Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-Eight – Yle Tyorm

The crystal pillars were denser and denser as they closed in on the Rift, battling vermin and Warpbands with equal regularity, taking cover against Chaos Storms that were reduced to mere sand storms in the Corridor. As the Warped died, the Corridor drove forwards, and wound towards Yle Tyorm.

There were murmurings from some of the men as they began to get some idea of the scope of what they were facing. By now, even the dumbest of them could calculate that they had slaughtered tens of thousands of the enemy, yet they still kept coming, and showed no sign of reluctance to do battle after so many of their own had already perished.

The number of Marked increased steadily, and the efficiency of the fighting companies soared with it. Mercenaries looking for plunder and non-Marked soon found themselves doing patrols along the Corridor, killing the extraplanars who were hurled in by the Warpstorms, or hunting down bugs, blooding themselves for the real killing that was still constantly marching out every day to face their lead elements.

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There were five of them this time, waiting for me as I climbed up this massive ring of sand and stone. It stretched out in an unbroken line into the distance, slowly curving around in a massive ring. Many crystal pillars jutted out of it like broken bones, tilted crazily in all directions, these pillars black, while the hill itself was white.

The only gap in it was the Silver Worm, whose waters had chewed right through it and continued on its way, undeterred by any reversals.

The five Brothers waited for me on top of the hill as the baggage train of The Camp followed the riverbed through the layered canyon, eyeing the pillars jutting out of the sides, seemingly ready to fall out and down onto them. Layers of white stone, melted and solidified in jagged waves, flowed through the rock around them, polished instead of pitted by the sands, unnaturally smooth and strange to see.

Less than five miles beyond were the walls of Yle Tyorm, south and east of which was the Warp Rift.

Lightscepter, Firesword, Bonescythe, Wayfist, and Mindring were all here. Ancientaxe, Mountainhammer, Windarrow, and Shadowknife were all out doing scouting at this moment, making sure no Warped were escaping in other directions. The latter were all people who had seen this place before, and they could share Marksight now, so there was no reason to be here in person.

Lightscepter was a slender human, blond-haired and hazel-eyed, with the look of a fanatic about him. Living so close to mortal faith, perhaps it was unsurprising. His new Scepter was anything from a rod to a mace to a flail to a greatclub, and he had definitely been enjoying wielding it against the Warped, interloper neo-gods from another reality, come to subsume this world and its souls.

Bonescythe looked like an ebon-skinned voodoo priest. His Scythe was now changeable from a kama or sickle to a warscythe, and he'd also been plying it for Karma. His normal area of interest was necromancy and undeath, and this was only tangentially of interest to him, although there were enemy Casters using death magic.

Wayfist looked like a martial scholar-priest, tanned skin, with layered robes and hair in a warrior's knot, dragons in colored threads embroidered over his robes, sharp eyes and straight posture. His hair was dark, his eyes were grey, and he had a focused and serious air about him.

Brother Mindring looked like a martial monk; coppery skin, bald head, dark eyes that seemed to go on forever, and a weird feeling that something was strange and austere around him. Regulating mentalists and invasive psionic entities without being one himself, surely an interesting life.

All of them were gazing at the city beyond, probably feeling combinations of energies twisted beyond tolerance, like a massive knot that couldn't be untied.

I panned right and left, seeing that this hill line was actually the ringed edge of a crater, where something obscenely powerful had shoved down the earth, turned it molten, and then pushed it all out to here... somehow without utterly destroying the city beyond.

The landscape between here and the walls of the city was basically glassy grey, impossibly level and straight, hard pressed to find a parking lot laid out more firmly. The only break in the perfection was the Silver Worm winding its way into the distant city.

The city itself was overlaid with shifting skies, just a mélange of odd colors until you got this close, and the dimensional interference was suddenly obvious.

There were at least twenty different skies and times of day visible over the city, showing different hues, clouds, stars, and angles of the sun. They moved at different speeds, forwards, backwards, sideways, with no discernible pattern to them, and the areas warped and shifted as the dimensional breaks shifted, too.

The walls must have been a polished light gray at one time, almost white, but their status now flowed and shifted, sometimes showing high and proud, and others broken and rent by terrible forces, scarred by magic and siege engines to various degrees. Sometimes the angles of them shifted sideways or vertically, yet still connected to their neighbors somehow, and fires still smoked, stones glowed with heat, and I could easily imagine the screams of battle taking place.

The city beyond must have been a metropolis of magic, with some buildings or edifices towering to a thousand feet, at least a five-mile rough circle of fairly densely-packed buildings in complex street patterns, now with yawning gaps and sites of ruin within them. The environment inside was twisted and uneven, but it didn't seem to be actively hostile, as the undergrowth of hundreds of years of Nature's patience was visible in greenery crawling over a lot of things in the city. I looked at detonation craters crawling with ivy, crumbled roads and corridors with trees poking from them, fallen edifices now overgrown hills, all of them shifting from place to place irregularly, the past and present combining and shifting back and forth, recombining the city as if someone was trying to put a puzzle back together and failing.

In the center of the blast, directly beneath the blast point that had formed this hill ring, a yawning pit descended into the depths of the land, and the Silver Worm emptied itself smoothly into it, not having filled it despite the centuries that had passed.

I didn't recognize the architecture, but the Marked said the style was something imitated in Rosencrux, with signs of both elven and dwarven influences. Records about what the place had been were very scarce, as if a divine hand had come down and removed much of it from memory and physical traces.

A high magic city, a City of Hope, where the great and good came together to build something awesome and wonderful, spurring rival forces to take it out at all costs. What had they brought here to make the history of both factions involved dire enough to be wiped from memory?

I wasn't a historian, so it was not a pressing matter. If it was important, I'd find out more. I briefly wondered how much the Hags knew, as I turned my eyes to the Rift.

There it was, a jagged, roughly circular opening about two hundred paces across; pink, magenta, orange, and red, stitches of another reality pulsing into our own, a blotchy bruise on the Land that was trying to heal, held at bay by the forces pulsing out through the ragged edges of the Rift. Weirdly colored lightnings jolted into the sky, bleeding out into the Dichromatic Plains, stirring up the winds and Chaos Storms out there, sometimes grounding themselves suddenly in whole arrays of crystal pillars that pulled them down and neutralized them.

It was about eight miles from our position, part way around the city, about half a mile outside the walls in the five-mile wide Scoured Circle below. Even now, I could see streams of dark figures marching out of it, some in disciplined formations, most in loose hordes. Some flew out, some rode, some even crawled. The forces spread out for about a mile around the Rift; mortals, demons, monstrous beasts, engines of war, mounts, whatever. There were rough tents for supplies, there were smiths making those Demon-pattern Dire weapons, and there were men heading off for that chunk of blue sky from the Ferals, aimed directly towards them.

And more were coming our way. Our Corridor was actually closer, as we'd made better time across the Plains, but we would have to swing around the White Ring to close on them, instead of going straight in. Not that it was an issue, we'd be sticking close to the Ring regardless as we moved, and likely setting up camp right in front of the Rift opposite it.

My eyes narrowed as I saw a weird circle out beyond the camp of the Warped. I could see the Rift's influence ended there, and it looked like the crystalline pillars of the place had been chopped off nearly uniform, and arranged to form a circle about a mile across.

The red and black colors of the crystals didn't inspire me.

"Fudge me, they built a Bloodyard," I swore as I looked at it.

All five brothers looked at me, and I fed them what I was seeing. "You boys ever see that before?"

Oddly enough, it was the Mindring that spoke up. "Fevered dreams in the Akasha, screaming out from the lower realms, a place of war and death and blood..."

I grunted assent to that. "It's an arena for warbands. The forces march in from opposite sides, the Bloodyard closes, and the winners walk out."

Mine weren't the only eyes that narrowed. "Your plan to blow the Rift may be interrupted by the presence of that thing, Sage Sama. It is entirely likely that the energies of those who die there will be drawn away by the Warp," the Bonescythe murmured in his voluble voice, so deep and smooth, like hearing chocolate.

"Well, I guess we'll just have to dissuade people from using it." My smile wasn't friendly. "They'll definitely want to be challenging us inside there, of course. I think we should be able to use it against them. Just gonna have to make something portable that can suck out the vivus when they burn."

"Will that be difficult?" Brother Wayfist asked, his knuckles popping.

"No. Vivus won't want to be caged by Warp energies, anyways. If they can blow all that power to make a soul siphon, we can pop it internally without too much problem." I scanned the area beyond. "Yeah, we should be able to set up some forts near the ringline. We'll have to clear out some chaff while we're doing it, but that just makes the job fun."

"There's at least twelve thousand combatants in that camp," Lightscepter said, eyes grim. "In addition to at least a thousand Interlopers of various power. We should wipe it first from all sides. The Warp will send more, but we don't want them building their own defenses, which we will be giving them incentive to if we set up our own."

"Mmmm. Well, the thing is, our forts aren't there to defend us, or even give us a place to rest. We may use them as temporary healing stations, and throw supplies in there, but the main purpose for them will be to make it easy to defend the Obelisks we're going to put up. If we make actual fortifications, the Warp Gods will use the excuse to invoke the five times siege rule, and things could get real nasty thereafter."

That rule being that if attacking a good fortification, you generally wanted five times the number of defenders to take it, and up to ten might be required, depending on how strong it was. An excuse to flood more Warped in was not appreciated.

"So, we end up playing their game regardless..." Firesword murmured, and I nodded.

"And then we punish them sooooo hard for it. We're dealing with gods here, people. They can cheat bigger and badder then we can. But they also know they can't push things too far. If we don't give them excuses, they have to obey the tacit agreements between them and our gods, and keep this fair, in its own way.

"So, don't you be worrying about the fighting. We got lots of folks eager to feed them to the Land, and coming up with ways to do so seems to occupy a fair amount of their time." I turned to regard them all. "And, naturally enough, we have some unique ways for the Brotherhood to contribute."

Firesword smiled despite himself. "Why do I have the feeling this is going to be very interesting to hear?"

"Hey, you're the Brotherhood. In the end, it comes down to you doing what has to be done. How could we not figure that into the equation, especially if it will screw the enemy the most?" My smile was most unkind.

I gestured them forward, and five of the greatest killers in the world stepped closer to listen to me...