TARTARUS

CW: Gore

The smoking lungs of the Deserter belch out their sickly flame, and the ice, as ever, recoils.

It is nineteen twenty-six, and the war has raged on for twelve long years. The Deserter brandishes his gun and his saber, and he pounds his booted feet against the muddy ice below him. Muck-caked leather, blood, metal sherd, flechette, shrapnel. He hears one hundred thousand roaring ghosts and screaming artillery shells, and he stands, and opens his mouth, and he, himself, roars at the Adversary.

The Adversary, with his cloak of rats, is an emissary of plague and rot. His crown, pus-slick and bone-wicked, protrudes from the bouquet of skulls adorning his thick, trenched neck, and his great whipping spine-tail whirls and lashes like a centipede's hundredfold death-throe. From the tail extend tails ever-smaller and ever-more brachial, fractalic, forever-expanding and shrinking and bifurcating and twitching and breathing and writhing and coiling.

The Deserter readies his saber, and, with his hair of barbed-wire, and his chest of Sheffield steel and guts of shore-distant oil, and his blood of cordite and Ottoman quicksilver, bellows out his war-cry. His eyes weep electrochemical flame, his tongue vomits mud and senseless roars, and his teeth, where they see fit to sprout within his mouth, are .22 hollow-points.

The Adversary and the Deserter hurl themselves at each other, and the storm forever grows. Ice cracks on their claws and their steel, the muzzles of his weapons sizzle with fresh-rimed frost; one's blood, where it bleeds fluidly, sticks to the other, and merges, and melts, and bubbles.

There is no distinction between them. There is no line wherein one being is divested from its other. There is only carnal violence, and soot, and blood, and rot, and spines, and throats, and shots, and shrapnel, and fire, and hatred. The redwood-bark-subdermis splits as shell and shot divests it from its wooden flesh. Echoes of death and specters of fire lumber and roar through the trenches and the veins and the arteries and the lungs.

The shells rain down. The earth ruptures. The screams grow. The world ends.

There is a collision, and there is gunfire, and they cut eachother into ribbons, and they die, and they die, and they die.

And then the trenches yawn open once more, and the battle begins anew.

Ever-stalking is the Halved, far older, and far newer, with his hide of glass and green-tinged metal, and his long-needle Caledfwlch, and he watches, and he waits. The Adversary, with his beeping electrical heart, stands as the beacon by which the Halved will see his Other return. He waits, for he has seen the Sharpmouth and their Returned, and seen the pain wrought unto them by the Deserter, and knows that such pain will not go unpunished.

“Un diwrnod byddwch chi'n dychwelyd at fy ochr i.”

There is no quiet on the Antarctic front.

The storm shall never die.