8,192 humans lives.
Mothers. Children. The elderly. As long as you breathe, you count. Even the mightiest warrior or the wisest king, you all count the same. How humbling.
These are the deep, vast encampments. The total number only known to those a part of the Magic Induction Experiment, also including Her Majesty, naturally.
Receiving the royally sealed letter, you gather with the others sharing such accursed luck. Sometimes, it's 50, others it's 1,000, and even more cruelly, sometimes it's just 1 or 2. But it will never be the entire encampment. Even if a toddler must be left alone, abandoned, just to starve a few days later, the encampment will remain occupied. And surely before the child dies new souls will replace the old. It's been seen time and time again.
The Accursed are then loaded into carriages, trains, ships, with the especially damned forced to march. Not walk, never walk. These are royal orders. Forced conscription into her greatest and most holy army. To be Accursed is to forebear any thought of survival. To simply forfeit yourself. Is it magic? Group hypnosis? Base emotions, such as hatred or fear? This only Her Majesty knows.
But within her domain, all know that when the green color of Altuor begins to bleed into the sky, until it runs over and begins to leak into the rivers, the buildings, even the people, she requires more soldiers. More sacrifices.
The growing totality of a single color is referred to as Green Fever by the locals. It begins with a festering in the mind, a slow, gradual, nearly imperceptible shift. Memory loss, both long and short term. Increased anxiety, depression, and all forms of mental illness. Rapid weight gain and loss, completely undetermined by food consumption. Joint pain, decreased mobility,
To escape Green Fever is to run before it ever begins. If people had the means to do this, they already would have. Left are the stragglers. Then they become the survivors. Just strong enough to live, just weak enough to be incapable of anything but waiting and trying to recover for the next Green Fever. And all the suffering ends if you become an Accursed, right?
Death comes in many forms, whether it be to your own life, the lives of those around you, or even just the natural order of your current existence. Mass death brings about change unfathomable to the mind. Yet humanity persists. Adapts. Even into cruelty. Even becoming livestock.
How often must this ritual happen? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? No, it would never be so kind as to give it's captives a regularly scheduled interval. No, the Green Fever only ever happens at the absolutely most unforeseen, impractical, and truly horrifically perfect moment to whip and punish all those attempting to stand, back into their fervent kneel and worship to Her Majesty.
Yes, worship. The zealots here outnumber the bakers, carpenters, butchers, tillers, sewers, and any other job you can think of. That is, any job besides the enforcer. Or as their neighbors would call them, the traitors. Their job is to ensure people comply with any laws they can think of, although, as most find out, they can always just read through the dusty tome sitting just outside of the Enforcement Center that each and every encampment has to create a guilt most unreasonable yet unfathomably legal.
To become an enforcer, is to be sent away to an entirely foreign encampment. Here you will know nobody, besides your fellows in business. You will not know the people you punish, you may not even speak their language or understand their culture. Then why do it?
You are a father of 3 young girls. Their mother passed away from the Green Fever 2 summers ago. The 2 youngest are weak from growing up under Mother Death's rule. They pass away a few weeks into the longest, most intense Green Fever your encampment has ever seen. As you lie dying with your only family in the entire world, in the shared hut, you live in with 4 other families, you receive an envelop. Upon it, you see the dreaded royal symbol. It summons your only daughter. Rather than have her be taken after your killed or imprisoned for attempting to disobey royalty, you have 1 other option. An official one, at that! Being offered so kindly and graciously in the letter, is a trade. Simply trade a 5 year service within the Enforcement Corp of Her Majesty's armed forces, for the call to make your daughter one of Mother Death's Accursed. 4 years into your service, you receive your own letter. You're tackled to the ground by men who were your comrades only a single delivery ago. They strip you of your weapon and drug you. As you weakly awake on a ship some days later you can only hope your sacrifice is enough to leave your daughter happy in some faraway land. Looking to your left you see her chained to a bar, her eyes never meet yours.
Such is life for the people of Mother Death.
A golden throne ascends. Skulls for arms rests, femurs stab downward as legs, ribcages for the back, a cushion made of layer after layer of skin mixed with fat. Upon it rests Her Majesty.
Her Majesty, Mother Death, perches her throne upon the highest peak of her overlook. Below her, the gathered 8,192 souls await their fate. She looks at them with disgust, thinking, how uncivilized, dormant creatures these humans are.
She waves a ring laden hand, it sparkles in the glistening moonlight. Attendants rush to either side of her, immediately saluting. Mother Death slowly rises, her black cloak gushing and billowing behind her, it shimmers a beautiful rainbow hue. This exact effect can only be seen on 1 other item in the world. It signifies the highest level protection spell, capable of stopping any attack, without even the slightest damage.
"Start the ritual."
The attendants rush away, immediately enacting her order without question. Enforcers herd various groups of accursed into complex, weaving patterns. They clump in the middle, pushing and shoving ensue. Electric whips crack until all movement ceases. Her Majesty feels a smile spread across her face, worthless ants, she thinks as she raises her hands. She begins a guttural chant. Malice, rage, anger, hotter than the heat of a thousand suns burns across her face. Mother Death allows herself to submit.
Below, the accursed have finished organizing. The symbol becomes clear. But only to Mother Death. The others, the enforcers, the accursed themselves cannot see it. But she does, only her perch allows the correct angle, the optimal orientation, and the absolutely necessary height. The accursed are twisted and woven into an intricately made animal, its 8 tentacles are stretched and tangled creating a golden ratio originating from the creature's blobular body. The detail is incredible, its eyes are intelligent and seem to look right through Mother Death. She shivers, “time to get this over with”.
Hear me oh great herald of the sea
I beckon you to nourish yourself on my tithings
Enjoy your feast and be famished no longer
The moon disappears, no, it’s opened up. A great tentacled monsters emerges. A face so horrid it hides from within the hole in space time that it crawled out of. Only its tentacles descend, the horror scattering the highly dedicated formation of accursed. Within moments great suckers and poisonous barbs longer than swords wipe out the accursed. Not killing, but rather harvesting. Nourishing itself upon the psychological torment of each and every victim.
Drained of all energy, the accursed turn into dark, dry husks, merely the shape of the humans they once were. They’re now each only around 2-3 inches thick and completely flat. They’re called shadows by the enforcers who must haul them up to the top of the peak, right where Mother Death is. They spend the oncoming weeks hauling and burning them, the heavy, thick, coal black smoke lingers into the countryside where animals both wild and domestic are found with severe deformities and complications with child birth.
Mother Death sits now at her throne, her energy intense and wickedly sharp. These are the moments which she craves. The feeling of the entire world's gravity shifting, bending, finally submitting to her and her alone. For these fleeting moments everything will completely and entirely revolve around her. She sits pondering. Never before has this felt so... empty.
I stare downward at the black goo, then towards MM. She just shrugs, "I've never seen that happen." But her sense of ease and uncaring makes me feel better. She continues, "Have you heard the tale of Ruby the Red Mage?" I shake my head. She smiles greedily, "I thought so." She pulls out two small vials from a pouch at her hip. She expertly pulls them through my black, viscous, magical regurgitation. She looks at me with a sudden sternness, "One for you, one for me."
I dislike how imposing she is, but I guess she just doesn't know any better. She seems to be kind at heart, just not familiar with how to act around other people.
MM corks the vials and slides them back into her pouch, clasping it. She begins her tale, "You see, Ruby was just a farm girl. A peasant. And nobody beside great and powerful men had ever become mages before. The knowledge of sorcery was heavily restricted, each kingdom was investing massive amounts of taxpayer coin into the attainment of devastating wartime spells. It's where Luther's most favorite, the fireball, comes from. But the Kings and Mages were not ready for what came next. They covetously hoarded their massive libraries of nothing but stupid explosion or instant death or liquify flesh spells. This pushed an increasing boiling pressure onto each and every mage of each and every kingdom. The King's would say, 'Come up with a new and even better way to kill someone by next week, or I'll take all your funding.' And everyone knows a wizard's most vital weak point is their purse. The pressure finally boiled over. A wizard named, 'Galfry the Fool', was desperate. He hadn't been able to come up with anything in months, the king had kindly granted him 3 extensions on his newest, most deadly, most horrifically dismemberment spell. But he knew this week's deadline was the last. He'd seen the nearby dusty barracks fill the elite knights over the oncoming week. Felt the strange and bitter flow of magic from several mages throwing all types of tracking spells on him. Galfry had worn out his favor in this kingdom. As he'd done in 4 others now. He solemnly packed what little thing's his weak arms could carry preparing to escape, knowing he wouldn't be able to use magic for weeks possibly months, in order to avoid his pursuers. He thought pompously, 'Such fools, they think a mage can't live without casting a spell every second.' And so he was off. He didn't travel far, just across the nearby river and through a small village, where he stopped right at the edge, seeking shelter. It was there, his fate would change. He found a farmer willing to lend him a spot to sleep in his stable. Humbly, Galfry agreed. There he shacked up, right next to a slightly confused partially annoyed horse. And he meet her. His savior, his demise. Ruby was not named such a precious and beautiful name. No, in that time, she was Jacob, the farmhand. She did all the grunt work the farm could offer and now was the time she would normally clean out the stables."
I perked up. It was a long and fairly boring tale, like I had figured, but Ruby had an unbelievably uncanny draw. It was almost like I was looking in a mirror, no, it was more like the reflection off a still pond, imperfect, blurry, ripples breaking through causing dissonance, yet all the same, it was eerily myself. MM smiles, "Funny isn't it?" I ask, "But how could Ruby be Jacob? T-that's a boy name." My face twists into a scowl at my own words.
MM sighs, "That's something that can only be answered by continuing the tale." She smirks, knowing she's hooked me like a fish, I begrudgingly nod, happy to hear more of the story, unhappy that MM gets to know that.
Our heads both snap towards the direction those 2 villains escaped. An unbelievable presence is making it's way right towards us. I feel death, the trees ache with each footstep. MM has already thrown Sir Kahlin onto the back of Artemis. "Come on, we need to move." I hop onto the back of Artemis. She flies up and over the canopy and into the young morning sky. The sun just beginning to rise, rippling orange and red light dance across the leaves.