Warp Token Update

2k words

***

“You look humorous with goggles on,” she giggled. “like a hairless warlock.”

He pulled a face, laughing along with her before passing the goggles back. “We’re so close now,” he said, leaning back on the sand. “Place must be no more than a days’ walk. A couple more nights from now, and we’ll have completed our mission.”

“Almost can’t believe closeness!” she breathed. “Feels like it was only three days ago I was scurrying through a different country.”

“That’s because we were,” Roderick chuckled. “Had you stayed your previous course, you might be halfway through the Border Princes by now, along with the rest of your Skaven clanmates. We’ve gained days, if not weeks, of a lead on them.”

“Never got to thank man-thing,” she said, taking his paw into her own and squeezing. “ever since knowledgeable Lord thrust me into surface-world, have been bumbling over own paw-feet trying to get here. Then you came along, and now Skaven has made more progress than could ever imagine! Not that I really needed you!” she hurriedly added. “Could have done it with my eyes closed! But efforts are still worth commending, so… thank you. For all things. I know I owe you more than words, but it’s all I have… unless you want a weeping blade?

It came out a little more emotionally than she wanted, but something about Roderick’s eyes just turned her insides to mush. Just like that stoneflesh spell Wilfred had cast on her, but the exact opposite.

“You owe me nothing,” he insisted. “I’d have hardly ever made it here myself if not for you, lass. We’ve both saved each other countless times, thanks isn’t necessary.”

“But you must want something in return for all hard work!”

“Your company alone is enough reward for me,” he replied without missing a beat, grinning down at her.

“If you’re trying to distract me by seducing Skaven… it’s working. Though, Skaven did set that up for man-thing…”

“With all seriousness though,” he added. “I know it might seem unnatural to you, but we humans don’t place value on someone based off what they can give us. You’re my friend and my lover, Skyseeker, and aside from reciprocating that, I expect nothing from you.”

“What about breeding?” she prompted.

“I… suppose that would be acceptable,” he added coyly. “But, let’s save it for later. Ploughing each other out here with the flies and the chariots isn’t really setting the mood for me.”

“You can plough me once we reach city,” she replied, rising to her feet. “Should provide much more incentive to reach it, yes-yes?”

-xXx-

They left behind the blood rivers, the greenery fading into the haze while the city grew in definition, Skyseeker picking out the bastions and turrets lining the length of the perimeter wall. It was far grander in size compared to the one in Portomaggoire, made of chunks of sandstone bigger than Roderick’s whole body, towering so high into the air she could see no rooftops or structures that lay within.

One last dune separated them from the city, and as they crested the slope, Skyseeker turned around, unable to see the rivers or the ocean, even with the aid of her goggles. She had come such a long way, it felt like an age had passed since she’d descended the steps of Lord Gnawdwell’s tower. She didn’t really know how her journey would conclude back then (aside from complete victory), but she certainly hadn’t expected it to be in the company of her man-thing lover. To think she would never have come to know him if either of them had decided to kill the other rather than make that initial deal…

“You alright, lass?” Roderick asked, snapping her back to the present. “See something out there?”

“N-No, nothing,” she replied, resuming her climb. After a few minutes, they were stood in the shade of the city wall. Craning her neck up, she noted that the bricks of sandstone were stacked into the dozens high, which was an odd design choice to Skyseeker. Higher walls betrayed the notion that something on the inside was valuable and worth protecting.

“Wish Fredwil had given us a ladder,” Skyseeker grumbled, turning her eyes to the sand. “Hmm. Perchance we can dig burrow? And crawl under?”

“How about we search for an entrance first?” Roderick suggested. “Whoever built this place had to leave a way in and out for its people.”

Turning to the left, the wall stretched on until the desert haze made things blurry and hard to see. To the right, the wall continued on for a ways before jutting at a right angle, Roderick taking up the lead as they proceeded in that direction.

They stayed close to the wall, both as a means of shade form the sun, and so as to not expose them to the turrets, which would make good spots for snipers. She was becoming increasingly doubtful that her enemies were up there searching for targets – they had walked straight up to the walls without incident – but perhaps they were biding their time, like Skaven readying an ambush.

They rounded the right angle of the wall, continuing on for a few minutes before coming across a gate, just as Roderick thought there would be. The archway was framed by smaller sandstone bricks, and just beyond the entrance was a pair of swinging doors, currently open, their surfaces carved with strange symbols and shapes.

Before she could take a closer look at them, her foot caught on something, and she would have ploughed face-first into the sand if Roderick hadn’t’ been there to catch her.

She flashed him an appreciative look, then looked down at what had tripped her, Skyseeker tilting her head at the sight. Sprawled out on the sand was a corpse, the creature almost as large as a rat ogre, with forearms as thick around as her torso. Its armour looked like it had been scrapped together from various sources – a metal pauldron here, a leather gauntlet there – its looted armour decorated in red pigment in the shape of giant hands.

Between the gaps in its armour she could see its body was green, and from its wide face, ivory tusks protruded from its bloodied mouth. She looked to Roderick with an unspoken question in her eyes, the man-thing narrowing his eyes as he looked the corpse over.

“Greenskins,” Roderick muttered. “plenty of their ilk back in the Empire. Looks like we’re not the first to come looking for the relic.”

The corpse was not alone. Dozens more of the ‘greenskins’ surrounded the outer gate, some with slash wounds, others with arrows protruding from their necks and chests. They were rotting in the sun, a foul stench permeating the air, leading her to believe the battle had happened some time ago.

“Seems they laid seige,” Roderick noted, peering into the gate. The floor was made of sand, a few more bodies piled up against the inner walls, the skeleton of a battering ram plugging the passage. “Stay close.”

“These green-things,” Skyseeker began, her feet kicking up dust as she followed him inside. The tunnel was mostly shaded by a stone roof, curved at the edges, slots on either side making fine positions for archers to shoot anything that approached. “tell me something about them. Fought things before?”

“Many times,” he replied, stepping over the battering ram’s framework, the construct a meshwork of ropes and wooden beams. “Greenskins, or Orcs as they call themselves, are a bunch of savages and tribals, with no grasp of honour or even a culture – unless you count raiding as a culture. Once they see something they want gone, they’ll toss a thousand bodies at it if it means accomplishing that goal.”

“Ingenious,” she muttered. It sounded like a Skaven tactic to her. “Weaknesses?”

“Don’t get too close if you can help it, and if you’re good at taunting, that’s a good way to get them to make a mistake. Don’t underestimate them, though. They might be savages, but they’re far from stupid.”

The inner gate was destroyed, the two halves of the gate laying on the ground just beyond the wall. Standing upon one of the inches thick slabs, she wiped away the caking dust with her foot, exposing tens of scrolling hieroglyphs etched onto the surface. They looked like a bunch of squiggling lines to her, but perhaps they told of the city’s name, or maybe warned trespassers about going any further.

A warning the Orcs did not listen too. There were even more of the greenskins laying about here, entire squads of the creatures trailing into the streets beyond. The ground was still as sandy as it was outside the walls, but tall, square buildings made from limestone rose up to either side of the pathways to form streets, the constructs pockmarked with spider-web cracks in place, but still standing strong in the sweltering heat.

Each building brought to mind images of the bunkers nestled in Skavenblight’s heart, each one a cube surrounded by reinforced pillars, their rooftops as flat as the surface of a table. She could see more hieroglyphs carved into some of the buildings, some sporting more intricate reliefs than others, the coloured artworks standing out against the desert tones. Perhaps those were more important buildings, like shops, or council chambers for the city’s warlords.

“Seems Orc siege didn’t go so good-good,” Skyseeker mused, pauing to examine the bodies. “enough dead-things here to fill a warband, and they’re only just inside the wall!”

“One thing you should know about Orcs,” Roderick warned. “Just when you think you’ve wiped them all out, that’s when more of them come.”

They walked forwards, Skyseeker grabbing the hilt of her daggers as they left the gate behind. It was so quiet, every crunch of sand created by each pace made loud in contrast. Even the wind seemed muted, the sounds it made as it filtered through the narrow alleyways akin to quiet screams.

Stepping over another Orc body, she turned her attention to the structures again. The designers were clearly showing off their skill and wealth, no surface left untouched by motifs or carvings, but not everything had been left untouched. Some walls had crumbled, leaving carpets of rubble that blocked some of the streets – result from the Orc siege if she had to guess. While the fact the Orcs may have recovered the relic during their attack troubled her, something far greater was bothering her.

“Where is everyone?” she asked, the two passing beneath an ornate archway, and into an open space that reminded her of the market square back in Tilea. In its centre was a giant monolith, the stone structure towering high into the air, so tall and thin she didn’t see how it was possible to create such a thing. Decorated upon its four faces was a giant symbol of an eye situated above a winged skull, the image stretched so it covered as much of the faces as possible.

“Good question,” Roderick replied, pausing by the monolith’s bronze base to admire it. “Perhaps the Orcs wiped out the city to a man? They’ve done it before…”

“But, we should have seen other bodies by now-now!” she pressed. “I see only Orcs.”

Roderick shrugged his shoulders, his armour creaking. As he led her through the square and back into another street, she snapped her fingers.

“Ah-ha! Maybe bonemen lived in city place! That’s why we see only dead Orcs, the bone-things wouldn’t leave remnants.”

“That’s… plausible,” Roderick admitted. “If only Wilfred were here, he’d have loved to study all these carvings, deduce all these mysteries.”

“Beg to differ, I like it when it’s just us two,” she replied, sidling up and curling her tail over his leg.

He grinned down at her, reaching over to scruff the fur between her ears, Skyseeker chuckling as she batted him away, her laughter echoing through the empty street. Her words were closer to the truth than she let on – she would have been terrified to explore this place by her lonesome.

They passed through more gridlocked streets, each set of buildings arranged in perfectly square blocks, Skyseeker taking a moment to peer into one of the doorways at random. The air inside was musty, every surface made from cut sandstone that was too course for her paws. Pots and vases decorated the sparse furniture, the layout oddly reminiscent of the man-thing dwellings she’d seen in the past. Perhaps the bonemen had been man-things, before their skin had peeled off?

“Find anything?” Roderick called from the street.

She retreated from the homestead, shaking her head up at him.

“So what’s our plan?” he added. “Should we be searching every building for this relic? If we have to turn this whole city on its head, we’ll be here for weeks.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” she chided, tapping her skull with a claw. “Think about things – if you had to hide super secret weapon, where would you put it? In the most biggerest, securest building of course! No need to search every burrow, just the more important-looking ones!”

“I hope you’re right,” he muttered, following her down another turn.

“Am I ever not?” she shot back. He made to reply but she talked over him. “Don’t answer that! Less talk, more searching, Rick-rod.”

As they moved on, she began to see larger structures looming over the rooftops, some distance to their south. She changed course, her warp-sight rewarding her with a delicious psychic pulse that set her nerves into overdrive. While she could feel the relic was nearby, its precise location was hidden to her. For the moment of course.

They soon came upon a structure similar to the outlying wall, a pair of pylons rising from the sand at the end of the next street. Their bases were thicker than their flat rooftops, their surfaces as decorated as the rest of the buildings they’d seen thus far. The two pylons were conjoined by an archway of pillars, forming a shadowy doorway that led deeper into the city. It looked almost like a gateway at a glance. The carvings etched into the pylons depicted figures wielding staves, standing head and shoulders above smaller counterparts who looked up to them for guidance. Could those be paintings of the relic she sought?

They ducked beneath the monuments, stepping around more Orcs, soon emerging into an entirely different part of the city. Gone was the tight, orderly structures of the outlying homesteads, replaced by vast sightlines occasionally broken up by a large, decorated structure. Skyseeker could see buildings big enough to be considered complexes in their own right, surrounded by columns decorated by those same, intricate symbols that seemed to be everywhere in this city. There were more of those monoliths as well, stretching up like fingers of stone throughout the city, that same symbol – the eye and the skull – carved into them. There were temples ringed by massive statues as well, with giant staircases leading up to their doorways, their rooftops carved with golden patterns that shone in the sun.

What really drew her gaze were the structures looming over the vista. While the temples and monuments were as tall as Gnawdwell’s tower, buildings even larger cast entire sections of the city into shadow. One was a monument, as tall as the Bell of the Horned Rat, carved with golden motifs, while beside it was a pyramidal structure, its weathered surface pockmarked with eroded blocks of sandstone. While the sun had reduced the structure to a withered appearance, its scope was no less impressive. Each block appeared to be the size of a small house, its sloped surfaces carved into perfect, acute angles.

“There!” Skyseeker exclaimed. “The relic is in that thing!”

“The pyramid?” Roderick asked. “You are certain?”

“Ohhh yes-yes, I can feel it… in my bones! Ha! Get it? BONES. B-Because the bonemen and… Eh, forget it, Skaven humour too-too smart for man-things.”

Shaking his head, Roderick continued on into the complex, Skyseeker following behind.