The Fallen World

Agglemon - Part 2

        As Malefactos flew over the blasted wasteland that had once been greater Arnor, he sensed a concentration of power ahead of him and activated the Crown of Auros again. Ahead of him, the Shadow reached an intensity far greater than anything he’d encountered so far, and he imagined that he could almost see the lines of force rising from a spot on the horizon about twenty miles ahead, a spot that could only be the Imperial Palace itself. He wasn’t quite ready to go to the very centre itself, though, and so after flying a few more miles he landed on the very edge of the new city of Arnor, the capital of the Shadowhosts. The Necropolis.

      A hundred years before, Arnor had been as ruined as every other city in what had been Agglemon, although a large number of public buildings had survived as overgrown, empty shells due to the strength and solidity with which they’d been built. Now, though, most of it had been rebuilt by order of the Shadowlord, in preparation for the day when a permanent portal would stand open between Tharia with the Pit. Ready for the day when the demons and their servants who would come through would need a city to dwell in, from which they would ‘govern’ the rest of the planet. It was even possible that the Shadowlord himself might come through to inspect his new possession, once the portal was wide enough, and everyone knew what would happen if he found the accommodation not to his liking.

     Most of the city’s most powerful inhabitants were incorporeal. Ghosts, spectres, wraiths and the like. Most of the reconstruction work had to be performed by the lesser forms of undead, therefore. Skeletons, zombies and other mindless corpse-forms. The corporeal remains of all those who’d died in the Shadowwars and whose bodies the Shadowsoldiers had been able to carry away, whether Shadowsoldiers themselves, Beltharans, Fu Nangians or whoever. Those taken alive were turned into mindless slaves and put to work in the fields, growing food for the living component of the Shadowarmies until they dropped dead, whereupon they were turned into zombies and took their place alongside those who’d died in battle. The zombies worked in the city until all their flesh had rotted away, whereupon they carried on as skeletons, continuing to work until they literally fell apart into their component bones. Even then, though, their usefulness was not at an end, and Malefactos felt a wry sense of amusement when he saw the use to which those bones had been put.

     Once brave and noble soldiers who’d died defending their homelands from the horror of the Shadowhosts had been reduced to mere decorative ornamentation as their bones were pressed into wet cement on the walls of the new buildings. In places, entire skeletons had been reconstructed and arranged in various poses of dancing or fighting, but with their skulls replaced by the skulls of beasts and monsters. For the most part, though, all the bones that were roughly the same size and shape had been taken from many skeletons and used for abstract decoration. Rows of several hundred thigh bones, pitted and worn from years of exposure, ran in straight lines along the roof and walls of what had once been a school, for instance, and thousands of finger bones, some still wearing rings, some still with cracked and broken fingernails, were arranged in swirling spiral patterns on the walls of a blacksmith’s shop. There were human, humanoid and demihuman bones everywhere Malefactos looked, and the rak was astonished by the sheer number of people who must have died to supply them. Considering that all fifty square miles of Arnor was, presumably, the same, Malefactos simply couldn’t believe that enough people had died in the whole world in the hundred years of the Shadow’s existence to provide that many bones.

     As he looked around, though, walking slowly along the deserted streets, another curious thing struck him. Although there were bones from every part of the skeleton all around him, thigh bones, collar bones, ribs, vertebrae, pelvices, sternums, arm and finger bones from every conceivable humanoid and demihuman race, nowhere he looked could he see a single human skull.