The Marches Campaign

Scott

The War Against Nahool
The Great Kingdom, it is obvious, needs maintain her preeminence through the studied application of force and puissance against the full panoply of rebellions, usurpations, calumnies, and vendettas which irregularly (if predictably) beset a foremost nation. While Godly Men do not hanker with unseemly blood-lust after such affrays, if the full truth be told, it is not meet that Man should live his life without conflict. And even now, it is said, the anathema Sorcerers of Astibaine have once more lit their balefires on the Kingdom's border, portending controversy with not only Sorcerers but Orcs and filthy Underworld beasts.

But the conflict with which the instant account is concerned was set into motion perhaps thirty years ago when the lusty but otherwise blameless knight Sir Blais Per Drax was caused, by wicked artifice, to engage in unnatural congress with a feminine simulacrum of vegetable origin, perhaps a quickened mandrake root. Sir Blais unsurprisingly went mad and to this day stalks the Marches, striking the heads off all he encounters in his guilt-wracked frenzy.

The by-blow of this blasphemous intercourse was ill-formed, but possessed of inhuman vitality and hideous perspicacity, and reached its full growth within five years. More to the point, the thing wore humanoid semblance and wielded formidable and alien powers of the mind, of magnitude and character unfamiliar in the annals of history, that could bend the wills of Unlawful Men and wrack the earthly forms of even faithful Disciples.

Calling itself Nahool, and marshalling its terrible might, the Chaotic bulb-thing bound to itself an unwholesome coalition of renegades, Warlocks, Anti-Clerics, Skraelings, lunatics, brigands, and even certain treacherous Marcher Lords, and made ruthless war upon the Great Kingdom for a period of not less than five years.

Nahool's motivation is to this day unclear. What is known is that the rapacity and brutality with which the war was prosecuted by each side is unparalleled in military history; not even the royal bloodline was spared, and the innocent Crown Prince was struck blind and cretinous by a particularly virulent Sending, a perfidious blow which wounds the Kingdom to this day. For their part, the knights and myrmidons of the Kingdom perhaps pursued retaliation for the unwarranted aggressions with an alacrity not explicitly sanctioned by Scripture.

Though the Golden Hind banner of the moribund Rump clan flew over no battlefield during this War, Tegel (like other March villages) was not unrepresented. The usual haphazard contingent of smallfolk set forth, some distinguishing themselves with valor and considerably fewer returning to the village. Most notable among these last is the current Mayor of Tegel Village -- Ternelmor, who acquitted himself in exemplary fashion and earned a battlefield commission during his years of service, and who witnessed the fall of Nahool.

On the Fields of Novad, within sight of the City Afar, the King himself took to the field, surrounded by his sworn Lictors, his glorious Griffon Knights winging overhead, against the gore-spattered Horde of Nahool. The High Wizard Trevilian Sagamundus called upon fell powers to shield the King against Nahool's invisible assault, and then slew the fibrous monstrosity in a single counterstroke, an explosion of pulp and sap -- though the High Wizard himself fell a lifeless, desiccated husk, consumed by the effort.

The Horde was broken and its command positions overrun by the King's best men, under his own able leadership; the Anti-Clerics of Nahool's staff were martyred or captured, in either case to be borne aloft above the walls of the City Afar by crucifix, red-hot cage, or inverted strappado, there to serve as object lessons in the folly of contention with the divinely ordained Font of Civilization.