A Disciple of Hashut - A Tale of the Dawi'Zharr in the Old World [Updated: 09/03/2013]
A Disciple of Hashut - A Tale of the Dawi'Zharr in the Old World
Chapter I: In the Beginning, Part I
[No idea who/which company this is drawn by, I own no claim to this and all copyright/rights go to the true owner. Whomever that may be.]
The smell of burning tar and oily fumes filled his nostrils, the two holes expanding and contacting as the sleeping form murmured over and over in its sleep. Images or visions, but memories in actuality, flashed behind the eyelids of the prone form and shrieks of pain echoed through the chamber. Everything seemed so real again; the lash of the serrated whip against the unblemished flesh, the beating with sticks and the sections of flesh torn away by the grating of a sharpened dagger against his hips, the curses and yells flung at him from guttural, tusk-filled, mouths before he was struck thrice more with the flat of a blade or a daemonic hoof where once had been a foot like any other.
“Nnnn-no...” hissed the half-sleeping half-waking form, “away,” it cried with weeping sobs, “stay away, no more...no more!”
As if startled or hearing an unfamiliar noise the man sat bolt upright, a hard bed of little comfort beneath his mass of scarred tissue and tortured limbs, and peered about the gloom of his chamber. A wide room of a circular shape, parchment, ink and objects thrown carelessly about its expanse to become scattered here and there, shapes rising eerily in the darkness of the dim light. Everything he had dreamt had happened, realised the sweating man, a shaking hand running itself through what was left of his matted brown hair, and ever-so-slowly he began to remember just who he was.
He was Cesare Laenas Di Remas, an infamous and much feared slave-trader of the Reman Republic once upon a long-ago time. He had traded flesh for coin or more flesh as if those he were trading were mere cattle, herds of mooing cows for which he had no time or emotion, a cruel, jealous and some would say evil figure. Even among his own men and fellow slavers he was reviled, hated for the amount of wealth he had gathered and for the utter lack of any human emotion. He was seen as, and was in fact, a cold and utterly unfeeling machine that cared nothing for his 'stock' or anyone unless it involved wealth or power...or both.
Such was the reason he had come to his current situation, one which both suited him perfectly and one which supremely did not!
It had happened that one day, a warm summers day he thought, an offer had come to him in his countryside villa where he used his slaves in the basest ways and made sure that if any became pregnant then they were thrown out. Who knew how many little bastards he had fathered and were now running around somewhere? As to the offer, it was beyond anything that Cesare had ever been asked to undertake in his life, but then again what was being offered would make him the richest man in Tilea and neighbouring Estalia at the very least.
Over the next six months he gathered every slave of decent quality that he could, hoarding them in their thousands, deserters, runaways, prisoners of war, all placed in shackles and set under the supervision of his hawk-eyed guards. Then when all was prepared he set out toward the eastern lands and a meeting with his fate.
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Months passed and went as if they were days, the caravan of the greatest slave-master in all of Tilea stopping and starting like a struggling beast and stretching for miles to the rear, exposed to attacks from Ogres, Hobgoblins and worse. Only his unending lust for wealth caused Cesare of Remas to keep going ever onwards and not care how many slaves fell to the wayside or how many guards were slain by unseen arrows or fiercely smelt dysentery.
With fear in their hearts and prayers to the Gods on their lips, slave and soldier alike, the winding column passed through the lands of the Border Princes and over Mad Dog Pass, reaching the Wolf Lands and suffering their first attack by mounted Hobgoblin archers only a couple of weeks into the expedition. Further attacks came as they moved through the Dark Lands, all manner of creatures, dead and alive, taking human flesh and devouring it in the perpetual gloom.
Only after these months of torment did he reach his destination – the great and towering Gates of Zharr. Huge and overly fortified by the denizens of this place, they were the perfect deterrent for any attacker, although it was not the fortifications that would dissuade an invader. It would be the carcasses and corpses piled around the gate without a wall, heaps of carrion-flesh and bleached bone greeting the slave-trader and his grey eyes more and more the closer he got. Until a low horn, like the moan of some beast, echoed from one of the towers of the gateway and Cesare knew that his employers were coming and that riches would soon be his.
Wealth did not come, only death and devastation on swift wings.
Carnage was wrought among slave and masters, guards falling with arrows piercing their eyes and breasts, explosions rocking the very ground as they landed amidst the panicking slaves who now turned on their tormentors even as they died in droves. All was chaos, but Cesare kept his nerve and spat curses as he saw a number of horsemen making their way toward him, before drawing his finely crafted blade and mockingly saluting them.
Without fear and with a war-cry he charged headlong into them, his eyes widening as if a deity stood before him, his mind unable to explain the tusked and bearded half-Dwarfs bearing down on him with their hoofed feet throwing up blackest earth in their wake and sharpened axes whirling in patterns about them as they came. Cesare was no coward however, and he gave as good as he got, striking home against one of the four-legged horrors and being deafened as it roared defiance in his face. Wrenching his blade back he then thrust it forward, the Tilean steel penetrating deep into the Bull-centaurs throat and ceasing the ear-splitting noise forever. His enemies did not stop though, and very soon he found his blade knocked from his hand, and now disarmed and with his entire slave train in ruin he was gripped by arms as thick as tree trunks and thrown from his saddle to eat the corrupt dirt of the Dark Lands floor.
He did not know it yet, but this was just the very beginning of his very own descent into pain and darkness...
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