Where the questions of good and evil come into play is in the methods needed for sustaining a decaying body. Such methods are typically seen as unethical, and thus referred to as “evil”; a concept which, I am sure we can agree, is quite amusing and useless.
Chapter 127
Tom slept soundly, curled in his now-common fetal position, clutching the Rod of Tommus as if it were a security blanket. It had been a long and exhilarating day. After being introduced to everyone in Krallnomton and ensuring that word was going out to the other cities and fortresses on the Isle of Doom, both by D’Orc messenger and shaman spirit message, they had all sat down to a hastily arranged feast. They had spent the rest of the day catching up and discussing plans for the Isle of Doom.
The stories of war, blood and sacrifice faced by those who had been stranded in Nysegard had been incredibly moving. Even though this had all occurred thousands of years before Tom’s birth and he had had nothing to do with any of it, he had somehow managed to feel guilty on behalf of Orcus for having left them with a skeleton crew when he’d gone to war in Etterdam.
Some of that discomfort was most likely due to the mistaken belief among some of the D’Orcs that he was somehow Orcus reborn. It was a belief that, to his own discomfort, Tom had avoided correcting. He supposed he felt some guilt on behalf of Orcus because he was technically pretending to be him reincarnated.
He had never claimed anything like this; the mistaken belief was all due to that silly prophecy from the incredibly suspiciously named prophet, Tis-Arog-Dal. He was more than a little suspicious that he might have walked into some sort of crazy plot of Tizzy’s. The only issue was that Tizzy did not strike him as someone capable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes of time, let alone thousands of years.
Tom shifted uncomfortably in his sleep as his dreams turned to fighting the Unlife in Nysegard. He was leading a charge of D’Orcs, orcs, dwarves and humans through a Storm Lord Fury, as their regiments were called.
The mortals were focused on ghouls, zombies, skeletons and other lesser undead; the D’Orcs worked to seek out and battle the greater undead. Vampyrs, vampires, jiangshi, lich commanders, necromancers and non-corporeal undead, all of which were very tricky for mortals to battle.
For whatever odd reason, they were fighting the battle at night; this seemed very odd to Tom. One would think battling in daylight would have given them a greater advantage. His assumption, as he tried to think about it in his dream, was that they had had no choice for some reason. Greasy smoke and the smell of burning flesh dominated his sense of smell as he ruthlessly smashed lesser undead before him and moved towards a nearby vampire necromancer.
Someone shouted at him from his right. He looked in that direction to see Vosh An-Non, his most trusted general, pointing to the sky. Storm Lords! Two of them were approaching on ice dragons. The dragons were blasting super-cold sleet down on the masses below them; a breath weapon that did little damage to the undead, but was extremely damaging to mortal troops.
Tom grinned in pleasure at Vosh An-Non, nodding in agreement at his general’s plan for the two of them to take the battle to the two liches. Tom twisted to his left and shouted to one of his newest D’Orcs, Vargg Agnoth.
“Vargg! Take the vampire colonel. Vosh and I are going for the ice makers!” He gestured to the two liches on dragonback. Vargg nodded. Fuzzily in his dream memory, Tom knew that while less than two centuries old, Vargg Agnoth was well versed in slaying undead, having grown up and demonstrating great prowess here in Nysegard.
He launched himself into the air towards the two Storm Lords, as did Vosh An-Non. Tom briefly thought of blasting the liches with fireballs from the Wand — no, the Rod of Tommus — but dismissed it as unsportsmanlike. He wanted to feel their icy bones crunch beneath the crushing weight of his Rod.
As happens in dreams, he was distracted by the sight of a pale D’Orc he knew to be Vordek Deathstealer swooping down upon a cluster of vampyrs, the incandescence of his lichtshwert painting their spike-filled maws in an almost surreal red bath of light against the inky blackness of the battlefield.
He smiled in appreciation of Vordek’s skill at slicing off the heads of the vampyrs. The sight caused his dream to jump to Visteroth, a rather dark and forbidding planet orbiting Erdnalla 3. Visteroth had been a world much like Nysegard, overwhelmed by Unlife. However, over thousands of years, the orc clans there had been able to adapt, creating through very risky trial and error, a genetic vaccine against the Unlife.
Unfortunately, not many survived vaccination, but those that did were immune to the predations of the Unlife, as were their descendants. There had been a few unforeseen side effects, of course. The Deathstealer and Soulwrecker clans were both very tall and thin for orcs and were also extremely pale, a dusky gray pallor that was frankly a bit off-putting to most other orcs. That paleness, along with their nearly fluorescent red eyes and deadly hand-to-hand fighting skills, made them some of the most feared warriors in their galaxy after they had driven the Unlife from their world.
Of course, Tom reflected in his dream, it was not just their fighting skills. For some reason, Loki (a vision of the jötunn-god laughing and drinking across the table from Tom came to mind) had speculated that it was related to the mana involved in the Unlife defense. The genetically modified orcs were far more sensitive to animus and mana than most orcs. Nearly all of them possessed strong animage skills of some form or the other. Naturally, being orcs, most of these animages focused on combat-related skills such as body mastery, cell mastery, kinetomastery, spatiomastery and temporamastery. Tom chuckled darkly to himself. And yes, a few of them had branched out and were skilled at telemastery and Mind Reaving; that could be very handy.
In his dream, Tom shook his head suddenly, wondering how he knew all this and where it had come from. But then he chided himself; when you had been around as long as he had been, you were bound to accumulate a lot of information. What? Sixteen or seventeen years? Tom asked himself in the dream. This dream, and he suddenly realized it was a dream, made very little sense. He shook his dream head harder. This caused his physical head to shake, and one of his horns snagged against the headboard, waking him up. What a crazy dream! he thought to himself before falling back to sleep, this time with only scattered thoughts of Unlife mixed in with disjointed conversations with his friends.
Teragdor stood in the doorway to the southwestern tower of Fort Murgatroid, watching the reconstruction work. It had taken a full day for Stevos to negotiate assistance, but he had managed it. Yesterday, they had returned to Fort Murgatroid, where they had welcomed multiple saints from both Tierhallon and Torholden to the fort.
They had left before dawn and ridden to Fort Murgatroid, where they planned to summon the saints by performing rituals that would allow the saints to find them. Stevos had brought a set of marching drums and a trumpet. He had shown Teragdor the beat he would need to play on the drums while he himself would sound the trumpet.
Teragdor smiled at the memory of the dawn summoning. He had belted the drums on, and felt filled with pride as upon them he began to bang, even as the setting of Uropia turned red as blood with the morning light of Fierd and Stevos’s trumpet sounded its call. Answering the call, Torean’s horsemen began to ride. With Fierd’s fire beginning to blaze, the stars began to fade from the dawn sky.