The Idoneth Deepkin are being forced from their watery hideaways by the increasing tumult across the Mortal Realms… and into increasingly risky raids, as today’s installment of the Chronicles of Ruin series demonstrates.
‘I grow weary of this argument,’ said King Ainhurr.
‘But you are firm enough of conscience to indulge me,’ said Odhem. ‘So few of you Akhelians care to confront existential matters.’
‘It is best to leave such things to your Isharann. Since you love the sound of your own voices so dearly, you can debate philosophy until the oceans dry.’
Odhem frowned, but there was the hint of a smile on his face. Ainhurr had always liked the Soulscryer, despite his companion’s tendency towards introspection. Theirs was a comradeship uncommon amongst the Deepkin. Martial-minded Akhelians seldom regarded those of the Isharann order as anything other than rivals, for the balance of power between the two social classes was a tenuous thing. But King Ainhurr had always appreciated Odhem’s quick wit and respected his willingness to give voice to ideas others would gladly have consigned to the deepest trenches of the abyss.
‘What would you have me do?’ the Akhelian said. ‘Call back my warriors? Send them back to the enclave with naught but honourable intentions as comfort? Every year more of our children are born to the withering. If we do not hunt for souls, we diminish.’
‘Do not mistake my words for a land-dweller’s weakness,’ said Odhem. ‘My own hands are stained with blood. For centuries, I have sifted the tides for potent spirits and led you to them. And here we are once more, trapped together in a moment of necessity.’
‘So we agree.’
‘We do not. I speak of our people’s future, not one raid.’
Ainhurr spread his palms wide in a gesture of invitation.
‘You know another way, Soulscryer? Speak now and I will listen.’
‘I do not. But neither have I been given the remit to search. Neither have any of my order truly dedicated themselves to the pursuit of another path. A better path. And in all that time, look at what others have accomplished. Morathi-Khaine has seized the mantle of godhood. True ascension! The lord of the humans has wrought immortal warriors from the tapestry of the heavens, and his armies hold the Ruinous Ones at bay. Even Teclis the Creator has reinvigorated his fallen empire. But we remain content to exist in stasis. As cursed things, feeding on stolen souls.’
Ainhurr said nothing, contemplating Odhem’s speech – implicit condemnation of a way of life that was all the Idoneth had known for centuries. The only reason it was not blasphemy to speak in such a way is that so few Idoneth would think to do so. Yet for all his instinctive aversion to the Soulscryer’s words, he could not deny that they troubled him.
‘I ask this,’ Odhem said softly. ‘Every time we kill to prolong our own lives, do we not prove the Creator right? Do we not reveal ourselves as the very monsters he sought to destroy? I would sooner embrace oblivion than do that.’
‘And I would not,’ King Ainhurr said firmly. ‘I will gladly sacrifice my own honour if it means a future for our people, however harsh and violent it must be.’
In silence, they watched the Namarti advance, climbing hand over hand to scale the rain-lashed cliffs, letting the rising currents of the ethersea ease their ascent. In the silvery light of twin Ghyranite moons, they looked like pale wraiths. Above the cliffs lay the enemy’s warcamp, and from their concealed position in a shadowy cleft in the rock face, Odhem and Ainhurr could see the outlines of sentries silhouetted against the sky. None of them had more than a few moments to live.
‘Tonight’s raid will be a bountiful one,’ said King Ainhurr.
‘Yes,’ said Odhem. ‘Yes, I think it will.’
At first, it seemed that Odhem was right.
The enemy appeared reckless, perhaps glutted by one too many easy victories. Their sentries were lax, some of them hopelessly drunk. The wretches died one by one without even knowing they were attacked, as the sea-mists rolled in and Namarti arrows whipped silently into eyes and throats. None made a sound as they fell.
The great bank of opaque clouds curled over the lip of the cliffs and swept silently down on the foe’s tents. Not all of the warlike humans were caught off guard. Indeed, the shouts of alarm now came swiftly, echoed throughout the encampment. Yet no warriors – no matter how formidable – could outrun the ethersea. Enervating magic from the ocean depths rolled over cooking fires, extinguishing them.
It swept up bands of bleary-eyed killers, who stumbled in a daze, hypnotised by the billowing mass. It sapped the wits, filled mortal minds with half-glimpsed images to incite horror and helplessness. Most of all, it masked King Ainhurr’s Phalanx until they were on their prey.
The Akhelian King led atop his Deepmare steed Maloth, plunging into the heart of the enemy with his sabre lashing out to cut down enemies left and right. His Ishlaen Guard swept in at his side, and their Fangmora Eels hissed in delight as the ethersea was stained with freshly spilled blood. Even as the first stunned victims of the raid collapsed, souls already leaving their torn bodies as they were drawn towards the lurelights held by Soulrenders, the Namarti formations came sweeping in, Reavers loosing arrows on the charge as their frontline brethren lashed out with curved lanmari blades.
‘Sea-aelves!’ a bearded warrior cried, before Ainhurr’s sword sliced through his throat and silenced him forever.
These were hard creatures, these scarred and tattooed killers. They raided as the Idoneth did, although their own rewards were base plunder and carnage. Their souls would be damaged things, and the Dark Gods would not part with their tribute easily. But at least they were still human. Still clinging to their fragile mortality, even as they dangled on the precipice of self-immolation. They were not yet so tainted by malignance as to be valueless, and so their souls were reaped without mercy.
‘Encircle them,’ ordered Ainhurr. ‘Let none escape.’
His Ishlaen moved to obey, corralling the enemy within a ring of crackling energy that danced around the flanks of their aquatic mounts. Ainhurr fought and slew until his arm throbbed with agony from blow after killing blow. But even as the enemy perished, something unpleasant struck him. Was this all that the enemy could muster? Even the most vague reports from his Namarti scouts had suggested their numbers would be greater. Where were the rest?
It was then that the harsh boom of war-horns split the air. They seemed to echo from all around, and now the obscuring mists of the ethersea impeded the Idoneth’s vision where before they had aided their advance. King Ainhurr could hear the tramping of boots and the demented, baying howls of the things that dwelt in the realms’ benighted corners.
‘My King?’ asked Lagainne, his Ishlaen captain, the normally impassive aelf’s words shot through with unease.
‘They knew we were coming,’ muttered Ainhurr. ‘Somehow they knew. They were waiting for us.’
Lagainne opened his mouth to speak, but something fell from the sky and slammed through his coralline armour, pinning him to the saddle of his fangmora. The enraged beast bucked and writhed, and Lagainne’s limp body sagged, held in place by the black haft of a javelin. Shapes emerged from the fog on all sides: no addled and drunken warriors these, but dark champions clad from head to toe in ensorcelled plate and holding aloft icons of the thrice-damned gods.
‘To me, Morrsarr!’ Ainhurr cried, and his eel-riders gathered into a spearhead, armour crackling as it channelled the bio-electricity of their eager mounts. Ainhurr’s heels struck Maloth’s flank, ordering the Deepmare into a headlong charge, and the Fangmora Eels followed at pace, darting towards the approaching block of swords, shields and hate-filled faces. They struck in a strobing eruption of lightning that sent ruin-worshippers reeling, half-blinded as their flesh smoked and burned. Ainhurr drove his helsabre into one horned fiend’s face, and Maloth reared to disembowel another with his raking claws.
Then the enemy recovered their senses and closed their ranks, and the true slaughter began.
By the time that the enemy was driven from the field, it was clear that Dhom-hain would not profit from this soul-raid. Too many Namarti had fallen, their bodies heaped atop the corpses of those they had come here to harvest. Though the Chaos counter-ambush had been thrown back, many of the souls reaped in the brutal, close-quarters fighting were too soiled by corruption to be of use to the Isharann.
Their own losses were a bitter wound that would not easily heal.
‘How did they know?’ said Odhem. The words were hard to pick out, masked as they were by the blood bubbling in his throat.
Ainhurr sighed. ‘Impossible to say. But we are not the only raiding Phalanx to be ambushed in these bitter times. Our ways are known to the land-dwellers now. Even your Isharann magic cannot conceal our every secret.’
‘They lured us,’ Odhem rasped, then made a sound that might have been a sharp, bitter laugh. It ended in a wracking cough that scattered droplets of blood across his robes.
King Ainhurr knelt by his dying comrade. A splinter from a ruin-knight’s lance had pierced the Soulscryer through the ribcage, and the wound was beyond the efforts of any healer to mend. In truth, Ainhurr had no idea how his friend was still capable of speech at all. The aelf’s ruined torso had been dressed with kelp-woven bandages and salves made from the egg sacs of diamondhead sharks, but all that could do was make the Soulscryer’s last moments somewhat more bearable.
‘Do you see why we must change?’ Odhem asked. ‘Do you see why this existence can only lead to our doom? The realms are closing in upon us, my friend. Our deeds can no longer be kept hidden, even by our most powerful magic. We are known. We are seen. We evolved once, to survive annihilation. We must do so again.’
‘Be still,’ said Ainhurr.
Odhem snarled in pain, a crude sound coming from the soft-spoken Isharann.
‘I am dying,’ he said. ‘But I pass my doubts, my fears to you.’
‘I am no philosopher. I am a warrior. What am I to do with doubt?’
The Soulscryer seized Ainhurr by the neck, his nails digging painfully into exposed skin. His eyes narrowed, and with his teeth bloodstained and gritted tight, he had a feral, unsettling look. It was taboo for any Idoneth to lay their hands upon a comrade so, and Ainhurr was so shocked he knew not how to react.
‘Think,’ snarled Odhem. ‘Feel. Ask yourself what is the right course, and what is merely convenient. The time is coming when the Idoneth will face a choice, perhaps the most important one in our long and tragic history. Your duty as an Akhelian King – as a leader – is to ensure we walk the right path.’
Then, with a shudder, the Isharann was gone. His hand fell limply from Ainhurr’s throat. The Akhelian King looked to the sky, where the first slivers of Hysh’s radiance were spearing through the clouds, casting the battlefield in golden light. Grief was an indulgence that the Idoneth could seldom afford to partake in, but still, Odhem’s passing left an ache at his core. He felt as though there was some sane reaction he must now perform, some ritual of remembrance or other symbolic gesture. But he could not imagine what that might be, and so he simply stared at the dead Isharann.
‘Sire?’ said one of Odhem’s retinue, a gaunt woman dressed in silver kelpweave robes. Had she overhead them? It was no crime to speak as Odhem had, but most Akhelians or Isharann would consider his words lunacy.
‘Be about your work,’ said Ainhurr, closing Odhem’s eyes. ‘The Soulrenders have many souls to claim if we are to balance the day’s losses.’
He was not yet ready to face the harshest truths. Nor, he knew, were his people. There would come a time for philosophising, perhaps, but not while the enclaves teetered on the brink of ruin. For now, King Ainhurr would live with his sins.
And yet even as he made his heart cold and focused on the task at hand, the Akhelian heard his friend’s final words ringing in the back of his mind. He suspected he always would.
The Idoneth Deepkin hit pre-orders tomorrow, with a new battletome, a new Spearhead box, a new special character, new Manifestations, and two new Heroes. They’ll be live at the normal time.
