CASTAMERE, A SMALL RAINY TOWN between the edge of Frostholm and further into the deep North, was empty of people as Rafel and the legions of the Eldorian host entered through the open, swinging wooden gates. The welcome sign was torn off the hinges, a cold wind plastered the drizzle to the boards, but Rafel could still make out the slimy brown letters.
'Castamere: Home of Inns and Taverns. May it rain forever!'
Rafel had heard about the little village. They were famous for their love of music and perpetual spring weather. The folk of Castamere had produced some of the most notable bards in the history of the Empire—some even rumored the depraved artist, Camerlengo was from the little sleepy town.
Castamere and its people were famous for lore and hospitable culture. They had a lot of stories to tell. The taverns were always full with rambunctious, raunchy crowd and you could always count on the town for good musical entertainment, little cute birdies in wench drabs with the voice of a canary.
But now it seemed, Castamere was abandoned.
No life. No song. No culture.
It didn't snow in Castamere. It rained. It seemed the winter had skipped Frostholm, one town over, and blasted onwards into the reaching tundra. And so, the ground was wet and the earth squelched with mud from the soldiers' pounding battle sandals. Few of the warriors removed their helmets to look around.
What was once a hospitable countryside village everyone in the continent could count on to maintain its simple, folk culture was a destroyed panorama of empty homes. Doors were kicked in. Taverns, half-burnt and still smoking in the slight rain. A fountain in the shape of a nereid asunder and leaking pure spring water. The long ale hall where people gathered to listen to stories fallen to its knees.
It looked like a hurricane blown in.
Rafel didn't like what he was seeing.
"We march on!" He shouted behind to the troops.
The head of his forward legion passed the message backward to the next Centurion commanding his own hundred. Trumpeters blew the bugles so the soldiers at the end of the long marching line could hear and follow the order. Behind, the troops had just skirted around the moat surrounding the recovered state of Frostholm.
The drawbridge was up. And several lookout guards waved and hailed the route of the marching army. Little children peered through windows in the high brick wall, smiling at the splendor of Her Majesty's host. In a watchtower, the newly appointed Lord of Frostholm bid the Queen and her allegiants godspeed against the Nephilims.
The people of Frostholm were lucky the armies of Eldoria had arrived when they did.
They were next in line for plunder by the crusade of Rumbrun.
The appareled soldier with the forehorn stopped blowing when Rafel's message had reached the very end of the winding campaign.
"At ease, Lieutenant!" Giselle spoke to the warrior on the horse beside her flagbearer.
She adjusted the chainmail of her golden armor and pulled up her Griffin next to Rafel. Seeing her look, Rafel finally put his hands up and unfastened his helmet. He pulled it off and raindrops met with his rufescent hair. The strands were soon stuck to his forehead and the sides of his face. He held the winter wolf's helm under his right arm and pushed back a ginger lock from his eyes.
"It looks like a village I once visited a while back. . .in the aftermath of Moloch's passing. Even the sheep and goats were skewered like stork," said Rafel.
He spoke of Castamere, and the surrounding dilapidated cabins. The cottages were torn to shambles in the fury of whatever creature had taken flight here. The homeliness of the little rainy town was gone. That quaint spark, extinguished. Rafel knew there weren't many good things in life, good souls even less, and so it pained him the more. He wondered where all the people went.
Hopefully, they had escaped whatever carnage Rumbrun had brought in with their unholy crusade. Hopefully.
Giselle brushed back her own paler blonde hair and wiped of drizzle from her cheeks. She attempted to exert humor into Rafel's broodiness.
"I guess the city of Frostholm is overjoyed we arrived when we did, yeah?"
Rafel didn't smile. His face didn't do anything. Didn't show anything. A complete, unreadable mask. Emotionless. In one word, Giselle would describe the beautiful man, her war Commander, as an avalanche. Inspiring and deadly, cold as fuck and would crush and bury you in an instant of your cry.
"This village you said," Giselle began again. "when you say Moloch, you mean The Destroyer?"
Rafel nodded. Giselle sighed in her saddle. He wasn't wrong. Castamere was a mess. One aspect of Rafel's speech she didn't deliberate upon was that now she knew his true infernal origins, 'a while back', could easily be a hundred years ago.
"The Nephilims did this!" Rafel growled under his breath.
Giselle wanted to stretch out her hand and touch him. But she refrained. She had to show strength and courage like he did to their armies behind. So rather than go with her heart, she glanced behind to the silver chariot sludging behind. Meeting Cora and Aya's eyes for a beat, she nodded and looked again to Rafel.
"—And we will make them pay!" She finished with authority.
The fore troops of the Eldorian legions had reached a fork in the muddy streets of Castamere. It appeared to be a branching out to the village's square. The quickest way out of this northernmost thorp and into the icy wastelands where they would meet a cold, certain death or return in shining glory, massive hairy heads of blue Giants on their shoulders.
Rafel took the bend in the road.
He and Giselle abruptly halted.
"Fuck."
Giselle pulled the reins on her Griffin and Rafel stopped his Pegasus in its canter.
Both Queen and Earl froze.
They had just found the people of Castamere!
No—the bodies.
"I was wrong," Rafel said. "This is worse than that village."
It was.
Giselle's golden eyes were wide in her face. Behind, Cora and Aya's mouths synchronically dropped open. "By the Son of God!" The Succubus yelped. It was the first time she had uttered the messiah's name. The campaign had reached an impromptu hold, and several soldiers peeked from behind to see what the hold was apart. They didn't break lines though.
Luckily, the fork in the road kept them from seeing the twisted violence their Queen beheld.
Giselle put a hand to her mouth. A second later, she closed her eyes too.
There, before them, in the village's square was a heap of corpses. Bodies of all the townies they had been looking for. The poor lot hadn't escaped after all. Beside the mountain of frozen, helpless limbs was also a cart full of kids, tossed into the heap as if in haste or mockery. It was the wheelbarrow of children that made Giselle shut her eyes.
Their skins were blue. Their innocent faces pale. Eyes glassy as hung deer. Their fingers caked in mud and nails broken in the final moments of their deaths.
Rafel could see them kicking and screaming at the attackers now. The events leading up to the massacre played like a whimsical screen in front of him, shrouded in fog and horror. But the children were locusts in the hands of the mighty Nephilims. They had to watch their fathers strangled and torn apart in the middle. Mothers, subjected to the worst defilement by giant pricks that'll give even a cow pause, raped and torn open from the inside.
And finally, their heads ripped off. Their still bodies tossed like dirty clothes into a pile, heap upon heap.
As Rafel looked on the interwoven corpses, he counted hundreds. No villager had escaped. None. There was no survivor either. The violence in itself was disturbing.
He also sighted animals interspersed in the pile. Cadavers of mongrel dogs and livestock. A man's head looked to be shoved up a bull's ass. Only superhuman strength could do that. Another woman was flayed to the bone—and Rafel only discerned her gender by the flatness of her groin area. One headless body had its arm clutching to a lute. It hung limply off the fingers, frozen stiff.
Rafel couldn't even begin with the children. He, with all the death and pain he had admittedly inflicted, could not send eyes to the cart of little souls now lost to the abyss. He figured he had seen enough.
The smell of the apothecary filled the air.
Flies would buzz but for the biting cold. And so, only black crows, so fat of rotting flesh they looked pregnant cawed and hopped about on the pile of dead bodies. Many corpses bore empty sockets—the murder birds had gone straight for the eyes.
Giselle finally pulled away her hand from covering her lips. She gave the command to continue the march, but in another direction. She spoke directly to that Lieutenant thus,
"Ser Romulus, lead the Legions through the small woodland on the other side. It's a longer path but we'll have to take it. Have the Wild Shapes among the armies draw up to the front to scare off the beasts of the tundra. As Persepolis and Ashtapur, Castamere too has fallen."
The soldier bowed and saluted his Queen. And swiftly turned astride his horse to do her bidding. The bugle swiftly sounded and soldiers accorded ear to the whistle. The Legions turned as one and took the path of the little snow forest.
Rafel, Giselle, Corazón, and Aya Naamah waited until the armies drave off, and then Rafel sparked a tongue of [Hellfire] in his palm and set ablaze the corpse pile. They all watched the blue bodies burn. The smell of fire licking flesh was acrid but all four of them held their positions, more determined now than ever to get even with the Nephilims.
About an hour later, Rafel and his female circle joined the host at a small pass sandwiched underneath two great ice peaks. The silver canyon was magnificent and the armies exited through it, finally entering into the no man's land of Rumbrun, where everything from there was snow, cave, and giant.
The ambiance of the marching forces was mostly quiet and would have remained so until the troops passed by a wide frozen lake. The soldiers were pounding across the center of the solid blue pool, frigid ice crunching under their boots when a crack in the ice stopped them.
SKRRR!
All the Legions stopped marching.
SKRRR!
The cracking sounded again. And all soldiers held their breaths.
Was the river of ice about to melt with all of them on it?
Like a web, the cracking spread right before the soldiers' gazes. The ice split with a resounding thunder but the whole river didn't melt. Only a large circular hole opened up in the lake. Out from the frothing frigid water burst a gigantic slimy beast. And on its back was Rafel's wife.
Green snake eyes blinked cautiously at them as the beast crawled across the ice to the stunned troops. The beast was part crocodile and had the streamlined body of a fish. It was generally slender, not counting the humongous striped blue tail.
It was the amphibian Lizadron, Yemaya's Familiar.
Giselle watched the Atlantean Queen cross the small ice bridge between them with narrowed eyes. Out from the water hole behind, other similar mutated water beasts broke out the surface to join her. More ice holes cracked in the frozen lake and several Atlantean soldiers burst out the freezing water. They silently joined ranks with the Eldorian troops.
Yemaya, Goddess of the seas, reached Rafel's side. Her Lizadron nudged his Pegasus and she leaned in to give him a cute peck on the side of his cheek. She nodded behind to Cora and Aya. The young women returned her smile.
Giselle was watching all these with quizzical eyes.
"What are you doing here, water queen? And why are your armies joining my ranks?"
Yemaya laughed warmly.
"I see you inherited the spiritedness of your grandfather, Giselle. Straight to business! While I don't owe you or your surface dwellers any reason to be here, I have come because of my husband. He goes to war. I go too!"
Yemaya touched a hand to her coiled flood of blue hair. The merman at her side, one of her lovers, Gawain, handled her own [Divine] Trident, Waverider. It was a silver feminine contrast of Rafel's FROSTBLADE.
Meanwhile, Giselle only heard one word of her entire speech.
"Your husband?"
"Yes, my husband." Yemaya did not care for the Eldorian Queen's large, saucer eyes and continued indifferently, "Lord BlüdThïrste and I are married. It's only a union of convenience now, mind you. But still, I would go to war with him. See. . ."
She held up her ring.
"I'm glad you wore yours too!"
Yemaya smiled down at Rafel's ruby marriage knocker. Giselle followed her crescent eyes and hissed through her teeth.
"Uh oh!" Aya shielded her face behind. Another war was about to break out just now.
"You are married?! Israfel!" Giselle screeched. "And you didn't fucking tell me?"
Rafel looked between both women. He didn't know where to start. Just how did his Uncle Lucifer manage the supremely jealous Vashti and his other concubines?
Like a boon from the very devil he was thinking about, the ice cracked again, turning everyone's attention momentarily to it. Rafel sneaked a smile under the women's noses and said,
"We have to keep moving. The ice wouldn't hold."
The two Queens forgot their possessiveness for the moment and pulled the reins on their respective beasts. Griffin and Lizadron followed Rafel's Pegasus as he led the charge, and host onward from the frozen lake and into the stretching tundra.
Yemaya's additional Atlantean troops brought up the total number of the host to a solid four hundred thousand warriors, all of them eager to plunder the land of giants.
As the legions crossed the expanse of the cold-blue frozen lake, Rafel sent telepathically to Aya Naamah.
"Tell Corazón I said thank you. I owe her one."
Aya promptly delivered the message, and Cora blushed and smiled. She stole a quick glance forward at the redhaired rogue on the winged horses. She wondered how Rafel knew it was her that conjured the last cracking of the ice to stop Giselle from going into a rant.
It was a little whispered spell, and it had worked marvelously.
None of the Queens were wiser. It had stopped a potential catfight from breaking out. Only she and Rafel knew the interruption was helped.
However, as the demonic giant himself stared out into the immense silver clouds bright with snowflakes and a rainbow, he guided his Pegasus onto white mushy earth again and knew, that he couldn't keep Giselle's fury at bay for long. Sooner or later, they were going to have 'The Talk'.
"Shit." He muttered, breathing snow.