Hopefully, you’ve been following our ongoing narration of the events in the Iron Kingdoms, and if not…WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
First and foremost, you can find daily updates from the Henge Hold Scroll at https://twitter.com/HengeholdScroll. Additionally, you can find the summation of events leading up to those unfolding here in this Insider.
As the events leading to Oblivion unfold, so too does the pace, like an avalanche speeding down the mountainside, growing beyond the ability of anyone involved to maintain any form of control. For some, it is all they can do simply to hold on and survive…
***
Ashlynn was covered in gore from infernals—much of it was blue, and all of it reeked. Down the hall, Marie Aguillon’s dark skin was a darker shade of that same blue. And though Ashlynn wasn’t sure where Vayne di Brascio was, she suspected the gun mage looked the same.
They were retaking the palace in Merywyn from the clawed horrors that had appeared along the Iron Highway to assault the city’s spires. Nobles like Moler had already fled, Ashlynn had heard, but no such thoughts had even occurred to her or her closest compatriots.
Nightmares with pulsing veins floated among traitorous infernalists finally brave enough to reveal their colors. Ashlynn dispatched them with her father’s sword, sending their souls to their masters.
Two rapid-fire explosions and two dead infernalists signaled di Brascio’s return from the royal quarters.
“The queen, she is safe,” he called out.
“The queen is safe,” Marie Aguillon answered. “Speak the language, Vayne.”
“You understood, yes? Then I speak fine enough.”
Ashlynn gutted an infernalist with an eyepatch. “We need to move her.”
Marie curled her lip. “You don’t mean the Llael Passage, do you?”
“Never. Her place is within Merywyn. The deserters—they’re no longer Llaelese. They can leave and never return.”
“Aha!” Vayne di Brascio gunned a horror out of the air and closed the gap in their triad.
“Even the Queen’s Blade speaks as I do.”
Marie ignored him. “So, where do we hide her?”
Ashlynn’s response was curtailed by the high brassy notes of trumpets from beyond the walls.
Marie’s eyes bulged; Vayne raised his magelock and cocked his head.
“How dare they?” he breathed. “Our own military?”
The trumpets sounded again, more mournful, despondent, than before.
“They can’t,” Marie groaned. Vayne made a guttural, furious noise in the back of his throat.
Ashlynn killed three infernalists with such fervor that others began to flee from her reach.
She snarled, “This will not stand. Not while I breathe.”
The trumpeting ended abruptly.
“They’re retreating,” Vayne said in disbelief.
Marie said, “Or surrendering.”
Ashlynn shook her head. “Unless they’re dying, no one stops fighting for Llael unless I command it. And I do not.”
***
The scrolls tell me much. Not all make sense. Some things are so unlikely they seem to ride against the flow of history and destiny. So it was as blood and flesh, at long last united, who strove to forever separate themselves with cold metal.
—Hermit of Henge Hold
***
Aurora held her father’s frail hand. Her father. The word still felt unreal. For so long he had been a nebulous figure in her imagination; now he was here, and he was dying.
“Where are we?” Nemo asked. His glassy eyes drifted around the temple’s interior, unable to focus on anything.
“Somewhere safe.” Aurora said, caressing the back of his weathered hand.
It was a temple abandoned after a shift of the geomantic web. Old and empty.
“You look so alike,” Nemo whispered, struggling to touch her face. His hand was clumsy, clammy. It fell limp to his side.
She touched his lips. “Quiet now. We haven’t much time.”
“For what?” Nemo asked.
Aurora chewed her lip with uncertainty. She knew her father opposed what she planned. But there was no other way.
“I spent my life wondering who you are,” Aurora said, “and I refuse to lose you now. Not when I can do something about it.”
Nemo looked up, eyes focusing on the apparatus that surrounded them. His weak breath whistled as he drew it in aghast.
The device of soul transference waited.
“No,” Nemo breathed. “I beg you, no.”
Aurora shook her head. “There is no other way. Your body dies soon.”
She turned from him, trying not to hear his pleas. With a gesture, the optifexes she’d brought for this task began their work. The old temple awoke with the deep purring of an enormous, contented beast about to enjoy a meal.
As the soul transference began, Aurora looked back at the frail body lying below the device. His face was a mask of betrayal and confusion. He was clearly ready to die, but she would not let him.
His old body twisted in pain as he called to her.
“Why? I do not want this!” he shouted. Bolts of energy lanced through his body, charring his flesh. The machine pulled everything that was Nemo from the body he once inhabited.
As the machine died down, the sound of charred flesh crackling replaced its mechanical purr. Aurora plucked the glowing cylinder from its mechanism, cradling it like a bird in her hands.
“Because we need you, Father. Now…and forever.”
***
Time is a vortex, drawing all things to their conclusion. Some are buffeted by its tide, caught in a force they cannot resist. Others pit their meager strength against inevitability and struggle to last.
A few, marked by fate and fortune, see the opportunity to ride the currents of the vortex. Carried on the gulf between escape and oblivion, they can catapult free from destiny or be drawn into its blackest depths.
—Hermit of Henge Hold
***
“At least they let you keep your sword,” Oleg Strakhov said.
The kommander’s burned flesh had twisted his already scarred mouth into a deeper snarl on one side.
“And you your looks,” Irusk replied.
Strakhov didn’t respond to the slight. Since leaving Cygnar, the assault kommander had been in high spirits, listing indulgences back home he planned for their return. It was out of character for the one-eyed killer to be cheerful.
“What did he say?” Strakhov asked as the pair approached the inner doors of Stasikov Palace.
“My freedom is predicated on delivery of a message to the empress,” Irusk replied, “one I fear she won’t take lightly.”
Strakhov clapped his bandaged hands, wincing at the pain. “An errand boy for a boy king. Are you to deliver a proclamation of war?”
As the throne room’s doors swung open to reveal the court, Irusk said, “Something far worse.”
They crossed the room and knelt before the empress. She sipped wine, taking her time with them before speaking.
“I would offer you a drink, but I did not prepare for so many guests,” she said. “Irusk, were my commands unclear?”
“No, my empress,” Irusk said. He kept his head bowed like the condemned at the headsman’s block, appropriately enough.
“Yet you grace the court with your appearance. Were the terms of your surrender not accepted?”
“They were not.”
The empress descended from her dais, touching Strakhov’s pauldron with a light hand, but she spoke at Irusk. “Illuminate us.”
“Julius offers this: the Iron Kingdoms must stand together while there is something still worth fighting for.”
She waited a moment, digesting the words. Her scowl grew. Then she barked with laughter.
“Idiot. His nation bleeds and he begs the wolves to give him peace,” she said.
“I believe hope motivated him, Empress, not desperation.”
“Be silent,” she snapped. “You were warned before, Irusk. Failure is not a quality I admire.”
He awaited her command to the Butcher. The one to set the madman’s axe swinging. But another voice came, low and resonant, filling the chamber.
“Ayn, wait.” Vladimir Tzepesci rose from his seat and took the empress’ hand. As she turned to face him, he spoke, soft enough Irusk could barely hear.
“A great wind blows, cold and cruel. If we do not face it together, we fight it alone.”
Their eyes locked for a long moment. Looking up at the Great Prince and imperial consort, Empress Vanar seemed to consider his words.
Without looking at Irusk, the empress asked, “What else did the boy say?”
***
Destiny. Like a great machine ticking down our final days. As the darkness grows, some pull to each other like lodestone and iron. Others are forced apart, broken pieces never to reunite.
At the heart of it all, one glowing soul bonded to two others, polarizing them. Pushing them apart like a fundamental force. What could have been their bridge instead becoming a barrier.
—Hermit of Henge Hold
***
Mother had known all along. Of course she had. A part of Aurora suspected the Directrix had even guided her actions. Not that it changed her punishment. Mother awaited her return to the temple complex with a cell waiting.
“What is she doing with him?” Aurora asked.
Axis, the Harmonic Enforcer, shrugged. He stood between Aurora and the door as her warden.
“Deciding,” he said.
“It’s not her decision to make.”
Axis cocked his helmed head. “It was yours?”
Frustrated, Aurora ignored him. She listened for any clue as to what transpired in the temple above. Though distant, the modulated voices of clockwork vessels droned through the walls, the familiar tone of Iron Mother loudest of all.
The cell door irised open. The young woman Athanor Locke stood beyond the aperture.
“Directrix demands your presence,” she said.
Axis moved to escort Aurora out, but Locke intervened. “She wants you to join the obstructors guarding the entrance.”
Without a word, the large warcaster brushed Locke aside and clomped away into the temple’s tunnels.
When his footsteps faded, Locke exhaled with relief. “Damn, he bought it. Hurry, there isn’t much time.”
“What are you doing?”
“Putting my neck out for you,” Locke said, ushering Aurora along. “Your mother and the others are deciding what to do with Nemo’s soul. It, uh, isn’t going in his favor.”
“We must stop them!”
“That’s the plan,” Locke said. “Just…be yourself.”
Moments later, the pair burst into the chamber. Iron Mother, Forge Master Syntherion, and Eminent Configurator Orion debated over Nemo’s soul vessel. When Iron Mother’s gaze fell on Aurora, her mantle of blades flexed and snapped with restrained anger.
Iron Mother swept the others aside with her bladed cloak. Their eyes fell on Aurora and Locke.
“You follow folly with impudence,” Iron Mother declared, “and bring low another promising worshipper with you.”
“Why are you here?” Orion asked.
“To prevent you from making a critical mistake,” Aurora said.
“A subject in which you are versed, Daughter.”
Mother and daughter faced each other down. The other leaders of the Convergence moved closer. Aurora readied for a fight.
“Now!” Locke shouted.
There was a confused moment. Everyone turned toward the woman.
The great glass constellation overhead shattered as a clockwork angel descended. Prefect Hypatia swooped down to Nemo’s forgotten soul. She snatched it and returned to the air.
Before anyone else could react, runes spun around Locke’s wrist. Her spell detonated like a bomb among them, hurling them back. Aurora’s ears rang, but she could read Locke’s cry on her lips.
“Time to run.”
***
So few grasped the necessity of war beyond the obvious desire to live. Yet to lay down one’s life for one’s cause feels noble; to do so to ensure the survival of one’s species feels desperate. Desperation is often all one has when someone like me can offer no other emotion.
—Hermit of Henge Hold
***
They pushed against a line of horrors with a storm of steel. Rattling sluggers sent lines of fire over the battlefield on the east flank. To the west, Stormblades’ glaives crackled with brilliant blue light.
Jeremiah Kraye and his warjacks wove among the chaos, pitting iron hulls and ordnance against nightmare-born muscle and sinew. A shell burst in front of him in fire and smoke. Malagant’s hooves clawed at the air.
Kraye pulled on the reins and steadied his carbine. Across the battlefield—once some speck on the map outside Caspia that now teemed with cultists—a howling creature laid into trollkin warriors.
Kraye put everything into his shot, guiding the bullet and urging it onward. It took the creature in the neck, and most of the shop wall behind it. The trollkin pressed on, into the smoke.
His orders: meet with a trencher platoon and provide warjack support. The infernalists built another damn gate; he was sent to destroy it. Simple enough on paper. With a hundred allied kriel warriors, they said it would be simple.
It wasn’t. Cultists and beasts boiled up into the streets from every sewer, around every corner. Friendly artillery fell like hail. Foul magic stained the air and rotted his allies’ flesh.
***
Our senses are often more full of death than life, though we notice the latter more as the former nears.
—Hermit of Henge Hold
***
Clouds of blasting powder smoke and soot from smokestacks choke the streets. It is dark, the artificial twilight of an obscured sun. The air burns to breathe, scratching at the throat and the lungs.
In this darkness, orange bursts of muzzle flare and the cracking of rifles mix with the cries of battle: challenges roared at opponents, screams of pain, the piercing shriek of unseen monsters in the haze.
The blanket of smoke, the stress of fighting, all turns the street into an oven. There is no air to stir up a breeze, just the packed heat of mobs of men and women, the cherry-glow of coals in sizzling furnaces.
Buildings are vague shapes. Some glow from fires inside, flames roaring through their windows. Broken timbers jut like splintered bones from roofs and walls caved in by errant artillery shells.
Beyond the cobbled streets there is what once was a park. The trees burn like torches, the manicured lawns chewed up by the advance and retreat of soldiers, by the hooves of heavy cavalry and tread of machines.
Fountains turned to temporary foxholes are stained pink from the bodies floating within their shallow waters. Statues of old heroes and kings chipped away by gunfire into vague silhouettes of gray-white stone.
In the park’s center, a grand arch. Built to commemorate some long-forgotten historical event, trimmed with patina-green bronze. Faint lines of something organic mar the white marble faces like creeping ivy.
But this ivy grows thick and sinewy, throbs and bulges, the living veins of something otherworldly grows into and among the stones.
An alphabet of runes glow along its columns, across its top, so foul they are almost alive. They wriggle and twist under the eye, trying to escape the grasp of scrutiny. Looking at them too long makes eyes water, drills into the skull like a hangover.
Deep crimson light glows from the arch’s center, casting the surroundings with an otherworldly glow. It ripples like a heat mirage on the summer desert. It fills the air with a piercing whine that makes molars rattle and the stomach churn.
From this light, shapes emerge into the world. Profane, disgusting forms of rubbery white flesh, talons of jet bone. Mocking reflections of human bodies, as malformed as the fractured statues. Their howls are the sound of tortured souls begging for release.
Squadrons advance on the gate through the blood-soaked grass, taking cover where they can. They fire at the growing mob of creatures, ripping through their bodies, but still the things advance. They grow in numbers, slithering into the world like unready births.
Trollkin fire their oversized weapons, laying down a storm from rapid-fire sluggers, titanic sprays of buckshot that could punch holes in a battleship. A roaring dire troll hurls a smoldering barrel that momentarily robs the world of sound.
Still more of the things come. They crawl over the mangled bodies of their dead, sprinting into battle with soldiers and trollkin with a frenzy of talons and scything blades.
The battle turns against them. A warjack has its limb ripped off and hurled aside to flatten a group of soldiers. Cavalry are bogged down by the dozens, horses and riders screaming as they are torn apart.
***
The scrolls reveal much about who will fight, who will flee, and who will stand in bewilderment. But the scrolls do not promise this as anyone’s final state.
—Hermit of Henge Hold
***
Desperate horns sound the retreat. Wounded and panicked soldiers fall back from their positions, trampling over those unable to get out of the way. The cracking voices and shrieks of pain mercifully muffle the crackling of broken bones.
The newborn mob struggles to flee. They become easy prey for the beasts at their backs. The weight presses bodies into walls, squeezes the life out of them. A shower of gore from those at the rear sprays over the rest in thick sheets of red.
Then, something overhead. The already dim light deepens further as a great shadow passes over the park. Downdrafts swirl the smoke, ripping a hole open to the sky.
A huge shape of armor and guns hangs overhead, as long as a battleship, with great turbines churning the air. A klaxon spins up within it. Then, a ripple of gunfire lights on its belly.
A shrieking chorus precedes the barrage that crawls across the ground, stitching a line of orange fire through the creatures and into the gate.
The soldiers below cannot hear their leader’s shouted commands. They do not need to. While the guns of the skyship above cycle in fresh shells, they turn back as one. Across a field of churned earth and scattered limbs, they advance.
King Julius Raelthorne watched the Khadoran vessels slowly move over Caspia. Even from a great distance, he could feel the punch of their cannons in his gut. Pillars of smoke grew from the streets wherever they flew.
It seemed the empress had gotten his message.
***
What makes the impossible possible? Perseverance? Desperation? Sheer force of will? While I see the impossible, I also see the possible, and when the two join, my visions can change without paradox or disparity. Stranger days may yet be probable.
—Hermit of Henge Hold
***
“What is this thing?” Aurora asked. The spherical machine dominated the heart of the Temple of the Incomplete Axiom, standing high as a house.
“About ten thousand crowns’ worth of parts and a few months of work,” Locke replied.
“Why would you build this? You couldn’t have known about Nemo or what I would do. I didn’t even know.”
Locke shrugged. “I’m a mechanik. I had to build something.”
“It looks—”
“Cygnaran. I know. I had a supplier in Corvis for some components.”
“If this works, then what?” Aurora asked.
“Honestly, I was hoping you’d answer that one,” Locke said.
Aurora cradled Nemo’s soul vessel. “An ancient Iosan told me Nemo’s mind held a key.”
“Ooh, vague. That’s fun.”
“He said it would be our salvation.”
“Then I hope he was right. We could use salvation about now,” Locke said.
“I hope so, too.”
“Maybe Nemo knows somewhere safe. Or has a machine to fly over the Meredius, away from the infernals?” Locke asked.
Aurora didn’t respond, stared up at the great machine.
“Did you, uh, want to do the honors?”
Aurora hesitated. She’d wrenched Nemo’s mortal life away, denied him peace. When he awoke, how would he respond?
No. The time for doubt was past. It died on a cold metal slab in the final beat of Sebastian Nemo’s heart.
Aurora plunged the soul chamber into its waiting port.
Light sparked across the machine, dim but growing to brilliant blue. Static charge built, sparking off Aurora’s metal armor.
Bolts of lightning sprang from the machine to crawl along the interior of the dark temple.
In a voice like the discharge of a dozen storm chambers, Nemo spoke.
“I was. Dead. I have returned.”
“I’m sorry,” Aurora said. “There was no other way.”
Nemo’s mechanical eye fixed on her. “We. Must hurry. There is much to do.”
***
But even the noblest efforts can fail. Fabric woven from the strongest threads tears. The patchwork of western Immoren began to falter, giving blood, body, and soul in their defiant efforts. Yet light began to shine as the dimmest of stars burned brightly to offer hope.
—Hermit of Henge Hold