Ether 14

I mentioned theft. It got so bad that you couldn’t set anything down and expect to find it there the next day. People started locking everything up, keeping it in full view, sleeping with it, and keeping a sword at hand to off anyone who dared attempt a theft.

And now, after two years, Shared’s brother Gilead tried to avenge his departed sibling. Coriantumr led his defensive campaign all the way to the wilds of Akish, where thousands ended up dead on the field. Gilead had some success with the old attack-them-when-they-get-drunk routine, which you’d think people would have wised up about. Or learned to handle their liquor better.

Gilead made it to Moron and installed himself on the throne. Coriantumr retooled at Akish for a full two years, where many recruits signed on to the cause, which was little more than Coriantumr himself. Gilead, meanwhile, got recruits too, though his came with blood oaths and secret rituals. Not your usual enlistment papyrus-work.

The upshot of all this clandestine faux religiosity? The high priest murdered Gilead as he sat on the throne. This high priest turned out to be a hit man for Lib, the tallest man in town, a social climber who wielded charisma like a blunt pipe.

Coriantumr attacked Lib and his men, who gave Coriantumr another flesh wound, this one in his arm. But Lib’s troops got pushed back to the seashore, where the two armies continued swinging and shooting. Lib won the day, repelling his enemies back to Agosh, where Coriantumr had relocated, in fact, all his subjects.

Coriantumr killed Lib there, but Lib’s brother, Shiz, took over the command and not only pursued the opposing troops, but torched cities along the way, though not before some raping and killing sprees. Shiz was the font of terrorism. Legends sprang up. Songs, too, one of which went, “You better sit down when he comes around because Shiz is the rankest the devil has found.”

Local alliances sprang up, some joining with Shiz, others with Coriantumr. The civil war blurred every line between armies and civilians. No one was safe from harm or safe to be around. Not until they were dead, at least. And people died like flies in a hothouse. Carcasses rotted where they fell unless passers-by threw them in piles. The gore was unimaginable, the stench like nothing ever inhaled before. The strewn corpses became the great feast of vultures and maggots.

If you lived you couldn’t sleep.

But it didn’t matter. Shiz had sworn eternal vengeance on Coriantumr.

Meanwhile, God told Ether Corantumr wouldn’t die from a sword. He also said that this demolition of an entire civilization was the fruit of his anger, coupled with the natural by-product of aggression.

Coriantumr’s troops moved to the eastern seashore, where they fought Shiz’s for three days. Coriantumr’s army, though attrition had been punishing, gradually outmatched Shiz’s. Many of Shiz’s men—and unarmed onlookers—got so scared they ran to Corihor, where they brutalized anyone who would not join their ranks.

Coriantumr’s troops pitched tents in nearby Shurr Valley, near Comnor Hill, where the troops came together and blew a trumpet as a call to battle.

Battles commenced, wave upon wave. In face to face fighting, Shiz slashed Coriantumr so often and deep that his medics carried him away on a stretcher, dead, it seemed.

At that, and considering the severity of his losses in manpower, Shiz ordered his troops to return to camp and await further orders.