BECMI Chapter 425 – An Immortal Harvest
Fire fought Ice.
Buttressed by the towering figure of their god Thyr, rising to twice the height of the mightiest of frost giants and even dwarfing a Storm Giant, the frost giants roared into combat against the defending fire giants with energy and will. Behind them the howling blizzards that heralded the March of Winter blew into the face of their fiery opponents, chilling them and dimming their flames. Boulders and hurled hammers and spears flew back and forth, fires occasionally gouting in defiance of the winter’s grasp, but such didn’t last long.
The figure of Thyr was naturally terrifying, a herald of the coming Winter and death for creatures of Fire in its path. These fire jotuns had taken too long to retreat, and now Ice was coming for them!
The mightiest of their attacks just bounced off the god without any effect at all, and no champion rushing defiantly to take him on lasted more than a blow or two before falling, frozen and perhaps shattered by the chilling cold of his great Axe.
Yet the towering blue-skinned figure was not expecting an attack from behind, especially one launched from so far away.
The lance of fire was long and as hot as a star when it slammed into the back of his great head. The hoary titan attempted to turn around in shock, the flaming point of the attack protruding out right between his eyes, but then the Spellflare kicked off, and all the unseen magical protections laid upon himself, including an Immunity to fire, blew away. Then all the magic Infused into the Spear impaling him unloaded inside of him.
He was only an Avatar, and didn’t have all that much Health to fall back on, relying instead on his invulnerability and a few layered protections. Once his Anti-Magic failed to save him, his spells blew into raw energy that seared at him, the fires in his brain exploded, and suddenly the cold and snows of the swirling Winter about him cleared as a massive Fireball exploded, blowing his skull and the great horned helm he was wearing to ash and less.
Fire and cold jotuns alike paused to stare in shock as the headless corpse of the great cold Immortal stood before them, flames blackening and burning his furs and armor, no head visible on the massive corpse at all.
Then the Axe of Winter’s Breath fell from a limp hand, and the body toppled over slowly, grandly, like a falling tree, and hit the ground with a heavy crash, for a moment the loudest thing that was on the battlefield.
Then the screams started, of deliverance and fury from the various fire giants, and horror and shock from the giants of frost, snow, and ice. The fighting suddenly took a very different turn as rich red flames erupted over the corpse of fallen Thyr, reducing it down to steaming, angry white mist with unnatural speed.
In the chaos of the continuing battle that found the demoralized cold giants stumbling away from the stronger and now zealous fire giants, nobody noticed that the great blued Axe had vanished, and soon enough there was no remaining trace of the corpse of Thyr but the scorched earth from the fiery explosion to the skull that had destroyed him.
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Ten thousand miles away, in a very similar fight as legions of advancing Fire, Coal, Ash, and Volcano giants marched over the melting landscape and chased the giants and creatures of Cold away before them, the hulking form of Surt hit the ground less than a second after the Avatar of Thyr. The only one who knew both events happened was Gulguz himself, with his Surt Avatar freezing solid and shattering into broken chunks of ice that swiftly fell apart into misting bits of icy sand, gone and melted into the thawing earth.
His massive flaming Sword, the Inferno’s Wrath, naturally vanished at the same time. Berserk Snow Giants led their smaller kin into an instant counter-strike, smashing into and through the fire jotuns’ lines and wreaking havoc among their disciplined and armored cousins as they did so.
Shaken by the sight of their dead god, the fire jotuns’ implacable advance stalled, wavered, and began to retreat, even the most fervent zealots of their shamans not knowing what to say when confronted with the fall of their Immortal Patron!
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On both fronts, the falls of the Avatars was the primary sign of a turning in the invasive conflict.
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Winter could not be held back, the March was ever-coming. A mile a day, the cold light of the Chilling Sun moved in, and the Burning Sun slid in to replace it. Where they overlapped, the land rapidly melted, thawed, and waters ran and flowed as they had not for a hundred years.
Lakes filled, then frozen seas cracked open and their coverings of ice melted away. For a short time, life erupted where the temperatures were mild, frenzied explosions of green and color as the plant life shifted rapidly from enduring winter to preparing for the baking Burning Season.
Soon enough the heat rose to near the boiling point of water. Mundane plants curled up and died, often bursting into flames and being reduced to ash as they did so. Magical plants that thrived on heat and light extended out from deep roots with dangerous thorns and stalks, seeking the Burning Sun, while whole forests of icy trees and plants blazed like pyric offerings to Surt and fell to ash. Volcanoes ignited, fireflows replaced glaciers and rivers, and rivulets of flame opened up and pushed into the seas, while surface water retreated deep underground, or was sucked off into the storms blowing east.
Clan after clan of fire giants arrived at new valleys and mountains, and put down their roots in an endless leapfrogging cycle. They would have up to a hundred years of heat to grow and increase their strength, have their children and raise their numbers, and then they would have to endure the coming of Winter’s March and race once again to the leading edge of their lands, thousands of miles away, before they could settle down for another generation or two.
As for the giants of cold, they did much the same. As Winter marched on, oceans and seas froze over, snow covered the land, was compressed into ice, and the stone and hills were buried in white. The great fields of fiery plant life shivered, cracked, and died as the ice and chill took their tolls. Ice worried at and cracked apart the cooling volcanoes, new mountains and hills were eroded and blunted and shattered.
Constant migration of all life was the key on the ringworlds, turning, ever turning with their pitiless sun of Fire and Ice. The herds and animals adapted to the cold marched across the frozen seas and lands in their own constant pacing of the flames following them, while the fiery herds were drawn to the volcanic channels that reached across even the greatest oceans in island chains revealed by the fall of the ice and the draining of the seas, continuing their routes without stopping.
Always there were those raiding ahead to find prey who had not left soon enough, for the opposite Elemental nature was the sweetest prize for the beasts, and a natural source of enmity for others.
Always there were the foolish who delayed too long because they could not or would not move, and they paid the price for their late starts, caught by raiding fiery beasts and giants of the Burning Season, or by the life-eating March of Winter and the frozen things that swept out of it to harvest them.
No, there was no mercy in Crescendoom, nor was there any to be expected.
To my pleasant surprise, this sort of conflict was also taking place across a wide area, as well as on ten different revolving fronts as the Rings spun slowly around the planet, leaving a whole lot of places to enjoy the attention and fighting going on.
So that’s where I did my harvesting.
The creatures of Fire were not actually prepared for a creature of cold to start resisting them magically. Though this was a plane of Energy and magic, the magic was in the beings, not in wizards, and Gulguz preferred fanatic worshipers, not clever wizards, for his servants.
Thus it was when a fey and terrible ice queen started reaping giants of Fire and Coal, Ash and Volcano alike, reaving through their numbers like Winter’s own mistress, it was quite unexpected to the invaders. The beings of cold were supposed to be retreating from them, not fighting them and killing them!
This confusion only mounted as cold jotuns, white dragons, frost Elementals, and creatures of cold seemed to be drawn to her, and joined her efforts for the purposes of eating the sweet frozen flesh of the jotuns of fire and flame, the red dragons breathing flame, other fiery beasts seeking prey, and freezing the ashes of slain fire Elementals.
Three rotations and a hundred thousand miles away, a similar Spear-wielding demoness of crimson skin and flaming hair raged through the March of Winter, seemingly unaffected by the chill, and spent her burning rage upon the creatures that came hunting for things of fire with energy and enthusiasm. She incinerated marching hordes of frost jotuns, brought dragons and creatures of ice and snow a-wing down in flaming trails from the sky, and cut a burning path through the freezing lands with merciless persistence.
Word of her traveled far slower than she herself did along the ever-moving fronts, leaving the survivors trying to send word on which she had already out-raced, and continued to be persistent with.
Gulguz himself, beside himself with the embarrassing and public loss of two Avatars, naturally went looking for the source, but the area was too large, and the strange events were taking place over forty thousand miles away from where his Avatars had fallen… in different directions!
Also, his shamans seemed to particularly attract the attention of said fey witches, and never really got much in the way of word out in their morning prayers when they were too dead to make them.
He did notice the silence coming from certain areas after a time, but by then the fighting had moved on by hundreds, if not thousands of miles, and there was no sign of who and what had done the slaughter, other than numbers of remarkably organized creatures that normally did not organize at all...
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So many bodies meant I had a lot of Gear to make and to upgrade. Happily Gulguz gave his servants plenty of precious metals and gemstones to dig up as offerings to him, and some of that filtered out to the beasts in their lairs and the giants, allowing me to harvest goldweight to Burn as I continued with my harvests.
It didn’t take much for me to start building followings of fast-moving creatures who sought battle and slaughter and the sweet flesh of fire-born or ice-born, respectively. I was happy to play the Warlord for them and arrange a slaughter of all those coming for them and their lands, fighting, pulling back, rinse and repeat over and over as the never-ending migration continued its inexorable march of survival.
Made a lot of Karma rather quickly, too.
With little fanfare, the Crescendoom Pyramid was growing deep underground, harvesting the Immortal Power released with all the killing here eagerly and grandly. It didn’t need to be at the center of the plane, inside the Dyson Sphere Sun/Planet ahead of me, as we were going to be striking at the Rules and Laws of the world, and those were everywhere about us.
Gulguz had died several times to Pyramids. It only made sense to continue the tradition, even if he didn’t really remember it.
Queens of the Burning and the Winter Courts were my guises, and I played at them well…