The rightful wrath of the God of War is mightily vented upon his mortal foes.
The God of War rode through the darkened forest within his midnight steed, soon to emerge under the cool gray sky of the false dawn. Just as he should have gloried in the open morning air of wind-caressed pasture, of heather-choked moors, more sprawling, glass-fronted merchant shops—thankfully closed at this early hour—lined the way.
Do these men of the Young Tribes do naught but revel by night and barter by day?
How shall I ever find worthy sword-food for battle?
What do those phonetic runes spell?
Normandy Shopping Center!
First the Scotts settle down to barter boar and then the Normans follow in their haggling steps?
Has every nation of reavers to fall under the spell of the damned Hanged God given up the sword and settled down to barter trinkets and breaded boar?
Just as Yule was about to scream to the empty shops of a blade-reckoning he was overcome by mirth and laughed uncontrollably with a deep sardonic undercurrent.
The traitorous Normans turned their backs on me to speak like the degenerate Franks and court the sniveling Peasant God hanging upon his cross. Hah, and now look at them, not even worthy sword-food. If this has truly been the way of it, with this vile religion spreading like camp fever among a Slav mob, then I shall be reduced to hunting Laplanders and Skraelings.
That is it! The prophet must be a Skraeling of some sort.
He put the soft-bellied Normans from his mind, almost—Hah! A warrior nation reduced to this! This is more of a laugh than Olaf’s cleaved head tumbling into the ale trough at the Ravens’ Feast. If only Olaf would have thought to wipe his nose we would not have had to pitch out the ale.
…He rode on, enjoying the sensation of enthronement as he drove the mechanical beast. Then it came to him, an epiphany about the mortals and their rudeness:
Yes, they are all so very arrogant because they are permitted to sit as if enthroned within these carriages which are appointed like some sorcerer’s very own hall! They have all hence come to think of themselves as their own lord and master. This shall change under my coming rule. Only I and my retainers—and such client kings I see fit to permit to live—shall be permitted this honor.
First I must see to my hunt. And before that a battle to hone my sword arm, and prior to battle a proper weapon of war.
He drove on away from the sprawling merchant nation out into the countryside where lords with fine carriages kept their manors and the occasional free-farmer had his fields. He rode, his steed roaring in the morning of a doomed world, as he, its master, reclined in naked splendor savoring dreams of slaughter that would be nightmares to the mortal mind.
Intent on imposing his will upon these quibbling traitor tribes, who had long ago bartered their faint shades in return for the wearisome promises of eternal boredom and apathy espoused by that damned hanged carpenter god, whose mother cried at his feet rather than raise a band of avengers, he vented his divine rage.
“Bah!” he roared, from within his night-black chariot, “I shall uproot your hanging tree and use it as a ram to batter down the door of your whining house!”
...The roar of his mighty mechanical steed seemed to echo his otherworldly ire as the complaisance of men softened by ages of lies and plenty—the one washing the other one down into the gullet of the mind with ease—irked him to a simmering fury.
His steed roared on west by northwest as he glowered behind its night-painted wheel.
War was in high gear and soon, mortal kind would cringe in fear.
