Battle of Smith's Sorrows, Part Six
Twenty-Third of the Second Month 294 AC
There was something surreal, Lya thought, about floating above the battle field watching the armies of the dead march amid devouring mists while her other self, her other iteration, was looking out over Sorcerer's Deep, a book discussing ethereal passages and arcane permutations still gripped in her hand. Contrary to what her friends might think and slyly jest, Lya could not actually read through anything.
At least you will live through it no matter what happens, the soft but undeniable voice of fear whispered in her mind. She shook off the thought firmly, she might be able to survive this body's death in a more straightforward way than most, but that did not mean she wanted to experience the pain of dying.
Here in the heart of the enemy host were gathered, ironically enough not the powers of Sarnath where the Dead God had by all assumptions come to dwell, but those of Gornath. A spectral plague of squeaking scurrying rats moved among the feet of warriors armed in crude iron. Of course some had died already, to dragon fire and herald's magic, to the light of incarnate spirits in the guise of cat and raven, even to a few spells conjured from Lya's own staff, but not enough, not near enough.
They were not just rats, she and Dany had gown more confident speaking among themselves from mind to mind. The souls that made up that twisted horde were much of what remained of the people of Gornath who perished in that final horrid siege. Beyond despair at a king slain and prayers unanswered, there had at the end been only hunger, the desperate need to see one more sunrise, and that itself had bred desperate deeds. Lya could not claim to be shocked at the notion of the living eating the dead, not after what she had seen in Tyrosh among the Daemon worshipers and in the far North among those enthralled by the Others, but there was something particularly sickening about souls shattering like that, reduced to blind instinct and dim malice, stripped of their reason.
A mind was a wondrous thing, each eye seeing the world with subtle differences worthy of contemplation, and of all that what did the Second Rising of Gornath make... blood and rats.
The enemy was growing close now, the crimson seeming to
clot around the ragged wounds that fires had torn into it and make of hollow bones and empty skulls a
thing far darker, the bloody visage of a city in ruin. A part of Lya, the part that was ever asking question of magic, wondered what will animated these beings. Were they among the greater dead who had simply stood back, perhaps beneath a glamor, or were they truly some transformation of lesser horrors curdled into new and terrible life by the will that drove them all?
Alas that even eyes that could glimpse the warp and weft of magic could not pick out the truth among the haze of death magic.
Viserys, it seemed, had better luck from above:
"The mist is weakening and so are the rats. I can see a sorcerer hiding among the throng greater than any other here. I think the Rat King is pulling the strings even as Anu-Simung is pulling his. Be ready to counter any time magic..."
As Lya began to climb to have a better look at the Lord of Gornath, Dany interjected into the mental communion.
"It looks like the Rat King is the key here but he is also a miser. Kill him and all his power will flow into the mist and the rats just as they come upon the legion."
"Yet trying to trap him leaves us with fewer options and more of a chance he'll slip away again," Lya countered as she caught sight of a hooded figure among the most wretched and rotting corpses well beyond the front lines. The last place she would have thought to look for the commander of the armies, for it seemed just one more common corpse exhumed to bury them in bodies, but Viserys' eyes had not deceived him. Looking closely she could see how the mist moved with him, through him.
How do you deal with the Rat King?
[] Kill him at once, the lines will hold
[] Try to sever the link and capture him
[] Write in
OOC: Sorry this took such an unreasonably long times guys. Not yet edited.
