Sanghorn at the Allsight of the Hamhath Plains of Vahldrum

I'll be honest with you. This one is a bit weird. Realistically, it doesn't go anywhere, it's cryptic and I don't know if you'll like it. But I wanted to do it because I felt like I could build a world worth exploring further. I like a good space fantasy. You know, like Star Wars. But sci-fi takes over and rarely is there a fantasy atmosphere that takes hold in those tales. So, I thought I'd turn that around.  -Bill

Prologue (Or, What I Justify as an Explanation for the Goings-On Ahead)

The Rapture over Londinium claimed the lives of the Lessers and one hundred generations have passed. Sanghorn has been tasked by the Prophet of Vahldrum to reclaim the Relic of Furmsul stolen by the vile Warglungs to call upon the Everlast and end the black rule of their Lord King Anvargul. He travels west, alone. Early in his journey, Sanghorn comes across a landmark familiar to the Eastern Rangers of Gloriam, his people. Whilst climbing its storied trails, he discovers a legend that welcomes him with shelter and food for the night.

Words by Bill Arundell
Illustration by Dylan Burnett

Sanghorn slumped down on the dirt at the base of the boulder and rest his back against its chilled surface to ease the soreness in his spine from the day’s long ride across the Hamhath Plains of Vahldrum. The crackling fire warmed his feet, which had nearly frozen as he dredged through the drifts on his climb to the lookout where he met Pagram the Blind in his hole atop the plateau. Pagram had called it the Allsight, but Sanghorn had only ever known it to be the lookout station where the Eastern Rangers of Gloriam would retire if the weather turned cold on their return home from a scouting run to Cathcar. Pagram skewered a clump of nondescript meat on a crooked spit and held it over the fire, feeling for the warmth on his hands to find the centre of the roaring pit. He looked in Sanghorn’s direction with his glazed eyes, clouded with a lifetime of soar sights burned into his memory like the flames that licked the raw meat in his hands. Sanghorn had never met Pagram the Blind before that night, though the tales of his miserable past preceded him in Gloriam. Sanghorn felt as if he already knew the old man, even if most of the stories were not true.

            “It would not hinder me from serving you as my guest, but I would welcome you by name if you would allow it,” said Pagram.

            Sanghorn hesitated as he thought carefully about who he shared his name with on the road that grew evermore dangerous with each night. “If you must call me by name, you shall call me Pathagar, the Raphaediun,” said Sanghorn. For it meant Lone Traveller, Requesting Little Attention in the old language of the Vael Woodsmen to the south. He hoped the blind man would understand.

            “You have traveled far, but I know that you have not come seeking the Allsight,” said Pagram as the spit turned, roasted in his hands. “What is it you seek in the flats of Hamhath, and in such depths of winter as you have now? It must be something of grand consequence to bring a Gloriam man out of his comfortable homestead in the east.”

            “I come with my own business,” said Sanghorn, not wishing to share his mission with the blind old man. Not yet. “I am sure you would understand if I were reluctant to discuss my personal matters.”

            Pagram tilted his head to the left and offered a smile. “You may do as you wish, but it is customary to explain yourself as a guest in my home, no matter how modest this hole may be to you,” said he.

            “I am travelling beyond Cathcar, if you must know,” said Sanghorn. “I will be gone long enough to see the snow melt and the grasses live again, as the trees bloom and the air grows warm. I will not be returning to the homestead, as you say it, for quite some time. That is, of course, if I ever return to Gloriam again. I reserve my own doubts, but there are many who fear I am as good as dead already.”

            The meat was sizzling against the lapping flames that charred its outer surface in a searing burn. Pagram listened to it cook and prodded at the blackened edges with his fingers, licking the juices as they flowed from the gaps formed by his overgrown nails. “If you are gone for as long as you suggest, you will surely pass Cathcar, and Brethna, too,” said he. “And you will draw the watchful eyes in the north before you reach the towering rocklands at the end of the flats. You will be followed, of which I have no doubt. But why would you be watched? What is it that you seek west of Brethna? There is nothing for you there, unless you are seeking death as your Gloriam friends fear most.”

            Sanghorn hoisted Surgruth, the legendary weapon, onto his lap and brushed the dust from the hole off of the icy-cold metal. It was frigid to the touch in all places save for the grip, which remained warm from the long day’s travel in the western portion of the plains as it never left Sanghorn’s grasp. He moved his eyes to glance up at Pagram, with his head still tilted downward at the weapon. “I do not seek death, but it has followed me each day of my journey save the first,” said Sanghorn. “It is like a shadow of my shadow, marking me for the end, but I do not answer to it any more than you can see who I really am, Pagram the Blind.”

            “I should not have to tell you that a blind man sees more than you know,” said Pagram. “Surely the phrase has reached your young ears at some stage in your short life.”

            “No matter its age, my life is of great importance,” said Sanghorn. “And that is not of my word, but the word of the Prophet of Vahldrum. And it was he who tasked me with the journey that I only began two moons short a fortnight. I have heard many a tale about you, Pagram the Blind, but I see you now before me and I do not think I could manage to recall one that suits you best. It would take all manners of convincing to have me share my story with you, Pagram.”

            Pagram the Blind lifted the meat from the fire and split it with his hands as the grease burned his palms, but he paid it no heed. He tossed the shredded slab to Sanghorn who felt the oily fats threaten to blister his hands as he gripped it in his fingers. He loosened his fists over the meat and chewed quickly to save his tongue. Sanghorn feared the insecurity of showing weakness, even to a blind man. Pagram tore at the meat between his hands like an animal fighting for the last scrap. Sanghorn thought him uncivilized, but ignored the manner in which he ate his own half portion. It tasted of salt rub and cloves, but Sanghorn had seen Pagram skin the animal as he entered the patch of his den where they now sat and he tore the muscles from the bones without seasoning it any more than the earth had already.

            “You are my guest, so I will serve you as you wish,” said Pagram between bites. Blood and fat ran down his chin, catching on the stubble that sat grey between his wrinkles. “But you request validation from me, which is something I cannot do alone. For I will always be biased of my own past, no matter the tale or the audience that receives it. But you, Sanghorn, are travelling down a path that you will never set foot on again." Sanghorn's eyes shot up to meet Pagram's. "For you are doomed to continue on to Furmring, and the way out will not be your familiar road. Your Gloriam friends are right to fear your death, as it is inevitable from the moment you set foot on the land of the Warglungs.”

            Sanghorn stopped chewing and locked his jaw shut, clacking his teeth together and burning his tongue on the meat. He had not told Pagram his name, nor his destination. Pagram did not identify his mission, but Sanghorn feared that the blind old man was only saving the traveller the grief of being exposed entirely, like a common criminal left naked in the fields on the coldest of nights. Perhaps Pagram was sparing Sanghorn the embarrassment. “Sanghorn, I have seen and heard more than you have ever been told ten fold. I have lived long enough to recall the Netherbeings descending from the skies and our civilization into the ground. When the Lessers succumbed to the Feeding of the Netherbeings and the Everlast was cast down into Mount Furthang, I was walking the Path of the Mlaidd on my journey to Coelbren. I was but one in a band of men escaping the outbreak of madness that followed the Warglungs, much like the death that trails you in your travels. When the great crafts cracked the skies I was not as young as you are today, but I had my sight. I had my wits, too, believe it or not. But nearly one hundred generations have passed me by since the rapturous events of the Netherbeing invasion and the abandonment of the Warglungs. Their masters shall never return, I believe, and they will remain here until someone or something destroys them. And I have this growing feeling that the Prophet of Vahldrum has fingered you to be the bringer of such a fate. Is it not your destiny?”

            Sanghorn swallowed, but there was nothing in his mouth. He could not recall losing the meat from his maw, but it had slowly fallen agape as he listened to Pagram. His throat had lost all moisture that had coated its walls and left it sore and coarse like the dirt beneath him. “You paid witness to the Rapture over Londinium? And you survived the Claiming of the Lessers?” Sanghorn stopped to gather himself again.

            “And then some,” Pagram said. “But I do not wish to revisit most of it. I remember a time before it was called Londinium.”

            Sanghorn ran Pagram’s words over again in his head. What the blind old man was telling him all but confirmed the stories he had heard as a boy and well into manhood, although they had become pub stories in jest more than tales of dangerous adventure beyond the safe walls of Gloriam. One that had remained with Sanghorn and was still itching at the back of his mind. “If you may tell me but one tale, please let it be of your blinding at the hand of King Anvargul,” said Sanghorn. “It is the only one that the Gloriam people believe to be your tallest and I wish to hear it from you, here and now in your company around your fire. To know its truth would be to confirm all else that I know. But first, I must apologize for my arrogance. I have been the most wretched guest. Surely, I am not Pathagar the Raphaediun, so much as I should be the foolish Urbia, the Ass of Baumfil.”

            “Fret not, Sanghorn,” said Pagram. He shifted his weight to lean toward his guest now that his hands were free from his meal. The blind man pulled a sack from behind the giant stone where Sanghorn rest and began to rummage through its contents, making a great clattering noise. He withdrew a short blade of strange construction, as it was the opposite of all other daggers Sanghorn had ever seen with his own two eyes. The hilt was made of a glistening metal, formed into a grip of secure strength, and the blade of scarred bone with a jagged edge like a cracked tusk. Sanghorn thought it upside down, but it was clear that Pagram held it true. It fit the legend of Pagram’s escape from Furmring when he fought the Lord King Anvargul’s wolfbeasts in the prison deep in the mines below the Warglung Relic Halls. The myth said that Pagram fought the two wolfbeasts that guarded his cell with nothing but his hands, teeth and a rock no greater than his own fist that he knocked from the walls during his escape. The rock was made of maglomite, unique to the depths of Mount Furthang, or so the story goes. Pagram struck the first guard with the rock and cracked its skull between the eyes, bursting its vile blood over Pagram’s bare face and chest, choking him as it covered his mouth. The second guard pounced on the prisoner, but could not pin Pagram to the ground because the blood made him slick to the touch. With a second swinging strike from the maglomite rock, Pagram cracked the wolfbeast’s daggertooth from its jaw. Pamgram lifted the tooth and used it to cut the wolfbeast’s throat before the Warglung soldiers could clamber down the winding steps from their chambers above. Covered in the blood of King Anvargul's wolfbeasts, Pagram ascended.

            “When I escaped the Warglung prison, I came face to face with the Lord King Anvargul and he clasped his scorched hands around my grime-slick, filthy head and cursed my sight. For he wished to set me free to wander the land without my eyes to guide me. When he placed that spell upon my soul he also cursed me with the immortality that was passed onto him by the Netherbeings, for he was a prisoner of their worlds elsewhere. Without the Everlast, no enemy of Anvargul may strike him down.”

            “It is that very Everlast that I seek in my journey to Furmring,” said Sanghorn. “I am burdened with the task of pulling it from the Relic Halls and damning Anvargul to a mortal death, taking the Warglungs with him back to the Netherbeing’s Hell of Souls from whence they came. They will be gathered by the ghost ships that claimed the Lessers and sent away from us so that we may live in peace once again.”

            “Oh, Sanghorn, you have never lived in peace. Even I struggle to remember such a time, and I lived before the Netherbeings. However, I trust that the Prophet of Vahldrum has chosen the right Gloriam King in a long line of leaders to banish the Warglungs once and for all. I—” but Pagram was interrupted by a distant footfalls that grew closer by the second. It became scattered as the Warglung scouts broke out into a run across the base of the Allsight and climbed the sloping trail to Pagram’s hole atop the plateau. “You may be but a guest, but I request that you assist in defending my home,” said Pagram as he stood, now brandishing the Calahast that was hidden beneath his cloak.

            “I will defend your life and home as if they were my own,” said Sanghorn. He stepped quickly to the gateway that framed the top of the path that the scouts were scrambling upon around the far bend, out of sight for only a moment longer. The first blackened brute emerged and Surgruth released a hellfire of blue rage, streaking through the night air like thunderous lightning striking the highest tree. The Allsight's walls echoed with every round. The scout dropped to his knees with a gaping hole in his chest where the bullets had penetrated his rotten maggot cage that contained his corrupt soul. He toppled over at the feet of the next wave of scouts, shocking them into a defensive stance low behind their fallen comrade’s body, using it as cover from the screaming rounds that continued to tear over their heads from the mouth of Surgruth. Although Pagram was blind, Calahast guided his aim toward the scouts in his outstretched hand, and he squeezed the trigger as if by instinct. Truth be told, Calahast whispered in his ear that his aim was true, and the enemy would be punished by the violent hammering of the Caulcrim Calahast. The pistol was as long as legend said, reaching nearly an arm’s length beyond Pagram’s grip and cracking like the ice of the Lake Apham nearing the end of winter with every expelled casing.

            Pagram called to Sanghorn over the claps of gunfire exchanged in the doorway of his home. “You must go! This group will not rest until they find you again, so if I cannot stop them you must gain ground on the next leg of the road,” said he.

            “I cannot leave you behind, not after your hospitality and confidence,” said Sanghorn. He continued to fire down on the scouts, even as the pile of their corpses grew higher with every burst.

            “There is a cleft in the ridge behind the stone,” said Pagram. “But first, you must know. You will find the Relic of Furmsul beneath the floor of the Halls of Furmring. Use it to call upon the Everlast and it will grant itself to you, if you are worthy as the Prophet says. It will banish Anvargul and you will have saved humanity from the bastard scum of the void expanse that have taken this earth from us. Go!”

            Sanghorn turned and placed a hand on Pagram’s shoulder before picking up his pack and climbing behind the stone. Sanghorn knew that if he succeeded in damning the Warglungs of Furmring and the Lord King Anvargul, Pagram the Blind would be known as Pagram the Everlasting. For his immortal soul had gifted Sanghorn the most precious knowledge of the Furmsul and the Everlast. He bound down the rear path and made his way to his Vipercraft and ripped through the night with great haste.

            It would dishearten him to know that Pagram fell to the scouts, but Sanghorn would never return to the Allsight in the Hamhath Plains of Vahldrum ever again.