All was touched by war. Women and children fled to safer reaches deeper within the Nation's territory as men prepared to go the other way headstrong into the gauntlet of their lives. From her transport wagon Dimia saw the corpses of hobgoblin warriors hanging from Fort Stowerling's front gates and ramparts. The fortsmen had skinned the runes from the creatures' bodies before putting the cadavers on display. The girl realized how easily she could now look upon death unmoved. Shock came nonetheless, for Dimia found that she recognized a number of the strung dead. Among the grisly trophies were a smattering of the wasters who'd fatefully visited the church in Marrow in their pursuit of the Reapers. Those very monsters who murdered Dimia's fellow orphans. Even the toothfaced leader was there, still in his bone armor but now relieved of his glyphed sword, alongside his freakish sorceress who had carved the runes into the church's floor that burned alive the children trapped below. Dimia cursed the souls of her enemies as her vessel went through those widening gates, glad to see them dead. But she did not catch among the slain the hobgoblin that stood out most in her memory. The one called 'Tecneli,' who'd sniffed for her in that steeple in his robe of stitched faces. Perhaps he still lived. For her to kill.

— • —

Tecneli did indeed still live. And always in the service of others. His ultimate master was his god, Xul the Everburning. But his own ears were denied the honor of hearing the creator's true voice. That pleasure and burden went to those who claimed to speak for the sun lord—the Prophets. And now, Emissaries spoke for them. One such holy ambassador, Phus, had come to Thajh with orders he claimed had from the Blind Prophet himself. Kill the Reaper, he instructed Tecneli. Then you will have the honor of leading our own company of Dark Reapers. Killing the captive would be easy. A moment alone in his cell was all he needed. But first... Tecneli had questions. If he enjoyed access to powers such as those contained in Yanhamu's sword, the painsmith could simply ask them after the Reaper was dead. But the secrets to such divinatory enchantments were lost to the ages. Only a handful of Justicars and Templars had access to those artifacts anymore, aside from legends of a few monks and liches who lived alone out in the wastes. To allow one of those holy relics to be lost meant a severe dishonor to Yanhamu's name. Knowing the fabled sword that held the souls of the August Emperor and so many others had now fallen into human hands chafed at Tecneli. And to think he once served Justicar Yanhamu so blindly. Even the most vaulted individual could be flawed, it seemed. Xul truly was the one and only perfect being. Tecneli's heart ached with love for his god's purity and strength. This, too, he struggled with, for that swimming devotion was itself a pleasurable feeling—and thus a forbidden thing.

For good measure Tecneli bit the inside of his cheek as he strode along a high catwalk connecting two mudspires. He was greeted with a burst of high gusty air and a dizzying view of Thajh's spires. At the bridge's end was a doorway that led inside an adjacent tower. The robed painsmith passed a pair of guards and all bit their calloused wrists in salute. As Tecneli entered the building he could already hear the satisfying pitches of agony afforded by this unique ward of the Painworks complex. The screams and pleas that carried through these halls came at a notably higher register and purity—for here were kept the human children. How the painsmith delighted in their fear of his quilted faces.

— • —

Blacwin pulled a mask over his face to shield his sensitive nose from the onslaught of odors that permeated the zone through which he scouted. The odious gases of putrefying death that rose like spirits from the dead. The burning and the rotting of it. He shuddered at the thought that by smelling these awful corpses and puddles of curdling gore he must be taking some small and invisible particulates of those matters into himself. The half-ylf moved ahead of his team, charged with scouting the outskirts of a smoldering town that according to their maps had the prophetic name of Vacancy. It was as if the gutted township had been decorated in preparation for some macabre festival in honor of ogreish gods. The town's walls were freshly painted with blood. Banners of penetralia hung in the noxious breeze. Innards were draped along the eaves of the ruined saloon and post office and general store like strands of garland. Scavenger birds sang hellish carols into the night.

Blacwin stopped at the outer perimeter next to a lone outhouse that sat like a monolithic idol to the shit gods. He'd caught movement and heard the faintest syllables on the back of the wind. Someone else was here. Blacwin thanked his ylfish senses. He often wondered if much of man's hatred for the woodfolk was borne from simple jealousy. Ylfs could see in darkness and sniff out scents like wolves. They lived far longer, concordant with nature. Small wonder that mankind feared and loathed them. There were frightening stories about the ylfs, too, that gave humans good cause to mistrust. It was said that many of the sylvans could perfectly mimic the voices of others. That they would stalk a traveler through the woods and learn his voice and use it to fool him or those who knew him. The natural ventriloquists sometimes led people to their deaths in this manner, or forced themselves upon women tricked alone by what they thought was the call of their distressed child or husband. Perhaps this was how Blacwin himself was conceived. This he did not know and perhaps would never know.

He crouched behind the shitshack and listened for more. Discerned voices issuing from the cluster of buildings at the settlement's center. Sounded like sandmen. Their sick rituals. Probably some lingering unit of hobgoblin scavengers moving in the wake of the awful force that previously churned through this territory. Many of the hardened wasters had turned their nightly ceremonies into a form of sport, escalating dares of pain.

Blacwin heard movement from behind. Backed against the outhouse and watched as three figures descended into the lot and quietly scissored through the dark. The Reaper blended into the shadows and did not stir. The newcomers had not seen him. These invaders had a different target in mind. They too were hobgoblins, perhaps of a different clan. Direct infighting was not uncommon among the more chaotic tribes even with their unholy unification within the deeper wastes. The stalkers had their bows drawn and arrows nocked. They had come here to kill.

A lanky silhouette rose against the umbral sky. It was a waster that had already been camped here, on patrol and armed with a spear. The stealthed invaders fired arrows into the guard and he soundlessly dropped to the ground, easily worsted by the assassins. The figures hissed and moved forward in their deadly course toward Vacancy's ruined center. Blacwin waited to be sure they had all passed and crept back into the rough so that he could return to camp and report the sighting to his teammates.

— • —

Team 3 sat in the hills and watched the sandmen pick one another off in Vacancy's battered streets. The Reapers placed bets as to who would be the victors. When the skirmish was done the commandos moved in to finish off the survivors themselves. Cruel and capricious Fate... as they said, she turned like a fitful sleeper.

The Reapers secured the site and the winners collected on their bets. Thirteen and Vulture did not treat the enemy corpses well. Made gory toys of them. The bloodshed did not end with their deaths. Vulture used their cadavers as practice for knife-throwing. Thirteen pissed on their dead faces. Sliced off their ears, their balls. Yanked out their many teeth and the both of them made jewelry of them.

"Leave them be," said Blacwin. "Have a shred of fucking decency."

"They don't mind," said Thirteen. He held up the severed head of one of the dead sandmen. "You don't mind, do ya?" He shook the skull as if it wished to communicate 'no' and then punted it into the night. Vulture fell backward cackling.

"Mutilate these freaks to your heart's content, men," said Nail. "And put it all on display. Perhaps it will strike some degree of fear in the enemy... or at least get their black blood boiling."

— • —

The Reapers set out again in the morning. The plain was wide and grassy. Two storms came and went. They soaked and dried and soaked again. The muddied Reapers came across a trading outpost that had been emptied and abandoned. Found a new occupant within, a delirious survivor hiding in the debris. The sootfaced witness rambled through his spit about the atrocities brought upon his former home of Vacancy. The heckling sandmen rode in from the wastes, brought to fervor by their whips and devotion, hysterical for blood. The wasters made his people eat the genitals of their own children. Sectioned them alive. He ran to this outer shack and hid like a rat. The rambler refused aid and would not depart his nest. The Reapers gave him what food and water they could spare and left him to his fate.

— • —

As Phus had told Tecneli in their private meeting, he had come to Thajh for more than just the Reaper captives. The emissary had a team of his own killers to assemble as well, his Dark Reapers, in the same spirit as the Nation's force of commandos. He went to an old temple at the heart of the city for this dire purpose. The domed building had been built long before the towering spires of mud, etched from the very heart of the ancient reef that served as the foundation of the city. This was the Temple of Zazmar where dwelled the monks known as the Sightless. The Blind Prophet himself hailed from a similar order of zealots deeper within the empire. It was among those most devout sorcerers and martial artists that Ixhalal had stared into the sun until his eyes went blind and then ritualistically gouged them from their sockets and burned them in offering to the One Above. All of the Sightless had undergone such treatment. The most exalted few were said to blind themselves not by the sun but by directly reading the scriptures themselves. The words on those sacred tablets and scrolls were held to have been inked with the great orb's very plasma, the actual brilliant and fiery soul-blood of their god. Those texts were kept deep in some vault in distant Khafarsis, only for the eyes of the truly blessed.

Any evidence Phus had seen of the power of these scriptures or Xul's divinity were in his estimation always truly borne from sorcery and lies. He believed what his peers would deem sacrilegious, that the miracles of the templars and the Sightless and the Gluttons' seers were all pure chicanery. Runecraft in the guise of miracle. When Phus looked through the tattered histories of the great goblin civilizations he found that most emperors and strategists and plotters and rulers were in fact not sorcerers at all. Mages went inward. Conquerors went outward. He also concluded that the black arts were likely responsible for twisting the hobgoblins into the creatures they were today and thus he developed great fear and respect for it. Kept his berth from all things sorcerous as best he could. Ancient tales spoke of his people before they had become corrupted by those entropic forces. They lived for centuries like the ylfs and were strong like men. Perhaps someday they would restore themselves to such heights. But he feared they would never shed their unfounded beliefs.

All this self-torture, all this supplication, was in Phus' mind a mirage. But he could use the fanaticism of his people to his advantage. The emissary could turn their devotion to the Blind Prophet, whom they still believed to be alive, toward his own ends. He had even considered for a moment posing to the Sightless as Ixhalal himself—since these monks had no eyes with which to see him—but thought the wiser of it. There was a real possibility one or more of the Sightless had known Ixhalal and were already familiar with his voice. And, like the departed Prophet, these ascetics could feel with the air itself thanks to the runery tattooed on their heads and bodies. Phus could not be sure they didn't have the power to sense the features of his face and know him to be an impostor. And perhaps the temple had eyes hidden in its walls. The best strategy, the emissary concluded, was to maintain the lie that the Blind Prophet was still alive and that Phus remained his sole surviving voice and direct representative. By virtue of that role, he had at his disposal nearly all the power and authority of the Prophet himself. That was enough. For now.

But the one thing Ixhalal had that Phus never would was the blind loyalty of his warriors and acolytes such as the Sightless and the Justicars. And so Phus needed to keep the Prophet alive in their minds to maintain his own power. He knew that in time the lie would give out. Supplicants and ambassadors had already been asking to seek an audience directly with Ixhalal himself. Phus was not enough for them. They wanted the one at the top. Phus continued to push them off, knowing that he would have to leverage his influence quickly and decisively before it expired in front of his eyes. He also had to prepare for backlash if he was ever discovered. The first order was to build loyalties of his own. The Prophet's currency had been salvation. Phus' chief currency was currency itself. He had funneled the dragon's share of war spoils into his own private chest and carefully stashed the monies and trophies in various safe locations on both sides of the great range. Treasure meant power.

Phus went into that temple and claimed he had orders from the Prophet. That he needed their best assassins. Their High Priestess Thelali brought him three Sightless monks, Hyptu and Ubaid and Sulili. "The Prophet has decreed that you three shall serve Emissary Phus and obey his every word," said the Priestess. The Sightless repeated the oaths Thelali made them swear. To be sure there were no protestations from the temple for the loss of these vaulted members Phus made a sizable donation in the name of Ixhalal and the emissary left the sacred dome with the trio of sunsick defenders in his wake.

— • —