Rise My Rivals

Zog had the audacity to laugh when my sons and I showed up in sheep skin cloaks and leather armor. He laughed long and good, which was good as it would be a shame for his final laugh to be a tittering chuckle.

"You guys do your ritual around the pit and we will stand over here." I indicated to my location south of the pit of molten rock, "When you start we will… harmonize with you."

"Your craven ways will be remembered." Zog barked and begun calling forth Tar Goroth.

I just chuckled and began my song.

(Parody of The Lion Sleeps Tonight by The Tokens)

"Ee-e-e-oh-mum-a-weh

Ee-e-e-oh-mum-a-weh"

Then my sons joined in.

"Uyimbube, uyimbube, uyimbube, uyimbube

Uyimbube, uyimbube, uyimbube, uyimbube

Uyimbube, uyimbube, uyimbube, uyimbube

Uyimbube, uyimbube, uyimbube, uyimbube"

Our song threw Zog off his game and he stared at us slack jawed as I began my next verse

"Here in Mordor, in mighty Mordor

The Balrog comes tonight

Here in Mordor, in vile Mordor

The Balrog comes tonight"

And come he did as a gargoyle made of fire, stone, and steel. Blazing wings erupted from his back and a whip of fire lashed out, immolating Zog's chanting disciples. The boys and I uncovered the blades of our pikes and spread out, ready for the Balrog's ascent.

He leapt from the pit, landing on the ridge across from us, and turned to fix a wary eye on us before he ran off east through the plains of Gorgoroth, towards Seregost.

Orthog just can't catch a break.

Zog finally stopped gaping at the monumental failure of our ritual and stomped over to us, frothing at the mouth in rage.

"You!" He cried, "You, your ritual did nothing!"

He made the last mistake of his life stepping within arm's reach of me and I slapped the stupid out of his mouth along with half his teeth, sending the scrawny uruk to the ground. There he lay as I took his head in my hands and turned it around the wrong way, internally decapitating him.

I dragged Zog to the fiery pit an threw him in, his body dipping briefly into the molten rock before buoyant forces brought his charring corpse back up the surface as the heat consumed him.

"He isn't making it to the next quest in the line, boys." I laughed and we turned to pursuit the Balrog and make sure he didn't turn south.

We ran until the land south of us transitioned to Lithlad before calling the chase off and going home, Tar Goroth turned neither left nor right during his run, but instead leapt over cliffs, crags and hills on his route to Seregost.

Traversing though Gorgoroth made me all the more grateful for my dominion of Nurn. I commend Sauron on his dedication to Brutal, but volcanos and wastelands are fucking boring. You gotta break that shit up with some Motorforges and other cool shit otherwise it's just sad.

Nurn provided an actually habitable setting while also being Brutal as hell, filled to the gills with wild monsters for my guys to fight and my builders were finally getting good enough with stonework to start applying my fantasy Aztec theme to our region.

My personal projects occurred around Fort Thrag, and while the Wyverns and Dragons were still a far ways off, my work on Wargs yielded fruit in the form of Damocles, a black warg and the first of the new breed I deemed the Bully Warg. He reached sexual maturity a season back and I bred him with as many females as possible. He passed his traits down to all the first generation pups, and I'd carefully cultivate these traits as the generations passed.

The average Mordor Warg is a seven hundred pound beast, with those bred in Gundabad being eight hundred pounds. Sauron's Isengard variety looked about a thousand pounds in the films. Damocles stood a full foot taller at the shoulders than the nearest sized male in my horde, and weighed fourteen hundred pounds. His broad head bore a wide muzzle and his shoulders and chest rippled with muscle that traveled down his thick limbs.

The dog was an absolute unit and a half.

In stress testing the giant Bully Warg performed similar feats of speed and endurance as regular Wargs, but lorded over them absolutely in feats of strength. He bit with enough force to break a troll femur and ripped with enough power to tear the leg off.

Keeping Damocles tame was a grand test of my Beastmaster skills, but he wasn't even my biggest win in the breeding game. That win came in the form of a new breed of dive bomber falcons. About twice the size of the peregrine falcon, just as fast and hardy, and loyal to me, I now had my answer to the various manner of small birds and beasts employed as information networks by Sauron, the Witch King, and later Sarumon.

With a bit of sorcery on my end the newly created Bully Hawks gained a sixth sense for sussing out the influence of other magic users in animals, and then they'd turn themselves into the Hammers of God and smash the fuck out the seditious cretins in a vicious plunging attack.

My sons and I fed the hatchlings a serum including our willingly shed blood, furthering the strength and endurance of the Bully Hawks and binding them tightly to our will. They were as much kin to us as we were to each other, and filled with as much low cunning as any of us, delighting in their task of hunting spies or spying themselves with eyes like telescopes.

The Bully Hawkes kept track of Tar Goroth as he enslaved the Mystic Tribe up in Seregost and demanded the allegiance of the Marauders in Lithlad. He emptied both regions and marched to Barad Dur. Sauron sallied out with the Nazgul and the Machine and Terror Tribes to meet them, rather than risk Tar Goroth bringing Barad Dur around him.

He just finished rebuilding from the last time someone destroyed it.

With my rivals posed to destroy each other I happily dragged my feet answering Sauron's rallying call. I gathered up my full forces, secured our supply line, and did everything short of building a road to the battlefield in my desire to arrive too tragically late to prevent a pyrrhic victory for whoever took the day.

It gave Talion more than enough time to assemble what remained of the Warmonger Tribe and their vassals to block our passage.

Hope he brought the she-elf with him. Left the women back home and could use a new slam piece for the campaign.