Warmonger - SCP Foundation

"Orok," Halyna once asked. "What am I?"

The Klavigar said nothing, but the faintest tilt of his head gestured for her to continue.

"I hear their whispers, Orok. They say I am not unlike the Deva that enslaved our people. I myself am not blind to my own actions. I slaughter and kill and I hate. Every damned mystic refuses to go near me for it, and my hate grows yet. Am I still human?"

Orok said nothing, and for a moment Halyna felt her temper stir. She would not strike her leader - she had learned far too many times the limits of the Klavigar's patience - but even she was prone to irrational actions in the heat of the moment.

"You are my follower," replied the Klavigar. "The Path of Strength guides you, but it cannot define you. Your war protects our people. Is that not enough to satisfy you?"

"No." There were many words she wished to tack onto that answer, but all eluded her. Instead, she raised her right fist, her thumb angled slightly upward. She trusted that Orok would understand.

And he did.

Orok reciprocated the gesture. The Klavigar then raised his fist and struck her, causing her form to explode into bloody mist. He watched silently as the blood slowly gathered again, reforming back into the being known as Halyna Ieva within minutes.

"Your… gift," said Orok. "Of the Six."

"My curse," she corrected. "Legions of my brothers and sisters die while I live on. I am from a bygone era. Like you."

"Like me." He nodded and closed his eye. "And yet, you too will outlive us all."

The Klavigar stood up and gestured toward the horizon. Halyna's gaze followed his arm. In the distance, she watched as others toiled in the fields.

"We are a peaceful people, Halyna," said Orok. "Many of us fight, but the peaceful outnumber us still. Children must be protected. Crops must be tended to. Not everyone has the resolve to kill like you."

"They fight to live. And I…"

Orok nodded. "You fight because you want to. You fight out of vengeance when he took your innocence away. As generations pass, Halyna, our people will forget the resentment and oppression that brought us to the Ozi̮rmok in the first place. We will grow complacent. But you, one of our first-"

"Will never forget."

Her first memory of meeting Orok was seared into her memory. Having killed Subandhu, she left with nothing. She joined the vagrants that made up Ion's revolution in rags, still stained in the blood of that night. She watched as slaves died around her, yet Ion's brilliance shone, rallying the people to push on against the Deva. And by his side was the Cyclops.

Where Halyna struck down one man, Orok slew a thousand. She was a murderer, but he - he was a weapon.

She needed to become like him.

"At times," said Orok, interrupting her thoughts. "I believed that you should not have joined the Path of Strength."

She said nothing.

"Its members believe in honor, in loyalty. But you, Halyna, are selfish. You fight neither for the Ozi̮rmok nor for your colleagues. You call them comrades, but you never truly believed in his words of unity, have you?"

Halyna did not need to respond. She had confessed these to Orok before, the only one she felt would be willing to hear her out. The only one who understood her goals.

"Saarn would have understood," he continued. "Her origins are not unlike yours, Halyna. More than anyone else, she would understand necessity. Of the role you play for our culture."

"I've no longer the wits for deception and poison Orok," said Halyna. "I kill, but from those fields alone, you can pick a score of children who would be more suited for subterfuge than me. I am a weapon."

Orok nodded. "You are that, and more."

Halyna tilted her head.

"You are our warmonger, our reaper. The Six did not curse you with immortality out of capriciousness. They did so because they are cruel gods, incapable of understanding what you truly hate. They see your war as an opportunity for sacrifice, to feast on your kills."

She nodded. She had felt the oceans of emotions and temptations hit her no matter how much she jeered and mocked those wicked angels. Visions of gifts and waves of euphoria would hit her time and again as she conversed with them, insults and ridicule met with more promises of power. If the Archons could understand her, or her hatred of control, they never showed it.

All they knew were false promises and bargains of power.

"I have heard your theories and even I find them absurd," confessed the Klavigar. "'Bloat the angels with corpses until they fall from the heavens.' Killing in the name of the gods until they grow indolent."

"Yet, you never censured me for them, unlike the Ozi̮rmok."

Orok shrugged. "His censures mean nothing to you, and he knows it. We four do. It is why he is comfortable admonishing you, Halyna. As for me, it is not my place to do so."

"'Men of action,'" recited Halyna. "'There is no judgment but for the still.'"

"I think your goals, however reckless, are attainable. The Ozi̮rmok was able to pass the trials of the Six. I have no right to tell you what is and is not possible."

He closed his eyes. "But for now, I have one final task for you, Halyna, before I send you to the West."

Halyna's jaw clenched and she tensed up a little.

"I need you to continue living. To remember."

She blinked.

"You, who hate. You, who remember what it was like under the chains of the Deva, what it was like to be at their whims. You, who remember our shameful history and burns with undying vengeance. Our people may prosper under our crusade, but Adytum will not last. No movement lives forever. Even I will die someday. We will grow complacent. Their leaders will not inherit our will. You, who have been cursed with immortality, can remember what our people refuse to record. Without you, the complete legacy of Adytum would be forgotten. I need you to remember the fires of the first Nälkä, of the first stones thrown, the first chains broken. Continue your crusade against the gods who have shackled you until even they cannot threaten our people again. Will you accept?"

For the first time in decades, a smile graced Halyna's face.

"By your will, Klavigar."

Halyna did not know how many awakenings she had had since her first death. Sometimes returns took mere minutes. Sometimes she found herself alone, buried in the rubble of an ambush of decades past. Sometimes she would stir to the screams of madmen who found her disfigured form, whatever beauty she once had offset by her grotesque lower body.

Sometimes her fellow Nälkä would be by her side, expecting the Scourge to fight for them. It disgusted her to see what had become of the Ozi̮rmok's followers, their lack of drive. Orok's warning had come true: their people had forgotten their fangs.

They chained others, they fattened themselves on spoils, they became the oppressors, and she struggled to see a difference between them and the Deva her people once overthrew. Instead of looking at her actions with fear, tactics she stole from her oppressors, they revered her.

The honeyed words of sycophants disgusted her far more than the wary looks her former companions once gave her did.

She wished Orok was there to scold her, or any of the four. They grounded her, reminded her of the true meaning of her war, that she fought to kill gods. Here… she fought for the pleasures of rich men, using long-forgotten magicks to lay carnage as entertainment for the ruling.

And her hate grew yet.

She hated the Nälkä for how low they had forgotten, terrorizing the weak that she had once belonged to. She hated the Ozi̮rmok for his absence, allowing his followers to become as wicked as they were now. She hated Orok for his acumen, for understanding how pathetic their people would be.

Above all, she hated herself, for allowing herself to be used time and time again, the faintest spark of hope still alive in her heart as she accepted the offerings, believing that her new allegiances would remember what it meant to be a follower of Ion. They all failed her.

In the end, she lost her patience when she stirred in a tube, suspended in an indeterminate liquid, while men and women clad in white observed her and took notes. They spoke in a tongue she was not familiar with, but one word stuck out to her.

Sarkic. An insult from the Men of Iron, the delusional who viewed their crusade as the time of ending. It annoyed her that even in this modern era those nuisances would continue to pester.

She would have moved had she not noticed one slight thing - she was bound. The chains were fragile, a single tentacle could have snapped them all.

Yet that was the breaking point for her.

The chains showed how weak she had become, that mortals believed that a cage as pathetic as that could restrain her. Once she commanded fear and adoration, her very gaze reducing even the mightiest warrior into a ball of flesh and blood.

Now, she was but a curiosity to be studied.

Alarms screamed around her and the Men in White panicked as she burst from her imprisonment with less effort than a jerk. She imaged they thought her dead, not needing but the lightest chains so that she would not crack the glass they kept her in. She wondered how many moons she slept while the inquisitive prodded her body, studying how her tentacles formed. She felt hollow, and an emptiness within her noted that she was missing organs that no amount of hunger-provoked cannibalism could explain.

It mattered not to her. The wicked Six had ensured that even if she were to have her entire head crushed, inevitably she would return. She was their insult to the Nälkä, a recurring nightmare that reminded them their presence still lingered. That every kill she made would be sacrificed to the very gods they were meant to slay.

The Men in White resisted fiercely. She did not know what weapons they used that could hurl chunks of metal at blinding speed, but they did little to impede her advance. Tentacles lashed out from under her, grabbing those who had yet to flee and forcing their bodies to bloat, becoming shields that blocked the projectiles.

She held out her hand and the spilled blood, both her own and her foes', surged to its palm. It wrought itself into a scythe, a gift imparted by Orok on the last day she saw the Old Nälkä. Perhaps he foresaw that her next awakening would not be for decades, long after Adytum was fractured by the world's empires. Perhaps he knew how lonely she would be, the last warrior from the first days of the crusade, that every Nälkä she would ever meet would never understand their origins.

She honored it with the title that Orok gave her, Warmonger.

She hacked away at the Men in White and their black-clad fighters, hate blending with catharsis as Warmonger tore through cloth and armor alike. A savage glee bubbled inside her, bloodlust singing as she moved from corridor to corridor. The lucky died quickly as the cursed scythe cleaved them and sent them to the wicked angels in an instant. The less fortunate had to fight against ever-growing tentacles of blood and bone - piercing them, crushing them, turning their weapons against them.

And the less said of those she wrought her magic on, the better.

The Men in White and Men in Black resisted heavily, she had to admit. Biological weapons caused her to heave even as she flung her diseased limbs at her attackers. Acids melted through her fleshcraft, and she would return the favor by sending her own assortment of dissolving liquid at them.

This was what she lived for. This was how she would fulfill the Ozi̮rmok's dream.

Of her opposers, one stood out. He was a Man in White, of a smaller stature than his peers, yet he stood before her without a weapon.

"Scourge of Iron," he said. Halyna could not resist the widening of her eyes, for the man spoke her tongue. "I have studied your myths. Last warrior of Adytum."

She narrowed her eyes but did not respond.

"I studied the Nälkä," said the Man in White. "The Old Nälkä, those of Ion's time. Yet, you are a mystery to me. Why does Halyna Ieva, a name that even the Grand Karcist would personally admonish, show up across history when the Klavigar do not? Why are you still alive?"

Halyna felt a tightening in her chest. The man confirmed to her everything she had suspected up til that point - that nothing remained of the people she once belonged to.

"Answer me this, Man in White," she said, dispelling Warmonger. "Why should I care, when all my peers and customs have been forgotten?"

The Man in White did not have a verbal response. Instead, he raised his right fist, his thumb angled slightly upward.

Halyna blinked.

She moved toward the man, her tentacles receding into her body. Legs, something she had not used in centuries, carried her before him.

To him, she would have looked like a normal woman.

"Do you understand what you are doing?" she demanded. "You. Challenge me?"

A firm nod.

Halyna stared in disbelief. Slowly a grin graced her face, a genuine one. "So be it." She stretched out her arms to indicate she had no hidden weapons or schemes. She raised her own fist before setting it down.

Then threw a punch in the Man in White's face.

It was not a powerful punch. Her strength had wasted away, as always as she slumbered in recuperation. Centuries had passed since the last time she had fought with only her hands, not since the days of Adytum.

Yet, the man himself was not very strong. Neither was his response, but for her part, she had dispelled all the usual protections she applied to herself.

A raw, unrestricted strike, reckless with abandon and sloppy with strength. It hit Halyna square in the face, and though she regained her bearings soon, she felt blood trickle down from her nose.

Her blood.

They spoke no words to one another. Such was the Path of Strength's duel of honor. All enhanced strength removed. No magic, no diplomacy. The only language that needed to be conveyed was the determination to fight on.

Perhaps the only thing she recognized that still endured into the present.

One blow after another was delivered by both parties, one at a time. Neither tried to block or evade, for that would have sullied the sanctity of the duel. A hook to the left temple dazed Halyna for a few seconds before she reciprocated with an uppercut so terrible that she swore broke both her fingerbones and the Man in White's teeth.

Halyna imagined herself as a freed slave, fighting in Ion's army. During those early days, they could barely be considered carnomancers, having just been freed. She fought with fists and rocks, her only fuel the fervor that the Ozi̮rmok inspired in his followers. A single Deva guard could slaughter a score of her people but they would clamor over their dead bodies, with her using the numbers advantage they had, desperate to strike down her foes with her bruised fists. That was all she could offer to Ion.

Slowly, the Man in White's blows slowed and became weaker. Yet Halyna's grew faster and stronger, bloodlust surging through her veins as memories of fighting in Ion's army clouded her vision. The last time she was truly happy, unburdened with the powers of fleshcraft or immortality. When she could die at any moment, yet fought on carelessly, wholeheartedly devoted to Ion's teachings, the beliefs that together, they could uproot the Deva oppressors and take back their destinies.

Halyna did not know when the man stopped punching or which one of her strikes had finally killed him. Perhaps it was when she grasped his temples and headbutted him. Perhaps one of her strikes had missed his chin and struck his neck. She was unsure of when she stopped punching.

As she heaved, her knuckles bruised and drenched in the man's blood, her hand screaming in pain from all the bones she had dislocated or fractured, she sat down. In her time, a healer would have come forward, or Orok himself, who would save the lives of the fighters. It was an honor battle, and though deaths were not forbidden, it would do little to further the Ozi̮rmok's cause to lose followers before a fight took place.

But Orok was not here. She had killed the man.

She felt the whispers return, the gnawing feeling of the Archons encroaching on her head, demanding the man as a sacrifice.

She picked up Warmonger, and slowly pointed it at the man. She was barely able to hold the weapon, and though she could have used her powers to heal herself of all the superficial wounds, she decided not to.

She swung the scythe, and for the first time in centuries, she claimed the man's soul not as Halyna Ieva, traitor-servant of the Archons.

She was Halyna Ieva, Warmonger of Adytum.