Thank you.
Rose is a distant relative of Mr Frog, thrown into Everoc as a child, possibly with or without a bit of Ballpoint technology that she doesn't know what it does. For one reason or another, possibly due to being ridiculed as a child for her undwarvenly figure, she wants to prove she's just as good a dwarf as any. Thus, she gets herself sent to the most crazy hellhole currently in existence: Spearbreakers.
I've got a lot past this as to how Mr Frog and Rose figure out they're distantly related, but that's as far as I'm going to go here, so as not to step on anybody's toes.
Also, I wrote this last night. I hesitate to post, as it's the reason there's not a V update today (I didn't think Hans was going to be able to finish his side of the plot so soon), and I feel guilty about that... But anyway... The following puts how Sus died in a different light. (I haven't had the time to proofread or spellcheck, so fogive mah bad spehling; and. grammar style. pleez.)
This is the paper-bound journal of an unknown soldier. It stands out in the room as one of the few items unbloodied by unwashed hands, its clean sheets catching your attention. Though it menaces not with name, rank or date, you soon find yourself lost within its pages.
"There's too many!"
~~~
Spearbreakers, late winter, Sus's reign. The spiked catwalk was seeing its second year of use, and my squad was guarding its entrance to keep the zombies from the caravan that was returning to the mountainhome. I had hardly been training a few months under Feb's command, and we were already in the thick of battle. They said it'd be like this before I signed the contracts, but in all honesty, I believed them not... who would have believed such a story? It sounds like fiction; like some horrific apocalyptic tall tale you'd invent for the campfire, not like real life... not like something you'd have to face on the battlefield, your own life at stake.
The plains writhed, seemingly alive with hundreds upon hundreds of corspes that were crawling, staggering towards us, the bload-soaked bodies camoflauging with the ground in an otherworldly manner.
I stood beside my friend and comrade, Uvash, in the middle of the endless plain.
"There's too many!" I heard myself crying as I batted away two heads with my pitchblende warhammer. They rolled swiftly back, flicking their jaws against the ground to propel themselves and cackling insanely all the while. How they even drew breath is beyond my comprehension.
"STAND YOUR GROUND!" Fischer yelled, swirling her pike about faster than my eyes could see, corpses flying from around her as though thrown from an explosive blast. Yet, even as I watched from the back of our formation, I could see them slowly closing in on her, inching their circle closer and closer to her feet.
With a heave, I crushed the rolling heads against the ground with a solid swing, the skulls splintering and flinging rotten flesh like splattering tomatoes. Hefting the heavy weapon once more over my shoulder, I ran towards where Fischer was, swinging my hammer back and forth to clear a path.
The blood-red corpses dripped with the recent rain of barbarian innards, dimly visible in the twilight. The sun was setting, and my patrol shift had been over long before, but I'd had no chance to go inside. The necromancers had come in force, raising the masses of bodies shuddering from the ground. We'd struck down every last one of them as they crowded in around us, only to turn and see fields upon endless fields of the dead. With the fiery sky, the sun blocked by red clouds of blood rain, and the living dead below, I couldn't help but wonder if some divine hand had plucked us from the mortal realm and placed us down in Hell.
Fischer went down, corpses piled upon her, clawing and pounding on her adamantine armor. I watched in horror as the upper half of a dwarf dragged its rotting frame forwards with sinewless arms and piled itself on top, weighing her down - yet it was only but one of the thousands that approached.
I crashed my hammer sideways, knocking clumps of undead away from her at a time, only to have them turn and attack me instead.
They crept at me, leapt at me, grabbing at my legs and wrapping their foul-smelling intestines around my arms, pulling me down. Even I screamed in horror as the writhing, twisting masses enveloped me, pulling me towards the ground as if they sought none other lofty goal than to drag me into the earth itself. For a brief moment I lost sight of the sky, completely covered in the dead and unable to breathe, before a miracle happened, both fell and wondrous.
"I'll save ya', laddie!" yelled a man's voice, and I felt the weight fall from my arms amidst the sweet clanging strokes of a sword against old bones. I removed the tangled innards from across the visor of my helm and looked upon my rescuer - it was Sus, the overseer of the fortress. "I cannae let ya go down fightin', laddie!" he cried in his thick accent, his yet-unstained armor glistening in the twilight as the foul breeze blew its stench across my nostrils. His face was half in shadows from his helm, his bushy eyebrows barely visible - I'd never seen him in full raiment until that final day. "Ain't nobody e'er gonna die durin' my term!" he cried with furrowed brow. "Get yerself back up an' let's get e'erybody belowground right quick!"
Encouraged by his heartening cry, I leapt forwards, swinging left and right beside the mighty warriors of the fortress - Feb, Draignean, Fischer - and together we beat a path through the screaming corpse-filled plains back to the tall, blood-streaked stone pillars that marked the entrance to the fortress. A storm was rolling in, and the sky roiled, red and heavy with the blood of the forgotten. It was all I could do to keep pace with the others, but the zombies began to close in upon me, staggering and screeching their eternal hatred of the living, their skeletal hands clutching blindly for my throat. My comrades fell one by one at my side - Dodok, and Uvash, and Stodir - trying desperately to free themselves, until I alone was left, separated from the leaders of our squads. And then, as if all was not bad enough, I heard a sound that chilled me to the bone - far out on the plain, the unmistakable calls of the Spawn of Holistic echoed eerily towards where we stood.
They had come. And we could not even move, trapped as we were between hundreds of uncannily staggering foes that sought to bring us early to our graves.
But Sus stood before me like a mighty tower of strength, his sturdy frame standing strong against the crimson tide, and he struck down those that would have us slain. "Jes' in time, boys! Come on, let's get back under!"
And so we steeled ourselves and charged towards the standing columns as the blood rain began to pour in torrents, soaking us to the skin. Dodok slipped and fell, but I helped him to his feet as Sus held off the hordes, and we continued, stumbling, down the hard stone stairs and into the welcome darkness of the catwalk entrance. It was to our terror that we found that yet more madness awaited us within. Even as we watched, corpses raised themselves from the withdrawn spikes, holes punched clean through their rotting bodies, and began to stagger in our direction as more poured down the stairs from behind.
"Lads, this is it!" Sus cried out, setting his jaw in determination grim. "You four get yerselves down under! I'll hold them off, don't ye worry yer head none about me!"
"But Sus!" Uvash protested.
"Nay, laddie!" Sus cried, swinging his sword towards our foes as bones splintered and shattered before him. "I'm overseer, and I give the orders, do ye hear?" With a shove he sent us on our way, charging towards the moaning dead on the coagulated bridge.
"FOR SPEARBREAKERS!" the brave dwarf yelled aloud as he, alone, rushed the foes behind us with the intent of holding them off so we could escape. We stormed across the bridge, stopping to fight the zombies that assailed us, careful not to fall into the abysses of immeasurable depth that lay on either side.
I looked behind us once more as we neared the halfway point, catching sight of a flash of blood-red steel among a slurry of bones and putrid flesh just once before it vanished, as the Spawn of Holistic rushed inwards from the surface.
"He saved our lives..." Uvash cried as we ran, dumbfounded in shock. "I didn't even vote for him, and he saved our bloody lives!"
Later Draignean would write it off as Sus's sudden obsession with a pigtail fiber sock that got him killed upon the bridge, but I and my friend Uvash know the truth of the tale. It wasn't Draignean who saved our lives - it was Sus. Sus had stayed behind and held off the wicked undead hordes so that we might escape. "No casualties" was always his motto, and even in his death, with the sacrifice that saved my life, he held true to that philosphy, though it cost him his own. Though he got not a hero's burial, only to be interred among the bridge's mush of dead, he may well have been the greatest hero that I've known.
EDIT: Xahnel, no! PMs.
Don't trust teh internets.
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Topic: [34.11] Spearbreakers - It shudders and begins to move (Read 2190012 times)