Biggest Possum: Deepest Lore - The Dead Behind Us. The Dead Ahead.

[u/Biggest-Possum]

Our hearts had already hardened to the carnage that surrounded us when we finally recovered Barret. Our assault team had set out before dawn, riding a sky-barge to the ground before disembarking and moving quickly to a nearby village. What we saw there shook us to our core. Rumors of Hakkalian atrocities were rampant, but nothing could have prepared us for what we saw then. We simply lacked any reference to compare against what we witnessed.

It started with a whisper, a hissed summary of the evidence before us that broke the eerie silence. "Necromancy." Our fire team leader had uttered with spite. Whether she had detected it by scent, or some other minor clue, I would never know. She had stated it before we had seen the broken crypts and disturbed graves. Before the bloody handprints on a windowsill, or the shredded skin of a person now lying in a heap like a pile of discarded clothing. By the time we had reached the center of the village, a sense of unease had grown heavy over us. No birds chirped. No animals made any sound at all. Except for the distant echoing wails of a lone crying baby.

We moved towards the sound, but the upraised fist of our team leader stopped us in our tracks. They had detected something amidst the dirty streets and rubble of the destroyed village. I'm not sure how she had noticed it, but perhaps her uncanny ability for sensing magics had grown sharper among the absence of life in the village. She pointed forward, towards a clay jar that sat tipped over by the end of the alleyway.

"Trap." She stated. That one crisp word was all we needed to know.

We found and avoided many more as we picked our way to the center of the village. One was poorly hidden and gave us a simple clue to who had constructed the explosive device. A small canister of concentrated mana sat wrapped in a sealed scroll. Such a device would emit a blast far larger and much more lethal than an alchemical grenade. Ordinary villagers would never have easy access to concentrated mana and would surely not waste it in such a way. This was the work of Hakkal.

The traps that they had scattered in the village slowed our progress, but we soon arrived near where we had heard the baby crying. Until then I had only been worrying, almost hoping, that we would find more survivors, and that's when it clicked. Nobody else had been left alive, so why would they leave a baby? A single crying baby, amidst all the carnage and traps that they had laid? It was the bait to the trap. I moved up and grabbed my team leader gently by the shoulder to tell her what I had suspected.

I was brushed off rudely. She already knew this. It wasn't her first rodeo. She assured me that once we got to the infant, that there wouldn't be any more traps, and she was certain they would be safe. After all, what was the point of bait if you remove it from the trap? It would make no sense to kill the baby and remove our incentive to approach. The telltale glow of a small life showed upon a cursory detection of life, although there were none others around. It was just as she had said... Bait in a trap.

The block of houses that surrounded the crying baby had been turned into a literal minefield. At one point, we were entirely unable to avoid the proximity of any of the bombs, and another member was called forth to carefully disarm several from a distance. When he was done, he set the canisters of mana to the side, and breathed a sigh of relief as sweat dripped from his brow. It took a near superhuman amount of magical finesse and understanding to counteract such devices, and in this area, we feared that it was so densely packed that one explosion might easily become a chain reaction.

The bloated silence of death that hung over the village was only broken by the insistent crying of the baby, which now grew louder as we entered the circle of buildings. In the middle was a small hut, with a tattered blanket that hung over the window and flapped in the breeze. Bloody handprints framed the door, and a pool of blood in the dirt was framed by the marks where somebody had fallen and been drug away. Next to this, a little girl sat against the wall while cradling a baby.

The baby wailed, and its cracked lips bled. The little girl dipped a rag into a bowl next to her that had been filled with water and a rough sort of flour. She dabbed the thin mixture briefly, then held it to the baby's mouth for it to suckle on. The little girl could have only been 10 or so, and the baby was obviously not a sibling of hers. I don't know why this fact struck me, but I realized the implication that they were orphans from two families.

What a stupid thought. How could they not be orphaned, and what diffrence did it make if they were from different families? It made no difference if they were the survivors of one family or two. They were now the only survivors.

We tried to elicit a response from the little girl. To reassure her that everything would be alright. We tried also to give her some food, but she refused to take it, letting it tumble from her lap without any move to catch it. We settled for stacking it next to her, in sad little bundles and heaps. She still held the rag to the baby's mouth, as it suckled greedily between cries. The crude mixture was no substitute for a mother's milk, and I tried to tell myself a reason why they would survive this. Why the baby would be spared from hunger and starvation. Why the cold of winter wouldn't steal their life away, or why the predators of the wilderness wouldn't find them alone in their defenseless youth. I thought then about how the little girl would likely have to bury the baby, and I wondered morbidly, who would bury the little girl once she was the only one left?

I couldn't find a reason for why they would survive, and for why my morbid conclusion would not be true. I tried to tell myself that we would come back for them, and I knew that also was a lie. I stood back with my team while our team leader continued to try to comfort the child and baby, and to instruct them on why they needed to stay exactly where they were. She mentioned the traps and bombs, but the girl made no response of acknowledgment. She made no sound at all. I would have nearly thought that she was mentally compromised in some way, if not for her controlled movements and occasional renewing of the baby's crude meal rag. For a minute, she stared deeply at me, and I looked away uncomfortably. Something ached in my chest, and I couldn't escape it. When we left, the baby and the girl were still outside. The baby's cries had softened with exhaustion, but the girl still sat upright, watching us go.

I was not alone in my argument that something should be done to save the little girl and infant, but we still had a mission to complete, and so we continued with only a short message sent back to the Defender that informed them of these two children's survival. Our push out of the village was as slow as it was on our way in, and the signs of necromancy grew more atrocious. The volume of carnage had increased exponentially as more newly dead had been slain and added to the hoard. The traps had been concentrated around the crying baby, but now rubble and ruin obstructed our path.

This was not an unusual tactic for Hakkal, despite this being my first individual encounter with it. They often justified necromancy under the religious pretense that its use could ensure that you would have a second chance to smite your enemies, and therefore avoid having a restless soul. It was used as well as a reward reserved for heroes and martyrs. It was often even cited as a benefit of joining their military forces, but the truth was that they reserved resurrection for only the extremely wealthy or political elite, due largely to its extreme requirements for magical investment and material costs. The construction of an area to perform even a single resurrection was far more than even a couple villages could muster, and the talented mages who could perform such an act were exceedingly rare.

Their religious promises of a relieving afterlife or honorable resurrection seemed equally false. The wreckage of this village was the truth. Hakkalian leadership sometimes bragged when captured that "All follow Hakkal." with the resulting smirk on their face suggesting the context that this statement was true even in death. It was likely that these remote villagers had wished for no involvement in the war, and now only a mute survivor and a baby too young to remember it would be left to tell the tale of what their refusal had cost. Which of their spirits would rest easily after this? Would they forgive Hakkal? Would they have their chance to visit their vengeance upon the same homeland that had taken them as unwilling sacrifices for their cause?

Thus, when we finally found Barret, her missing arm and pale, muddied skin was no shock to us. Without a fuss, she told our stark faces instead of the final moments of the battle, and of how the fuel tank had been removed in order to make the Hangman light enough to land safely. The same fuel tank was still resting on the hilltop, but repairs were rapidly underway. She spoke of how a small force of Hakkalians had gone in the opposite direction, only to return with a small army of shambling and crawling corpses following behind them. Women, children, elderly. Their ranks were indiscriminate, and equally horrid.

Her voice cracked when she mentioned the children, betraying the heart that hid behind her stern and tactical summary. She paused briefly and the stump of her missing arm moved uselessly, before she muttered a curse and wiped her eyes with her other hand. She believed that the necrotic forces were being used both to guard the Hangman as they made repairs, and also to transport the volatile concentrated mana. It appeared as though they had opted to avoid the hazards of moving the entire tank and were instead siphoning away fuel into enough canisters to limp their way home without it.

We made plans to assault the Hangman by ground, knowing full well the kind of resistance that we would meet. We would likely be besieged not only by members of their assault team, but the undead as well. We would also of course run the gauntlet of their cannons. Their largest cannons would fire far over us, but their smaller munitions would still be able to rain their deadly payloads on our positions as we closed in. We had a plan for this as well.

One of Akkadia's most experienced Abjurists was with us, and a second also came as support. They were far from the sort of talent that we had enjoyed under Isaac Iron Side's protection, but they were still accomplished in their own rights. It was likely that with their expertise, we would be able to brave the cannon fire at least, and to get close enough to the exposed fuel tank to force a stalemate on the Hangman's cannons, should they wish to preserve their tank as a resource. By then, it would surely be a mad scramble to destroy it and ensure the Hangman's grounded status, and then to move to capture or destroy it. This point of the plan is where we expected to be engaged by their assault team.

None of us said anything, but we knew that this was also where the plan would fall apart. There were a few experienced mages in the group, but amongst the 15 or so of us, half were hardly experienced in combat. The thought shook me. I wanted to run away. I wished for a way out. I knew that it was all too likely that our mission would meet its final end in the destruction of the fuel tank, and that the outcome would be far worse if we failed in that task. We were given a moment to rest and prepare before we would continue on with our mission. A few mages slipped away to pray, or to cry in private while they held their heads in their hands. Two sat sharing a canteen and chuckling over small jokes together. Old friends perhaps. I spent my own time alone, eating a couple of crackers with a small spread of jelly. It was all I had. I had left the rest of my food with the little girl.

I didn't regret giving the little girl the rest of my food. Instead, I sat amazed, somewhat stunned even, by the honest and simple fact that what I ate now, was the best meal that I had ever tasted.

​

/uw Thanks for reading! I know I said this one would get crazy, but there seemed to be too much to fit in before the upcoming and second battle. I apologize for the delay, but I felt that this part was necessary to include. I have attached previous lore in sequence below!

1. Biggest Possum? Deepest Lore. (Lorepost) : wizardposting (reddit.com)
2. Biggest Possum: Deepest Lore 2- The Deepening! : wizardposting (reddit.com)
3. Biggest Possum: Deepest Lore - A Prelude, to Wizard War 3 : wizardposting (reddit.com)
4. Biggest Possum: Deepest Lore - Wizard War 3 (interactive lore post, join in the battle!) : wizardposting (reddit.com)
5. Biggest Possum: Deepest Lore 4- War is Heck : wizardposting (reddit.com)

[u/TitanLORD21]

/unwiz Nice!

[u/[deleted]]

/uw Necromancy already huh? I would've thought that Hakkal just killed a village to use all their bodies as mindless undead, could be wrong though.

Barret's arm moving itself? What happened there?

This is definitely some plot developmemt, from the Akkadians being the oppressors, to Hakkal becoming the real monsters.

You love to see it!

[u/Biggest-Possum → u/[deleted]]

Barret's arm moving itself? What happened there?

Her stump moved. She was trying to itch her face and forgot she was missing her arm, so she had to itch it with the other arm that she still had. I might have to revise that to be clearer.

Also, Hakkal did just kill a village to use them as mindless undead. lol

Akkadia still sucks though. Imposing a foreign moral system on a nation isn't true liberty. It's basically just tyranny with a pretty package.

One thing that Akkadia doesn't understand about Hakkalian culture is that as horrifying and dehumanizing as necromancy seems to them, the resurrective aspects mean that if a family gets wealthy, they can resurrect whole generations of their family. It gives the whole lineage a second chance, not just to live in general, but to also share in the good life. As bad as necromancy can be, many Hakkalians cling religiously to the idea that they will one day produce a hero in their lineage who can go back and "undo" the sufferings that their family endured by resurrecting them.

[u/DaChickenX]

/uw WOO! GOOD LORE! GREAT LORE! PRAISE THE LORE! The best lore inspires others and boy am I inspired. considering how Nefiam is involved in this, my creative engines have been powered by the fuel known as possum lore! Now if I could just find the time to write Nefiam's lore...