Grendel's Warband for Conquest Last Argument of Kings #PathOfConquest

Drekki stalked among the stones, his flame red hair slowing behind him in the wind like the lazy floating embers of a smouldering fire. He approached the throng of dispossessed that sat around the bonfire waiting for him. Shadows flickered across the rune marked rocks he was picking his way through.

As each shadow caressed a rune or pictogram another truth was opened and revealed to Drekki, moving darkness pointing out truth and prophecy.

All around him the mad and dispossessed from ice in the far north watched him with the eyes that gleamed a passion that was only felt by the truly fervent or those touched with visions.

And they had been touched. Where Drekki walked visions and dreams haunted those that had lost, those that mourned, those that the cold had stolen from them. Like those shadows he now watched, visions and dreams flickered from him like shadow from flame. 

Dreams of a void beyond the ice, a wyrm that devoured all it gazed upon, of a terrible darkness that swam beneath the ice. A darkness that was making its way south like cracks spreading from shattering ice.

They knew that they had to follow, that Drekki somehow was guiding them south for a reason, and for that they were loyal. They would throw themselves into combat with wild abandon. Tearing at their enemies with blade or blooded fingers, like frenzied animals knowing their only way out was forward. They knew they had a purpose guided by this fire that walked.

Drekki, smiled as he looked at his devotees. He knew the truth of what laid beneath the ice. The horror that was coming. He knew that on the ice only the strong would survive and that the Einharjer and their blooded descendants could stand against it. Like the times before when they fought the Jotnar, they would be the ice storm that would cut down the enemies of the Nord.

Yet Drekki had a plan. To take his followers and the Blooded Grendel and forge a weapon of them. A spear to drive into the heart of this darkness, a spear forged from the mad and the monstrous.

Was that not what the Einharjar were now he thought to himself, was this warhost not the perfect legacy of these fallen legends? Not flawless divine beings that was the fad in the city, but warriors and killers that were red in tooth and claw.

‘My children,’ he began as he stared at the madmen in their blackened tattoos that surrounded him, he made eye contact with each as he stalked around the assembled warriors, the flickering flame casting shadows across his aging face.

‘I have seen a truth in the shadow of the fire, a darkness is coming and we must act…..’

The killers howled in response.