The Enmity of Scolrys, Part XXXVI: The Siege of Qor Qogol
As the Threefold Alliance mustered their forces and once more aligned their focus, their generals set sights upon the Deepest City’s nigh impenetrable gates as their next conquest. Led by the Heralds of the Light, the Hammer’s forces enacted a grand plan with the aid of Rhulin Glintspear and the Dauntless Herself. Inspired by myriad ideas passed back and forth by budding, impressionable Ascendril, the city transported several large enchanted tridents by portal and old-fashioned team lifting. With these tridents empowered, blessed, and set into proper position, the forces of spirit and water combined to create an overwhelming assault that blasted through the enchanted doors – allowing the forces of the Light to set forth into the city. Hot on their heels were four hundred of the Amethyst avengers that had taken up post outside the Deepest City for the last several months, their drakir whipped into a wrothing rage that could only be sated by the snap of enemy necks.
The second prong of the assault, headed by the generals of the Sanguine Fist, made its way into the city from the opposite direction. Utilising shil’tok detained from the city’s campaign to recapture Helba, the Empire navigated a colossal network of tunnels found beneath their city in an earlier portion of the war. Bereft of the usual lava that covered this network up, Bloodloch found the trail navigable – if slightly treacherous. Though they managed to arrive at the bottom level of the city, they found their progress barred by a colossal legion of skeletal warriors that had amassed in the city throughout the earliest days of the War of the Six Nations. Unable to press forward any further, the city reached a stalemate broken only by the timely arrival of Haratos, master of the Theatre of Shadows.
Haratos had not come alone, either. With the Theatre’s ranks replenished by years of recruitment in the wake of Nalibhtavi’s destructive outburst, a mass of understudies followed the man to the front lines. After a brief comment about the Undercity of Djeir receiving word of attempted diplomacy and allied arrangements, he said, the Empress had seen fit to request that the entirety of the Theatre assemble to aid the Sanguine Fist’s strike. With such introductions out of the way, Haratos turned to the new generation of apprentices and began to conduct an ominous, eerily familiar tune: the Song of Oblivion.
As the final note rang out into the black, Djeir’s sworn vengeance took root.
A wild wave of songcalled sorcery crashed through the bottom of the Deepest City, reverberating off of stone walls and setting its still lake to countless ripples. Skeletal soldiers and sworn defenders alike crumbled before the overwhelming power of Haratos’ opus, its lethal procession stripping the magical patina from reanimated bone and laying to rest the masses that hold the city’s docks and residential district. The destruction’s aftermath rattled throughout the realm entire, earning a respectful cheer from Empress Malieh Garilicci herself, may she live forever.
With Varach Scolrys’ forces caught between two sizable forces and the Heartwood’s interfere still stubbornly gnawing at the roots of his demesne, the Hlugnic Chaos Lord saw little other option aside from retreat. The Dragon of the North fought on with unmatched ferocity, buying enough time for a thin sheen of arcane energy to be formed that swept across the third tier of Qor Qogol, focused upon a lone doorway leading into a forbidden workshop. The energy soon sealed off the way inside the necromancer’s abode, allowing his mysterious work to continue on without interference. Even as the Threefold Alliance captured the rest of the city and took control of the canal system, the ancient necromancer plotted his next move – albeit slightly panicked.
A solitary wind swept through the whole of the Deepest City as the Alliance surveyed their conquest, sending a lonesome whistle through its empty streets. Bereft of its makeshift fabrications and cleared of its skeletal legions, nothing remained within the city of empty antiquity aside from their own occupying forces…
Penned by my hand on Quensday, the 13th of Dharos, in the year 5 AC.
