Half-Scales & Pale-Hides
Turrak and Yurlok were perched on a rock, watching a team of viashino and human iguanar riders mark a path between two meeting-points for communicating messages between humans and viashino. It was one of the several systems to communicate, this one being for moderate priority situations within either territory or changes in movement of hostile factions outside of Jund. The other system was untested, and would basically be shamans sending out a distress call through the ground for any shaman to pick up on. There was a simple pattern of pulses they had decided to use to send the distress signals, and the hope was that these pulses would be similar enough to a minor earthquake that anyone not in the loop wouldn’t be alerted of the situation. The tension between the humans and viashino working together was decreasing, but still noticeable. It was to be expected, they were blazing a new trail after all. Turrak and Yurlok were an exception to this dynamic. The two were forming a friendship. Yurlok was about six years older than Turrak, the youngest of the thrash leaders, both were shamans, and both were creative prodigies when it came to using magic. Yurlok had crafted a technique that punished mages for excess mana by siphoning it off and converting it into heat strong enough to burn them. Especially dangerous about this piece of magecraft was that it was an ambient field projected from Yurlok himself, rather than being placed on other spellcasters, meaning it bypassed most wards, and often wasn’t noticed until it scorched the other mage’s skin. Turrak hadn’t invented anything of regular usage as unique, but had joined two leylines on different planes through an omenpath, and in doing so, gained power and knowledge beyond the average mage. Currently, the two were discussing the differences and similarities in how humans and viashino practiced magic, and not paying much attention to their surroundings.
“So, humans do earth magic, lightning magic, fire magic, and amplify magic all using ‘red mana’. But also do earth magic, healing magic, plant magic, animal magic, and amplify magic with ‘green mana’. And do tar magic, death magic, bone magic, and fear magic with ‘black mana’. All that correct?” Yurlok asked.
“Yeah, that’s pretty much it, although I can also wield blue mana, unlike most other human shamans from Jund. Mostly, I can do water magic with it, but when combined with red mana, I can control and call storms. Real useful for screwing up Esper stormcallers,” Turrak replied.
“By human terms, Yurlok wield black, red, green mana. Viashino term magic by source,” Yurlok said.
As Turrak was about to respond, a strange, altered goblin with horns and wings swooped down from the trees and bit down on Yurlok’s snout. Yurlok’s scream drowned out the shouts of the human and viashino warriors who were also being set upon by the strange goblins.
Yurlok clawed at the nasty little goblin, but the bizarre creature held tight, stronger than it should’ve been. Turrak bashed it over the head with their staff, but the goblin stuck fast, clawed feet digging into the underside of Yurlok’s jaw. Turrak whacked it again, splitting open its skull with the crystal adorning his staff, and the goblin corpse fell to the ground, Yurlok now clutching his face.
The two of them heard the shouts of the warriors who’d had to fend off the first wave of goblins with the machetes and axes they’d been clearing a path with, rather than their preferred weapons, and sprang into action. Turrak called down bolts of lightning from the skies, taking out flying clusters of goblins and kathri, all with scaly wings, horns, and muscles so grotesque, Turrak thought they were tumors at first glance. Yurlok jumped down from the overhang, cauterizing the wounds on his face and knocking aside three goblins with a sweep of his staff before he landed on the ground. As his claws touched down on the earth, a crack opened up and a jet of lava shot up, incinerating a host of the strange beings that attacked.
With the two shamans having joined the fight, the humans and viashino began to turn the tide, although they had suffered casualties in the initial assault, so the warriors were mainly clustered together, back to back, going on the defensive rather than the offensive, a rarity for any Jundian. The strategy was working well, with humans and viashino watching each others’ blind spots, using spears, javelins, and viashino challika (plural form of challik) to bring down goblins and kathri. It was working well.
As one of the viashino warriors pulled a winged, horned goblin into the path of a human’s spear, a stranger creature swooped down from the sky. It had a viashino-like upper torso, but with three arms, and dragon wings. Its head was like that of a dragon’s but with two differently sized horns. Where the legs of a viashino would’ve been, things got weird. It was almost like a centaur, but mottled with scales, and instead of hooves, had a different number of talons at the end of each leg, some in a shape like that of a viashino or dragon foot, some more in the shape of a human’s foot.
A cry of fear from the human, goblin corpse still dangling from her spear, was silenced by the torrent of fire the creature let forth form its mouth. Three javelins struck its side, but it just spun towards the throwers, almost hovering as it did so. Its jaws flared orange, ready to pour flame once more, but with a twist of his hand, crushing a small talisman carved from a dragon’s tooth as he did so, Yurlok trapped the heat in its throat. With another motion, Yurlok stoked the bellows. The dragon-thing writhed in pain, and a goblin-thing bit Yurlok on the leg. The viashino shaman grimaced, but kept working his magic.
The fighting momentarily paused when the dragon-thing exploded with a loud crack, burnt viscera raining down on the battlefield. Yurlok took the opportunity to ram the butt of his staff through the goblin’s torso before shaking it loose with a kick.
Turrak let out a roar, calling brambles and vines to grow from the canopy, lashing aerial combatants to shreds. This, combined with Yurlok’s feat of temperature control, caused the strange attackers to start retreating. Jundian humans and viashino rarely show quarter to retreating enemies, tending to pursue them like a quarry, running them down, but they held back with a command from Turrak and Yurlok, who independently both called the warriors to halt. Yurlok, who had commanded more battles than Turrak, knew that going on the offense, and potentially running into more of these bizarre creatures was risky, especially with the fact that six of the two dozen warriors had died in the initial assault, and more were injured. Turrak wanted to examine the strange creatures and send word to the clans and thrashes about the new threat, especially because there was a chance that this attack was meant to disrupt communication between humans and viashino before it really began. If it was just goblins, that was unlikely, but the addition of kathri and a viashino meant that someone was organizing this.
As the two shamans rallied their troops, tending to injuries and beginning an examination of the goblins, another mage of a different stripe turned to his fellow viashino, high upon a mountain looking down at the battlefield.
[The following conversation is translated from Jundian viashino.]
“Do you see how our kin side with the hairy ones? They have betrayed us! I have devised a method of elevating us, and even freeing the pale-hides from their scaleless existence, but they reject it and cast down my champions!” Ushruk Draakhide said to Elder Igh, leader of Pale Hide Thrash.
“Our kin allying with the humans is troubling, but I don’t see how your twisted creations are the answer,” Igh replied, crossing his arms.
“Because dragons are the apex of the scaled form!” Ushruk said, eyes glowing red, and a bloody mist pouring forth from his mouth. “They will cleanse not just Jund, not just Alara, but the multiverse of the soft-backed, save for the chosen few who are worthy of ascending to the perfected form! With your warriors joining us, we can sweep aside the clans and thrashes who oppose us with ease, and empower the dragons to spread scaled supremacy to the other shards, then through the omenpaths! We will make a new order, one where hairy beings know their place!”
“Yes. I see now, I see it!” Ighsaid, his eyes glazing over with the same blood-red color in Ushruk’s.
“But, these pale-hides you want to join us, are they truly scaled?” Igh asked, eyes flickering between his normal black-brown and the solid red of Ushruk’s magic.
“Xecau!” Ushruk shouted, snapping his fingers as he smiled wide.
Flying from a shallow cave a bit higher up, Xecau descended to the outcropping the two viashino were at. His body was not the same one that Shregresha had mauled in Grixis. He looked like a perfected version of the viashino-dragon-thing that Yurlok had blown apart, with the same sort of humanoid torso on top of a draconic body, but with two symmetrical horns, and three-taloned feet at the ends of legs that were not uneven with each other. He had four muscular arms and a thick tail, all covered in reddish-black scales like the rest of him. His hair had transformed into a spiky frill, the adornments of his bloodbraids still on the ends, and it flared up as he let out a plume of flame into the air, startling Igh. He had two massive wings protruding from his upper back, but not counting wings, was almost twenty feet tall, sixteen feet long, and four feet wide. His wingspan was over forty feet in length, but like almost all dragons, his flight was enabled by mana. The wings were just for steering. He wore his bronze saber on a belt where a normal-sized warrior would’ve worn a dagger, and carried a massive blade carved from the bone of a leviathan he’d slain while testing the limits of his form.
Igh fell to his knees, weeping. Ushruk had honed his power of mental manipulation over seventy years of running a dragon cult, and wrapping a half-senile brute like Igh around his claw was something he could’ve done in his sleep.
Pale Hide thrash joined the Blood of Malfegor within the hour.
