The sun hung low and red in the west, about to descend to its den, to the dark cradle that even now cast its spreading shroud over the east.

They had come, one hundred strong, to this Place Reverent, to find the Mud Mobs finishing the slaughter of the colony, the keystone of the South, the hub of Nord life since Nordhome had been buried in ice in the time of his grandfather.

The vultures gathered in vast rustling flocks at the forest’s edge—the forest that had once been their refuge, from whence death had no sped upon their cousins.

Every lodge smoldered or burned

Every woman had been quartered by their beasts.

Every man had been devoured or mauled by their dogs.

Every child lay face-first, with empty skull before the Holy Tree, the hope of the Nords dashed to gore against the trunk of that soaring oak, planted in the time of their fathers, when the great warband had descended this accursed river to drive the Mud Mobs back into the pit from whence they had issued forth into the North World—back into the arms of Hel.

Their ninety brothers and three chiefs lay in ordered rows, right here, before the seeing stone, where they had fought the surging mobs to save Reverent Chandler from the hooded clutch of the papas who had staked him out, chopped off his feet, and were in the process of flaying his rune-inked back, inked with the record of their race. Thanks to him, Fend Spikeson, Reverent Chandler lived. The stumps were astringed, stitched, bound, and elevated, though there was nothing for the pain but Reverent Chandler’s unfathomable will.

A dog could be heard howling its last down on the river’s edge, just before the crunch of Cull’s axe was heard. The old lame-footed slayer was stalking the disordered heaps of the mud horde—a mob more vast than had been recorded in living memory—and dispatching the maimed and dying, re-killing the dead, spitting curses into the empty eyes, and flinging each and every head, man, beast and hound, into the river, so as to send a message to their betters that the Nords yet lived. The bodies of their chiefs would be in for special treatment, for which the old brute would no doubt request from Fend a laxative.

Their chiefs were dead.

Their brothers were fallen.

The People were already wandering the Nightlands beyond this miserable world.

The enemy had been ruthlessly crushed, their remains soon to be duly cursed.

Trek, Wolfson, inspected the forest’s edge, looking into the eyes of the gathered vultures and ravens, their friends more often than not over these many years, and their friends still this day, for the Nords had offered more upon which to feed than had the enemy, ferocious though they had been. He would soon return with the judgment of the Death Birds, just as Cull would soon be up from the bank with word from Hel, who even now watched greedily from her great pet’s muddy depths.

“What shall we do?” grumbled Singe, Forgeson. A a tall rangy man with forked beard and sweeping mustache, dull grey eyes sunken into a shaved and painted head, clutching his maws, his shield hanging from his back, Singe was not the most creative thinker.

Fend was a timid sort.

Cull, of the blood-caked belly-sweeping beard, defiling a chiefly corpse this moment, was of legendary use, but not a man people wanted to listen to on this side of the Nightlands.

Trek was likewise odd, bare face painted black, more at home with the envoys of The One Beyond, than with folk.

Nord, blind in one eye, whitely bearded, too old to care whose son he was—though it was whispered to have been a snow bear that fathered him—was a man of the Tribe, with no living sons. He was in shock from the shattering of his shield arm just moments ago, by the last of these deranged mace-wielding papas and merely shook and drooled.

Dusk, Wolfson, bare face stained sooty gray, younger brother of Trek, his alternately gray and steely eyes, darting in their liquid way from face to face, finally landed on the heavy angular countenance of Est, Cumberson, adopted into the clan out of the Morning Lands, but immediately acknowledged as the best man left standing.

Est met Dusk’s furtive gaze, then looked to each in the order he respected them: Nord, Trek—clicking to a raven—Cull, crapping down an enemy neck, Singe, and, least and last, Fend.

Est nodded to Reverent Chandler, aimed a silent snarl at Fend, and then rumbled in his grinding voice, hoarse from the shield-splitting roars he had let go so recently as he cut down the last of the Mud papas with his great cleaver, “The current is against us, choked with ice. We must trek back to Broodhome, on this morning side of the river. Trek out front, Dusk to the flank, Cull the rear.”

He then looked meaningfully at Fend, who knew him well, but was not known to him. “Tender, if you are able, haul Reverent Chandler. If you are not, go tell Cull so he might sing you a mud song.”