Hounds of God

*I am writing to you, Mighty Khagan*

*My fastest courier is racing towards you.*

*I’ve heard you had left your castle,*

*and for four weeks you’ve been sitting in your saddle*

*Tell me, Magnanimous Khagan,*

*Why does the wind from the east carry fumes*

*and the sunset had sunk into a bottomless vat*

*of blood?*

Telek’s eyes were open, but he could not see. His ears unplugged, but he could not hear either. At least at first. Telek swam in total darkness. Not a single thing in this realm of nothingness beside him. He tried moving, but the overwhelming void surrounding him made it difficult for the man to tell whether he was walking or stuck in place.

The sound of fire crackling in the distance distracted Telek from the overwhelming emptiness around him. Still unable to feel anything but the odd noise bouncing off of his eardrums. He attempted to walk towards the source of the noise but was unsure if he was getting any closer.

A distant scream turned Telek’s blind attention elsewhere, followed by a terrible growl. Fear began sinking its teeth into the man’s body. The sound of his heartbeat became audible as the approaching growls and cries got louder and louder all around Telek.

Heat, noise, light…

Impossibly bright light violated Telek’s eyes, forcing him on all fours as he groaned in pain. The light dimmed away before the confused man. Confusion soon gave way to terror mixed in with tinges of grief.

The man found himself perched on top of a hill overlooking a white castle from above. He was watching as the white castle was under attack by a legion of monstrously gigantic black wolves. The wild beasts were pouncing on the inhabitants of the castle. Tearing everyone in sight limb from limb and devouring whatever they could get their jaws around. Telek watched in horror as the beasts breathed fire at the buildings. Like dragons dressed in wolf skins, the beasts were exacting divine revenge upon the inhabitants of the white castle. Mustering his courage, Telek reached for his sword, only to realize he was, in fact, naked.

“A dream…” a single monotone thought raced all across the halls of mind. Before long, the man floated in the air, observing passively the destruction of the white castle. Unable to turn his sight away or stop the carnage.

The cries of innocent women and children echoed in the air, augmented by scornful and gleeful howling and snarling of the demonic wolves below.

One wolf had noticed the man and stared him dead in his eyes, sending shivers down his spine. There was something incredibly human about the eyes of that horrible monster. With a human arm locked in its maw, the beast stood upright, and with a sickening crunching sound, its fur and hide cracked. Patches of canine matter fell off, making the noise of a wet piece of meat falling onto the ground.

Telek’s heart and mind raced, unable to believe what he was witnessing. The wolf was turning into a man right before his eyes!

Before long, the wolves were gone, and in their stead stood men. Northmen. Tall, blonde, and sturdy. Their forms were painfully familiar to Telek. They had destroyed a portion of his country a few years ago. Their prince mockingly presents himself more like the Khagan than a Northman.

While Telek was getting lost in thoughts, the Northmen in his dream were rebuilding the country they had destroyed moments before. Erecting new settlements and castles as far as the eye could see.

Erecting cross-shaped idols to their new god, one not too dissimilar to that of the khagans. A strange religion in which the believers profess their god has died to absolve them of all wrongdoing. Telek had seen those strange people in the capital before.

The thundering noise of hooves crashing against the ground echoed in the background, getting louder and louder with each moment; coming from the east. Telek turned his gaze and saw an ocean of horses marching towards the Northmen and their cities. The endless fleet of horses trampled over everything. Destroying and crashing everything in their path. They brought an end to the Northmen’s rule. They’ve liberated the land from the Northmen in their endless march westward.

Telek felt relieved for a moment, thinking that his people had reclaimed their place in the world. Yet his cruel dream immediately reminded him that this was not to be. A mountain rose in the east. It grew and grew until it covered the horizon. The dreaming man could make out hair covering the mountain as it shook and moved beneath him, slowly revealing itself to be a nightmarish entity.

A super-sized bear, so large it defied the human imagination.

The beast lumbered forward, trampling everything in its path. Demolishing all signs of civilization and human life beneath its massive paws. The beast must’ve noticed the man floating above it as it stood on its hind legs; covering the sun and the entire sky. It reached out toward him, much to Telek’s horror, with a paw. Telek tried floating away but found himself unable to escape the beast's grasp.

Horror once more gripped the man as the claws of the gargantuan animal grew closer to his body. Sharp pain replaced the terror when the bear pierced the man with one of its claws and pulled him over its seemingly endless maw.

Telek thought he was dead for a moment, before remembering he was dreaming, and then he became convinced he was about to awake from the terrible dream. Yet again, he was terribly mistaken as the pain of being snapped in half in the jaws of the god of all bears nearly snapped his mind in half. The sensation of a thunderbolt riding through his body and the sensation of a thousand arrows piercing him at the waist combined with the sensation of his guts catching on fire forced an anguished roar out of his lungs as he once more found himself in a pit of empty unforgiving darkness.

Floating in the pool of void for a few moments, the pain subsided from Telek’s body. He was still dreaming when he overheard people screaming in the distance. The language was foreign but somewhat similar to the Northmen and the Slavs he knew. Thunder erupted all around him as he tried to catch his bearings.

Lightning exploded next to Telek in a bright flash of light. Chunks of torn soil flew in the air along with men dressed in strange clothes. Telek’s heart and mind had raced yet again. The area had been familiar. These were lands belonging to the Khagan for sure. He had been there before.

Telek found himself between two armies, one of the Northmen and one of the Slavs, led by a giant of a man who looked somewhat similar to himself, facially. Both armies wielded no swords, no bows, no axes. They wore strange coats and hats, rolling around strange wheeled barrels and carrying long flutes.

The Slavic army pointed its flutes at the Northmen and with the cracking of thunder, men in the Northmen army started dropping dead.

"What are those? Invisible arrows?!" Telek thought to himself as one of the wheeled barrels thundered right behind him. The Northmen fired one of their wheeled barrels, expelling a large sphere that tore through Telek’s body. It sent shock waves of pain through what had remained of him as it flew into the army of the Slavs. The orb landed, tearing apart men and soil upon impact.

“What is this madness?! Such might… is this…”

A barrage of invisible arrows tore straight through the dreaming man and the soldiers behind him. Pain and fear gripped at the remnants of his form as he floated through the air, through space, and through time.

Sunlight reflected from piles of snow below irritated the scotched and torn body of Telek as he floated above a land he could no longer recognize. His fear only intensified as he witnessed the terrors of a war between gods dressed as men below him.

Corpses dressed in thin coats, clutching their fire flutes. Black and blue from frostbite, terrifyingly thin. Strewed on the ground below him. A field of dead, decomposing bodies. Some were still alive, too weak to move, too weak to fight their apparent hunger.

Telek flew forward towards a great city, abandoned, emptied. Filled with the starving and dead soldiers freezing in the unyielding, icy grasp of Erlig Khan.

One such soldier huddled over the remains of another, his hands buried deep within the wounds of his dead comrade, or perhaps an enemy. His face was buried in the wounds as well. He looks up at Telek, revealing a bloody face. The northern soldier was chewing on a piece of human flesh, preserved by the insufferable, blistering cold.

All traces of humanity are missing from the man’s eyes.

Disgust filled Telek’s being. Such a condition is unforgivable. Even in the absence of food, one mustn’t spill the blood of another. Most definitely one mustn't consume the flesh of fellow men. The Northmen were surely to be sent to the Tamag for eternal torture in the flames of the Black Khan.

The cross-shaped idol hung from the bloodied soldier’s neck, prompting Telek’s body to react in scornful disgust. Before long, a divine burst of wind swipes him away into another land and another time.

Telek saw a massive chariot made up of iron and steel racing through a forest, running over fallen trees and rocks like they were nothing. Truly divine technology. Each chariot was equipped with a long and thin tubular device not too dissimilar to the firebreathing devices on Roman ships. A thundering roar came out of one of the metal chariots before a fiery blast erupted in the distance. The force of the blast had sent the dreaming man adrift into the distance as the winds from the blast tore through his broken body while flames ate away at a little hut barely visible from Terek’s perspective.

“A Greek fire with the capacity to burn even the mountains. This is impossible… Tengrii… how is this possible?” Telek begs to know as the currents of time swept him to a different place and a different place.

Above an island, a mountain in the sea, Telek is observing a quiet piece of heavenly landscape, uninterrupted by the Northmen or any human. A place of complete serenity and silence. Telek’s entire body aches from the endless travel through space and time. Chunks of his body were missing, and others barely hang on by threads of skin and muscle. The nightmare seemed to have reached its conclusion as Telek’s body was sinking towards the ground below.

And then, in a single instance, the roar of ten thousand lions in unison with the crack of an equal amount of lightning bolts echoed throughout the sky. The sun seemed to have fallen right before his eyes into the ground.

A small light shone from the ground at first, but then it grew, and grew and grew until it covered the entire world in a bright burning light of a dying sun as it devoured everything in its suicidal path of destruction.

The heat of the solar fire caught Telek and burnt his body almost entirely to ash. Nothing but his charred skull was left to float in the air. Higher and higher the remnants of the dreamer flew as a smoke cloud took shape beneath him. With each passing second, the cloud grew until it took the shape of a mushroom many times larger than the largest trees.

Violent burning winds tossed even higher into the heavens until he saw a gigantic bird of metal hover above. At that moment, he also noticed that the sun had remained in place. His soul pounded like a war drum within the confines of his skull as the fear grasped at whatever remained of his form.

The dreaded realization that the cataclysm he had just witnessed was a human invention slowly sunk in, but then he saw the man-shaped thing inside the metal bird. He heard it speak a language quite similar to that tongue of the Khagan’s northern enemies, which made his terror even more tangible. His mind wasn’t able to wrap itself around the sheer amount of destruction birthed by the hands of these men. He wasn’t able to even digest the pain he was feeling, but before long, all of that was gone.

*I am writing to you, dead Khagan!*

*Because today in a fair battle*

*You won’t die of fair wounds,*

*for I’ll put you down like a rabid dog!*

*Do not rape your gods*

*They are powerless! Because the light shines*

*over the efforts of my armies,*

*in their path towards sacred victories.*

*Across sleeping forests, through the stars at night,*

*straight through the winds, on which we sharpen our swords*

*on the carpets of wild grass - I want to come at you!*

Telek had awoken in his tent, covered in a cold sweat. His body was sore and his mind racing. It was a dream, a vision, a prophecy of a future to come unless the Khagan were to be warned and reverse the course of action of the Northmen. They had to be stopped and put to the sword or else they’ll destroy the world in a hellfire.

Too preoccupied with thoughts of his dream, the shaman remained oblivious to the sound of horses galloping around his tent. Single-minded in his intention to reach his lord. He was adamant about relaying the contents of his dream to him. Telek dressed and prepared for a journey to the capital. The moment he set a foot out of his tent; an arrow landed right in its center. The sharp pain sent the shaman tumbling backward, causing more pain. He screamed in anguish as the sound of horse hooves became clearer. Fear once again gripped his heart as he saw the approaching horse of Northmen, Slavs, and Pecheneg horsemen all around.

Another arrow hit in the gut, forcing blood out of his mouth. The pain was almost tangible, unbearable, and all-encompassing. Like a fire burning deep inside of his body.

Another arrow lodged in his shoulder blade, driving the air out of him, piercing a lung. He felt like he was drowning. Each breath was so much more painful than the last. He fell down; the pain started fading, in its stead, a deathly chill gripped his heart. Telek started lamenting that his blood was staining the sacred ground beneath his feet. Everything seemed to get duller and more distant, but one thing remained as clear as day. The striking image of the death god before him. A pale, stocky, clean-shaven-headed figure clad in white robes with a single blonde lock hanging at the side of its face. Blue eyes like the water of the sea, filled with rage and bloodlust. The dreaded northern prince.

“Have we sinned so much you’d feed us to your hounds, Tengrii?” the dying shaman questioned before proudly pulling himself up to his feet. His gaze met the longing gaze of a starving Pecheneg wolf begging to get his filthy claws on its prey. The Pecheneg stared at the prince of the Northmen and mouthed something unintelligible to the shaman. Although barely audible, the disdain was quite audible, even to the dull senses of a dying man.

The prince nodded and barked something. Strangely enough, the shaman could still hear enough to make out the word for “head” in his enemy’s wretched tongue. The Pecheneg’s hungry gaze turned towards Telek again. In an instant, his sword sliced across the shaman’s neck, nearly decapitating him.

Indescribable pain flooded the mind of the shaman, as he sank into the pits of darkness presiding over the realm of the dead.

His entrails spilled over the steppe, not unlike butchered cattle and swine. Punishment for the sins of his people. It's only befitting that the messenger of the gods to men would become the sacrificial feast of the ravenous hounds spawned from the wrath of the heavenly khagan of all creation.