Chapter XX:
Temple of the Unghost
The little shadows watched him no more.
The Weever was blind to him.
Whatever he had become was only the faintest semblance of that man and boy he had once lived as.
Now he was aquatic, a drowned pulver-body among the many dead ettins who too were full of that poisonous stuff.
He fed on them, drank them, sucking the blood from the drowned dead in the firth.
When he was strong enough, he emerged from that rotting sea, discovering a land unknown to him and men.
Wild and tormented by the most hateful wraiths was that land, desolate like the dead sequoia woods, uninhabited except for the mile high walled counties lorded by a few ettin princelings not swept away by the tidal wave.
Whatever survivors remained, he had no ambition to find.
He thirsted, hungered for another era, for memories that he had forsaken and now were like dreams that are forgotten upon waking.
He knew his name though; it was a good name, a powerful name, one that the ettins respected.
As he passed into the great city of Azzastad, the last technologically advanced megalopolis of that age, he was begged for his services by the ettin citizenry.
Azza assigned him as the last solicitor of the apegift.
And he dutifully obliged the citizens with their apegifts, so long as he received his due sacrifices.
A temple was designated for him, just below the temple of Azza.
Those seeking apegifts would call his name: “Orbaulker! I request an apegift!”
And he would answer.
Those remaining sons of the last age now designated Azzastad as a pilgrimage point to offer Orbaulker and Azza sacrifice.
One pilgrim a day would be granted entry to his temple, the line outside the city gates containing nearly all of the ettinland's population.
One morning, a thousand years from his first coming to Azzastad, Orbaulker received a non-ettin visitor.
“Kurt! We are here to call you home!” cried out the visitor's voice. “Kurt? I am Orbaulker! Priest of the Unghost and Viceroy of Azzastad!”
His temple shook, a massive tremor dislodging all sacrificial vessels from their nooks, all those lined up miles back towards the city crushed as the pulver edifice toppled.
Only the temple of Azza still stood, though its worshippers fell dead without apparent cause.
No men survived the quake. Only Orbaulker remained.
He removed himself from his quarters and crawling through rubble looked upon the one calling him. “Kurt. Listen.” Kalendros looked down on him, two children standing at his left and right.
Orbaulker remembered his decision when he was still that man at Castle Bloodfirth; to war against the last stronghold of the Quickore King.
He would need men, proxies to do his bidding.
Into the Temple of Azza he fled.
The space was a vast hall covered in a waxy green film, dripping and growing over burning candles and the outlines of bodies.
“Kurt!” called Kalendros still.
There were piles bodies of the most beautiful ettins, stinking, gargantuan velvety flies abuzz in their midst, the green walls spilling over on the heaps of them, feeding.
At the end of the temple was a throne crafted from the crimson skeleton of a massive ettin.
Upon the throne sat a pale entity, his eyes dark, small, a long white moustache drooping along his chest.
His long segmented abdomen was like a centipede's, but the arms and legs were of a herculean musculature, outstretched, gripping the throne.
Azza rose and looking upon Kurt, he spoke, the lips not moving:
“Sow thou art. Pick up a weapon and fight that witch out my door.”
Orbaulker growled. “I listen to no one but myself, Unghost. I, the god of gods!”
“And yet you pursue me like a suckling to its mother’s teat?”
“I will make this my own temple if I must…”
The walls shook with Azza’s laughter. “Seest thou my throne? The greatest of ettins have challenged me, and I contorted their bones for my comfort. Thou art nothing but a cushion for my arsehole.”
Kurt gripped the pulver dagger fashioned from his father’s slab.
He used every mote of superhuman-ability the pulver blood of Orbaulker afforded him, the transformative strength, his arms stretched out as wings, his mouth a beak, his feet ripping, tearing talons, gripping the dagger.
Azza yawned.
Like a gnat, the man was swatted, pulverized, made an invisible black smudge on the throne of ettin bone.
He was one of the last of them, and perhaps the most insignificant; as he set forward no new agenda, nor invent a novel machine for the masses, nor even lord over men and ettins.
But as he was squashed and left a stain on the seat of the Unghost, he still continued as a phantasm, and half-existed in the temple among the miserable dead until the errandghosts finally arrived.
Kalendros, Iseld and Peltwarder carrying the banner of Rammbock entered the corpse-stinking hall of Azza.
Behind them were five other errandhosts; and an army of a thousand men led by Rammbock.
Peltwarder gripped Deatheld and charged towards the throne. Azza fled, abandoned his hall, chased by the army into the swamps of the Wildermark.
He was fettered by Kalendros with a quickore-cord, and hurled into the Maelstrom of the Eldermark.
+++++
Azzastad, the only remaining sliver of the Wildermark, crumbled.
The throne of ettins, the seat of the Unghost was lifted from the rubble and cast in the chasm after him.
Those skeletal creatures imbedded in the throne remained with him, a seat for their lord’s foul rear.
The phantasm that was Kurt had accepted his fate.
He wasted away among a plurality of souls who called themselves superlative gods, living diminishing half-lives, ever on diminishing, as the Eldermark too diminished eternally, spiralling on and on.
“Kurt! It’s enough.”
The voice again…whose voice? The voice of a phantom?
“Kurt, it’s time to leave. Time to come home.”
Kalendros stared at a boy in the abyss.
A young Etzel and Verity were standing at his right and left.
“See now, the shadows at my side? They are illuminated by my presence. Kurt, you are one of them, one of these shadows.
Your bodies all are elsewhere, looking forward…Watching what will transpire if you accept the Unghost's apegift.”
The phantasm did not understand.
“You have witnessed all as a player in this show, a watching shadow, watching shadows of events yet to be,
but the show is over; I will return you to where our journey began.”
“Yes, Eisenforst, it’s time to leave this place, we’ve watched enough,” said Etzel.
“Can’t come...am dead…hellfire...am dead. Hellfire," spoke the little phantom shadow.
Kurt looked up to see the face of a man, warzone-weary, reaching out to him.
He lay in a pit of charcoal, the rolling hills above him covered in the same pits, burning, other men, boys, all burning on makeshift cremation pyres.
He reached forward and gripped the man’s hand.
John Ormsvard hoisted him up over onto a saddle, and the two rode off along the bodies as a burning schoolhouse collapsed.
Snow cast itself on the orchards and hills and the two riders.
From a hilltop, a ghost in red robes and a lady cloaked in purple watched the two riders.
“Remember what you’ve seen, Kurt Eisenforst. It was no dream. Remember and learn, else far worse will befall this earth.”
Kalendros flew off over the orchards and mountains as Icewild sounded across the warzone, heading to the sequoia-laden north.
End of Part Two