"Chapter 1: "Wherein our protagonists discover: sometimes, discretion is the only part of valor."
Kirby let out a truly impressive string of Ubantu obscenities. Taggart would ordinarily have stopped to bathe in the linguistic glory of that profane construct, but they were both running for their lives. Another desperate horn BLARED from their right. The trumpet calls were getting closer, faster. These were signal horns. They were to be sounded when a section of the Vesh line was collapsing, calling for reinforcements.
They'd been sounding nonstop, from all over the battlefield, for the last five minutes.
Taggart and Kirby hurtled through a copse of woods at full tilt. "Have I mentioned I hate this war?" Taggart gasped, rain slamming him in the face.
Kirby nimbly sidestepped a cluster of corpses impaled on a charge-breaker. "You see, why didn't you mention that earlier? I've been sticking around because I thought you were enjoying yourself."
Taggart glimpsed over his shoulder. The furred-and-fanged-and scaled wave of the Bandit King's army was breaking over the ridge behind them like a howling, insane tidal wave. The two men were ahead of the collapsing line by a hundred yards. Taggart figured they were losing ten yards a minute, even at full run. Dammit ...
The two men broke into a clearing filled with Veshian soldiers. That cheered them up. After all, they too wore the uniforms of the Iron Throne. They weren't actually soldiers of the Iron Throne, but such details were for the small-minded to worry about.
The Veshians were closing on a single old man in a black robe. Even as the charged with their pikes, the old man muttered and gestured --
"Run," suggested Kirby.
"Run," answered Taggart. Any idiots who didn't keep an archer readied against a spell-caster deserved what was coming to them.
A disk of air in front of the mage rippled. Space-time pinched. Suddenly, a half-ton of snarling insect-demon ROARED from the void. Heads went flying , ricocheting off the narrow saplings. Kirby winced as one soldier took the extra three seconds to die.
Before the summoned spawn could turn on them, the two mis-adventurers slid on their butts twenty feet down the muddy embankment into the next trenchline. They sloshed through the knee-deep mud, the sucking sounds almost loud enough to be heard over the pounding rainstorm. Three years of supernatural rain had turned this section of the Blood Steppes into one huge quagmire. Taggart seemed to remember a time when his crotch and socks had been dry ... but it was hazy. Probably another hallucination.
They rounded a sharp bend in the trench and pulled up short. They had to climb over a big pile of dead guys.
And the brunette with the five-foot sword probably had something to say about that.
She stuck the end of her Oathblade in the mud, leaned against it. A wiry blond man stood up from behind the big pile of dead guys. He was scratching notes on wax-paper bound in a loose book.
"In the name of the Iron Throne, clear the way!" Kirby called.
The blond man raised an eyebrow. "That is the worst disguise I have ever seen. Ever. Orcs have more cunning disguises."
Taggart looked down. The uniforms were kind of ratty. And he was still wearing his thick Termana leather duster over his armor. "How about this," he tried. "The line's collapsing and the we're right now about fifty yards from a Gorgon death squad."
"That works," the young woman snapped. The four took off at a dead run. "I'm Alec," the young man introduced himself. "She's Indigo Montoya. She's really quite amazing with that --"
"Running now, chat later," Kirby yelled back.
A slow, building ROAR began over their heads. It grew louder and louder, closer and closer ... it was teeth-rattling, skull-shattering, bowel-emptying. Kirby looked up as a DARKNESS engulfed them --
The burning black dragon SLAMMED into the mud just next to them. They bounced off the walls of the trenches as it CRASHED through the wood barricades, leaving a furrow twenty yards across. It finally came to rest in a crumpled, flaming heap. They crawled to the shattered edge of their trench. The monster still burned in its crater.
"Now that," Kirby muttered, "is a helluva thing."
"Hey, look," Taggart deadpanned. "The dragons have returned to Ghelspad."
"What sets a dragon on fire?" Indigo asked.
They looked at each other. They thought about what the answer might be. They started running again.
Suddenly a warning trumpet IN FRONT of them sounded. "Oh, that is not good!" Taggart shouted. They cut a hard angle through wrecked trench-warrens. A high LAUGH from above them caught their ear. When they looked up, they saw a giggling wizard flying through the air, his robes flapping behind him like raged wings. He was unleashing arcane green BOLTS of energy from a wand, FLASH-FRYING Veshians as they ran. He turned his attention to the four fugitives --
An elf leaped over their trench, his bow SINGING four times in mid-jump. The wizard screamed as the arrows punched through his torso. A weak gurgle, and the dead necromancer began drifting slowly to earth.
The elf paused long enough to mutter a vile word in Elven before disapearing. Taggart, Kirby, Indigo Montoya and Alec raced off as the cries of titanspawn grew louder behind them.
"THERE!" Kirby pointed to a nearby hilltop. A ruined GUARDHOUSE was silhouetted against the grey sky. There was no roof, and two of the walls were wrecked and only chest-high, but the back walls were solid. High, narrow windows might give good sniper positions and cover --
"If I know the Iron Throne army," Taggart announced, "there's some heavily fortified bunch of hard-@sses dug into that strongpoint!"
The four slogged up the hill desperately. They hit the low wall, Taggart and Indigo vaulting the wreckage, Kirby and Alec leaping through remaining window openings.
There were Veshian soldiers in the guardhouse, all right.
They were lying in the mud, their wounds bandaged. Some of them moaned. Most of them just politely bled out in the mud.
One man stood watch over these wretched wounded. He raised his shining spear. Light improbably gleamed off his chainmail shirt. Rain ran off his shaved head. His eyes were intense over a trim goatee. "In the name of Madriel, I say to you, YIELD!"
Taggart was so busy trying to figure out how to steal the cleric's horse, he almost didn't realize he'd finally found his twin brother.
Don't know much about The Scarred Lands, but if jonrog1 is telling the story, it's bound to be a good one.
