World of Darkness - [Time of Judgment 02] - The Last Battle
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Every Wyrm creature in the valley reacted as if shocked by an electrical jolt. They then ran for the passageway, retreating as commanded. Many moaned and wailed as their limbs acted against their own wishes, carrying them away from the fight.
Zhyzhak ran, her sense of smell and hearing her only clue as to the beings scrambling around her. She had an insane urge to flee, to retreat from the valley. From the sounds, it seemed her army was doing that very thing. She howled in anger and ran into a wall.
As she stumbled down, her hand brushed against the lens fetish that still hung from her neck, the lens she had used to track the Red Star through the Labyrinth. She growled and yanked it out, placing the lens like a monocle in her eye.
She looked around and chortled. She couldn’t see people or things, but their supernatural powers glowed like little lights. Their fetishes shone through the pitch black of her blindness, allowing her some semblance of sight.
The urge to depart the valley was gone. She lunged forward, searching for the one fetish that mattered. There, across the way, it shone, floating in the air, buoyed by the head that wore it.
She growled and dropped to all fours, charging forward. She would not be denied this time.
Zhyzhak collided with the Garou body attached to the glowing fetish. She snarled and dug her jaws into him, clamping them down into what felt like his shoulder. Her claws latched onto the arms, pinning them to the side, while her rear claws dug away, tearing into his legs and guts.
A gargled cry of pain and shock greeted her and she clamped down deeper, exultant. The body collapsed and stopped moving. She felt blood still pumping in the veins by her mouth and slashed with her claws again, tearing away at the flesh until she was sure he was dead.
She released the body and howled with joy, placing a paw over her prey’s chest.
Then she stopped, sniffing, confused. She looked down. The cursed Silver Crown still glowed, wrapped around the now lifeless head. But the scent was all wrong. It wasn't Albrecht. It was that cub who had attacked her earlier.
She screamed in rage and vaulted away, searching with her single lens for any sign of Albrecht. All she could see were shining fetishes and active spirits. She dove to her left, toward a cluster of them, and howled as her jaws bit into flesh.
• • •
Albrecht stepped forward and stumbled. He was weaker than he’d thought. Too much blood loss. He had to move.
He watched Martin’s body as Zhyzhak leaped away from it. She had finished him off in mere seconds. The kid never had a chance.
Mari howled in pain as one of the Garou sank its teeth into her flanks. She spun and threw him off, wheeling around again to bury her own teeth in his throat. The Garou thrashed and stopped moving. All the immediate threats were gone. No Garou moved nearby. The valley was filled with wounded and dead Garou. Across the way, a single group of shamans and straggling warriors fought to defend themselves against Zhyzhak.
Mari limped forward and collapsed, unconscious. Evan ran to her side, hugging her neck. Tears streamed down his cheek. He had taken wounds himself; Albrecht was surprised at how long he had stayed up. Evan had used his last healing fetish on him. Albrecht wasn’t sure it would be enough.
He crawled forward, unable to stand. He used his hands to pull himself forward, moving slowly toward Martin’s body.
He gritted his teeth, trying to shut out the screams of his warriors as they fell beneath Zhyzhak’s blind assault. The Black Spiral Dancer was more powerful than he had ever seen her before.
He reached Martin’s body and grasped the crown. He thrust it onto his head and shut his eyes, calling out to the power within it. Falcon! By the power of the Sun and Moon that forged this crown, give me the strength to destroy that bitch! If it’s the last goddamn thing I do!
The crown exploded with light, a bright smoldering gold and silver. Albrecht felt new strength enter his limbs. He saw an ephemeral haze of wings and feathers all around him. He stood up, lifting his klaive, stalking toward Zhyzhak.
He reached her side but she didn’t react. She was too busy chewing at a Silver Fang shaman to hear or smell him. Her eyes were red pits of raw flesh. As his klaive swung back, she caught its movement in her monocle. She rolled to the side, avoiding the brunt of the blow. It split her stomach open, spilling her guts across the ground.
She howled and leaped at him but he easily sidestepped her, the crown’s strength increasing his speed. As she shot past him, he swung his klaive again and sliced her torso in half.
She sucked in a shocked breath and fell, her front claws scrabbling at the air as her rear quarters tumbled away from her front half. A dying growl croaked out of her, rattling away into silence.
Albrecht stepped back, his strength ebbing. The Silver Crown shattered, its metal pieces flying in all directions. The gold and silver aura went out and Albrecht collapsed. • • •
The dragon buckled, thrashing its tail across the plain, knocking banes into the air and across the ground.
The Maeljin Incarna stared at it, worry furrowing their brows.
“First a retreat, then this, " Doge Klypse said. “Has Zhyzhak failed? ”
Aliara cursed and drew her slender sword. “Do you see? The Wyrm prepares for its final meal. I was right. "
The dragon opened its maw and began to suck in mammoth gusts of air. Banes hurtled through the sky and into its gullet. The retreating army, milling around outside the forest, waiting for new orders, scattered and ran. Their strength was useless against that inexorable force. They fell and flew backwards, sucked into the Wyrm’s mouth.
“No! ” DuBois yelled, losing his footing as the force of the Great Devourer began to draw him in. "I don't understand! ”
Aliara stabbed her sword into her own gut, collapsing to the ground. “It... eats... the corrupt. ” Her body, no longer resisting the pull, shot into the air and down the dragon’s throat.
The remaining Maeljin screamed and tried to resist, but their powers were nothing against the being they had worshipped for millennia. One by one, they flew down its throat and into its furnace of utter destruction.
Once the armies were devoured and the last bane eaten, the dragon snapped its tail forward and bit its tip. It slurped and sucked at the scaled appendage, drawing it into its throat like a snake eating a mouse.
Eating its own tail, it shrank, becoming ever smaller, until there was only a tiny, infinitesimal point left. The point exploded outwards into a white star, brilliant against the empty night, and then went out.
• • •
Altair, his breathing slow and labored, tried to smile. He had dropped in and out of consciousness, trying to muster the strength to live. He had witnessed Martin’s victory over the bane within him and knew that both prophecies had come true. The Perfect Metis was both the world’s doom and its savior. Too bad Zhyzhak had killed him before he could further assert his powers against the Wyrm.
He watched as the black hole beyond the valley’s passage slowly ate itself. As the singularity burst into a pinprick of pure light, he marveled at the star. His tribe’s symbol was a star. He had suspected when he witnessed the Wyrm’s battle with Rorg that more was afoot than mere appearances suggested. He had seen his tribe’s totem, Chimera, deep within the black hole.
Perhaps it had eaten something that disagreed with it, something that had fought from within to reverse its course and return it to its natural cycle.
He pondered this for a moment and then stopped breathing.
• • •
Albrecht stumbled and collapsed, landing beside Evan and Mari. Both his packmates lay still, unmoving.
He rolled onto his back and let out a deep breath. Nothing in the valley moved. Everybody was dead or dying. There were no healers left to restore them.
Albrecht sighed, watching a bright white star appear briefly in the sky before winking out, leaving only black emptiness.
He scanned the bodies, looking for Mephi Faster-Than-Death, hoping the gallia
rd had survived. Somebody had to tell the tale. But there was no sign of his body anywhere.
He closed his eyes, tired beyond tired. He wanted nothing more than to rest. After a while, he stopped moving.
The battlefield was silent. Garou bodies lay scattered across the valley floor. Snow slowly began to fall, descending from the blackness.
• • •
A figure stirred near Albrecht. Mari Cabrah opened her eyes, feeling a terrible pain in her ribs and chest. She looked over at Evan and Albrecht and choked back a sob. She watched the snow fall slowly over them.
She looked out over the valley and watched the snow pile up around the megaliths, pregnant with the slumbering spirits none of them could awaken. She wondered: Was there even a world left for them to awaken into?
She closed her eyes, feeling her body grow numb, but then snapped them open again with a growl. She remembered. Her duty was not yet done.
Her hand fumbled in her pocket and withdrew the nut she had taken from the Most Ancient’s tangled hair. Nothing else matters, the Ancient had said. Mari looked at it, examining its seamless, hard surface. With her other hand, she used her claws to dig into the hard dirt, wincing in pain with the strength it required to open a hole big enough for the small object.
She placed the nut in the hole and scraped the loose dirt on top of it, covering the hole. She waited, watching. Time passed, moments impossible to count. Nothing happened.
She closed her eyes, tired and numb, and forgot what she was waiting for.
The snow fell, covering her with its mantle, wrapping her and her packmates beneath a single white sheet. A cold wind whistled through the valley, blowing the snow in small circles as it fell.
From the ground by Mari’s hand, a single green shoot rose from the earth.