Chương 76: 7.iii

1058th Year Mid Grainturn. Our mission to secure the border of the Empire in this campaign has met with failure. The northern fortress city of Thorn we had come to liberate from barbarian occupation is no more. Accursed by the workings and Nodens of the barbarian practitioner Volta The Stricken. To stride a ruin that was once a bustling city of twenty-five thousand after less then a year strikes a pain in the heart. And the means by which it was accomplished? It will haunt me.

The devastation is not in cut down bodies, ash, stripped skeletons or even rotting corpses. The buildings here are still standing. Though abandoned for most of the spring season or more by the growth of plants and the rot in their stores. It for all accounts is the appearance of as if every living soul of the city, man and beast alike simply fled entirely and never returned or maybe astoundingly perished in winter.

But within the center of the city, every man, woman and soldier of the original fortress garrison was found. Arrayed together in a great disk in the plaza at the center of the city. Joined hand in hand in great spokes that had been tightened to wind around so that every body was pressed and contorted into its neighbors. Amongst the men are also the beast, swine just as twisted, holding fast to ankles with mouths and then tail or trotter further grasped by mouth in their own chains.

So forth on inspection were rats and dogs and even birds. The only living animal absent was the cats who apparently held some premonition of the danger. But all others, even proud horses and cattle could be found scattered in the midst of the rest. All of them wound through a great disk that had been made of the populace and now held fast and still like a carpet woven of joined bodies. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

All of them still and staring to the center at nothingness. Their faces are placid and serene where visible. Bodies untensed but for what was needed to entwine them so. And every single one is run through in their veins with cold black stone. To cut the limbs is an effort much like hewing young saplings. And they bleed not at all although their flesh oozes other humors.

The rest of their bodies and especially their eyes are each marbled in its own stone, not yet complete in many but tentative scouts were able to confirm that in the very center the spread progresses almost totally through the afflicted. Like ice finding its way through the lakes in these hateful northern winters. Stone mixed and mingled with flesh and left every living inhabitant of the city stone and cold but given their subtle shifts and movements, not entirely dead. If only they were dead.

Our Wise Magister of Noddens and his attendant Elementalists made a survey of the calamity and after three days of investigation and strict discipline put upon the soldiers announced the cause of the terrible sorcery. Upon the wells of the city a foul working had been made and for reasons known only to the barbarian practitioner Volta, the city was set to this by the nature of that working into their flesh by what should have been life giving waters.

Of the practitioner responsible no sign was found in the city although we had come to make war and liberate it from him. It is my opinion that the barbarian practitioner, contrary to what had been reported, had brought down the fortress by a single stroke of cowardly art. That the city was already dead by the time we had received word and planned to muster. The Magister believes that every well must be filled, every aqueduct toppled and all plumbing melted or broken asunder.

When this act is done he will set the Elementalists to a great working of our own and topple all the works and history of the fortress of Thorn. Only once there is no chance that more unwary men or beasts will add to the number of the abominable horror that was made of the populace will we depart these lands and return home. I expect that I will suffer for a failure; that was certain before I even set out. Even so I will entreat the senate and the emperor that another campaign is called for.

These barbarians must suffer twice fold the horror that was enacted here. - Excerpt from the General Aurelia of Cantor's Campaign Journal