BERZERKER

I bear witness to fury. For I am it. Personified.

I never tire of hearing a skull crack inwardly. To me it fills the void within my belly, albeit fleetingly. There is a deep longing here to see blood, pulse and spurt.

Fire and talons pass my ear as I pull the axe from my slain. A trio of screeching Gothama witches run toward me, scimitars raised, full moonlight enhancing the blades – they say Gothama steel is imbued with the souls of their celestial gods. I think that’s horseshit. An arrow from fuck knows where hits me passionately in the collar bone. It tickles the senses, nothing more. My nerve endings were cut at birth, as was my tongue, mouth sewn shut in battle with spider silk, such is my pedigree.

One moment, sweet reader.

I reach down, foraging for a grip upon the skull I had just opened. My fingertips find a warm crevice. The axe wound had opened avenues I longingly expected. Sweet places within that inspire the methods of war. Moist brain and sinew gloved my fingers as I held tight to the skull and lifted the corpse. If indeed it was a limp cadaver? I had no time to check if it was still alive. The Gothama witches stopped in their respective strides as I hurled the body – headfirst, toward them. Even a corpse has its uses. They struggled beneath the weight of their dead sister. What grievance they had with me was soon settled as I sliced the heads from two, while the other crawled through sodden, jellied earth, away from me; away from death. She didn't get far - my boot finding the elasticated muscle of her neck a hard thing to severe with a solitary heel. Her breath gave out before her neck did.

I will pay no quarter.

Another arow clipped the side of my head, taking the extent of my ear with it. I felt the blood trickle down the nape of my neck. A normal man would be in shock right now. But I must stress, and I’m sure you can gather - I am no normal man.

Across the Unholiest, a sea of predatory nature, in the forests and fields of Muir my people reside. My people! I use the term loosely. Under the Ashen Keep – the great tree of the world, where eons ago the spider and the serpent cast their last breaths, both beaten in battle. Over the centuries their blood fed the tree and in the barmiest of summers the sap would glisten like ice, ready to be harvested and ingested by the Romni.

This is in point of fact an evolutionary paradox, that the venom of the spider and the serpent congealed within the sap, to be endured by the Romni. Times change, they always do. And we, as mere mortals have no say.

At first the sap was used for healing, medicine to cure the afflicted, but knowledge of the Ashen Keep spread. Rival clans came looking, as did the Golem men of Razi’Dir. Many Romni died that day so they decided to protect the Ashen Keep, turning the sap they had farmed for centuries as the weapon of their protection.

I was born to another state of being. Delivered under the shade of the Ashen Keep by the progenitors.

One moment, sweet reader.

A volley of arrows splayed the nightscape. Two found entry into my chest, chainmail taking the brunt, my hardened skin, leather-like tissue trained into becoming a shell to house my untethered fury. Skin forged with stalks of flaming bamboo in the House of Pain. Me and my kin have evolved beyond pain, the sap taking us to another level of consciousness.

I see movement in the tree line, a shrouded sniper revelling in their tirade. Nature speaks to the Berzerkers of the Ashen Keep. I see patterns in the air, ripples in the grass that speak to me in abstract tongue. This sniper echoes to me like a wailing cat. They think themself safe in the darkness, coveted by trees and branch and the veil of night and yet she bays to me - a wounded hog, soul gasping for finality.

I reach for the club on my back, encrusted with the extracted teeth of half a dozen Golem men. I’ll charge through the brush and batter her skull into earthen jam.

Gravity had grander ideas.

It was strange to me that I didn’t sense the trap. The covered ground that gave way to the pit, and its resident.

It wasn’t all that deep but laying on the floor impaled by a spike or two made my escape all the more interesting. I reached for the pouch at my neck, making sure the sap was still there. I thought I was alone at first. My senses never failed me. But I could feel something brushing pass my feet, slithering around the ruts in the broken earth and mud. It was sizing me up.

There weren’t many things in the world that didn’t reverberate in the ether, and a dead worm was one of them. They were a part of the world’s rot. The Great Tree’s roots stretched deep into the world, but there were places where even those long tendrils of nature would turn. Dead worms were an ancient part of the world, the remnants of the spilt blood of dark gods buried in memory. They were exceedingly rare, thankfully. But it seemed the Gothama witches had an affinity for the old world and its dark eldritch treasures. They must have captured it once upon a day and slung it in the pit, feeding it the occasional unfortunate – like myself. Its scent was enough to make you shit yourself in fear. I tried my best not to inhale, yet my flared nostrils made it hard.

Most Berzerkers had flared nostrils. As our tongues were taken at birth and our mouths sewn shut each time we stepped into battle, it was tradition and common practice for Romni midwives to slice and stitch our nostrils for more air intake. Right now, with the smell of shit and putrefaction abundant in the pit, I wished they had never bothered.

It moved and convulsed, creating a sound not to dissimilar to air passing through an anus. A wheezing retch that brought with it a scolding lime green sludge from its tepid gut flowing over my knees. I could see the heat rising from my legs. It was hot, though my nerve endings had been cut I knew the difference between hot and cold. I knew what was coming, and I didn’t have a hope in hell of getting out of the dead worm’s larder.

What feeling remained in my legs would soon spiral into a deep emptiness as the acidic vomit tore away at sinew and bone. It would be impossible not to feel something. Nature, by definition wouldn’t let the maimed go silently, even one of the Ashen Keep.

I took of the sap, probably too much. We used it sparingly in battle, imbibing it before a campaign to heighten the senses. I had no place for sense in this dank pit. No prerequisite for survival. I could already feel the vomit eating my legs. No Romni campaign required a half man. If the dead worm didn’t ingest me then assuredly my kin would imbed an axe into my skull.

There was no way out of this.

Legs dissolved by acid, a spike through the right thigh, another in my lower abdomen. Luck, if that was such a thing in this plight, had been kind. Another spike passed my right ear. Any closer and I wouldn’t even be reciting this lovely tale.

The effects of the sap emphasised the moonlight which shone over the pale mountain range. A gleaming pearl in the ravaged night. Something spun at its centre. At first a miniature droplet of pitch night, hollowing out the moon. It burrowed, outward, as if escaping some long dark exile, freedom more important than air, mandibles shaking, excited. It descended from the heavens on a silk chord, whistling my name.

The sap had hit me.

The spider sat on the edge of the pit, staring for what seemed an age. It wove an intricate web over the pit and then descended, calling my name, urging me to get up, telling me the feeling of despair was an illusion and the sap was here to free me – my benefactor. The silk thread glimmered with starshine, coalescing shadow and moonlight creating a from that hissed and spat at the dead worm.

I reached out, the serpent coiling around my arm, lifting me from living death, pulling me from spikes, a sensation akin to wind brushing pass the hairs on my skin. I looked down, blood rain falling from my dissolved legs. A pallid grey form moved in the muck. The dead worm wasn’t much for retaliation – they were lazy cunts. Plus, it had my legs to chow on until another unfortunate succumbed to gravity.

The serpent pulled me out, uncoiled itself and slithered through the reeds. I watched it, wanting to say thank you for the first time in my life but my mouth wouldn’t open. The serpent sprouted eight legs from its back and moved through the scrub, stopping, waiting, wanting me to follow it - the deities of the Great Tree of the world. This amalgamated power

I pushed through the dirt and blood. Corpses littered the pathway, such as it was, some Berzerkers, some Gothama, all dead. All I could smell was carnage - the iron of blood and the shit of broken corpses as the spider brought me to the water’s edge.

It was refreshing, although my need for water was small, it was the sap that nourished me, gave me succour. I didn’t think my gods wanted me to wash, though such a premise wasn’t a bad idea, scrubbing the lair of the dead worm from flesh. I soon had my wish.

The dark pool wasted no time in showing me its dark depths. Cold weeds burst from sticky sediment, pulling me in. Had I disappointed my gods? How could this fate be any worse than that of the pit and the dead worm?

It was a freezing darkness. I had seen cold. Battles at the top of the world that had brought with it spears of ice and statuesque corpses. But this, this was god magic. A power I had no place in breathing in.

I felt the touch of the spider and the serpent within me, the veins of the Great Tree – the weeds, singing to me, telling me of lineage and history. I saw the snake and the spider dying in the branches of the Ashen Keep, their blood mixing, fusing with the sap. We were all part of each other, etched in prophecy and tasks that were alien to me. The Great Tree of the world wanted me alive.

Grumweed was a particularly nasty form of flora, it tended to strangle any form of life it could catch. I was privileged. It seemed that the grumweed wanted to become a part of me. It enveloped my legs - what was left – nerve endings twitched with what I could only describe as the spark of life. Plant, grumweed – forged by the spark of deities resurrected their Berzerker. Their anointed.

I broke the surface of the dark pool, reborn. Remade, a carrion call of freedom and rage. I screamed, the spider silk ripped from my lips, uncaged in battle, naked in my cries.

An arrow pierced my chest. My sweet sniper had returned to me, eager to finish the job. I plucked the arrow from my chest and snapped it, throwing the fledgling dart aside. Picking up a dead Berzerker’s club from the broken skull of a Gothama witch, I spun the club through my hard fingers, showing my dexterity with the weapon.

More arrows followed. I swiped a few aside. Not all. Some, some found their target – me. But they were little pricks in a Mazak whore.

I could feel the grumweed tighten, my new legs, a gift from the gods, eager to show their worth. I treated it as a call to spill blood, as did the will of the Great Tree.

I could see the sniper begin to panic. Arrows running short, a Berzerker in her sights. The panic was beautiful, a collage of worlds colliding – that of life and death. The grumweed led me to her and she felt the teeth of Golem men crack her head open. I had never felt so much pleasure in opening a skull. Perhaps it had been the thought that only moments ago I had been on death’s very door, the screeching mouth of a dead worm eager to dissolve me into sludge.

I battered the shit out of the sniper’s legs, breaking her knees and probably her feet in my gorgeous furore. I was zealous.

A bitch Gothama shrilled as her scimitar found the meat of my back. I felt that. Inches from my spine, a cold streak that fermented a deep desire to splay her open. I swung my right arm backwards giving her false hope in a valiant kill. She ducked, expecting as such, clad in her leather sarong, alabaster limbs glowing in shaded cool. She was overconfident, sharing her soul with me as my right hand grabbed her throat and my clenched left shattered her thorax. I held the dead puppet of the celestial god, Innax, in my grip and tossed her aside as the Berserker vermin she procrastinated to appease, snubbed out her piffling life.

I picked the sniper up by her skull, the crack giving me grip to inch my fingers inward. Garbled screams fell from her limp mouth. She was holding onto life. Inspired. A staunch advocate for the beatings of hearts. It’s a shame she dealt in death.

I dragged her further through the reeds as she muttered sweet nothings of a girl named Daina. She had loved this one. They always spilt the names of their loves when the brain had been breached. It was if their very thoughts were escaping through the schism, never to return and they were clutching onto the warmth they held close. Perhaps she would find solace in the dark as I had. Maybe not. I didn’t care.

I tossed her into the pit.

The battlefield burned for hours after. Berzerkers and Romni dead, slain. It seemed my people had finally met their end. Maybe that was why the spider and the serpent had come to me, to fashion a new beginning.

I was no longer Berzerker, and yet my mind remained so, my body, half of it, came from the roots of the Great Tree. They had moved me forward, foreseen the demise of the Romni and prepared. To move forward, become something else. To endure beyond.

I saw a batch of Gothama down the slope, taking the heads of Romni and Berzerkers alike. I felt different, and yet not. My Berzerker rage still burned deep and the grumweed fed of it, rallying me to spill blood.

Why me? Why, this? These legs that defied flesh. Why was I alive and not in the pit? I looked down at these new legs as I took refuge behind the grand oak. Dawn was breaking and it cast my new legs in a bizarre hue. Green tendons and pulsing weeds that moved of their own volition, moving relentlessly like a nest of vipers.

Why me?

‘Why me?’

It felt strange to hear my voice.

The mass of weeds and pulsing stem stopped.

Dainty flowers started sprouting from erect stems and I watched the beauty literally flower within my new extremities. Spring personified blazoned my new legs and they found calling in the coming dawn. I looked at the nearest and the head of it started degrading, rotting. A once vibrant vision of summer now blighted by something dank, inherently ancient and cold. The head of the flower gave way to throbbing darkness and a maw that could never reconcile with the premise of hunger. The dead worm came for my throat, and in reprisal I stabbed its face, the inside of its vantablack gullet, its side, its underbelly, and when I ran out of places to stab the foul cunt, I stabbed it in places I had stabbed a thousand time already until it stopped moving and the spider silk that stitched my lips together in battle withered and degraded into nothing and the scream that permeated the pit stopped Berzerker and Gothama in their strides.

I cannot tell you how long I laid there, within the dead worm’s pit, but it grew cold until a Romni saw me in there, breathing, just, exhausted beyond measure. They pulled me from the earthen nest and talked for a while, offering me sap and nunce weed.

It didn’t dawn on me for a while, but I tried moving my legs. Nothing gave. Nothing of anything did. The Romni who had liberated me from the dead worm’s lair sat with me out of courtesy, singing the spider’s lament.

You always know it’s coming, and yet you always expect to swerve it.

You never can.

I didn’t feel anything! And after my head fell to the floor, I realised for one precious moment as the spider crawled toward me everything would be calm soon. Everything would be quiet, finally.

I bear witness to fury, for I am it.