As Told from the Viewpoint of Warlord Zrathkha
They told him not to.
Not once, not in passing, not as a warning whispered by firelight. No, the seers screamed their portents like dying birds, tearing open the veil of sleep with bloodied hands and blackened bone. The ash-pit flares burned sideways that night. The marrow cracked backward. The entrails of the goat coiled into a perfect spiral, as if the gods themselves were trying to draw a seal against what Zrathkha intended.
“Do not wake the slimes,” they said.
“The earth remembers.”
“The dark doom waits.”
But Warlord Zrathkha of the Black Claw had grown tired of riddles and rituals, of old hands clutching at power behind veils of incense. He had clawed his way up from the filth of Anufed’s bone-pits not by heeding the mutterings of crones, but by spilling blood on stone and carving victory from weakness. The old ways had left them scraping moss from cliff walls, preying on carrion, and waiting for death to forget them.
He would not die a whisper.
He would make the world scream their name.
He had already begun, in secret.
Down in the wetbone caves, past the drowned wells and salt-lit grottos, he bred them—blind, writhing horrors of acid and hunger. The slimes. They had no eyes, no loyalty, no souls—only the memory of old hunger and the promise of destruction. Fed on refuse, blood, and spells half-remembered from plague-witches long buried, Zrathkha shaped them into a weapon the world had forgotten. They would tunnel, devour, dissolve. A creeping tide beneath the world.
To Zrathkha, they were the future.
To the elders, they were a portent of doom in the flesh.
The conflict never broke into shouting. That would have been easier. Instead, it festered in silence. Seers turned their faces from him in council. Thornale the Fateweaver, eldest and most feared of their number, ceased calling him “Warlord” and instead addressed him as “Zrathkha, son of ambition.” A subtle curse.
She stood before the war-table once, unsummoned, her bones wrapped in skins painted with her own dreams. Her voice was soft and terrible.
“The warren holds a truth the bones dare not speak,” she whispered, drawing circles in ash on the ground. “Iron will melt. Fire will flee. The stone will open its mouth and swallow us whole. This path leads only to echo and ruin.”
Zrathkha spat on her sigils. “Then may the world echo my ruin forever.”
He marched with three thousand beneath the torn crescent of the Black Claw banner. It was not just war he led—it was defiance. Every bootstep into kobold territory was a rejection of seer and sign. The air grew thinner. The tunnels tighter. Still, they advanced.
The slimes surged ahead, melting traps, burrowing through vents, unraveling the warren’s careful defenses. Kobolds died in hundreds. Zrathkha laughed then—a brutal, full-bellied roar that rang from tunnel wall to tunnel wall. The seers had been wrong. The earth would not swallow him. The earth would kneel.
And then the lake came.
A tremor. A crack. And then the roar—not of a warlord, but of water, ancient and black, thundering down through breached stone. It crashed through the caverns like a divine fist. The kobolds, cornered and desperate, had done the unthinkable—they’d broken the seal above the reservoir.
Zrathkha’s final memory was not of blood or fire. It was cold. Endless cold.
The darkness took him screaming, not in glory, but in drowning silence.
The Aftermath
Of the Black Claw, barely a thousand limped back. Shell-shocked. Leaderless. Shamed. They had followed Zrathkha into the deep and found only death and disgrace.
The Grinko brothers—thorny, quarrelsome twins who served as guards to the seers—were among the few who had never entered the tunnels. They’d been assigned to watch over the elders who refused the march. Now, they argued endlessly, as if the riddle of their own names might hold off grief a moment longer.
Thornale remained. The Fateweaver did not speak of vengeance. She spoke of threads.
“The world has changed,” she said to the broken survivors. “The weight of fate is no longer your warlord’s to carry. We walk now in silence and shadow. The banner remains, but it must be stitched anew.”
Anufed was abandoned; the greater clans would enslave or slay them if they remained. Its cliffs echoed with hunger. The Black Claw turned west, toward Taurdain—toward exile, and perhaps… salvation.
The Thread Ahead
Thornale, though bent with age, now holds the reins of what remains of her people. She claims the bones whisper of one path left—one place where fate might be mended.
Glimmermere.
A lake of starlight at the heart of Deathwatch Mountain. A place cursed and sacred, within the skeletal grasp of the Burn itself.
She says its waters can unmake what was done. Purge the taint. Heal the soul of the tribe and the soil of Taurdain alike.
She travels now with the Grinko brothers at her side—bickering still, but ever loyal. They carry the hopes of the Black Claw on their backs.
But in her sleep, Thornale still mutters.
Of the drowned tunnels.
Of the cold.
Of the boy who did not drown.
A kobold with lakewater in his lungs and fury in his heart.
She dreams his name as a warning and a promise both.
“Eeyagoo.”
Shermans fantasy world 