Pelts For XP - The Laughing Shadow

During creation, when gods slithered across an empty world carving waterways and bringing life, they left traces of themselves behind. Shedded skin. Discarded scales. Dry, diseased things. A nameless tribe, maddened by pride and greed and hate, sought out these scraps. Ate the godflesh. Wore the scales like cloaks. Tried to steal the power of the spirits.

From this act came the Serpentmen. Greedy ophidians obsessed with hoarding arcane secrets, monopolising metallurgy and building experimental superweapons that always blew up in their faces. Their hubris was the origin of their curse and their greatest motivator. They had to be masters of all they surveyed, to emulate the gods they despised. They knew no other path.

Binjang missed the snakes. And the one-eyed men. And the dragons. Even the cannibal giants. He missed the days when the continent was brimming with inhuman monsters to heroically triumph over. Now the land was tiled with alien crops, overrun with cloven herds and ravaged by foreign diseases. His sacred vows had spared him from the plagues. Most hadn't been so lucky.

It wasn't a world for paladins anymore. The colonial project was a different kind of monster, one with defences that couldn't be bypassed with a magic weapon. Fuelled by the inexhaustible appetite of a market economy, its constituent parts weren't inhuman lunatics, but people. Often his own people, corralled into settlements, converted to foreign religions, armed with matchlocks and commanded by marcher lords and merchant princes and clerics.

And here he was, working alongside a foreign wizard. He wondered if that was any better.

National Museum of Australia

The saurian growled beneath him, interrupting his musings. They'd arrived. He gripped his feathered shield, letting its enchantment flow into his eyes. Granting him vision like Laughing Shadow; he who snatched up the hated ophidian and dashed them upon the rock again and again and again.

The Mulyawonks had camped in the marshland ahead. The paladin held no real enmity against the fishmen, but they protected his true quarry. A coven of hags, imperial collaborators who'd tortured, cursed and slaughtered with impunity. But the snakes weren't here to protect them anymore. 

Binjang glanced at the ogre-shaped void to his left, enhanced eyes bypassing the Invisibility spell Uave the Twice-Burnt had cast on his goons. The big man's face was marred with obvious signs of inbreeding, but his eyes glittered with a violent cunning. He gave the half-giant a nod.

Blackpowder, grapeshot and chunks of vaporised Deep One filled the air. The wizard's mercenaries carried muskets the size of falconets, and Binjang charged forward as the ogres moved to reload. Though they stung from the gunsmoke, his eyes stayed locked on a hut at the camp's centre.

A Mulyawonk warrior, necklace of old imperial silver glittering around her gilled neck, moved to intercept the paladin. She fell backwards with a sickening thud, staring down at the iron spear embedded in her chest. There was a flash of light as the rider clicked his fingers, the enchanted weapon teleporting back to his hand. He ignored the death rattle of the fishman, spurring his mount closer to the hag's lair.

Binjang heard the half-giants gasp behind him as the structure of wattle, mud and manskin lurched upwards. Carried on stilts like gnarled emu legs, it moved to flee into the dense marshlands.

The paladin gave a rare chuckle as he reached into his saddlebags. They weren't going to make it far.

Andrew Ferez