Obsidian Shattered

Peregrine awoke good as new.

Some may have called it a miracle. Some may have called it the work of the potions he’d been laced with by that Acheron fellow after breaking half the bones in his body jumping from a second story window onto stone (with a child strung over his backbone screaming as the burning building exploded). Some without medical knowledge may have called it “a fine constitution” while others may have called it luck if they didn’t have it on good authority his bones really had been broken. He called it Destiny. Evidently they were pleased with his contribution to the drama of existence, and evidently they wished to be pleased again. Now. Immediately. With the same task as that assigned before. Or so the spinning dice at the village shrine said as he gave them a dutiful whirl.

Some may have called him a mage and assumed that was the cause of the miraculous healing, seeing him visit a shrine only mages went to with serious intent. They would be mistaken. He simply wished with impossible fervor for impossible favor. He was overjoyed to be a nonmage, one of the normal ones not just sitting there trying desperately not to hatch into the true menace within. But he still wanted a destiny. He wanted everyone with the capabilities to want the same. To make the world good without the help of cursed eggs trying not to hatch. He would be a monster hunter. A real one. Not just some lowlife mopping up the scraps, killing cleaverbills and other small fry that didn’t really matter very much compared to the real quarry. He was Peregrine Montague and he would end Corrupted beasts. Not if it was the last thing he did. That would suggest a certain futility. For a new world to be sustainable those who made it what it was couldn’t exactly go dying every time they tried to do anything of note. He also took issue with the word if. There would be no if’s, and’s, or but’s. He would succeed, with the favor of Destiny, and it was simple as that.

Maybe the Patron was so easily bored they thought only mages were worth their time and attention. Flashy monstrosities. He’d show them. He’d show them all.

He could be plenty entertaining too.

“Fahlravhen help me,” Peregrine prayed as he gallopped across the charred plains, soot puffing up behind him in a cloud like a trail of glory in the light of a hellfire dawn. “Help me destroy this destroyer.”

Those left in Sommerang trying to put their lives back together watched the bovine with the burnt off hair leave and shook their heads in confusion, bemused admiration, or scorn. Some might call the man a lunatic. They wouldn’t be exactly wrong.

For all that hate and crazed determination can do to get a person somewhere faster, they can’t ship a man the distance of a parched wildfire’s daily travel in the space of time before he runs himself ragged from his unsustainable pace. Even with his armor entrusted to the mayor of Sommerang’s protege (the mayor was dead), he simply couldn’t outrun a wildfire.

What he could do was take a break and then swim across the lake that had deflected the path of the skeletal Pyre to gain a lot of ground. And then he found a great chain, exactly what he needed, at the husk of a boatyard. But he had to abandon it, for he could not lug it as a pace useful to ever catch up to the tireless monster. He’d have to commission Adelita for some kind of ultrafine, strong chain to carry with him on his travels for purposes of tripping up monsters in future. She was probably up for the task. If he could afford her services again, anyway. She was a monster hunter herself. Maybe she could be persuaded to accept favors instead.

Peregrine trekked across the wasteland, saddened to see the desolation around him- whatever firefighting measures had been taken had not been sufficient to contain the blaze, and the land was a ruination. At least the crops were long harvested, but the winter silos? They were the most flammable things of all. People would very possibly starve.

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The only reason Peregrine Montague ever caught up to the Pyre, much less got ahead of it to prepare his trap, were the mages waging war against it, slowing it down. The Pyre never tired, but it could be slowed- by barrages of lightning and blasts of light, by pits of steaming asphalt and portals spewing lakewater, by blasts of chill wind and walls of ice. Peregrine had little love for such contributions. Only tolerance twinged with resigned appreciation brought upon by necessity.

Peregrine passed them all by, steering a wide berth of the looming monster and its devastating flames.And he kept running. He was too tired to be tired, too worn to feel the burning in his legs, too angry to experience the fire in his lungs as he pulled in deep, deep breaths of smoke fouled air through the cloth he’d tied around his face earlier.

He ran and ran ran and ran. Others warned the populace ahead of the coming walking apocalypse, others who were faster than him. Far ahead, a burning woman with monstrous arms at her sides and a crystallized blood witch pounded the earth to dust beneath their hooves, spreading the ill fated word to all in their path, and a dragon familiar passed over the land in the distance. Flight provided the fastest method of travel next to magical means, and it was because of this burning woman’s familiar that the town Peregrine found himself in was abandoned. Little did he know the pair looping back around and passing him on the road were connected to the soaring serpent he had glimpsed in the distance, that they’d been giving advance notice to civilians of the Pyre’s path, or that they were undeserving of his sneer of subconscious distaste. It wasn’t on purpose. He knew they were likely monster hunters, but hate was a hard thing to mask, even if one didn’t mean to feel that way.

In the evacuated town he found another dock by another lake, and there yet again he found a great chain and plenty of rope. And he pulled the chain, and he dragged the chain, dragged the great heavy links across the landscapes until he found a pair of crags in the path of the beast, and as the glow lit the horizon with fiercer and fiercer light in the darkness of the violent night, he set to work tying the great chain to the best shaped rocks with their own curves and an absurd amount of robe. He wedged the chains in place with boulders he rolled into the divots of the crags using makeshift levers; he cleared all flammable material from the vicinity with savage intensity. This firebreak served him well when the inevitable advance of flames overtook him in advance of the Pyre. He hadn’t really been thinking about his own survival.

As the black skeleton loomed over the horizon, almost seeming to step across the lip of the world in its hugeness, Peregrine ran toward peril.

“A chain,” Peregrine rasped, crazed, to a pair of resting mages taking the briefest of moments to recuperate from the fight.

“What? Spit it out,” the one with the red moon over head and the crimson crystals about her body barked. His voice was so roughened by toil and smoke barely a discernible sound had been emitted.

“A CHAIN!” he bellowed, blasting the words from his wretched throat like the air from a bellows. “Tripwire, giant tripwire to trip the bones! Corral it into the crack between the crags! A trap!”

“Good thinking, we’ll alert the others as fast as we can!” declared the one with the monster hands trailing along her sides from near her chest, seemingly understanding. The flames along her neck roared and she struck out with fearsome steps toward the battle in the distance.

“Good, good,” Peregrine mumbled, and collapsed.

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He was awoken by a great towering blob of all things; was this the Weeping Colossus? The gigantic, liquid outlander had unceremoniously picked him up with a slopping tarry tentacle and shoved him halfway into their chest as they pounded away from beast. It was wildly abrupt and inelegant and unbecoming of a person of his honor, reminding him of when Meridia had dragged him screaming away from the Crone.

“Let me go, brute!” he seethed angrily, lashing out, or trying to anyway, with his hooves, but the mire was too thick to move at all, despite flowing smoothly with the ripples of a simulated solid body. He threw his head about freely, piercing at their chest with his horns, and felt every muscle in his body scream, felt the heat within his lungs, the smoke within his chest as the mask came loose and stuck to the undead mage.

Everything hurt.

With a splat, the mage spit him up from their body in a firebreak a distance out of the way of the path of destruction, and rushed back into the fray without a word.

Trembling, he climbed the nearby tree, stepping from a boulder to the lowest branch, and watched the battle at a distance, breath like sandpaper in his chest.

He watched as the glimmering and sparkling and broiling and roiling and splashing and slashing of a horde of distant mages drove the inferno toward his trap, having scouted it out and confirmed its existence and soundness.

He watched as the flames unfurled for the briefest of moments, revealing the legs of the brute in a roiling haze of shimmering heat. The Pyre of the North surveyed the great chain between the rocks, titanic tusks tilted down as it gazed upon his work, and a shiver went down his spine despite the agonizing heat and the protestations of his flesh. 

Methodically, a hoof the size of a small barn sailed over the chain, and the ground shook when it crushed the rocks beneath it on the other side. The flames engulfed the beast again as it lifted each foot up and over his trap with distinct intent, and it did not take line of sight to infer from each ensuing rumble and the steady motion of the wings that it had simply stepped over his trap like a giant scoffing at a hamlet’s low stone wall.

Futility.

The word hit him like a boulder crashing down from the shattered sky.

Everything he did, no matter the grandiose vision, the panache, the ferocity, the burning ambition and desire, was for naught in this world shaped by the actions of the doomed.

Peregrine’s soul broke like obsidian.

“NO!” he screamed at existence, railed at Destiny, with the last power of his voice. “I DEFY YOU!”

Where once was shapeless black were now a thousand daggers of ebon-dark.

The world simmered and the sounds of battle were drowned in wind and distant thunder, a susurration of magic upon the horizon, moving away.

His eyes glowed with a hot, white light.

He would not live in a world like this. He would shape it with his very soul into something completely and utterly different. He prayed to the patron Destiny, to the god Fahlravhen, to existence itself, to his own spirit. The warrior was not done here. He would never be done. He would never give up. No matter the pressing weight of insufficiency.

It was the dawning of a new day.

Far away, the inscrutable Corrupted one dragged the chain it had, in truth, simply kicked at with its last hoof, not even bothering to step over, ripping it from its posts and welding it to the bones of the wreckage that was Volund’s ankle. It didn’t care. It didn’t slow. It didn’t matter at all.

Except, now it did.

Melded to the towering nightmare’s leg as it was, the gooey chain, half liquified by heat, became stuck in the crevices of a field of jagged boulders, and the Pyre stumbled, falling in slow motion. With a deafening clamor, its right tusk sparked against a large stone, and the very tip chipped off, oozing ichor. For the briefest of moments, the flame of the Pyre burned just a little colder.

The monster picked itself up, beat its wings at the mages impeding its progress, and glanced back over its shoulder bones in the direction of the one who had placed the chain. Coldly for one so hot, what remained of Volund continued north, headless of destruction, headless of pain, as the dawn rose sick and charred along the line of the eastern plains.