Ganath - A Jaghut female
Paran reined in, watching as a tall, gaunt figure climbed free of the barrow, slowly straightening. Grey-green skin, trailing dusty cobwebs, wearing a silver-clasped harness and baldric of iron mail from which hung knives in copper scabbards -- the various metals blackened or green with verdigris. Whatever clothing that had once covered the figure’s body had since rotted away.
A Jaghut woman, her long black hair drawn into a single tail that reached down to the small of her back. Her tusks were silver-sheathed and thus black. She slowly looked round, finding and settling on him. Vertical pupils set in amber studied Paran from beneath a heavy brow. (BH)
“One of my rituals has been shattered. I must needs repair it.” (BH)
Paran to Ganath: “Ah, yes, to repair the damage to that ritual of yours. I’m curious, what did it imprison?”
“A sky-keep of the K’Chain Che’Malle. And … other things.” (BH)
The Jaghut, Ganath, stood looking into the chasm. The sorcerous weaving she had set upon this … intrusion, had shattered. She did not need to descend that vast fissure, nor enter the buried Skykeep itself, to know the cause of that shattering. Draconic blood had been spilled, although that in itself was not enough. The chaos between the warrens had also been unleashed, and it had devoured Omtose Phellack as boiling water does ice.
Yet her sense of the sequence of events necessary for such a thing to happen remained clouded, as if time itself had been twisted within that once-floating fortress. There was outrage locked in the very bedrock, and now, a most peculiar imposition of … order.
She wished for companions here, at her side. Cynnigig, especially. And Phyrlis. As it was, in this place, alone as she was, she felt oddly vulnerable.
Ganath pulled her unhuman gaze from the dark fissure -- in time to see, flowing across the flat rock to either side, and behind her, a swarm of shadows -- and now figures, huge, reptilian, all closing in on where she stood.
She cried out, her warren of Omtose Phellack rising within her, an instinctive response to panic, as the creatures closed.
There was no escape -- no time --
She understood, suddenly, that strange sense of order. K’Chain Che’Malle, a recollection stirred to life once more, after all this time. They had returned, then. But not the truly chaotic ones. No, not the Long-Tails. These were the others, servants of machines, of order in all its brutality. Nah’Ruk (BH)
Sarkanos, Ivindonos and Ganath stood looking
down on the heaped corpses, the strewn pieces
of flesh and fragments of bone. A field of battle
knows only lost dreams and the ghosts clutch
futilely at the ground, remembering naught but
the last place of their lives, and the air is sullen
now that the clangour is past, and the last moans
of the dying have dwindled into silence.
While this did not belong to them, they
yet stood. Of Jaghut, one can never know their
thoughts, nor even their aspirations, but they
were heard to speak, then.
“All told,” said Ganath. “This sordid
tale here has ended, and there is no one left
to heave the standard high, and proclaim
justice triumphant.”
“This is a dark plain,” said Ivindonos,
“and I am mindful of such things, the sorrow
untold, unless witnessed.”
“Not mindful enough,” said Sarkanos.
“A bold accusation,” said Ivindonos,
his tusks bared in anger. “Tell me what I am
blind to. Tell me what greater sorrow exists
than what we see before us.”
And Sarkanos made reply, “Darker plains
lie beyond.”
Stela Fragment (Yath Alban)
Anonymous
