Midnight RPG - Chapter 21.666

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The sun hangs high in the sky this day and you’re chopping wood among a forest of illusionary trees, they whisper and fade allowing you to see through them as ghosts - they are now only ash. The old ox-yoke from dreams in the past still have themselves locked around your neck, your feet now blistered from the heat. Yet still your Orc ears take comfort in the sounds of whips cracking and worg growls, the songs of the coming victory. Suddenly your vardatch makes a strange noise, and you look down to find blood welling up from the split in the log. At your side, the stack of wood becomes a pile of severed limbs, and the few remaining broken-burned trees around you begin to scream as they float south down the Felthera... a graveyard of the ash of old tree-shepards and the broken bones of decomposing fae corpses, the belly of the great albino Dire Gator rises amid the ashen river - dead.
You wade up to your neck in a river of burned bones, blood and ash that flows through a bare and grey landscape. Your veins begin to burn and writhe beneath your flesh as hundreds of worms burrow through them, occasionally piercing the skin. Scorched-barked thorn trees spill their jagged, leafless roots down into the black river, swelling and throbbing as though it simmers with hungry serpents. A massive giant man turns to smile as he says...


"In the Dark God’s frozen claws. Scores will be settle in blood. Only one will survive to lead them all. Even the greatest amongst them, those that have called the claws their home from before the age of man, will bow to this one."
And in the dreamscape an old orc mother-wife approaches you with a needle and tread. She sits you on a stump jutting up in mid-river-stream and carefully stitches your mouth closed. For some reason, you find yourself unable to protest. Next, she sews shut your nostrils, then your right eye. When she finishes, she licks your cheek with a maternal smile, her breath smells like rotten eggs and the last thing you see is her daggerlike claw on a crooked, withered finger as she gouges out your unstiched left eye.

"The one will raise the banners of war and like vermin, they will come in their hordes from the bowels of Aryth, and the coldest wood shall burn and the fortresses shall become as dust.
A sea will form in the Caraheen, a vast sea of fire. It will stretch as far as the eyes can see. From the east, along a roadway burning with flames a great beast of metal will come, lumbering over the bones of Aryth. It shall feed the sea like none other, belching fire and devastation. Even death will not be a refuge, as the dark spirit of this fire will allow no rest and no end to torment. On the coming of Autumn it WILL breach, there is no hope... She is Maugum, she is Death.



NOTE

PS... I might have spelled Maugum wrong. I'll check my notes later and correct her name if I did.



The unblinking black-eyed gaze of the Witch Queen

This is the vision I gave you prior to recap.


The avatars she uses to spy all over Eredane are her undoing. Three of them give in to despair, all committing suicide while her consciousness is elsewhere. It is a terrible wound upon her psyche. When they rise from the noose, the poison, and the fall as undead, her corruption is complete. The shock of her avatars giving in to despair and then becoming the hungry dead destroys the benevolent queen, and something else is left in her flesh.
Her first move while under the thrall of the Shadow is to gather her cult. They become her new council, the Witch Council, but even that is not enough to make her people turn against her. When she calls her finest smiths to her Arbor and demand they create for her a new suit of armor and weapons so that she might war on their enemies from the front lines, her people cheer. When she announces that Arderin, once the greatest of the Caransil’s heroes, had turned to Shadow her people despair.
In is when she announces that she is taking the Night King as her husband that the revolt begins. The High Court rallies its forces and attacks the Witch Queen and her consort. They cry as they fight and wail as they die.
She decimates those who stand against her and turns Caradul into a charnel house. Blood runs down the trunk of the Elder Tree until all of the bark is red Caransil wildlanders disappear into the deep wood under the protection of the dire beasts. Most survivors bend their knees and pledge their allegiance to their queen and her consort. This Witch Queen and the Witch King of Erethor welcome Jahzir, the King of Erenland, and Sunulael, the First Legate, to their wedding. Sunulael himself marries them, consecrating their union in the name of Shadow. Zardrix gives her blessing, circling above the Elder Tree once for every year of the Last Age.
Even their wedding is doomed to blood and slaughter. Arderin and his new bride turn on the once-human Night Kings, Sunulael and Jahzir, lashing out at them with eldritch might not seen since the First Age. Zardrix finishes circling the tree and sides with the Witch Queen and King, knowing their might is stronger.
The newly crowned Witch King speaks before a mighty assemblage of orcs, ogres, and shadow-beasts spawned in the breeding pits. The Witch Queen then declares humanity’s time on Eredane finished and explains her plan to hunt them to extinction. Her speech is met with such adoration and bloodlust to fight under the Witch Queen’s leadership.