Tales of Destiny

In the rolling dunes where skirmishes and battles were fought, where young heroes bloomed and old ones shepherded, a story, one of many, played out. These battles, these tales, every one of them mattered. But in the east, in the uttermost east, where the dunes were as much ash as sand, the earth was black, and the very air leeches life from men’s lungs, a war had been fought.

A war of fire, a war of steel, a war against the ancient Dead, to decide the flows of fate, the choices which would wash back to those smaller heroes.

When the men of the Golden Fields had come here, chasing tales of the gathering Dead, they had found them surely enough. Great mobs of ashen hunger, lashing out at all within reach. And yet, they had found something else as well. Towers, towers built all across the rolling hills of the furthest east, of white and blue mortared stone and brick, blooming with life and braziers of smokeless white fire.

There had been confusion. Words shouted between high walls manned by stern and dusky men and the fish scaled giants which walked among them, and the suspicious horse-borne lords of the Fields and their glittering banners.

But the Dead abounded, and so contact was brief. The lords wheeled their steeds and charged down the mobs of the Dead, the men of the towers descended on wings of fire and light and reaped great tolls with sun-fletched arrows.

And yet where men are, quarrels emerge. Once, twice, thrice, and more they clashed, scouts captured, fire exchanged, rituals interrupted and besmirched.

Behind towers, in warded camps, men spoke in two different tongues of expelling the barbarians.

But the Dead hunger. Always, they hunger. They are empty, and what remains to them is no patient thing.

For that all must be thankful.

For the legion which marched from the Grave of the Sun cared not for petty squabbles, and underneath the tread of countless millions of the Dead, all thoughts of living enemies were erased.

For the men of the Fields, it was the nightmare of their grandfather’s grandfathers, a muster of the Dead which blanketed the earth, within which marched heroes of legend withered to mummified horrors. In the sky the long-dead Heavenly Patriarch of the East let out a keening roar, empty eye sockets now vast caverns of green fire, black and rotten scales raining death upon the earth, the twisting coils of a dragon lord wrought as the shadow of a mountain in the sky.

For the men of the towers, there was only horror, for only the least favored of seers had ever whispered that such things could still be in the lands of the Dead. White fires blazed one and all, desperate messages all the way back to the far distant sea, and the glittering cities which laid beyond its lapping waves.

In this at least the men of the Golden Fields were better prepared. As panic and furor overcame the towers, prayers and rites were performed, great smoking bonfires were raised in their war camps, and men were daubed with purifying salts.

If they were already slain, then they would not betray their homes, but pass forever into the fires. Such was life in the Golden Fields.

They were not alone. Their homes were behind them. And Grandfather was coming.

Three days and three nights they were assailed. The roar of tigers and the whinneys of horses echoed, the sky was alight with fires, with lightning, with blades of wind. Living champions clashed against the Dead, and were worn down wound by wound.

They and the tower men were pushed apart. The smokeless fire of the tower men burned the Dead, but choked on the mass of them. The men on their wings of light were ripped from the sky and poisoned by falling draconic ash. Towers crumbled. Lines crumbled. The champions of the Golden Fields were dragged down one by one. A Lord of the Han roared his last fury, shattering bones for a kilometer around as he drove his blade through a dragon's skull, even as he was torn apart by the cold-burning talons and claws of what remained of the once proud phoenixes of the east.

Men of the Fan beat their spears upon their shields and stamped their feet in bellowing challenge as their peers retreated, and raised ramparts of stone a hundred meters high to bar their way, and in the end to fall upon the Dead and crush them in their thousands. Their Lord stood until all was lost, his warspear striking thunderous clashes against a giant of an Ashwalker whose bones still hung with thick cords of muscle and bristled with crimson hair, its jaw rattling in an endless cruel laugh. He and his foe both vanished into the earth in the end, dragged down to swim in the Nameless mother’s magmatic blood.

For three days, such tales abounded. The men of the Fields died. The men of the towers died.

They were pushed back kilometer by kilometer, but they did not break.

It was on the fourth day that the Deathly Dragon Patriarch's roar was matched. It echoed, a deep bestial thing that reached into men's hearts where the cowering prey they had once been still lived.

And among the men of the Golden Fields, it wrought joy. The horizon-drowning deathly pestilence of the Dragon’s breath, thus far staved off only with the dwindling store of talisman craft and at the cost of many lives, met the wall of sound rolling across the ashen dunes and scattered.

A paw larger than a castle keep crashed down among the Dead, crushing bones to dust, and the White Tiger, Ancestor of the Han, was visible for but a moment before her wake tore a canyon through the legion of the Dead. Sandstorms and whirlwinds came in her wake, funnels of wind rising into the clouds, the air screaming and igniting with sheer force.

And a thousand more roars, smaller but still shattering the sky, followed, as her descendants rode behind her.

The white tiger and the black dragon clashed in the sky, shockwaves ripping through the dust and the winds as titans clashed, ripping claws tearing yawning gashes in dead scales, unleashing toxic fumes that could drown a city.

The Dead legions roared and thundered in their advance. The Dead heroes of the last great Imperial muster, now millennia past, surged.

Ten thousand serpents with polluted white scales rose to meet the charge of the Han, lithe figures with gold still flickering within the gravefires of their eyes flew through the sky, a thousand piercing spears finding the white tiger’s hide.

Great beasts like walking fortresses of stone trudged forward from the reserve, serpent and tortoise, some walking some dragging skeletal flippers and shells through the sand, formed a bulwark against the rallying men of the fields. The silent skeletons of Xuan scholars gazed down with cold malice as they wove their formations.

Until even the Dead faltered, their gazes rising into the sky as the air groaned under the power which had arrived there, the dusty echoes of fear rising in Dead hearts.

It was a single man, draped in classical robes of green and blue. He was neither young nor old, clean shaven, his hair bound in a single braid which fell far past the feet that stood in midair. His eyes were solid, inky black, and his chin was cupped by what at first seemed dull red armor, but was instead chitin.

His hands were splayed out to his sides, intricate gauntlets extending curved razor talons from his fingers.

The men of the Fields bellowed in jubilation as the air stilled, and the power of the Patriarch washed over them, each man feeling his strength and vigor double and treble and more, mortal veins and immortal meridians swelling with power.

The Patriarch of the Guo tilted his chin toward the Dead, and a second sun bloomed behind him. It was countless blades, sliding into reality, countless swords, each a shard of sunlight, boiling with the endless fury of the Eldest. They turned like the gears of a clock behind him, in great circles which blotted out the sky behind. Then they rained, and the world went white.

When the world resolved again from the blinding flash, a city had risen over the horizon. It swayed like no object so large should, and the plume of sand which surrounded it was an impenetrable veil. A claw that could snap a mountain in twain clacked shut, and the detonation of sound ripped circling dragons and screaming grave phoenixes from the sky.

Grandfather Fortress had come, and no more would join the dead.

The Deathly Dragon Patriarch roared in fury, and a titanic blow slammed the white tiger savaging his belly to earth, cracking a new canyon in the bedrock as he ascended in a trail of detonating sunfire. A slab of dead flesh is torn by a striking sting, and ripped free by the weight of the earth’s law, doubled and trebled.

For three days and three nights the battle raged on, until the last of the Dead was trampled to dust. Seven times the dragon was slain, and only on the last is it scattered in a bonfire that ignites the horizon. Grandfather Fortress’ promise was kept, and yet the Patriarch, the Tiger, and the Scorpion were battered, for all of their might.

It was only then that the black eyes of the Patriarch turned east again, to see the towers. Many crumbled, many abandoned, the fires going out one by one, back toward the sea.

But there is a line where the white fire blazes, smokeless and defiant still, and on them the Patriarch’s eyes rest for a very long time indeed.