Do you know where Tusks go to die? Of course you don’t. You’re not even from here, are you? Then you cannot possibly imagine the biting cold of the tundra, where trees are few and only grass and shrub can cling to life above a subsurface layer of permanent frost. Yes, that is correct. The ground here never truly thaws. In this habitat, the Tusks make their home. The great mammoth people, who have wooly, elephantine heads atop two-legged bodies. They are a hardy people, but few in number, and have existed since as far back as memory will go.
When old Tusks know they are dying, they travel to a place known simply as the Graveyard, where all other Tusks have gone to die.
The location of this Graveyard is not a thing Tusks will give willingly.
But Dina di Ossatura did not ask.
She commanded.
She ripped it from the mind of a Tusk, like ripping out the page of a book. Do you think tearing out a page from the spine hurts a book? Then amplify that pain tenfold and you will know something of what the Tusk felt.
Yes, Dina learned many useful skills at the college of Elbion. Nothing so brutally direct as taught to Dreadlords at their Academy, all fireballs and blasts of lightning.
Dina’s abilities lie in far different realms.
And it is upon these abilities that Dina calls as she stands in the Graveyard of the Tusks, after an excruciating journey to reach it. The sealskin coat she wears is wrapped tightly about her. Her face is hidden behind a fleece mask. She raises gloved hands to either side and closes her eyes. About her lie the bones of a thousand generations of Tusks.
She defiles them utterly. Her magic suffuses them, calls them back to life. There came a rattling sound and bone connected to bone. The frost covering half-frozen corpses cracked as they shuddered. One by one, they got to their feet, each over eight feet tall. Mammoths of the snow, now animated by unholy powers.
Unthinking.
Unfeeling.
Utterly at her command.
And oh, she did command them. They marched in procession, a parade of the dead coming in from the snow, bound for the capital of the Nordenfiir.
When old Tusks know they are dying, they travel to a place known simply as the Graveyard, where all other Tusks have gone to die.
The location of this Graveyard is not a thing Tusks will give willingly.
But Dina di Ossatura did not ask.
She commanded.
She ripped it from the mind of a Tusk, like ripping out the page of a book. Do you think tearing out a page from the spine hurts a book? Then amplify that pain tenfold and you will know something of what the Tusk felt.
Yes, Dina learned many useful skills at the college of Elbion. Nothing so brutally direct as taught to Dreadlords at their Academy, all fireballs and blasts of lightning.
Dina’s abilities lie in far different realms.
And it is upon these abilities that Dina calls as she stands in the Graveyard of the Tusks, after an excruciating journey to reach it. The sealskin coat she wears is wrapped tightly about her. Her face is hidden behind a fleece mask. She raises gloved hands to either side and closes her eyes. About her lie the bones of a thousand generations of Tusks.
She defiles them utterly. Her magic suffuses them, calls them back to life. There came a rattling sound and bone connected to bone. The frost covering half-frozen corpses cracked as they shuddered. One by one, they got to their feet, each over eight feet tall. Mammoths of the snow, now animated by unholy powers.
Unthinking.
Unfeeling.
Utterly at her command.
And oh, she did command them. They marched in procession, a parade of the dead coming in from the snow, bound for the capital of the Nordenfiir.
