Fable - Ask Embrace the Slaughter

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Mogrin caught Irene in his arms, barely noticing the impact or her weight despite his fatigue. He set her down onto her feet. Around them were the corpses of Risen gretches freshly returned to the dead, these crushed or cleaved by Mogrin to clear the space. Yet, though six of the necromancers had fallen by Irene's blades, there were enough still to cause near boundless troubles, and corpses nearby stirred with undead animation, snarling and sneering and eyes aglow with that unholy magic.

Mogrin and Irene hurried inside the defensive circle of Gildans and Templar.

"We need a plan," he said.

It was that work of figuring out tactics again. But while the dwarves and Templar and his Maulgar kept the living and Risen gretches at bay, this was what needed to be done. This was what was going to get them the hell out of this damn gorge.

And he knew Irene would want what advice he had to offer, and so he couldn't get to killing. Not just yet.
 
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Irene nearly lost her footing, nearly stumbled, when Mogrin set her down and her boots touched the ground. A swirl of lightheadedness, rushing through her skull like a gale, made her gasp quietly, stealing in one terrifying moment her strength before, just as swiftly as it had come, it departed, and she by her own power, depleted as it now was, could yet stand. Her exertions up there on the shelf had cost her.

And so it was that forming a plan was indeed necessary, also did it provide her a brief respite, a chance to rest. Each and every ounce of strength would recover, tiny and precious, she already had allotted for the future, knowing that this fight was far from over. Ordering her small troop of ranged soldiers to expend all their arrows and bolts on the gretches had been a tactical error; but even if the elves and the crossbowmen had been able to loose upon the necromancers, it would have been to little effect, given the safety of the mages' high vantage on the natural shelves.

The Curites had planned this assault well.

"Chapter Master Arndel! Kegbreaker! To me!" Irene called once inside the defensive circle. And as it had been before, once again the highest leadership of the joint force convened, the four in whose hands nearly two hundred lives depended. The weight of command was heaviest in such pivotal moments. To Arndel, to Kegbreaker, and to Mogrin, Irene stated the practical fact before them: "There are only two ways out. Either forward or back. Speak quickly."

"To our rear is the blockade, and the men, the ogres especially, are exhausted; hard labor is a risky prospect," said Arndel. "Let us push through. The horde to our front is thinned enough. We push through and out of this deathtrap."

"Now wait a minute, Templar," said Kegbreaker. "We don't know what's up there at the end of the pass."

"We do know what's at the bottom of it, and it won't budge."

"A whole other horde could be waiting up there. More Trolls. More Curites. Regel knows. But we don't."

"Praetor," Arndel said, beseeching Irene directly, "to stay here is to invite death. This is where they want us."

"And it's also easy ground to hold," Kegbreaker said.

"Who will hold it? My men, your men, are dying. We need countless thousands of victories to stay alive. The dead only need one, and then we lose a warrior while they gain one. This until the tide takes us all!"

Irene looked up to Mogrin. "Tell me on the honor of Regel and Threshkuul together: can your ogres still take down at least some of that blockade?"
 
Mogrin's face pressed into one of hard, realistic consideration. He glanced down the pass and toward the barricade of boulders and fallen trees. Handy work, for a bunch of stupid gretches, even if they had help from Curites. Dismantling a portion of it he thought was certainly possible, though it came with complications. First, his ogres were by now sluggish and tired, and this was only getting worse as they defended themselves outside of the defensive circle against the Risen Trolls and gretches. When one's muscles were fresh, obviously, one's greatest feats of strength were available to be called upon. Now? His ogres would likely have to work in teams, so depleted was the might in their beleaguered arms. And it was still going to take precious time for even a portion to be dismantled.

Secondly, once the way out was open, the entire force would not be able to escape at once, but rather it would have to file out. The last fighters to leave, of course, would suffer the greatest danger. But this was something they did not have the luxury to worry about right now.

So Mogrin gave his assessment. "Yes. We can do it. But I'll need all of my ogres for the job. They'll need to be defended while they work."
 
"Then my dwarves will be your shield," said Kegbreaker.

"As will my Templar," said Arndel.

"This is it then," Irene said, deciding on their course of action. "We will make our stand at the bottom of the pass."

She had already felt the bite of the unknown with the archers' and crossbowmen's expenditure of ammunition. Risking the unknown again by pushing through the horde and up the pass was a step too far, beyond what was even seemly to pray for. Regel knew the distinction between boldness and recklessness, the former only finding his favor.

Now, they just needed to—
 
"Let us collect our dead, and be about it," Mogrin said.

This was foremost on his mind, and without any thought to the foe they were facing. Because to Mogrin, it went without question that Maulgar dead, their torques, needed to be recovered. To abandon them on the battlefield was shameful for the living and disrespectful to the dead. To leave their bodies vulnerable to the whims of foul necromancers desecrating their remains even worse.

But he saw the uncertain glances that Arndel, Kegbreaker, and Irene shared among each other.

And he felt already some obstinacy building within his breast to what he sensed was coming.
 
"Mogrin..." Irene said, being the first to speak. Her voice was that of a cautious, well-meaning friend, knowing just how dear the issue was to him.

"...we can't do that."
 
"We can, and we will. My ogres will carry our own," Mogrin asserted.

"It's not that, madi," Kegbreaker said, calling him friend in the Old Gildan tongue to soften the blow.

"It's the danger," said Arndel, picking up where the dwarf left off. "The risk. Bringing corpses into our midst while our enemy is a group of necromancers—"

"Irene can handle it," Mogrin said, making a forceful assertion once more. "She can handle it with her Praetor powers. Right, Irene?"
 
Irene drew in a breath through her nose. Around them, the desperate fight continued. Time spent on this was, in Regel's honest truth, a waste. Yet handling this improperly, when all of them were relying on the ogres to get out of the pass, could be disastrous.

One thing she would not do, could not do, was lie to him.

"I cannot, Mogrin," she admitted. "I cannot keep the Risen Trolls neutralized, and keep all of our own dead neutralized, and stop whatever else these Curites might conjure."

Her lips pursed with a second's worth of reluctance, and then she said it:

"We have to leave our dead behind."
 
Mogrin felt his head already shaking before he even consciously knew it was shaking. "No," he said defiantly. "No, we Maulgar will not leave our dead. You lot can abandon yours. But we will not."

"Madi, come now, we don't have time for this," Kegbreaker said. "We have to go now."

"The risk is too great," Arndel said. "Just too great, and we need every hand available for the fighting retreat. You know that."

"No," Mogrin asserted, throwing a dismissive hand up into the air, signaling that he was done with the lot of them. He turned. "Our dead will be taken, and that's—"
 
"MOGRIN, HALT!" Irene bellowed with all the commanding force she could muster. And it was this same force which stabbed back at her as well, its bladed tip like a spear skewering her own heart for what she by circumstance would have to say.

Mogrin halted, and then Irene said it: "We will leave our dead where they lie. That's an order."

The look Mogrin came to give her over his shoulder was one that she would never forget. A look of deep, painful betrayal, obscured but partially by a thin mask of fuming anger.

And now both of them were wounded over this ordeal. That Mogrin would be denied that which was of great significance to him and his people, that Irene would be the one to forcibly deny him.
 
"Yes. Praetor."

And with that, Mogrin forced his way out of the defensive circle, toward his ogres, intent on organizing them and telling them the plan and their part in it.
 
Never did those two words in tandem hurt as much as they did now, spoken by Mogrin in this most forsaken of ordeals. A terrible tightness gripped at Irene's breast, a hard swelling at her throat, an awful scratching at the corners of her eyes. She knew the order was undoubtedly for the best, but, by the Saints, it was the most wretched order she ever had to give.

As she watched him go, the quiet and malformed words escaped her lips of their own volition, "I'm sor—"

But she swallowed.

Pursed her lips.

Pinched her eyes.

Breathed out.

And then looked to Arndel and Kegbreaker and said, "Instruct your warriors on the plan. We fall back now."
 
Fury coursed through Mogrin's veins. Betrayal stabbed at his heart. A deep cultural wound festered acidicly in his spirit. Would his fallen kin, their sacred torques, just be left there in the bloodied ground of the Westlurch Pass? That would be the best outcome, and correspondingly was it slim. Worse, and far more likely, the necromancers wouldn't miss their chance to raise the Maulgar dead, adding Risen ogres to their vile army. If the Gildans had to retreat fully from the Pass, and this seemed incredibly likely to be so, Threshkuul knew where the necromancers would puppeteer their zombified horde off to. Mogrin scarcely wanted to think about such a thing.

And so he didn't. He shoved all of that down hard within his mind, crushed the resentment within his breast. Praetor Irene had given him an order, the battle and the peril they all faced was still dire, and he and his ogres still needed to do their part.

Mogrin kicked a Risen gretch out of his way, sending the creature flying into the gorge's rock wall, and then, standing before the collection of his ogre warriors engaged in their fighting, he roared, "MAULGAR! Listen to me! We're moving down the Pass. The dwarves and Templar will hold the line, and it's our job to get us out of here."

Some fierce (though tired) growls and cheers, no complaints, and only a few questions—easily answered. Good. His boys wanted to get out here just as much as everybody else. It was unavoidable though that one of his ogres would bring up the same thing he himself brought up to Irene. Skrog, the Dhuumok, happened to be the one, and Mogrin had to shut him down as quickly and uncompromisingly as Irene had done to him. Skrog, like Mogrin earlier, protested; by the fury of the two gods, what an inversion. But Mogrin couldn't risk having it stand. If Skrog's protests got too many Maulgar swayed, it would be a disaster for good order.

So Mogrin asserted himself by grabbing hold of Skrog and viciously headbutting him, knocking the other ogre flat on his ass. "You heard me, Maulgar!" he shouted in general, helping Skrog back up to his feet as he spoke. "We are leaving the dead. We have no choice. Now get to crushing—clear a path for us all to retreat."

None of the ogres raised any complaints, laments, or challenges after that. They did as ordered...even if Mogrin knew they felt as he did.

He said a small prayer under his breath in the midst of the battle. "Threshkuul...Regel...give Maulgar hands the strength to recover our honored dead, today, or some day soon."
 
The battle down the pass to the blockade was a blood-drenched nightmare.

What rest Irene had been able to get while she, Mogrin, Arndel, and Kegbreaker was a godsend, yet still not nearly enough, and she was far from fresh. Thank Regel for the endurance of dwarves; on that account Kegbreaker had made no wanton boast, but stated with confidence the plain fact. Yet even the endurance of the dwarves had its limits, and the fighting had been going on now for over an hour. For a human, simply giving one's all against a determined foe for scarcely five minutes straight was exhausting—a normal battle order required a rotation of the fatigued and the fresh. No such luxury had been afforded to the Gildans here in the deadly Westlurch Pass. And as the beleaguered Gildan formation tried to retreat back down the Pass, Irene felt the true weight of the Curites' sinister plan.

Exhaustion was the true killer.

At the beginning of the retreat the Gildans had to hold their circular formation, assailed on all sides as they were. Mogrin, wisely, sent half of his remaining ogres into the protection of the circle to take what time as was available to rest and recuperate their strength—they would be the first ones working to dismantle the barricade. The other ogres, along with Mogrin and Irene herself, battled the Risen gretches, knocking them down, crushing them, cleaving them, ripping them in half, and only for a short while would the undead stay dead before the necromancers' incessant magic would find them again, raising and repairing their shattered bodies to once more enter the fray; the ogres tackled or grappled with the Risen Trolls as the hulking beasts stood, neutralizing them and giving Irene time to Disrupt the necromancy animating them. By the grace of Saint Sofia, whensoever her Praetor Power became available, she had to use it—again and again and again. Hers would be an exhaustion both of a physical and spiritual nature.

The front fared no better. Dwarves made for the shield, the bulwark upon which the gretches, both living and dead, would crash—and in many cases catch the blade of an axe in retaliation. Templar made for the butchers of green flesh, cleaving and carving it up with the reach of their halberds and spears from behind the solid aegis provided by the dwarves. Had all the men involved been fresh, it would have been as devastating as it had been earlier in the battle. But it was not to be. Many blows lacked vigor. Movements were sluggish. Mistakes were made. And, in some cases, there was simply nothing which anyone could do.

And this is how Ol' Kegbreaker fell.

"Come! Come you filthy, slobbering beasts!" he said, his show of undaunted courage, despite his panting, meant to keep up the morale of the dwarves around him. "I have delivered a thousand blows, and I've a thousand more yet!"

But then a Risen gretch, armed with a long hooked blade, snared Ol' Kegbreaker in the clutch of the weapon and with the help of other undead pulled him out from the formation and into the horde. The dwarves, alarmed, all began shouting his name, yet so swamped in the tide of bestial and undead flesh were they all, so exhausted, that no effective push could be made to recover him—and anyone who broke formation would similarly be a dead man.

In a cruel twist, Kegbreaker was still alive. Still fighting, even as he was being savaged on all sides. Arndel called for Irene, she came running back into the circle and up to the front, and Arndel on behalf of the Gildan dwarves desperately beseeched her to order the resting ogres, those recovering in the circle's safety, to push through and recover Kegbreaker.

But Kegbreaker himself called back to them all: "GO! GO! The bottom of the Pass is just there!" And of himself and his fate, and he cried out: "It's but a few stinking gretches!" Irene, knowing that to send the resting ogres would spend all of the strength they had just recuperated, maybe even see some of their number perish in the effort, chose the bitter choice of heeding Kegbreaker's wish...and leaving him to his fate.

She made eye contact with Kegbreaker one last time. Irene, still holding her bloody seax, pressed her hand over her heart, snapped off a quick bow of her head, honoring Kegbreaker's sacrifice with a final Gildan salute.

"Godspeed, Ohlmaand," she said, using Kegbreaker's true name.

The last anyone saw of Kegbreaker was that he was in the thick of the horde, fighting till the last.
 
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