Latest Character Q&A

Hi everyone! I've just finished scanning in last month's sketchbook sketches, and I'm working on cleaning them up now. I should have them posted to the Shadowvault in the next day or two for you.

Until then, please enjoy the latest Character Question that one kind reader posed to Lyca, chief of the Valryn.

Question:

"Where are you and your people now? How many are left, and have you fought anything else worth-while since your encounter with Bree?"

Answer:

My people are wherever glory pulses in the veins of foes yet unslain. We are in the breath that frosts the black ice of a stygian war wall. We are in the sweat that drips from a warrior’s body as she drives her spear through the bowels of an abyssal scorch-fiend. We are… actually lost at the moment.

Several days ago, we came across the burrow of a titanic worm, larger than any foe we’d yet faced. My captains urged me to give the order to enter the tunnel in search of the beast, and perhaps a worthy death. I hesitated, not out of fear, but rather in consideration of the chance that we might never find the beast that carved the tunnel. We could, I argued, wander, lost in the depths of the earth until we succumbed at last to some ignoble death of starvation or dehydration.

Heated words passed between my sisters and I, and certain accusations were leveled at me, to which I was forced to respond in the only manner I could.

Then, while my accusers’ bodies lay, heaving their final breaths at my hooves, the beast itself returned, rising from the ground to crush nearly a dozen of my sisters in its spiny maw.

Any quarrel forgotten, we joined battle with the creature, flinging ourselves upon it, still naked and blood-streaked from our previous debate. Realizing its mistake, the worm burrowed into the earth again beneath us, and only those few of us able to carve a suitable shelter for ourselves in its living flanks were spared the meager glory of being crushed to paste against the walls of its tunnel.

Separated by yards of gory flesh, none of us knew ourselves not to be the sole survivor of our group, and so we each did our duty, thinking ourselves perhaps the last of our generation’s hunt. Our fervent efforts were rewarded with a joyful reunion when we met one another in the pulsing heart of the worm, each having torn a path to it with tooth, nail, and horn. There in the lightless stench of the creature’s inner chambers, we reveled and feasted upon its still-beating heart, knowing and counting our number with ichor-slicked hands in the dark.

At last, when we felt the tormented thrashing of the beast subside, we made our way toward its jaws. We found two of our sisters yet alive in the creature’s gullet, one of them having wedged herself sideways by hoof and horn, and her companion still clinging, somewhat amorously to her savior’s body. After sporting with the pair a bit, we continued on, emerging together from the beast’s jowls to find ourselves carried somewhere deep beneath the maze of passages above.

At first, I feared that we were indeed doomed to wander the worm tunnels until some nameless doom dragged us down into oblivion, but my sisters balmed my fears by harvesting such a store of worm-flesh as should keep us fed for many weeks to come, and there is no shortage of moisture here in the worm-gnawed tunnels beneath the Delve.

And so we wandered for a weary while, crusted in worm gore and bereft of our armaments, yet in high spirits nonetheless. So it was that we came to place, reeking of brimstone and thick with the dead of some unfamiliar race, crushed and broken by the collapse of their subterranean homes. The only living things that remained were a few of the creatures’ domesticated beasts which had survived the collapse inside a heavily walled pen of sorts.

Whatever killed these people may yet linger near, in search of more such easy prey, and we hope to give its wretched victims at least some measure of vengeance before we too lay our broken bodies on the altar of glory.