Prologue: What has come before.
My name is Sene, Daughter of Larb, and I am the 613th Warlady of the Bohond Necrocracy.
It falls to me, as it has to each Warlord or Warlady of our glorious nation since the dawning days of World War Z-1 to record my thoughts and positions for posterity. We who rule the Bohond Necrocracy are also it's foremost historians, for, after all, the strong rule, and history is to be written by the victors, of which, we are the foremost.
As have all before me, I begin this day with a recap of what has transpired before now in the annals of our race.
In the beginning, we were hunters and gatherers; we roamed the great valleys and plateaus of Zaanamar, our mighty home-world, once a lush and green paradise compared to what it was to later become. In time, great civilizations rose, the Khagitte, the Neaphall, the Kittezhune, the Kouyotee, the Aabazhinitan and others. Long they contended among themselves, long did we strive for greatness. 2200 years ago, almost to the day, all that changed. We had just begun a bitter and bloody war among nations that would come to be called "The Prelude War" a few years earlier when the death-spores rained from the skies. I have seen one of them, preserved in a hermetically sealed bunker case deep beneath the planetary capital, in "The Hall of Icons", it is 2.61011 of our Kulags long, 0.50018 Kulags in diameter, and made entirely from titanium, save a few parts that are glass and some small bits that were once spring-steel and long-ago rusted away. Engraved all across its surface are runes and icons that proclaim its purpose for those who know how to read them, finally translated a little less than 200 years ago by the love-flame of Krin, Son of Murg, and Zush, Daughter of Shran: The Great Linguists.
"To you subjected to this bombardment by the Valmorian Khanate; you have our respect. You were not intended to survive the deployment of the Mortification Fungus on your world, and the fact that you have lived long enough to become able to read this, means you are a race strong enough to at-last provide meaningful challenge to our great war-fleets. Come against us when you are ready, oh contenders. Either we will destroy you in fire, as we have so many others, or you will destroy us, as we did the Fozhkethi, aeons ago. Know that you will be shown no mercy: in this galaxy only the strong survive, and there is no peace among the stars: only an eternity of slaughter, and the laughter of the God-Races echoing through the Ethereal-Sub-Reality. We wait you beyond the hyper-lanes, young contenders; and our knives grow ever-sharper the longer you delay."
This writing's meaning was discovered just before World War Z-3, the last of the three great wars against the Vat'na-Ka, the fungal-infected zombie-beings who emerged from the ruins of our world at the end of World War Z-1 which followed the spore bombardment. The Mortification Fungus had become symbiotic with them, and they lived as strong-but-stupid laborers in many places. Twice more there would be a general resurgence of the old-form of the fungus that resurrected the dead and dying as hideous mockeries of life whose only desire was to prey on the living, thrice we would cull their herds and reduce their false-cities to nothing more than premade necropolis. The last such war ended 159 years ago.
Our supplies of fossil fuels are long exhausted, our world an arid and seer wasteland of ash and snow from the many thousands of super-charged chemical warheads used to fight the Zombie hordes over the years in the three Greater Z-Wars and hundreds of lesser outbreaks. We have learned that might truly does make right, for only the vicious have strength enough to prosper, and only those who prosper can truly judge if an act is kind or cruel over the long term. Yet we rose, using the wan light of our star, Zaan, to burn and melt with thousands of mirrors focusing its power. In time, we created industrial forges again, then war-machines, and soon enough, we rose back into space. Thirty Four of our home-world's years ago, I was born.
Chapter 1: Introductions are in Order.
My birth was of humble origins, for the lofty position I now hold, I was born to my mother Larb late in 2166, under the abutment of a ruined bridge near the sacred necropolis of Letharge: Site of the first Global Defense Command bunker-city during the first Z-War. She was, and were it not for me still would be, a mere street-walker: a scavenger and harlot selling her body to any with coin enough to buy her meals and clothing for her and her children. When I was born, there were eight of us, a grotesque number of children almost equal to the shamefully slutty behaviors of Vat'na-Ka women, but what do you expect? Mom is a whore. By the time I was a contender for the role of Warlady, that number had swelled to eleven, and then been reduced to four, myself included. Mother we will speak of more later, but I would be remiss if I didn't talk of my three surviving siblings now.
Feti, Daughter of Vurp, is my only surviving sister, and she and I are, close. In all my days I've never met another female as skilled at the arts of seduction and sexual gratification, which she puts to very good use securing my position as Warlady; turning neutrals into allies, and potential enemies into neutral observers. Of course she has been betrayed by her paramours before, but I have often helped her exact her vengeance for such sins, a vengeance she always gains, with or without my help. My Sister, of course, is my ally as well as my subject, and knows how far the invisible and intangible leash I have over her runs, hers is a simple and strong set of motives, ones we both understand and can agree on. I love her as much as anyone in my position can safely do, but like all my family, I would kill her without a second thought if she became a threat or liability, much as I would regret having had to do so; she is after-all very skilled at what she does, and I'd miss her servicing.
Vinn, Son of Vurp, is my oldest living brother. He is, an advisor that I am able to trust more than most, though of course I can trust no one. His alabaster and peach fur, so different from my own charcoal grey, often makes people believe that he is younger than he really is, a trait that he puts to good use in the direct governance of our terrestrial nation while I focus on the larger galactic picture. He too I have on a short leash, and for much the same reasons. His, in a way, is a closeness equal to my sister; closer, some might argue, though they are fools. After all, one can never fully trust a member of the opposite gender or someone in ones own profession. As you may guess by their shared sobriquet Feti and Vinn have the same father, one of mother's best customers, who was her patron for over 11 years and sired 4 of my siblings in total: but not a sire I share. I love them, of-course, but also envy their knowing the identity of their sire.
My other living brother is Mubi, Son of Bick: a scientists that was MADE to explore the stars. Always he has been inquisitive and prone to leaps of genius, I hold him to be one of the foremost minds of our time, second only to my beloved sister. Of my siblings only I take after my sire, rather than my dam in appearance, and all of them are youthful looking redheads. This gives me the perfect opportunity to discuss my mother.
Simply put, Mom was made for the job of being a whore. I've never known her to be happy except when she was sluting-it-up with someone. Mother revels in wanton carnality and the feeling of being at anther's mercy to a degree that is as disgusting as it is alluring: how she produced such driven and powerful children as myself and my surviving siblings I'll never understand. She is still well in her prime child-bearing years, having started with my eldest sister (now deceased) at the disgraceful age of twenty one years, and now being only sixty-two. I fully expect that she will still be acting as a professional breeder (her newly upgraded profession since my ascension) until well into her nineties, and probably die in the aftermath of completing one last successful childbirth as she has always dreamed of. Hah, you do at least have to admire mother's purity of purpose: wallowing in mindless lust is all she's ever wanted, and she has managed to pursue that singular goal her whole life from the age of 21 till today almost without stopping or even slowing down.
There are some who might think these passages of my auto-biography show weakness: I contend the opposite: I don't need to CARE if anyone reads this and tries to use it against me: my power is such that any attempt of that nature will merely serve to pull my enemies out into the open where I will utterly crush them and leave their entire clan burning in my wake; I've done it before. The first such event was at the age of merely 15 years old, when I organized my siblings to orchestrate an absolutely BRUTAL retaliatory strike against the Bladed-Skull street gang of Letharge, They hurt my sister Kiwe (Who died only a few months later from the psychological wounds of the attack...) and we made them PAY, to the last Pvinosk and drop of blood; leaving their slaves and Thralls under my authority, the first of many victories on the long road to becoming Warlady at the unprecedented age of only 34.
I won't bore you with the long tale of my series of victories here; this after-all will be the subject of my forthcoming treatise on modern military tactics that will be mandatory reading in the war-academies of the Bohond Necrocracy, but the highlights will be talked of here.
At 20 years old I was captured by a rival gang and they tried to force me to become a whore like my mother; it was at this moment that the necromancy powers which would propel my rapid rise to dominion over our nation would first manifest. With a primal scream of rage I summoned a horde of Zed forth from the sewers to consume my foes living flesh, and become the first cadre of my necrotic army. The slaughter was as sudden and unexpected as it was brutal, with the man who was trying to shove himself down my throat being both the first to see them, and the last to join their numbers. I savor the memories of the terror in his eyes to this day and hour. His corpse is in fact standing next to me as I write this memoir, painstakingly preserved with some of the most advanced fungal growth solutions known to our best scientific minds. Some of my brother Mubi's early experiments led to mild advances in that field which allowed his Zombified Remains to last long enough for more specialized scientists to apply their talents to the project. I never knew the bastard's name, so I refer to him as Jevs, Scion of Deth; and the fact that his very identity has been permanently subsumed into my ongoing legend gives me no small amount of joy.
Several other minor victories followed as I slowly took control of Anjuvarshak province and some of the surrounding areas with my necrotic hordes, but what was to be my most crushing defeat was only a few years away, and it was not obtained on the battle-field, but in the arena of politics. You see, true strategy requires cunning, a lesson I had never learned, but was about to be taught with bloody and brutal efficiency.
At the time, my armies consisted almost entirely of the reanimated dead; zombies, and nothing more. I was about to learn a painful lesson in the whys-and-wherefores of our race's continual victories over the undead. Three times have the living dead reanimated by the pure-strain Mortification Fungus emerged across the world, three times have they been thrown back at great cost, and each such war has been shorter than the last. More than five hundred times have large-scale outbreaks threatened to engulf the world, and each time they have been contained more easily and with less loss of life than they were during the preceding century, save the two Greater Z-Wars. My first attempt to rise to the glory of being acclaimed "Warlady" on the back of my necromantic legions would be no different.
Things were going well, I had secured an entire province and was taking control of others, already I'd therefore forced a "Test of Taking" on the Warlord of the time, Sabn, Son of Duun. However, he was not one to be so easily swept aside, and marshaled his best anti-zombie troops to oppose me, but the larger blow was yet to be struck. Sabn turned public opinion against my methods, saying that the zed could not be controlled, that I was merely luring them into position to attack military outposts and the like, ancient tactics dolled up with new tricks and pseudo-mystical mummery. He was a liar, and a fraud, as Jevs would prove for me some years later; but in that moment, he was quite convincing. My enemies began to multiply in number, I'd scarce turned 23 when all the various Warlord Contenders united against me and struck as-one. Over two months of misfortune the three provinces I'd gained controll of were taken from me and only a handful of my troops, followers, and slaves survived. Chastened, I slunk away into the darkness to lick my metaphorical wounds.
Over the next seven years I prepared for my resurgence. I found others with the psychic gift to control and propagate this new necromantically receptive strain of the fungus, a underground cult spread across the world, with myself at the hub of the network of 'black magic' and continually acting to deepen the growing civil-war that the Test of Taking was spiraling into, as every man and woman with ambition and a handful of followers decided that he or she should try their hand at becoming Warlord or Warlady of our empire. It all came to a head when I turned 30, full majority for our culture, and in a single day and night of misfortune for my enemies my cultists and their zombie retinues attacked en-mass, killing hundreds of thousands of opponents and leaving only the strongest contenders still alive. Within six months, the battle-lines had fully drawn up and myself, the old Warlord Sabn, and three new contenders:
Veti, Daughter of Brok; an eager young mercenary of immense charisma who would go-on to become the first admiral of our star-navy after I seduced her and made her swear a binding oath to serve me. We later parted ways romantically, but are still fast friends, insofar as the Warlady may have "friends". (She's also married to my eldest surviving brother: it was quite a scandal with the large age-gap...)
Kalel, Scion of Chug: a brutish man with origins as base as my own, but who saw raw-power as the key to all things and knew nothing of cunning or subterfuge. His Fur was as white as his soul was dark as ink: I did our race a great service when I finally gutted him like a fish.
And Ukna, Son of Kreb: a man whom, insofar as I can say it of anyone outside my family, I love. I will bear his kits if he is fortunate enough to survive the wounds inflicted in the final battle for supremacy that he fought at my side, though his prognosis is not looking great. Like the admiral above, I seduced him and swore him to my service, unlike her, we have never gone our separate ways, romantically.
The campaigns of seduction that turned two of my enemies into my allies would go-on for the next three years, and ended only after my strongest opponent, the old Warlord Sabn, Son of Duun was defeated on the field of battle. It was during this period that The Keepers of Tradition would hand me what was delectably either a crushing victory or a bitter defeat; they ruled that in light of the religious groundswell of support for myself and my necromancers and the ample proof in later years that the necromancers could truly CONTROL the undead, I must be considered and treated as a legitimate contender within the Test of Taking, and so the other four contenders had to treat me with respect and honor in spite of my disreputable methods. Sabn, Son of Duun was the only one who would not accept their ruling, and unsurprising too, considering how much of his reputation he had staked on defeating me before, and as-such he invoked the rarely used "Rite of Refusal" which called for an all-out war between only our two factions till one of us was dead. Just barely less than a year later, I had Jevs, Scion of Deth; bite out his throat and bite into each of his limbs, exactly once then withdraw while he exanguinated and re-animated, live on international television. There could not be any further doubt that the zombies would obey my orders in defiance of their instincts.
The following three years were spent gathering the two who would become my allies into my fold and forcing Kalel, Scion of Chug to engage my forces at the battle of White Mountain, an engagement in our arctic northern reaches that would prove decisive.
The Battle of White Mountain was based around the mountain of the same name which had been turned into the heavily fortified capital of of Kalel's lands, and it was rumored he was creating a new airiesolized fungicide of such potency that a single drop of the concentrate when volatilized could exterminate an entire city worth of Vat'na-Ka slaves. That would ultimately prove to have been true, much to everyone's horror. We knew we had to strike, or our forces were doomed. Armoring our zombie legions in encounter-suits to protected them from gas attacks we stormed the walls in our hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile I and my elite guard of living soldiers and necromancess Nuns made a near-suicidal HALO insertion to land directly atop his palace, alongside a handful of specialized crates containing a few of our very finest and most responsive commando-zombies. Though the fighting was fierce in all areas of the assault we eventually battled our way into the throne-room of the Beggar-Lord Kalel and I rushed him where he sat receiving 'service' from a woman who could have been my mother's twin-sister. He managed to kick-away both his whore and pants just in time to be able to draw a sword and counter me, starting a duel that would not end until after my beloved Ukna took a blow from an envenomed dagger meant for me which he has not recovered from to-this-day. However, Ukna, as cunning on the battle-field and he was careless in the bedroom trapped both Kalel's blades with his wounded body allowing me to finish the bastard and gut him like a fish: spiting him open with my honor-blade from navel to nose. However my shout of triumph was short-lived, Kalel had a 'suicide switch' attached to his heart that released hundreds of thousands of millibars worth of the anti-fungal gas into the atmosphere of the area upon his death: the death-tole among our Vat'na-Ka slaves was catastrophic, with entire working-quarters over a hundred miles down-wind being depopulated overnight and sickness and lesions continuing to appear in unexpected areas more than a year later. He has proven quite arguably the greatest war-criminal in our entire history.
After that, a year or so passed while we did mop-up and tried to contain the ongoing damage of Kalel's "Final Strike" with the RSR Gas. I am now in a position to begin writing my memories, of which this has been the first chapter. Immediately to follow will be an update on the first year and a Quarter of my unopposed rule, as during that time, we have accomplished more as a race than in the preceding 2200 years combine.
My name is Sene, Daughter of Larb, and I am the 613th Warlady of the Bohond Necrocracy.
It falls to me, as it has to each Warlord or Warlady of our glorious nation since the dawning days of World War Z-1 to record my thoughts and positions for posterity. We who rule the Bohond Necrocracy are also it's foremost historians, for, after all, the strong rule, and history is to be written by the victors, of which, we are the foremost.
As have all before me, I begin this day with a recap of what has transpired before now in the annals of our race.
In the beginning, we were hunters and gatherers; we roamed the great valleys and plateaus of Zaanamar, our mighty home-world, once a lush and green paradise compared to what it was to later become. In time, great civilizations rose, the Khagitte, the Neaphall, the Kittezhune, the Kouyotee, the Aabazhinitan and others. Long they contended among themselves, long did we strive for greatness. 2200 years ago, almost to the day, all that changed. We had just begun a bitter and bloody war among nations that would come to be called "The Prelude War" a few years earlier when the death-spores rained from the skies. I have seen one of them, preserved in a hermetically sealed bunker case deep beneath the planetary capital, in "The Hall of Icons", it is 2.61011 of our Kulags long, 0.50018 Kulags in diameter, and made entirely from titanium, save a few parts that are glass and some small bits that were once spring-steel and long-ago rusted away. Engraved all across its surface are runes and icons that proclaim its purpose for those who know how to read them, finally translated a little less than 200 years ago by the love-flame of Krin, Son of Murg, and Zush, Daughter of Shran: The Great Linguists.
"To you subjected to this bombardment by the Valmorian Khanate; you have our respect. You were not intended to survive the deployment of the Mortification Fungus on your world, and the fact that you have lived long enough to become able to read this, means you are a race strong enough to at-last provide meaningful challenge to our great war-fleets. Come against us when you are ready, oh contenders. Either we will destroy you in fire, as we have so many others, or you will destroy us, as we did the Fozhkethi, aeons ago. Know that you will be shown no mercy: in this galaxy only the strong survive, and there is no peace among the stars: only an eternity of slaughter, and the laughter of the God-Races echoing through the Ethereal-Sub-Reality. We wait you beyond the hyper-lanes, young contenders; and our knives grow ever-sharper the longer you delay."
This writing's meaning was discovered just before World War Z-3, the last of the three great wars against the Vat'na-Ka, the fungal-infected zombie-beings who emerged from the ruins of our world at the end of World War Z-1 which followed the spore bombardment. The Mortification Fungus had become symbiotic with them, and they lived as strong-but-stupid laborers in many places. Twice more there would be a general resurgence of the old-form of the fungus that resurrected the dead and dying as hideous mockeries of life whose only desire was to prey on the living, thrice we would cull their herds and reduce their false-cities to nothing more than premade necropolis. The last such war ended 159 years ago.
Our supplies of fossil fuels are long exhausted, our world an arid and seer wasteland of ash and snow from the many thousands of super-charged chemical warheads used to fight the Zombie hordes over the years in the three Greater Z-Wars and hundreds of lesser outbreaks. We have learned that might truly does make right, for only the vicious have strength enough to prosper, and only those who prosper can truly judge if an act is kind or cruel over the long term. Yet we rose, using the wan light of our star, Zaan, to burn and melt with thousands of mirrors focusing its power. In time, we created industrial forges again, then war-machines, and soon enough, we rose back into space. Thirty Four of our home-world's years ago, I was born.
Chapter 1: Introductions are in Order.
My birth was of humble origins, for the lofty position I now hold, I was born to my mother Larb late in 2166, under the abutment of a ruined bridge near the sacred necropolis of Letharge: Site of the first Global Defense Command bunker-city during the first Z-War. She was, and were it not for me still would be, a mere street-walker: a scavenger and harlot selling her body to any with coin enough to buy her meals and clothing for her and her children. When I was born, there were eight of us, a grotesque number of children almost equal to the shamefully slutty behaviors of Vat'na-Ka women, but what do you expect? Mom is a whore. By the time I was a contender for the role of Warlady, that number had swelled to eleven, and then been reduced to four, myself included. Mother we will speak of more later, but I would be remiss if I didn't talk of my three surviving siblings now.
Feti, Daughter of Vurp, is my only surviving sister, and she and I are, close. In all my days I've never met another female as skilled at the arts of seduction and sexual gratification, which she puts to very good use securing my position as Warlady; turning neutrals into allies, and potential enemies into neutral observers. Of course she has been betrayed by her paramours before, but I have often helped her exact her vengeance for such sins, a vengeance she always gains, with or without my help. My Sister, of course, is my ally as well as my subject, and knows how far the invisible and intangible leash I have over her runs, hers is a simple and strong set of motives, ones we both understand and can agree on. I love her as much as anyone in my position can safely do, but like all my family, I would kill her without a second thought if she became a threat or liability, much as I would regret having had to do so; she is after-all very skilled at what she does, and I'd miss her servicing.
Vinn, Son of Vurp, is my oldest living brother. He is, an advisor that I am able to trust more than most, though of course I can trust no one. His alabaster and peach fur, so different from my own charcoal grey, often makes people believe that he is younger than he really is, a trait that he puts to good use in the direct governance of our terrestrial nation while I focus on the larger galactic picture. He too I have on a short leash, and for much the same reasons. His, in a way, is a closeness equal to my sister; closer, some might argue, though they are fools. After all, one can never fully trust a member of the opposite gender or someone in ones own profession. As you may guess by their shared sobriquet Feti and Vinn have the same father, one of mother's best customers, who was her patron for over 11 years and sired 4 of my siblings in total: but not a sire I share. I love them, of-course, but also envy their knowing the identity of their sire.
My other living brother is Mubi, Son of Bick: a scientists that was MADE to explore the stars. Always he has been inquisitive and prone to leaps of genius, I hold him to be one of the foremost minds of our time, second only to my beloved sister. Of my siblings only I take after my sire, rather than my dam in appearance, and all of them are youthful looking redheads. This gives me the perfect opportunity to discuss my mother.
Simply put, Mom was made for the job of being a whore. I've never known her to be happy except when she was sluting-it-up with someone. Mother revels in wanton carnality and the feeling of being at anther's mercy to a degree that is as disgusting as it is alluring: how she produced such driven and powerful children as myself and my surviving siblings I'll never understand. She is still well in her prime child-bearing years, having started with my eldest sister (now deceased) at the disgraceful age of twenty one years, and now being only sixty-two. I fully expect that she will still be acting as a professional breeder (her newly upgraded profession since my ascension) until well into her nineties, and probably die in the aftermath of completing one last successful childbirth as she has always dreamed of. Hah, you do at least have to admire mother's purity of purpose: wallowing in mindless lust is all she's ever wanted, and she has managed to pursue that singular goal her whole life from the age of 21 till today almost without stopping or even slowing down.
There are some who might think these passages of my auto-biography show weakness: I contend the opposite: I don't need to CARE if anyone reads this and tries to use it against me: my power is such that any attempt of that nature will merely serve to pull my enemies out into the open where I will utterly crush them and leave their entire clan burning in my wake; I've done it before. The first such event was at the age of merely 15 years old, when I organized my siblings to orchestrate an absolutely BRUTAL retaliatory strike against the Bladed-Skull street gang of Letharge, They hurt my sister Kiwe (Who died only a few months later from the psychological wounds of the attack...) and we made them PAY, to the last Pvinosk and drop of blood; leaving their slaves and Thralls under my authority, the first of many victories on the long road to becoming Warlady at the unprecedented age of only 34.
I won't bore you with the long tale of my series of victories here; this after-all will be the subject of my forthcoming treatise on modern military tactics that will be mandatory reading in the war-academies of the Bohond Necrocracy, but the highlights will be talked of here.
At 20 years old I was captured by a rival gang and they tried to force me to become a whore like my mother; it was at this moment that the necromancy powers which would propel my rapid rise to dominion over our nation would first manifest. With a primal scream of rage I summoned a horde of Zed forth from the sewers to consume my foes living flesh, and become the first cadre of my necrotic army. The slaughter was as sudden and unexpected as it was brutal, with the man who was trying to shove himself down my throat being both the first to see them, and the last to join their numbers. I savor the memories of the terror in his eyes to this day and hour. His corpse is in fact standing next to me as I write this memoir, painstakingly preserved with some of the most advanced fungal growth solutions known to our best scientific minds. Some of my brother Mubi's early experiments led to mild advances in that field which allowed his Zombified Remains to last long enough for more specialized scientists to apply their talents to the project. I never knew the bastard's name, so I refer to him as Jevs, Scion of Deth; and the fact that his very identity has been permanently subsumed into my ongoing legend gives me no small amount of joy.
Several other minor victories followed as I slowly took control of Anjuvarshak province and some of the surrounding areas with my necrotic hordes, but what was to be my most crushing defeat was only a few years away, and it was not obtained on the battle-field, but in the arena of politics. You see, true strategy requires cunning, a lesson I had never learned, but was about to be taught with bloody and brutal efficiency.
At the time, my armies consisted almost entirely of the reanimated dead; zombies, and nothing more. I was about to learn a painful lesson in the whys-and-wherefores of our race's continual victories over the undead. Three times have the living dead reanimated by the pure-strain Mortification Fungus emerged across the world, three times have they been thrown back at great cost, and each such war has been shorter than the last. More than five hundred times have large-scale outbreaks threatened to engulf the world, and each time they have been contained more easily and with less loss of life than they were during the preceding century, save the two Greater Z-Wars. My first attempt to rise to the glory of being acclaimed "Warlady" on the back of my necromantic legions would be no different.
Things were going well, I had secured an entire province and was taking control of others, already I'd therefore forced a "Test of Taking" on the Warlord of the time, Sabn, Son of Duun. However, he was not one to be so easily swept aside, and marshaled his best anti-zombie troops to oppose me, but the larger blow was yet to be struck. Sabn turned public opinion against my methods, saying that the zed could not be controlled, that I was merely luring them into position to attack military outposts and the like, ancient tactics dolled up with new tricks and pseudo-mystical mummery. He was a liar, and a fraud, as Jevs would prove for me some years later; but in that moment, he was quite convincing. My enemies began to multiply in number, I'd scarce turned 23 when all the various Warlord Contenders united against me and struck as-one. Over two months of misfortune the three provinces I'd gained controll of were taken from me and only a handful of my troops, followers, and slaves survived. Chastened, I slunk away into the darkness to lick my metaphorical wounds.
Over the next seven years I prepared for my resurgence. I found others with the psychic gift to control and propagate this new necromantically receptive strain of the fungus, a underground cult spread across the world, with myself at the hub of the network of 'black magic' and continually acting to deepen the growing civil-war that the Test of Taking was spiraling into, as every man and woman with ambition and a handful of followers decided that he or she should try their hand at becoming Warlord or Warlady of our empire. It all came to a head when I turned 30, full majority for our culture, and in a single day and night of misfortune for my enemies my cultists and their zombie retinues attacked en-mass, killing hundreds of thousands of opponents and leaving only the strongest contenders still alive. Within six months, the battle-lines had fully drawn up and myself, the old Warlord Sabn, and three new contenders:
Veti, Daughter of Brok; an eager young mercenary of immense charisma who would go-on to become the first admiral of our star-navy after I seduced her and made her swear a binding oath to serve me. We later parted ways romantically, but are still fast friends, insofar as the Warlady may have "friends". (She's also married to my eldest surviving brother: it was quite a scandal with the large age-gap...)
Kalel, Scion of Chug: a brutish man with origins as base as my own, but who saw raw-power as the key to all things and knew nothing of cunning or subterfuge. His Fur was as white as his soul was dark as ink: I did our race a great service when I finally gutted him like a fish.
And Ukna, Son of Kreb: a man whom, insofar as I can say it of anyone outside my family, I love. I will bear his kits if he is fortunate enough to survive the wounds inflicted in the final battle for supremacy that he fought at my side, though his prognosis is not looking great. Like the admiral above, I seduced him and swore him to my service, unlike her, we have never gone our separate ways, romantically.
The campaigns of seduction that turned two of my enemies into my allies would go-on for the next three years, and ended only after my strongest opponent, the old Warlord Sabn, Son of Duun was defeated on the field of battle. It was during this period that The Keepers of Tradition would hand me what was delectably either a crushing victory or a bitter defeat; they ruled that in light of the religious groundswell of support for myself and my necromancers and the ample proof in later years that the necromancers could truly CONTROL the undead, I must be considered and treated as a legitimate contender within the Test of Taking, and so the other four contenders had to treat me with respect and honor in spite of my disreputable methods. Sabn, Son of Duun was the only one who would not accept their ruling, and unsurprising too, considering how much of his reputation he had staked on defeating me before, and as-such he invoked the rarely used "Rite of Refusal" which called for an all-out war between only our two factions till one of us was dead. Just barely less than a year later, I had Jevs, Scion of Deth; bite out his throat and bite into each of his limbs, exactly once then withdraw while he exanguinated and re-animated, live on international television. There could not be any further doubt that the zombies would obey my orders in defiance of their instincts.
The following three years were spent gathering the two who would become my allies into my fold and forcing Kalel, Scion of Chug to engage my forces at the battle of White Mountain, an engagement in our arctic northern reaches that would prove decisive.
The Battle of White Mountain was based around the mountain of the same name which had been turned into the heavily fortified capital of of Kalel's lands, and it was rumored he was creating a new airiesolized fungicide of such potency that a single drop of the concentrate when volatilized could exterminate an entire city worth of Vat'na-Ka slaves. That would ultimately prove to have been true, much to everyone's horror. We knew we had to strike, or our forces were doomed. Armoring our zombie legions in encounter-suits to protected them from gas attacks we stormed the walls in our hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile I and my elite guard of living soldiers and necromancess Nuns made a near-suicidal HALO insertion to land directly atop his palace, alongside a handful of specialized crates containing a few of our very finest and most responsive commando-zombies. Though the fighting was fierce in all areas of the assault we eventually battled our way into the throne-room of the Beggar-Lord Kalel and I rushed him where he sat receiving 'service' from a woman who could have been my mother's twin-sister. He managed to kick-away both his whore and pants just in time to be able to draw a sword and counter me, starting a duel that would not end until after my beloved Ukna took a blow from an envenomed dagger meant for me which he has not recovered from to-this-day. However, Ukna, as cunning on the battle-field and he was careless in the bedroom trapped both Kalel's blades with his wounded body allowing me to finish the bastard and gut him like a fish: spiting him open with my honor-blade from navel to nose. However my shout of triumph was short-lived, Kalel had a 'suicide switch' attached to his heart that released hundreds of thousands of millibars worth of the anti-fungal gas into the atmosphere of the area upon his death: the death-tole among our Vat'na-Ka slaves was catastrophic, with entire working-quarters over a hundred miles down-wind being depopulated overnight and sickness and lesions continuing to appear in unexpected areas more than a year later. He has proven quite arguably the greatest war-criminal in our entire history.
After that, a year or so passed while we did mop-up and tried to contain the ongoing damage of Kalel's "Final Strike" with the RSR Gas. I am now in a position to begin writing my memories, of which this has been the first chapter. Immediately to follow will be an update on the first year and a Quarter of my unopposed rule, as during that time, we have accomplished more as a race than in the preceding 2200 years combine.
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