They told no one their name that was not of their tribe
It was I who slyly bribed their scribe, he saw I was not a rival but a learned man
He could not speak it but took pen in hand and wrote it there on the animal-candied margin banding his annals
Ferrathians of the tribe of Phecalbus, old wise rearing horse maddened by its own shadow tamed by a lame shoemaker
His book has a space for every day his God has made, but the end is already filled
They will ride a last time to the battlefield with steeled lance, whence every man be killed.
Neo-assyrian riders clad in tiger pelts with curved blades questioning at their belts questing the outer belt, he sees them dealt with
The noble Emperor will take no Empress and nothing else can be impressed upon him
He wears prophecy at his breast, he is obsessed with the end
In his head venom and mayhem, drinks wine laced with hemlock and feels his worries blotting out
He watches his chimp-helmed, wolf-pelted peltasts casting in the sun-dappled courtyard
Taking dragon-headed mannequins to task with spear and axe, pilums violently drag out hay
But can they cast so in a mass, no way to glance through gas at enemies, with no space
The gash-marred gnomelike gallowglass in charge, his mirrored breastplate halved by a red sash, is Ghile Mear who’ll die tomorrow
Pushes up his glasses, barks orders to discharge unleashing inferno
The thudding sound rouses the occupants of the birdhouses, who turn out in shouting force, loudly demanding
Songful mouths bellowing out commands for murmuration
They rise higher skyward toward the dome of the earth thence returning turn swerve curve of the firmament above the world
Ineternal ephemera of this world will return to the dirt, he speaks internally
All this worth is none truly
Lets a goblet clatter to the floor, gold platter shatters down after
Gems fleeing fastens, facets and clasps scatter over cold flagstones in hollow bastion
Vast castle full ample fortune and walls thick for fortitude truly empty
None of it enough to mollify entropy or nullify prophecy.
Troopers loyal to tyrants self-mutilate tied hands and feet
Sporting scoured miracle flesh like Ignatius Loyola
Which they leave open and oft-infected
Pommels pus-greened by steelshaking deflections
They believe doing so protects them from killing blows and enflames eligible souls, the gold-flecked incorporeal shells of the elect, with battle passion and something called a warp spasm
Often after battle, they lash themselves ragged in flimsy wind-bedragelled tents and wear itchy horsehair vestments beneath their wash-wanting armour
They are inamarous, spurning paramours, never removing their spurs even to sleep
They are humourless, all knowledge without their book a rumour
A seizing Cumaean abeyant their creator kept chained in a crater below a sulphurous cave
Their numerous works are numinous, their illuminated volumes voluminous kept in tomblike underground libraries
Skull-backed spiders haunt the grime-caked spines of divinely inspired tomes.
In attention deficit mythoses reverence-demanding forefathers battled an army of revenant griffins from a different galaxy
So unlike in build, breed and history from the deficient sharing their earth as to be like aliens
In some camps, it is said they brokered an alliance with the Pale One who smiles over Sheol
In former skyscrapers they scrape out the stinking hide of an aurochs, gore-hot floor they flock over and soon it is torn apart.
Soon it will be dark and long boring homilies commence
Shrill threnodies, malefic melodies they send against enemies
Chests heaving with heavy breath of vengeance
They tear down ancient henges, declaimed as testament to witchcraft
Their existence pronounced tantamount to heresy, they tear down old stone
Some drowned in rivers, others ground to rubble with hammers under false banners
Ill-mannered to a man, they march ceaselessly
They despise art and drill rapine
They hoist the screaming atop lofty spears as vespers to evil evenings
Only shards and rubble left marking Cathedrals, they drive all life from the land
Their leaders hailing from other planets wear strange holographic masks, redoubting displeasing countenances.
The Ferrathian leader zephyr-hassled in tasselled azure leders hustles through heat-hopeful troops huddling
The dial twitching on his breathing apparatus, he sweeps past them like an automatic casket
No retinue in tow, he will go to the hilltop and refuse to treat
Even the sweet-smelling tents hosting the diseased and near-deceased cannot dissuade him from the path
He spies the masked slingers with their swinging pouches of stinging missiles
Last of the New Atlantean fantasy factions
He watches for a moment the necromancers handling the dead with the gentleness of romance
He watches Niburian odalisques drilling intricate death dances, prancing before masters to which they are abominably grafted
Strange alien material with stretch capability allows them to leap free from him
He is a dullard with bland eyes, a square head and mantis lips, but he can recall them at will
He chooses their form, but they are free to perform their own actions on the field
They are the fiercest faction under his grille, they have come hither by minute chance from far afield
When repealed, they melt back into pliant flesh of their skinwearing mech who appears swollen and gigantic
They are unruly in the chrysalis, like crystals in the earth waiting to be seen, swimming beneath the skin they live in
Long knots of flesh like socks twisted to dry fly out when their angry fists deny their confination
In combination, in a melee situation, they cannot be surmounted
They move as one though are counted four, none have ever fallen in battle
When they are repelled from him, they burst forth and much of the mech’s mass is diminished
In the final war they are killed within a minute of its beginning
Linnet like seeker missiles with minute but capable minds sought to find not the diving dryads but their hive; they struck the mech five a second until he was a pile of buzzing circuits
His harpies did not fall dead but ceased to exist before the gas-blistered eyes of battle participants.
Yanks the bridle, guides his piebald and sidles over alongside his rival’s metallic appaloosa
He meets purple manners with ribaldries and dire threats
Listen to me he says, impressing himself upon them with a fascinating stare
His hands extend outward, a rising chin ruffling a belt-tucked beard
Sunspears his windlifted locks of red hair
Horse threshing below him, no blow could unseat him ever
I will tell you now what will happen to you:
We will plant the red swaddles of your dead infants to feed our new lands
We will take a hand from every dead man and fasten it to a post in warning at every border
Every morning, our exhorders will groom the heath for survivors and order them dead
We will exhume corpses to further exhaust resources
We will resort to such brutalities that render death like a gift
Your skins our flesh artisans will use to practise their glyphs
We will clip pages of your holiest books to our sandalflats then walk through glass
Your spines will be bent such that your lips kiss your feet
Better to conserve space in the mass graves we’ll salt with quick-acting lyme
You will hear children crying but not for a long time
There will be no long lines of chained slaves leaving this place, this is your grave
This defeat will mark the end of your age, now is the rending place, now is the rendering
Harrying and sundering is all you will know, chased ragged like the hunted fox
Your trading routes will atrophy
Your raided rooms full of sparkling trophies
Your gentled sons will nurse sore arses
Will tender no sons themselves, fanning whilst we vainly sun ourselves in your former palaces
Your ruined busts we will harass back to marble chips
When departing arrives we invite further slaughter, marking remaining necks with jagged deathmarks
Your name we will eclipse from all records
Every lip which knows that name’s contours will have its tongue split
Your alchemist’s retorts, their medicinal treatises, we treat illy, smashing to smithereens the gleaming crystal things your fiends grow in
The gem-socketed, flower-broccaded flowing robes of your highest offices we will throw into hungry fires
We will stress again the total vehemence we have regarding your extinction, it is beyond vengeance
Our judges will sit bored-looking at lecterns while our lictors prepare the necks
Your officers we will delect in executing next to their next of kin.
This suicidal army’s willingness to self harm stymies any battle alarm, their drives are legendarily violent
Piles of bodies high enough to confine the horizon to its sloping sides
Wrenlike gliders eliding laser fire zip ahead of palanquin-seated mammoth riders through a cider sky evening, a deciding battle
Pistons steaming inside cannon-struck machines full of midget engineers in xanthine flight suits careening into streams in missile-carved runnels green with battlefield runoff
Troops teeming knee-deep in the dead feeling their way along through war’s fog
Battle dogs squeal like stuck hogs caught up in weblike spider spirals of dentated barbed wire.
Puddles by some means electrified, in which magma-bombed petrified bodies repose like gorgon victims among the putrefying disguises of monstrous enemies
Frenzy moulded for intense situations lends inner quietude to the pious
Plenty of corpses they have sent their fiend
Flyer pilot’s mangled, abused body, flesh and steel lead-fused, utterly ruined meets the field smoking like failed alcheme
A shaking forearm ne’er seen in the ranks making up their frontline phalanx
Their shield wall tight and gapless as wave-lapped planks in a clinker built ship
Duckboards, gas gas quick boys, fumbling ecstasies, next man drops dead
Energy weapons discharged at will, with reckless abandon
Such voltages leave only molten, smoking bones of the once-mortal
A crackle as if of lightning, a concussive platinum fork strikes out
A fluxsome, tasing beam wide and unduckable, the aura around which buckles
Floods the arena with blinding, contagious christbirth light
The struck hammered by forcive atoms have even their phantoms erased.
With hundreds of thousands dead on either side, who can say who won the day
Save the gravedigger
Armies lining either ridge armed with divine powers glower at one another like dogs before a scant allowance
Neither will bow to be yoked, this rod inallowing must then be broken
No terms are brokered; the breeze may treat with the smoke from your fields.
Bolts thick as redwood boughs, quicker than plagues through crowds, plough through flanking cavalry inflicting heavy casualties
Time-spiting armaments ripple injuriously amongst seething battalions, medallion-thirsty soldiers are hurled back centuries and impossibly-far forward beyond our sun’s dying
Horsemen riding augmented manhorses, long-nosed torturers capable of moving at great speeds, fleet and equine but retaining supine abilities, leaping like apes across the salient
Chewing the gradient like a dog who has bitten the rabbit already, they are war-ready straight from the lab
Dark forces whom none adore, wrothfully brought forth from dark delinquent forges only dire war stokes to action
Something which resembles a vengeful traction engine, only more powerful, carves scaleable trenches and splutterbelches out hydrogen sulphide-like steam to ease tension
It splashes through corpse-choked gutters splattering mud-battered wheels with guts
Dabhand mechanic they called the shly Slattery slumps and breathes his last
The glass fronting his four-teated scattergun shattered by a peltast’s cast lance (which gives an answer to a question asked)
Followed by a triple catapult on tank tracks operated by a helmed cataphract perched on a circulating dirigible seat at elevation, his panel buttons unleash a crippling mayhem as might stay the enemy men and break this antient stalemate
Heatseekers glyph the nightsky like fingerskaters on fire, seeking out glyders
The angel fighters who fly in support of their pilots employ temperature masking implements to influence and misdirect missiles
Loud as the words of the epistles, which echoed through history louder than any cracking pistol, the terrible discharge of the nuclear missiles
They have augmented baboons working as pilots, willing to die for them
Apes infected with various labgrown rage viruses maim their cages
Their full-eye black irises shine when light hits them, their system is rigged up to permit them rip apart steel girders and commit unthinkably heinous murder
On the field they are fearless, Simian soldiers enter the fold
Not an injection’s length before they’re toast, roasted by napalm mines planted around the foot of the mine where heretofore the man apes were confined
Jars full of pest bombs tossed by the untiring arm of an arbalest
The much-missed mind of their best technician who had a tradition for succeeding in difficult missions, the soldier Tician whose seared tissue stews where grass once grew where now bootmarks tattoo
They arc away into darkness, landing among the enemy armies
Scorpions and hornets rousing much bark and alarm, harmful stingers plunging into unready arms.
The cities empty out, not a mouse moves for the tack leftover in the empty houses
Not a grouse moves unshot in the surrounding lands, all able and even the lame and disabled
The females and those nursing babes, the sable-wearing widows made unstable by grief
They all march to the fluttering banner of their chief, per the prophecy
They have no fear of grief from war, adoring the roar of massing forces leaving the forts
A wolf within man clawing forth in adoration of imminent gore; they have a half million horse.
No breath whatsoever, streets dream-eerie appear post-apocalyptic
Both sides’ seers wake screaming troubling preternatural dreams
Blurting out cryptic messages lacking meaning, before dying seizing
Alarums and excursions, arms out for alms on street corners, soldiers now urchins hurting, urgently urging the war virgins with eyes averted to turn toward them, who of course swerve to evade dismay
They travel the old kingsway, straddling the outer limits of the worldwide battlefield
A dry trench where once a stream ran
The exhausted sway uneasily in their saddles leading the shocktroopers in single file
Horses shake dreadlocked fetlocks to bat away flies.
Alchemisland 
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