The Lore Anthology: Lore of the Underlings: Episodes 1 - 5 by John Klobucher

Treasured ones, fathers and fathers before Ayrie and me. But you were there boy, you knew them all. And when the young Semperess herself, the beautiful Amyly, gave them the gift of a farewell song, you heard each note from her fabled lips. I know but the naked words:
     
    Three thousand, three hundred, thirty-three
    Heroes every one
    Cast to dwell in this hellish place
    To keep the blood of their people safe
     
    Left alone to wander lost
    In wastes no foe would know or brave
    Hidden for some fearsome day
    Foreseen…
     
    Three thousand, three hundred, thirty-three
    Jewels in the Semperor’s vault of souls
    Treasured in our hearts to hold
    Forever
     
    “It is said she sang as an angel… from childhood raised a Voyce of the Court, but enchanted in time the Semperor so… he fell in desperate love… and banished his first to take her as bride… What does an angel sound like, boy ?…”
    Fyryx snapped back with a start, having nearly slipped into dreamy sleep. “Oh, I’m sorry Ary… Arrowboy… I must have… So, the counting…
    “First, the Guard. That was easy. For thirty-three there were and thirty-three there would always be. Fiercest fighters of all the known. Bravest of brave, true to the bone. One for each sector of Syland. Twenty-two bore the bounty of our oceanlands’ twin tides, sibling shores of brothers in arms never breached, whence rivers rose as blood aflow from the rim of the rugged east, running red by the stormy Syar Sea and westward down to drown in the thirsty Sea of Mer’n, deep blue but bedeviled — these gave us the outer Guard, proud soldiers of the ‘syr’. Eleven more were nobler still, warriors all of the inner ‘ull’, the sectors of secret, landlocked and walled, which held the Semperors’ city strong and ringed this wild heart, our home. Where you were born, Arrowboy.
    “Next were the elders, we knew we’d need to tally those. They tended to die… though age and ill-health were the least of their woes. It seems that’s why the Semperor, so wise and well served by the eyes of spies, ruled their number so high as three hundred.
    “Remember old Cornox, the boven man? Just a day before our departure, as Ayrie and I picked up pricklets in a thornblind down by the tar pool’s edge, we heard him come with another for a sit unseen on the round rocks. The other whispered a bit, but fell silent with a slap. Then the boven man began. In a voice that rattled of death he wheezed a musty tale, but nothing like we knew, all of the elders’ origin, of how they came to be. We couldn’t believe our ears and listened hard with all we had. This story was thick with politics. A lesson in the leader’s art, some of it dark.”
    Fyryx coughed up something in his throat to make it go raspy and rough. “It went like this…”
     
    So you believe the rhymes of children, do you? Songs of the elders’ election? O, how they were handpicked, selected from the wisest and most steadfast of all the land! Each by the touch of the Semperor himself, Poxum LVIII, the Foreknowing, Marshal of the Guarding Armies, Pilot Admiral of the Two-Seas Fleet, Keeper of the City at Syar-ull. Ooo, yes indeed. Then celebration! Their affirmation, solemn and warm, in the great cathydra’s Heroes Hall at Thynes, and the adoration of thousands strong, a throng awaiting them that night, beyond the storied rosewood doors…
    Now surely that’s what some saw. But another side of the stone there was, the side in the soil with crawling things. Do you catch my meaning? It wasn’t just the good and pretty that the Semperor picked. No, he was too clever not to toss some gutworms and bloodgrubs into the mix and be rid of them easy and quick.
    So for every two of merit anointed he chose as third a foe, a voice of dissent appointed for the Wilderness to swallow up silent. From popular prayerman Xole of Mer’n-syr who preached of the Semperors’ power grown too strong, to the ancient Sons of the Shadow Guard forever claiming a