Raid on Pyandonea, Book Five

War-Wife Vjali gritted her teeth in anger. She had just watched her husband die. She was shocked, and angry, and mournful. She hefted her axe into the air and looked about, as if looking for something to kill, preferably an elf. Unfortunately, none were present - besides the elf-slave translators, but they were still needed - for the Atmorans had taken no prisoners during the initial battle. That was for later.

Without an elf to behead for some small solace, she went on to do what needed to be done.

"Everybody aboard the faering! We're going to search for my husband!"

As Vjali and those who accompanied her in the faering rowed out, the sea suddenly grew violent, as if angry at the Atmorans as it had been before the crossed the Mist-Veil. Dreadmund, bearing Orgnum's corpse in his arms, burst out of the water and into the air. The violent waves of his emergence shoved the faering aside and nearly submerged it, but those aboard it, as well as those aboard the longboats in the distance, ignored the waves and watched in awe as Dreadmund, in flight, sank his fangs into Orgnum's carcass, ripped out his heart, and flung it north-east into the horizon with a mighty flick of his long neck. Then he dropped Orgnum into the sea. And then Dreadmund fell and landed in the Snow Whale's faering. Those aboard the faering sat agape, staring in awe, awe that he had survived.

He looked up, grinning. "I think we're here to stay."

A month later, Dreadmund and his followers had adapted to the land of Pyandonea and claimed a bloody, chunk of it as their own. At first, their outpost had been a mere camp on a beach, but it had grown and it was alternately called Smallwall and Narrowwall (for the wall was too small to be called broad, and the beach was too narrow to ever hold a broad wall). At first, they knew nothing of the land, but they stole the oracle bones of Hermium who was a friend of the Sea Elves and who the Atmorans hated as though he was an old enemy. From the oracle bones, they learned to navigate the reaching kelp without being caught (which, luckily, they had not encountered during the initial battle) and they learned to effectively fight the Sea Elves and their sea serpents, to successfully raid and pillage their towns and villages. They learned that the huge beetles the Sea Elves used to build ships lived in the jungled interiors of the islands, though the Atmorans rarely saw them and never fought them, for they hated the jungle. They even learned some Sea-Elvish: words for insults, words for battle cries, and words for ordering the Sea Elves they captured about.

They had learned, too, that there were as many kinds of serpent as there were kinds of dragon. Though the sea serpents - who were lesser—could not do thus, many of the serpents could, more or less, Thu'um with their eyes. The most common examples were those serpents that shot jets of fire, streams of frozen wind, or both from their eyes (but never both at once, of course). There were serpents that could drain men's vitality with a glance, serpents that could Stare men unto stone, serpents that could Stare men's weapons out of their hands, serpents that could look somewhere and move there in an instant, and on and on.

As the Atmorans explored further and further into Pyandonea, the islands packed tighter and tighter together, until some branches of the sea looked more like canyon rivers than ocean waters. They found waxy octopus elves, a giant who howled "Ilyadi" and who was like the karstaag-men except that he had more eyes, beaked reptiles with domed shells, and a wide variety of bizarre fish. They also found a great many rewards for their exploration: a shield that struck those who beheld it with fear, a flask that made the imbiber briefly immune to magicka, a sword which spread the injuries of a single enemy to all nearby enemies with each cut, and a chest filled with gold which, if emptied, refilled by the same time the next day. Those rewards have different names today: the first was called Fearstruck before it was destroyed, the second was called the Flask of Something-or-Other, the third disappeared even before it could be named, and the fourth was dubbed Orgnum's Coffer.

And we can't forget their raids on the cities of the Sea Elves, where they claimed those treasures and captured Sea Elves as Stuhn had taught them. The cities ranged from a city built of beetle shells to a city of mixed High Elf crystals and Wood Elf plants, from a city of of ships, bridges, and scaffoldings afloat at sea to an underground city swarming with serpents. The Atmorans raided them all, one by one, and stole from them amid chaos and violence.

There were rumors among the Sea Elves, extracted from those that the Atmorans captured, that the King Orgnum was gathering a fleet to push the Atmorans out. The Atmorans told them that Orgnum was dead, and they agreed, but insisted that he was also gathering the fleet and that they should flee. In response, the Atmorans simply shrugged, assuming that the Sea Elves were just nuts or that maybe Orgnum had turned himself into some sort of Draugr-Mage, or that he had escaped through trickery.