Army of the Obsidian Queen
Posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2012
Happy New Year everyone! We have a lot of stories (and some more changes) coming out of Royal Archivist this year, so we hope you stick with us throughout what promises to be a really exciting 2012. To kick off the turn of the calendar, how about something a little different (and 5x longer) here on Monday?
(Language Warning: This post uses a four-letter synonym for “copulate.”)
Army of the Obsidian Queen
The Obsidian Queen did not set out to lead an army, but one follows her nonetheless. Every day, men, women, and even children flock to her banner from far-flung nations from all across her world. They travel by ship and horse and wagon and foot, crossing through untold dangers and lands engulfed by demonic taint. Most do not survive the journey–for every ten who set out to join the Obsidian Queen, eight never lay eyes upon her or the colorful assemblage that obeys her every word.
Whatever world it is on which the Obsidian Queen fights–we know of it only from the report of one lone pergressor who refuses to give its address–it is one wholly dominated by evil and formerly bereft of all hope. Two decades ago, the task of closing a rift between this world and one of the more hateful Other Realities fell to an unlikely fellowship of brave but feckless wanderers.
They failed.
Their failure sealed the planet’s doom, as the various human nations quickly fell, one by one, to the seemingly unstoppable forces of evil.
Not all humans sniveled and whined and bowed their heads in frightened subjugation, though. Some continued to fight despite the impossible odds. For a decade, they succeeded at little more than temporarily liberating some keep or fortified city, only to lose it again shortly thereafter. That changed, though, about eleven years ago, when a young woman–barely more than a girl–proved her pious mettle and in time became the Obsidian Queen. Here are five stories about her and the army she leads.
1. Marnini, the Girl of Courage: A fearful neighbor exposed Marnini’s father, who billeted a company of soldiers on his farmstead–an act banned by their demonic overlords and punishable by death. When a demon of middling power appeared, it grievously wounded the soldier standing guard and called out for his comrades. The other soldiers rushed out to confront the demon but were held at bay by a loathsome aura of discord; Marnini, though, ran out into the yard, took up the fallen soldier’s spear, and drove it deep into the demon’s gut. Blasphemous energy tore down the spear shaft, shattering it and exploding the girl’s arm in a shower of bone and blood and gore. Although the demon barely felt the wound Marnini inflicted, the human soldiers took courage in her act and pressed back the monster, allowing their healer to tend to both the girl and their downed friend.
Enraged by the humans’ attack, the demon fought back, scattering the fearful soldiers and standing triumphant upon the battlefield. It was at that moment that Marnini grabbed the healer’s knife with her remaining hand and plunged it recklessly into the demon’s chest. Perhaps it was her courage or piety, the wholesome blessings of the healer’s knife, or some act of a forgotten but benevolent god–whatever it was, Marnini’s second attack struck a mortal blow to the demon. It fell to the ground and disintegrated into ash.
Both the wounded soldier and Marnini recovered, and later they became friends, then lovers. They conceived a child and he served as her advisor in her rise to power, but he lost his life two years later in a bid to repay the favor that brought them together. Marnini now carries his favorite dagger in a special sheathe formed into her boot, a solitary expression of sentimentality in a world all but bereft of such emotion.
2. Marnini, the Obsidian Queen: At first, few believed the story of the young woman Marnini, but she continued to lead into battle companies of men better-trained and better-armed than herself, proving her valor again and again. Soon, those men who broke away from the traditional armies to follow the one-armed girl were joined as well by women who, like her and the men who followed her, saw no value in slavishly following the old ways–the old ways that had allowed their world to fall in the first place. The first of the men to join Marnini were the famed lancers of her native Talmara, and they too were the first military unit to admit women into their ranks. Marnini continues to directly lead them and they in turn unflinchingly die for her in battle.
Fateminters of Adraba heard the stories of Marnini and braved the demonic hordes separating her from them; those who survived forged for her a magical arm made of dark wood close to the color of her own flesh and fitted with obsidian, rubies, and diamonds. Marnini’s magical arm ends in an obsidian fist carved only to hold a lance, and the lancers of Talmara crafted one for her that the witches of Doana then enchanted. It was later that the fateminters completed a set of lancer armor made of blackened leather and heavily enchanted obsidian. When she first cried out her customary “Follow me!” into battle, dressed in her obsidian armor and obsidian-inlaid magical arm, her followers granted her the title she bears to this day.
3. The Blessed Heroes: Marnini’s four lieutenants–those she hand-picked to lead parts of her army and act as her advisors–are collectively known as the Blessed Heroes.
Armu: Boisterous and big, flaxen-haired Armu wields a hundred-pound hammer of pure elfsilver he forged himself with the soul-flames of dying demons. Or so he claims. Regardless of the true origin of his immense hammer, it nonetheless pulverizes the bodies of even the most powerful demon breeds–and shakes the earth around him–with but a single crushing sledge. Nobody knows where Armu comes from but most appreciate his boundless optimism and unquenchable zeal for life. His admirers (he refuses to lead anyone, but many people follow him anyway) say of him, “Nobody swings as hard as Armu, nobody drinks as hard as Armu, and nobody fucks as hard as Armu.” Marnini accepted that challenge, took Armu as a lover, and with him has so far conceived a pair of stout twins.
Desini: More thinker than warrior, Desini serves the Obsidian Queen as an engineer, demolitionist, and planner. It was Desini’s calculations that determined the size of a floating island large enough to support the Matka ilMoahn, her carefully placed explosives that brought down the demonic siege engines outside Castle Roy, and her plan made on the back of a fleeing horse that prevented the tragedy of Calma Ridge from claiming even more lives. And of all the lieutenants who serve Marnini, only Desini knew her before she became the Obsidian Queen. Desini witnessed the demonic attack on the farmstead that cost Marnini her arm but set her on her current path, for it was Desini’s own brother–Marnini’s father–who brought down the wrath of the demons onto their yard. Telling that story and many others from Marnini’s childhood (often the most embarrassing, of course) seems to bring endless pleasure to the aging engineer, and her gleeful cackles draw out laughter from her battle-worn audiences.
Saga: This young witch, born several years after the fall of Doana two decades ago, descends from the few surviving hexcrafter witches who escaped the early purges conducted by the fearful peasantry. An extraordinarily talented girl, Saga mastered the Soothing Tears at the age of twelve and the Curse of Salt at fifteen. Despite Saga’s youth and the distrusted origin of her witchery, Marnini considers her a trusted friend and talented lieutenant. The Doana witches and Adraban fateminters who follow Saga tell the story of the Battle at Kolomo Sea, when Saga drew the salt from the nearby water to flense their foes with a crystalline wave–and created a pocket of fresh water close to shore the army quickly used to fill canteens and water wagons.
Tan: Wielding a straight blade with a single sharpened edge and squared tip, Tan practices a school of swordsmanship unknown elsewhere in the army. He wears white-on-blue lacquer-wood brigantine armor bearing a helmet formed to resemble the face of a dragon. In battle, Tan fights with fluid grace, never wasting movement or applying more pressure than needed to slash his foes and see their ichorous innards spray out behind the cut of his blade. The footmen who follow Tan tell, retell, and exaggerate the story of how he alone dueled Marnini to a draw, neither warrior landing a single blow on the other. In the more fanciful versions of the story (or are they?), the two of them dueled within a volcano, with their strikes so powerful as to cause it to erupt all around them.
4. The World-Army: Those who join the Army of the Obsidian Queen hail from dozens of nations, brought together under Marnini’s banner for the cause of mutual survival. The largest contingents come from the nations liberated by the army, but small groups (which usually started as much larger ones) trickle in almost monthly from all corners of the world. In addition to Marnini’s core of Talmara lancers, the army contains notable numbers of witches of Doana, Adraban fateminters, Klastan pikemen, Shumo musketeers, Sinixt bombardiers, Haadsæte heavy cavalry, and Chesha archers.
It is the individuals, though, the tiny groups–those who are alone in the crowd among people they cannot understand–who stand out all the more within the army: here is an elderly man with naught but a loincloth, a flint-tipped spear, and a confused expression; there is a matronly woman hiding a swift knife glistening with demonbane poison; yonder is a trio of lithe tumblers, more acrobats than warriors, who dance across battlefields. While it is easy to group together the entire army under one epic tale, in truth it is made up of twenty-thousand stories, similar in some ways but as unique as each individual they represent.
Humans remain humans, though, and such a diverse group cannot exist in perfect harmony. Old rivalries, ancient enmities, and simple misunderstandings escalated to violence constantly threaten to shatter the cohesion of the army. Other forces at work within the larger group help reinforce the army’s solidarity, though. For every scuffle there is laughter, for every theft a trade agreement, for every hurtful defamation the promise of a new friendship. These agreements and friendships always hinge on the mostly unspoken sentiment of “after we have won,” but they continue to form and strengthen nonetheless.
But where does this hope come from? Certainly, Marnini deserves a great deal of the credit, but as remarkable and amazing as she is, she remains human. The Obsidian Queen makes mistakes–and sometimes costly ones. Few have forgotten the tragedy of Calma Ridge, where Marnini opposed the advice of her Blessed Heroes and lost a quarter of the army to a surge of demons–then a tenth of the survivors to desertion. Fortunately for the army, though, such errors are rare.
But still… even Marnini must find her hope spring from something greater than herself…
5. Matka ilMoahn: Part castle, part cathedral, all a symbol of hope–Matka ilMoahn stands atop a kilometer-diameter chunk of granite floating several hundred meters above the ground. Its white-marble walls, gilded decorations, and elaborate stained-glass windows cause it to shine as a beacon to all who have seen it. Behind its high walls wait scores of cannon and artillery pieces, dozens of mortars and trebuchet, and more than five thousand determined minutemen ready to launch all the spells, bullets, and arrows they can at any approaching demonic force.
But a building and its devoted defenders alone cannot give hope, for they are far now from any battle the Army of the Obsidian Queen faces. No, there is something else. Beneath Matka ilMoahn, a hundred meters or more from any surface of the immense floating island, sleeps Marnini’s decisive secret: a living weapon of power known only to the gods of myth. How she knows of it is itself a mystery, but she believes in it to the very core of her being; its existence is as water for the seed of piety planted in her long ago.
Some say, then, that Marnini’s war against the demons is more than one of liberation–it is a holy quest given to her within the marbled walls of Matka ilMoahn, which she visited only once more than a decade ago. She seeks in some forgotten ruin or shattered tomb that which she needs to awaken the slumbering ultimatum that will grant her final, utter, total victory.
Final Thoughts, In-World: Does the Obsidian Queen really exist or is she and her army a product of the active imagination of an unnamed pergressor? If the world does exist, is it listed in the Janus Syndicate’s Index Planetarum Prohibitorum? And if it does exist, does the Bouvillier family know about this demon-controlled world?
Final Thoughts, Meta: There is a clue within one of these stories that shows how this world might connect to the greater Ingressa, should this demon-scarred planet actually exist. If you think you’ve found it, email me at archivist@royalarchivist.com with your guess, and if you’re right I’ll send you a copy of one of the guidebooks of your choice. Good luck! :)
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