Apocalypse by J. Robert King

Author:J. Robert King
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Publishing
Published: 2018-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

Battles Without and Within

Nothing so thrilled Crovax as battle. Even here, in an invading forest and beneath the blazing sun, Crovax was happy as long as he got to kill. By jingo did he get to kill.

His axe cleft an elf from neck to navel and emerged before the thing had time to scream. Its two halves peeled away like the skin of a banana. Crovax rammed his blade into the voice box of another elf. It failed to shriek its death, though air bubbled red around Crovax’s blade. His foot shoved the thing off. His hand broke the neck of another. His axe bisected two more with a single stroke.

Battle thrilled.

Crovax’s zombie army literally ate through the elf infantry. Finger bones made remarkable forks in elf bodies. Zombie teeth bit elf heads like crunchy apples. Hungrily, the undead fought and with a fury that was Crovax’s own.

Atrocious! A forest where swamps should be! He would burn every tree and slay every green critter. Already, Crovax had ignited fires all along the perimeter of the forest. Black columns of smoke spiraled into the sky. Crovax and his undead troops meanwhile slaughtered saprolings and Kavu, woodmen and druids and elves in their hundreds. He would fight until every last one had fallen.

There was a singing greatness in his axe as it slew, a keen joy. Crovax worked as a sculptor, carving air and skin and blood and bone. He fashioned a self-portrait in severed flesh. There were his fiery eyes, those two woodmen whose heads flamed with his spell. There was his rumpled nose, the kneeling druid in brown robes and severed neck. There were his jagged teeth, that Kavu corpse with the flayed and sharp-shorn ribs. In the thousands dead, Crovax saw only a wide feasting table. In the manifold shrieks and moans, Crovax heard only the glad cacophony of his own heart.

Until an odd sound came—a shout of fear not from outside the evincar but from within. He half-turned, listening to the dread in that voice. The words came from a weak creature—one mentally powerful but otherwise weak.

“Ertai,” Crovax muttered.

The moment’s reverie nearly cost him his neck. A woodman—one of his own Phyrexian shock troopers transformed into flora—swung a cudgel his way. Crovax stepped out from under it, braced the thing’s leg with one foot, and idly broke its knee with the other.

“What could Ertai need?” Crovax mused as he cleft a saproling that landed in his path. “He’s in my throne room, for the love of—” A sudden, terrible realization came to Crovax. “My throne room!”

He loved nothing more than battle and loved nothing less than being torn from battle. That’s what was happening to him. Yes, he summoned the magical sac. It enfolded him and teased his solid body into spirit. The beaming thing lifted him off the bloody volcano and whirled him into the sky. Down the caldera he went and to the Stronghold.

The throne room was in danger. Ertai—impotent to handle the problem—had summoned his master.

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