Severed by Nate Crowley

Author:Nate Crowley
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, mobi
Published: 2019-09-11T08:19:57+00:00

Seven

For a time the campaign saw renewed success; in the days following the capture of the first sepulchral hall, the invasion force fought its way nine leagues underground, cutting through Doahht’s infested crust like a powerblade through flesh. Chamber after chamber was seized, each deeper than the last, and each quickly secured by the Sautekh crypteks to act as a translation anchor for the next push. The Severed continued to boil up from the dead world’s heart, but the spirit of Doahht was too vast, too ponderous, to adapt to the intrusion. Time after time, the once-lords who acted as command nodes were identified and eliminated, leaving the warriors around them baffled and helpless as reeds before a scythe.

Although Obyron hated to admit it, the assault had proceeded even faster when he had finally accepted Setekh’s offer of three legions of deathmark snipers. He had stalled at first, as Zahndrekh had always found the use of any sort of assassins distasteful against an honoured foe, but the deeper into the catacombs he fought without his master’s guiding voice, the more irrelevant his nemesor’s habitual scruples became. They might as well have been just another damaged engram, blackened by the fire of his exertions.

The truth was, Doahht’s cavernous spaces, and the command nodes’ habit of hovering above their legions, offered a perfect tactical environment for snipers. The silent warriors with their single sapphire eyes could snuff out the puppeted nobles from dozens of khet away, allowing the infantry to advance with little or no resistance. Obyron was always at the front, hacking down Severed by the hundred, but the violence did nothing to quench either his fury, or the deep misery beneath the veneer of his wrath.

By the time they breached Doahht’s long-cool asthenosphere, the process of conquest had become so efficient that the expedition’s vanguard was almost perpetually on the march, pausing only briefly to secure each new vault before moving on. Sometimes, they came upon whole decurions of unwoken Severed, heads slumped in their sleep-caskets, and the Sautekh scarabs fell on them to harvest their matter.

Frequently, as Obyron waited in the sepulchral chambers to marshal a new assault, he would look up and see – once again – those strange scrawlings carved over the wall friezes. And no matter how long he stared at them (he tried not to, but they always drew his eye), they remained incomprehensible, somewhere between mathematical notation and nonsense verse. The carvings made him think of Setekh’s words about secrets and treasure, and he wondered often what madness they were fighting their way to the heart of. But he did not let his attention linger. It was not his job to understand the ultimate goal of their campaign, or to ponder the mysteries of this world – he was here to defeat it. Why invite the agony of thought, when there was fighting to be done?

Eventually, the advance began to slow. Like some leaden behemoth growing dimly aware of scavengers at its heels, Doahht was becoming angry.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.