Fevered Dreams

It was a moment of terrible realisation. A threatening spectre, long lurking in the shadowy corners of fevered sleep, now bursting through into waking thought. It grasped out from the mist, thirsting for vengeance, an ancient and unspeakable evil long since forgotten. A primal scream of crimson fury that froze the soul with fear. A portent of woe and despair.

Atop his pyramid in Hor’takn, Mage-Priest Cxaz-Lotl-Chitxi roused fitfully from his other-worldly ruminations. Wrenched free of his cogitative slumber the ancient Slann came gasping back into the corporeal world. Alarmed Skink attendants fussed around the dais. To see one so ancient and so wise as Cxaz-Lotl-Chitxi seemingly gripped as if by a waking nightmare during his meditations was a fearful sight to behold. What terrible vision or portent of evil Cxaz-Lotl-Chitxi had seen remained unspoken. The Mage-Priest urgently summoned the Ogre Captains of Graag and commanded them to make haste for the east with all their strength. Yet the purpose of their mission would be lost with them.

The Ogre war-party, assembled in the summer of 385PC, marched with all the speed they could muster. They made the crossing of the great expanse of the Desert of Bones and over into the Durom Ranges seemingly without respite. Yet the host never reached its destination. Outriders of the Sigmarite Empire, tracking the Ogres as they progressed across the border into Holwingen, lost sight of the army in a day of autumn fog on the Holwingen moors. Try as they might the scouts could not locate the column again. The Ogres seemed to have simply disappeared in the night.

With the onset of winter, caravans and traders plying the Northern Road across Holwingen brought fanciful tales to the markets Sigmarheim and bazaars of Graawk. They spoke of hillsides that were strewn with abandoned weapons. They claimed sightings of huge supply wagons found untended and untouched on the mountain roads. Some whispered of hulking hauberks and mail shirts hanging empty in the woods like grotesque overgrown scarecrows, as if the occupants had just melted away from within them. And bones. Bones as large and thick as logs, gnawed and picked clean by carrion birds, timber wolves, or worse.

But no-one, not travellers nor traders nor outriders reported sighting the Ogres themselves.

In Hor’takn, Mage-Priest Cxaz-Lotl-Chitxi daily returns to his meditations. Yet nightly he wakes, startled from his cogitation by portents of evil. The primal scream of the terror in the darkness echoing in his fevered dreams, and growing ever stronger.