Chapter 190: Those Beyond the River!
Though many would refer to all 72 as Dukes, the lowest among them are the Counts and the Knights, and even these are terrible beyond what most Warriors of the Lands of Stone could survive encountering. A Count commands legions of lesser demons the way a Chieftain commands a tribe, and a Knight carries power enough to shatter the walls of any Sworn settlent without slowing. They are the foot soldiers of the 72, the ones sent to test borders and probe weaknesses, and entire tribes have been erased from the Lands of Stone by Knights whose nas were never recorded because no one survived to write them down.
Above them sit the Marquises, and the Marquises are where the old records begin to fail. The Shamans who docunted these beings did so from accounts given by survivors, and survivors of encounters with Marquises are rare enough that the accounts contradict one another in ways that suggest the Marquises themselves may have been altering what the survivors rembered.
The 7th Marquis Aamon is recorded as having walked the battlefields of three fallen empires and consud the souls of their rulers while their armies watched and could not intervene. The accounts say his presence alone caused Warriors below the Eighth Circle to forget their own nas.
The Dukes stand above even these. There are those among the 72 who hold this rank, and their power is such that the old Shamans stopped attempting to asure it and simply recorded its effects. Where a Duke walks, the land rembers fear for generations afterward. Where a Duke feeds, the spiritual fabric of the region thins so severely that Ancestral communion becos impossible for decades. The 8th Duke Barbatos was recorded in the oldest surviving texts as a being who could see across ti and distance simultaneously, who could speak to every bird and beast in a territory and turn them against the humans living among them, and whose appetite for young souls was so refined that she could taste the difference between a child raised in love and a child raised in neglect.
The Princes sit above the Dukes, and the Princes are not recorded in any text that has survived intact. What remains are fragnts, sentences torn from scrolls that were burned by the very Empires that commissioned their writing, because the knowledge contained within them was deed too dangerous to preserve. The 3rd Prince Vassago is ntioned in one such fragnt as a being who could see what was, what is, and who used this sight not for wisdom but for the precise identification of which souls would taste best at which mont of their lives.
Another fragnt, attributed to a Sangoma whose na was struck from all records, states simply that the Princes do not negotiate because negotiation implies the possibility of an outco they have not already chosen.
Above the Princes, the old texts grow silent.
Not because there is nothing above them, but because what sits above them was considered too terrible to commit to any dium that human hands could hold. The Shamans called it the First Throne. The Sangomas called it the Mouth That Does Not Close. The fragnts that survive from the oldest era, before the Three Pillars existed, before the Covenant was founded, before the Dominion learned to spell its own na, refer to it only as the Demon Emperor!
The Light of The Emperor.
What little can be pieced together from the surviving records paints a picture that the mind resists holding. The Demon Emperor does not rule the 72 because he conquered them. He rules them because the 72 were born from him. Every Duke, every Prince, every Marquis and Count and Knight erged from the substance of his being the way fingers erge from a hand, and they remain connected to him the way fingers remain connected to a palm. When the Demon Emperor wishes to act in the Lands of Stone without crossing the River himself, he extends a hand. Literally.
The old texts describe a ritual through which the Dukes and Princes can channel a fraction of his power into the mortal world, a manifestation they call the Hand of the Demon Emperor, and this manifestation alone carries enough force to reshape the geography of whatever it touches.
The Shamans who first encountered this manifestation did not survive to describe it themselves. Their apprentices described it for them, having watched from distances great enough to preserve their lives but not great enough to preserve their sanity. One such apprentice, a woman whose na is recorded only as Amahle, wrote the following before she stopped speaking forever.
"It reached down from a sky that had turned the color of old blood, and where it touched the earth, the earth did not break. It did not shatter or crack or crumble. It simply stopped being earth. What remained was not a crater. It was an absence. The land itself had been consud, and the souls of everything that had lived upon it had been consud with it, and the silence that followed was not the silence of death but the silence of a place where nothing had ever existed to die."
She wrote nothing else. She lived for forty more years and never spoke another word.
The 72 do not invade the Lands of Stone because they must. They do not really cross the River because hunger drives them or because territory compels them. They cross because consumption is what they are. It is not their purpose. It is their nature, the way fire does not choose to burn.
The River of the World holds them back not through strength but through ancient agreents forged in an era when beings powerful enough to negotiate with the Demon Emperor still walked the Lands of Stone.
Those beings are gone now.
The agreents remain, but the hands that enforced them have long since turned to dust. And on the other side of the River, the 72 have been patient for a very long ti.
Patience, among beings who do not die, is a terrifying strategy.
- Compiled from forbidden archives across three territories, sealed by order of The Hallowed Voice, The Obsidian Throne, and Emperor Vakochev.
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