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- Registered: 19.05.09
- last visit: 28.07.12
- Posts: 93
 Posted: 26.05.2009, 11:51
A DOOMED ARMY
A GENOCDAL EMPIRE
AN UNCONQUERABLE CITY
At the edge of the known world, two desperate armies struggle for the right to siege a city that has never been taken. Terrible magics are unleashed and the fate of empires hangs in the balance. Highdome and his misfit crew of cutthroats, monsters, and mutants don?t care. They just want to stay alive. But when sorcery backfires and the fury of the Vast White desert itself is unleashed, the men and women of the Red Regiment must look inside of themselves to find the strength to survive. Only courage, brotherhood, and the mysterious force known as the Murderer?s Edge stands between them and total destruction!
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Dave Mattingly
BlackWyrm
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- Registered: 19.05.09
- last visit: 28.07.12
- Posts: 93
Posted: 26.05.2009, 11:52
Sample 1: The Murderer?s Edge
It was then that it came over me like a warm, red wave. The Murder?s Edge: that feral, animal thing that?s kept me alive through all these long years of killing. Like a blackened lump of coal at the center of a man?s heart, it sits there just waiting to burst into flame when things get hot enough. When you?re pizzle scared into thoughtlessness, when Death is so close you can smell the cheap booze on her whore?s breath, the Murderer?s Edge gives you that extra burst of energy you need to stay alive. It makes your sword bite home before your opponent has time to act. It causes your shield come up just in time to block his spear. It makes you fast. It makes him slow. It?s the brute part of you that wants not just to live, but to live bad enough to do the terrible things a man must sometimes do to stay alive in a fight.
With a burst of manic strength I slammed my helmeted head into his large, wet dog nose. The manimal released a tormented howl of pain that was quickly followed by an anguished yelp as I drove my knee into his groin. He was definitely human in that respect. (Probably more so than an Imperial eunuch who spends his days reading semi-literate mercenary reports from the edge of the Empire.) Weakened, I threw him off and sprang quickly to my feet. My sword was in my hand an instant later. Hoping for the satisfying feeling of bone and flesh shattering in its wake, I brought the heavy blade down upon his head with all of my strength.
Only he wasn?t there. Nimble for all his massive size, the Canaanite had flung himself into a roll that had handily avoided my strike. A shower of sparks flew in all directions as steel struck against fieldstone. He kept right on rolling until he reached a nearby ledge, vanishing over the side in a flash of golden fur. Cursing I ran after him blade in hand. Determined not to let my prey escape, I made my way grimly toward the edge of the embankment. The dog-man had already righted himself. Standing almost seven feet tall, he drew a wicked-looking halberd from a holster on his back, and then hefted it over his head with one hand before letting loose with a long, mournful howl that quickly found its echoes in the distance. Breaking my attention loose from the narrow seduction of combat, I could hear the sounds of battle all around me. The Canaanites had found Waif and Morlock. Or, perhaps more likely, the two silent warriors had ambushed them up ahead somewhere. Steel rang upon steel out of sight.
There was little I could do about that one way or the other. I might not like it but my friends would have to fight their own battles while I fought mine. Slapping the flat of my sword against my calloused palm in the universal sign of ?bring it on,? I advanced down the rocky slope to my meet my opponent or my Maker, whichever it might be. With a shriek he charged uphill against me, his weapon leading him as he went.
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Dave Mattingly
BlackWyrm
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- Registered: 19.05.09
- last visit: 28.07.12
- Posts: 93
Posted: 26.05.2009, 11:52
Sample 2: The Brine Dragon
With these pleasant thoughts ? food, women, money, and my own general cleverness ? taking up a significant amount of my tiny brain, and with the men enjoying themselves for almost the first time since we had set out on our cursed adventure, I wasn?t doing a particularly good job of watching out for the ?truly dangerous? things Hanif had warned me would come. Which is probably why I found myself flying 20 Imperium through the air as something the size of a prosperous farmer?s house rose up directly beneath my feet, roared, and began eating Hanif?s Bedune warriors like party snacks.
?Brine Dragon!? shouted the old rahaq. A moment later he vanished from sight as the thing swung about, sending massive waves of water in every direction. It was I suppose a bug, not a dragon. Or at the very least it was a bug in the same way that both a minnow and a whale are both fish. It was the exact size that I had always imagined a dragon being, but without the added bonus of being in any way majestic or wise looking. It looked more like an ur-cricket that with a pair of scissors the size of hay wagons grafted to its ugly face. At first glance you immediately wanted to kill it, yet were unable to fathom how that might even be possible.
All of this vanished for a moment as I hit the water. Flailing about in desperation, I managed to come up swinging my sword impotently and shouting orders at the same time. Which was also pretty pointless as no one could actually hear me. The brine dragon?s roaring thoroughly drowned out whatever sounds were left after al-Zilzaal?s shrieking. Still, most of the Regimentals and Bedune had done the most logical thing imaginable when confronted by an insect the size of a sailing ship. Namely, run. Which was pretty much the content of my orders anyhow.
A few unlucky souls like myself simply didn?t have that option. We were too close. Strong arms lifted me to my feet as Ploughboy and Shortround came to my aid. On either side of them, the Bear and the Weasel grimly gripped their strange crossbows, took aim, and began to fire a barrage of glowing projectiles up at the thing?s head. This mildly annoyed the massive creature. It swung about and glared down at us through its barrel-sized eyes.
?Will you two freaks please start using arrows?? I screamed as the massive thing lumbered toward us. Suddenly, Morlock emerged from the water near its abdomen and drove his bokkon up to the hilt into one of its rear legs. The thing howled and began to turn about, only to have Hanif emerge from the water on the other side. He began hacking at another leg like a mad woodsman. Simultaneously, Trogdore leapt straight out of the water onto its back. He ran up the length of the Brine Dragon, striking at soft points with his macana as he went.
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Dave Mattingly
BlackWyrm
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- Registered: 19.05.09
- last visit: 28.07.12
- Posts: 93
Posted: 26.05.2009, 12:09
Sample 3: Blitzscreamer
A familiar, horrid scream from above interrupted my fatalistic musings: an al-Baqara and her rider. The al-Baqara cried out once again in its horrible, amplified woman-being-violated way. Its rider, a Bedune wytch-man or rahaq, probably wasn?t going to do anything while he was up there except look scary in his black, flowing robes and massive purple veil. Fair enough. But an al-Baqara made you shudder just to look at it. At some point it must have been an attractive, normal sized woman... until somebody with a nasty turn of mind tried unsuccessfully to turn it into a giant bird. Arms rendered impossibly thin, then stretched ten feet in either direction to form wings. Lovely, smooth skin somehow transformed into frayed, bat-like wings that flutter raggedly behind the al-Baqara, like morbid banners being flown by a dead army. Its legs broken then reformed so that they bend backwards and can fold up underneath its elongated body. Its feet transformed into massive, three-toed claws.
The rahaq turned his mount about in a lazy arc, banking his hellish bride against the darkening, purple sky. He?d probably caught a glint off of the spyglass. Only officers had those. My blood ran cold through my veins. Reaching into the folds of his billowing robes he withdrew a dark circular object, took careful aim, and hurled it toward the earth. A moment later a tail like a feathery corkscrew sprouted from the rear of the tumbling object, enabling it to control its rapid descent. Then a nail-toothed maw opened up at the thing?s front to emit a piercing, unholy wail of despair and doom.
?Blitzscreamer!? I yelled down the line. Various trench corporals quickly took up my cry. Then I tackled Abdul into the sewage filled ditch below. The two of us went down in a tangle of limbs as the living projectile struck the ground nearby. The explosion that followed was deafening. We were lifted several feet off of the earth, and then flung down like a petulant child?s rag dolls as dust, rock, and mud fell around us on all sides. Neither of us bothered to get up as, a moment later, hundreds of bits of spinning bone shrapnel whizzed directly over our heads like a swarm of deadly bees.
?By the Tyrant, I am unmanned!? screamed a voice further down the trenchworks. The Blitzscreamer must have struck dead on at the bottom of our fortifications, sending tiny bits of itself along the line at waste level. It was a nasty weapon, some sort of magycally summoned hell-thing with bones made of steel and bowels filled with explosive gas. Its voice was intended to awe and shock men on the ground so that they forgot to dive for cover. Fortunately, that part of its devil magic didn?t always work.
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Dave Mattingly
BlackWyrm
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