The Crippled God

families. Hands were held, rag-ends clutched, legs embraced. She paused in her journey. She had forgotten how many still lived.
    Forcing herself on, she walked until she stood before Rutt, and then she spun round and raised her arms out to the sides.
‘The city spits us out
We are sour and we are bitter
To taste.
The blind feeders-on-us turn away
As they gorge
As they devour all that was meant for us
All we thought to inherit
Because we wanted what they had
Because we thought it belonged to us
Just as it did to them
They looked away as they ate our future
And now the city’s walls
Steal our wants
And spit out what remains
It’s not much
Just something sour, something bitter
To taste.
And this is what you taste
In your mouths.
Something sour, something bitter.’
     
    Rutt stared at her for a long moment, and then he nodded, and set out along the wide central avenue. Westward, into the Glass Desert. Behind him, the Snake uncoiled itself from its months-long slumber.
    This was something the Snake understood, and Badalle could see it. In the steady, unhurried strides of the children trooping past, in their set faces, bleakness settling with familiarity in thin, wan features. We know this. We have learned to love this .
    To walk. To slither beneath the fists of the world .
    We are the Snake reborn .
    In time, they reached the city’s edge, and looked out on the flat glittering wastes.
    Suffering’s comfort. Like a dead mother’s embrace .

CHAPTER SIX
     
‘Dominant among the ancient races we can observe four: the Imass, the Jaghut, the K’Chain Che’Malle, and the Forkrul Assail. While others were present in the eldritch times, either their numbers were scant or their legacies have all but vanished from the world.
As for us humans, we were the rats in the walls and crawlspaces, those few of us that existed.
But is not domination our birthright? Are we not the likenesses of carved idols and prophets? Do these idols not serve us? Do these prophets not prophesy our dominion over all other creatures?
Perhaps you might note, with a sly wink, that the hands that carved the idols were our own; and that those blessed prophets so bold in their claims of righteous glory, each emerged from the common human press. You might note, then, that our fierce assertions cannot help but be blatantly self-serving, indeed, self-justifying.
And if you did, well, you are no friend of ours. And for you we have this dagger, this pyre, this iron tongue of torture. Retract your claims to our unexceptional selves, our gross banality of the profane.
As a species, we are displeased by notions of a mundane disconnect from destiny, and we shall hold to our deadly displeasure until we humans have crumbled to ash and dust.
For, as the Elder Races would tell you, were they around to do so, the world has its own dagger, its own iron tongue, its own pyre. And from its flames, there is nowhere to hide.’
    Fragment purportedly from a translator’s note to a lost
edition of Gothos’ Folly , Genabaris, 835 Burn’s Sleep
     
    THREE DAYS AND TWO NIGHTS THEY HAD STOOD AMONG THE DEAD bodies. The blood and gore dried on their tattered furs, their weapons. Their only motion came from the wind plucking at strands of hair and rawhide strips.
    The carrion birds, lizards and capemoths that descended upon the field of slaughter fed undisturbed, leisurely in their feasting on rotting flesh. The figures standing motionless in their midst were too desiccated for their attentions; they might as well have been the stumps of long-dead trees, wind-torn and lifeless.
    The small creatures were entirely unaware of the silent howls erupting from the souls of the slayers, the unending waves of grief that battered at these withered apparitions, the horror churning beneath layers of blackened, dried blood. They could not feel the storm raging behind skin-stretched faces, in the caverns of skulls, in the shrunken pits of eye sockets.
    With the sun fleeing beneath the horizon on the third night, First Sword Onos T’oolan faced southeast and, with heavy but even strides, set out, the sword in his hand dragging a path through the knotted grasses.
    The others followed, an army of destitute, bereft T’lan Imass, their souls utterly destroyed.
    Slayers of the innocent. Murderers of children. The stone weapons lifted and the stone weapons fell. Faces wrote knotted tales of horror. Small skulls cracked open like ostrich eggs. Spirits fled like tiny birds .
    When the others left,