Lorkan’s tale

He awakens with a start, the bed empty beside him, and the clanging of the village bells thundering in his ears.

Lorkan bolts up, yanking yesterday’s britches over his nakedness, and grabbing up his sword belt, where it lays by the bed. Adding a shirt to his torso, he scrambles out of the room as he wrestles with it, then heads for the front door.

The commotion hits him like a fist to the face, and he struggles for a moment to take in the extent of what is happening.

Great holes have been smashed in the villages simple stone walls, and several of his neighbours houses are in similar states of disrepair; fires seem to be everywhere, and the village folk rush this way and that. Corpses litter the ground, and he sees the faces of many of his drinking companions of the previous night.

“Oh Gods.” He whispers.

“Lork!” Valiri flings herself into his arms, her mail shirt bumping against his chest as she grips him tight. He holds her face in his hands, cupping the messy bob of red hair and small, pale features of the leader of the town militia tenderly.

“You were gone when I woke.” He mutters, fairly redundantly.

“Because the bloody sky is falling in, Lork! They’re everywhere!” She takes his hand, pulling him along behind her.

“They? They who?” He asks, looking around desperately at the destruction.

“Them.” She points with her axe, indicating a pair of fallen men. They are strangers to Lorkan, and indeed, strange.

Their heads are shaven and tattooed with strange triangular runes. They look almost like Priests.

They’re just men, how could they have done all this?

They join up with a ragged line of the town militia, and a few of the village menfolk. Lorkan gives an encouraging nod to the nervous looking blond Kurt, and One Eyed Abnur, despite feeling very little resolve himself. Abnur gives him a weak smile, his kind old eye roving nervously.

A sound not unlike thunder, but with a raw, whispering after-tone erupts through the sky, accompanied by a flash of sickly purple energy from somewhere beyond the village walls. A sense of dread steals over Lorkan.

Leave. Now. They’re all doomed. They’re cattle.

He shakes his head, trying to quell the sudden thoughts.

Turn your sword on the others. Make an offering.

He grunts, drawing his sword and pounding the pommel into his side, trying to clear his head. He sees Abnur shake his own head vigorously at his side.

“Did you -“ he begins to ask, but Valiri cries with alarm, cutting him off.

A trio of villagers come wailing and running out of the rubble and dust ahead, only to be cut down a moment later by a scattering of vicious-looking black arrows.

Following the arrows come five towering, black-armoured figures, carrying blades and maces of a similar design to the cruel arrows.

Three of them wear helms of curved and spiked black iron, but the two that lead them are bareheaded, revealing unearthly, daemonic visages. Both are orange skinned and horned, with strange runes carved into their flesh, and, fanged teeth, visible in sickly smiling mouths.

The village defenders quaver as one, Valiri doing her best to calm and coordinate them.

And then the Daemons charge.