The Battle of Bloodneck Valley - Finish The Story Contest, Week #30

This is my entry for week 30 of the Finish The Story Contest, created by @f3nix! This fun contest provides writers with the first half of a story and then asks them to finish it in 500 words. This week's opening half (shown in blockquote) was written by @dirge.

The Battle of Bloodneck Valley

by @dirge

Shog, called the Bonecrusher by his people, knew they’d lost when human horns roared across the battlefield. The Imperiate had come after all, to aid their elven allies of the Alish’tae Republic. Shog’s people, orcs of the Galak Tribe, so named after the mountain upon which they’d once lived, fought hard and well. But they fought alone.

Orcs no allies. Not even their Gods, the Old Ones, cared anymore.

As the morning sun crept above the clouds, illuminating the blood soaked fields, the Imperiate horsemen charged out from the forest. Muk’nola, matriarch of the Galaks, sounded her war horn, signalling the retreat. But it would be too late, Shog knew. Those horsemen would slaughter them as they fled. Their children, next.

An elf, empowered by the sense of looming victory, stormed forward from their line, straight towards Shog. He parried the elf’s longsword then heaved his mighty hammer, Breaker of Worlds, in a perfect arc. It smashed upon the elf’s helmeted skull, and he proved his namesake for the countless time. The elf’s head exploded in bone and carnage.

“Back!” he heard. “Fall back!” In disarray, the others around him fled towards Bloodneck Valley, where they’d encamped. Their position fell. Shog screamed to maintain the line but knew the day was lost. His people fled. He had no choice but to follow.

He reached the camp, already nearly moving again, fleeing up the valley to the highlands. Shog, exhausted, reached Zee-zee, his daughter, and Gheelah, his love. Gheelah had already packed their yurt and few remaining possessions. “Flee!” he shouted to her.

“And you?” Gheelah asked.

“I stay to hold them back.”

In typical orcish fashion, their utter devotion, love and mutual respect expressed itself only in their shared gaze, never in public, spoken word. He gripped her hand. He told Zee-zee to be strong. Gheelah nodded. Then the doy galloped away with the rest of the fleeing, broken host.

Muk-nola, matriarch, rallied the remaining Galak warriors. They reformed to a single line. Bloodneck Valley was narrow. Rocky. Layered with crimson colored clay. The land elevated as it led to the Highlands, their only advantage.

Maybe at the height of the tribe’s strength, before the humans had come with their purges and stolen their land, before the elves had arrived to ‘cleanse the world of evil’, maybe they would have been strong enough. But Shog saw they had a few hundred left. A few hundred to hold a line against an entire battalion of Imperiate horsemen and Alish’tae swordsmen, the latter no doubt already being reinforced.

The ‘Fair Folk’ would aim to eradicate the Galak now, as they fled.

Shog marched up to Muk-nola. She hailed him. “Yog-Sothoth burns in us,” she said.

“Yog-Sothoth hasn’t given a shit about us since Galak Mountain ceased its fire,” Shog replied.

Imperiate horns loomed. The sun flared, blinding Shog for a moment. Another disadvantage. The ground rumbled with the cavalry charge.

“Either way. I’ll crush his soul in hell. Right after I’m done with these Fair Folk.”

The Alish'tae swept across the valley like a wind, their blades already drawn. Then the Imperiate cavalry crested the ridge, their horns still blaring. Squinting at them through the glower of the morning sun, Shog was gifted with a vision-boon: a glimpse of Mankind's true form.

The horsemen, silhouetted in the glare, all seemed to fuse into a writhing, shadowy corpus, an undulating bulk. Watching it heave, Shog realized that unlike Orcs or Elves, Men were not a people, nor even a species, but an entity. Every human was a limb, their civilization a horde of pseudo-selves, astrally tethered to a single seething mind. A hideous Intelligence, not entirely unlike, in kind, the Old Ones. But nascent. Smaller. Weaker by orders of magnitude. A bastard upstart, struggling to rise beyond itself. A maggot, foundering in filth.

When the vision passed, Shog reaffirmed his grasp on Breaker of Worlds. Her immense heft reassured him, and when he brought her arcing down, Sylvan steel tore like tin, and plumes of rich, red blood festooned the air.

* * *

Five hours later, Shog fell.

He'd hacked down countless Elves and Men, a mountain of their broken bodies stacked around, the soil a swamp of blood. . . both theirs and his.

Orcflesh -- rough as bark at birth -- healed over even harder every time that it was cut. Prolific scourgings were a part of every warrior's training, their skin flailed and slashed until it hardened into scales. And Shog, who'd fought in more battles than most, and suffered countless wounds, was hard as steel.

But even steel had its limits. Pierced and hewn relentlessly and riddled with arrows, his flesh dangled off him in dripping flaps. His eyes gouged out, his genitals and viscera stabbed through, he still felt strong, felt dangerous. He believed that given time to heal, he would calcify into a god.

But the vermin swarmed him, practically fighting each other in their eagerness to finish him. And though he lacked the strength to shake them off, he refused to let them prize his hammer from his grasp. He clung to her till he'd expelled his dying breath.

And in that breath, he was vouchsafed another vision-boon: the wages of Muk'Nola's final sacrament.

The matriarch had spoken to him once about her rituals. "Only a reckless fool prays to Yog-Sothoth," she'd said. "Wisdom is to draw His attention to your enemies. To be perceived by an Outer God is to be cursed."

Though blind, Shog saw: great arrays of glowing spheres orbiting the battlefield. Their fell trajectories afforded glimpses of the future and Yog-Sothoth's will.

Orcs would perish from the world. The very last of them would soon be hunted down, including Gheela and Zee-zee.

But Elves would perish soon thereafter at the hands of Men, betrayed and butchered by their former allies.

And the final, cruelest curse was saved for Man itself. That upstart, that malignancy, that larval deity would murder and devour everything within its scope and then forever gnaw itself.

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Thanks for reading! :D

Props to @dirge for the first half of the story, and the brilliant way it merges high fantasy with the Cthulhu Mythos. It was a lot of fun to read and to write to! Thanks for letting everybody run with it! And thanks, as always to @f3nix for the contest, and the mighty @bananafish for making all things possible! <3