had aspired for the war to end with a peace treaty in which humans and mokoi could live together in equality.
That didn't happen.
Instead, the war was paused while the mokoi fought against each other for scraps once again. Arete and the White Witch would infect the susceptible minds of the young, including this girl, and lead them to their deaths on this battlefield.
It was a fruitless endeavour, this conflict among their own kind. A senseless cycle of bloodshed and betrayal, where idealism was used as bait and loyalty as a weapon. The war that should have united them was now nothing more than a farce—a spectacle of death and despair. And in the end, all that remained was the cold inevitability of his glaive. With each swing, there would be no redemption, no victory—only death, swift and merciless.
He found himself pondering how Arete and the White Witch managed to convert someone like her to their side, how they could twist her mind and shatter her purity. She once had such a wholesome dream of saving all the mokoi, and that led her to rebel against and slaughter those same mokoi. The words from Arete's mouth must have been a very sweet toxin to violate an innocent conscience so thoroughly.
He hunched his body over her fallen form, his rough hand gently sweeping over her eyelids to close them. The small, private gesture cast a shadow over the jubilant soldiers around him. Their laughter and shouts faltered, eyes flicking toward him with concern, but he paid them no mind. Their joy felt distant, foreign, something found in a noble's gala, not atop the rotting death of allies mislead.
He ignored their concerned glances. He had a lot more work ahead of him, after all.
There were still many more extractions that needed to be organized for the mokoi still left abandoned in Trammel. He also had to be quick to capitalize on this astounding victory if they wanted to reclaim the Abyss. He definitely could not forget to increase the search efforts for Princess Vow since they would need her if they wanted the full support of the nobles and legitimize their claim to the throne.
It was obvious to any humble citizen that they were the original mokoi army and true representatives of the throne, but the seat of power often spoke more than honour. So long as the revolutionaries were strong and profitable, there would be no shortage of backers from the mokoi elite.
The work ahead of him was truly endless. He couldn't help but wonder if he would ever live to see the mokoi peacefully settled on Trammel, free from war and strife. Well, mokoi aside from the Pleurothallidinae, of course.
The Pleurothallidinae didn't count, though; they were nearly as bad as the revolutionaries. The moment they tasted Trammel's bountiful riches, they abandoned their homeland without a second thought. They had refused to lift a finger when their people needed them, too busy basking in their newfound comforts. Even now, as their homeland faced an existential crisis, the Pleurothallidinae remained stubbornly neutral—too self-absorbed to care about anything beyond their own indulgence.
If he ever got a chance to meet that pompous beach-obsessed, war-averse, duck-admiring, human-curious, blood-gourmet in person, he would personally execute him on the spot. Sadly, he probably wouldn't get such a cathartic opportunity for an irritatingly long time, if ever.
Before he could entertain such fantasies, the civil war with the Surrogate Revolutionary Army demanded his full attention. A task that, for now, would be waged far from the bloodied fields and deep within the confines of the war room. The battlefield was no longer where the real work needed to be done—at least not for him. There were plans to be laid, strategies to be crafted, and alliances to be secured. It was there where the war would actually be won or lost, not the battlefield.
He at least had the mercy of being so lost in his wandering mind that he reached the tent without recognizing any more past comrades among the dead. He nearly even walked right past the war room if it weren't for one of its guards hailing him down.
He stepped into the tent, and immediately, he was met with the eager chattering of the small mokoi gathered there. Their energy was a sharp contrast to his own exhaustion. It was clear that these generals—more tacticians than warriors—would never be seen on the battlefield, at least not in the way he was. They were the thinkers, the strategists, the ones who sat behind desks while others spilled blood. In a line-up against knights, they would appear laughable, yet their actions were weighed in the thousands of lives.
One of the smallest of the bunch, a bulbous, toad-like mokoi no bigger than a thumb, bounced forward. His eyes gleamed with an almost manic excitement, and he was the first to speak. "Ah, General Zeal! It appears news travels faster than you do. A stupendous job, as usual."
A resounding chorus of agreement swept through the room as many nodded and hummed in approval. But General Zeal did not join in this celebration either. He stood still, his face stern, and his silence spoke louder than any words. The other generals quickly sensed his displeasure and the room fell silent, the energy draining out of it as they awaited his response.
Zeal handed his glaive to a gangly servant standing nearby, who hurried off with the weapon to have it cleaned. Without a word, Zeal approached the round table at the center of the room. His eyes immediately fixed on the map laid before him, its surface now marked with symbols and lines that told the tale of battles fought and territories lost and gained. He stared at it for a long moment, the silence of the room pressing in on him as he took in the dramatic changes that had occurred in his absence.
The map, once a symbol of their controlled expansion, now seemed to reflect a war that was spinning out of control. There were gaps in the territories, sudden shifts in positions, and marks that hinted at defeats he hadn't yet heard of. It wasn't just the land that had changed—it was the very nature of the war itself and, with it, his own place within it.
Perhaps it was due to his toxic partnership with Arete from the Second Human-Mokoi War, but he wondered if they had purposefully sent him out into battle so that they could change the plans without him. He tried to mask the bitterness in his voice, but it slipped through, unmistakable. "Why are we sending troops to claim the vernal nest? Hadn't we decided we would need our full force to claim the supply routes to the Abyss bridge?"
A rotund mokoi at the back of the room bristled at Zeal's confrontational tone, his expression twisting into one of barely restrained annoyance. He did not take kindly to the challenge. "We received an update from the thirteenth scouting squad," he snapped, his voice laced with spite. "It seems that the Surrogates were planning on forming an alliance with the nest and flanking our forces from behind."
Zeal ignored the bitterness from his contemporary, he was too distracted by the news itself. "But we formed a treaty," he said, his voice tight with disbelief. "We agreed that using the nest was a war crime; they're just children."
"The Surrogates are criminals, General Zeal," the rotund mokoi said, his voice dripping with disdain. "Do you really think they would hesitate for a second to break that treaty once it benefits them?"
Zeal's gaze hardened as he glared at the generals around him, the weight of their expectations pressing down on him. "If we respond to the Surrogates by stooping to their level, then why not just join them?" His voice was a low growl, filled with simmering frustration. "We will not be claiming the nest—"
"But the—"
Zeal cut the mokoi off with a sharp motion, raising his hand to silence the interruption. The room seemed to freeze for a moment, the sharpness of his gesture enough to make even the most vocal generals hesitate. The mokoi fell silent, lips twitching with uncertainty. Zeal's voice was colder, harder now as he continued.
"We will not be claiming the nest. But we can't let the Surrogates claim it either. We can send some troops to intercept them before they arrive. The Vernal Bacillus will not be involved in any aspect of this war."
"The nest is an impeccable fortress," the fat general interjected, his tone insistent. "It would be far easier to defend from within."
Zeal glared at his queriless ally. "The Vernal Bacillus will not be involved in any aspect of this war."
The short toad was about to intervene before the two generals erupted into a shouting match, but they were interrupted by the chime of a bell. All the generals except for Zeal retreated away from the sound while guards poured into the room with weapons drawn. Zeal, however, remained rooted to the spot, his expression unreadable as he watched the sudden intrusion unfold.
In front of Zeal there was what seemed to be a small pink rhombus that grew out of thin air, or it was a rhombus, but its body would reject any stable state. It would shift and transform, shrink and grow, continuously morphing into other shapes. The pink shape finally locked into a form resembling that of a featureless human with only one limb. The arm was outstretched towards Zeal holding a glowing parchment: It read.
