Heart hammering, I backed away and fumbled at my belt for a knife I didn’t have.
Angharad bowed in its presence, reeking of respect and admiration. “I greet ye, Eldest. I have brought the spawn o’ my spawn as ye have requested.” If this was the Eldest then the creature was ancient beyond belief. Its race had vanished from history and human ken long ago, or so the Arcanum had believed.
It was a beast of legend that our corrupted Setharii myths had called ogres and depicted as mindless raging beasts. “Ogarim,” I said, remembering what Shadea had called that ancient desiccated corpse in the Boneyards below Setharis, the one that had once been slain by my spirit-bound blade, Dissever.
You know of my race, broken one? it said, the words brushing against my mind like a soft breeze. Despite the mental magic involved it did not feel threatening. How?
A gentle urging to tell all lapped against my defences, a subtle but strong invitation. I ignored the urge and kept my Gift wide open, trickling magic into my muscles and mind ready to fight for my life. The ogarim felt almost-human, which probably meant I could kill it. “What do you want with me?”
Human words are crude, it said, and I felt its frustration with humans, or ‘broken ones’ as it knew us. May I… There was a meaning there I did not understand, some sort of linkage that felt like a lesser version of the Gift-bond I had once shared with my old friend Lynas.
“Do not dare show the Eldest disrespect,” my grandmother hissed. “Do as it wishes.”
The ogarim felt my fear and my hatred of her, and in response it thumped its big hairy arse down on the floor, knowingly appearing less threatening. I would show you.
“Show me what?” I asked, suspicious.
Origin. Scarrabus. War. Future. All were accompanied by an incredibly complex interplay of emotion.
“And the Eldest will also reveal to me how ye may heal your hand,” Angharad said, grinning like a cat.
I took a deep breath and pondered it. It was a risk, certainly, but the Scarrabus were ancient creatures and if we wanted more information then what better source than another ancient monster? I eased open my mental defences and probed the ogarim’s mind. It was a formidable fortress, but its gate was open, allowing me to enter the inner courtyard and communicate mind-to-mind. There was no feeling of danger, only patient tolerance.
It was pleased as I touched it, and then a river of thought and emotion flowed into me. For a moment the deluge threatened to drown me, but I quickly found my balance and pushed back. Our thoughts flowed into one another, swirling and mixing, sharing…
All was peace and joy. The ogarim dwelled in small family groups within pyramids of living black stone and danced to the music of magic in vast stone temples grown from the bones of the earth itself. There was no want, no starvation or disease, no war or hatred, and no death from age, only accident. All ogarim knew all others on an intimate level that only a human tyrant like me could truly understand. If you hurt one you hurt all. What they needed they made from the elements around them, every member of their race wielding innate magic as potent as an elder magus but without the need for centuries of training or the restrictions of the Gift. They did not have pyromancers, geomancers, aeromancers or aquamacers, seers or knights, or tyrants or anything else – they had all Gifts in one.
Broken ones…
The ogarim looked up from their temples as the music faltered and the currents of magic changed. In the night sky a star guttered and went out. A few years later, another died, and in its place a sucking pit of nothingness. They felt fear, and although not a new concept, it was an uncommon thing only experienced by individuals in unforeseen peril. The eight eldest among them set out across the daemon-infested Far Realms to uncover the fate of the missing stars…
Daemons… The ogarim thought my opinion and information on the inhabitants of the Far Realms insulting and ignorant. They were alien animals and greater intelligences to match our own, and all worthy of existing as much as we did. Other realms hosted vicious predators however, and after the first death the ogarim learned to defend themselves. Which they did with unexpected and terrifying magical ferocity, though also without anger.
Eventually they travelled to a new realm close to the missing stars and discovered an intelligent species, shaped something like bears, that were tearing their own civilisation to pieces. The ogarim watched, confused and horrified as unbear slaughtered unbear. The ogarim did not understand how war was possible, not then, thinking the violence caused by disease or poison. When portals from other realms opened and unknown daemons entered this new realm to side with one faction of unbears, the ogarim thought that peacekeepers had arrived to stop the madness and heal the suffering.
Naive… The sense of regret and loss almost drove me to tears. How could they have possibly known that the armies of the Scarrabus had arrived to aid their already-infested allies in conquering that realm?
The first taking… Its deep anger was more human than anything I had yet felt from it.
The then-Eldest of the ogarim party went to meet with the supposed peacekeepers. Then she… disappeared. This was not death, for they would have felt her passing. This was something else – a cutting of ties. When she returned to them she was no longer ogarim but attempting to pass as one, like a predator that wears the hollowed shell of another before striking. They reached into their Eldest’s mind and felt what was now in her.
I shuddered, remembering my own encounter with the Scarrabus queen and its host.
War. Conquest. They understood it then. There was no reasoning with the Scarrabus. The enemy did not value all life as they did – the life of others was just another resource to be used and abused. They were selfishness incarnate.
The six surviving ogarim defended themselves and destroyed the daemon hordes of the Scarrabus in an awesome display of power that left me shaking. They felt bone-deep sadness at causing such great loss of life. The alien sky boiled and the ground burned as they disabled their Eldest and retreated back through the realms to their distant home where others better versed in healing could remove the parasite.
So foolish…
The Scarrabus infestation of their Eldest proved to be incompatible with the incredible power of the innate ogarim connection to magic. The flood of magic was slowly killing the Scarrabus, and the decaying parasite was in turn killing the ogarim. They tried to remove it from its host and keep both alive, they tried and failed and tried again but it proved impossible. Ogarim did not kill ogarim; it was not something they were capable of, so in the end they locked their Eldest away to die an unfortunate and unnatural death.
They still did not understand the enemy’s uncaring desire to possess and kill other sentient beings, so they gathered at their most sacred temple with a number of Scarrabus-infested prisoners recovered from across the Far Realms and then they forced open their minds. They discovered that there were many Scarrabus queens scattered across realms near and far, each one a hive mind controlling all the lesser spawn hatched from its flesh.
The ogarim invaded the inner mind-realms of the parasite queens, linked through the minds of their offspring. I had felt the power of a Scarrabus queen, and it was no easy feat to conquer one, but somehow they managed it and learned exactly what the