Sauron vs Raest

Raest drove his senses down into the ground, seeking what dwelt there. Earth and bedrock, the sluggish molten darkness beneath, down, down to find the sleeping goddess-young as far as the Jaghut Tyrant was concerned. "Shall I wake you?" he whispered. "Not yet. But I shall make you bleed." His right hand closed into a fist.

He speared the goddess with pain, driving a fissure through the bedrock, feeling the gush of her blood, enough to make her stir but not awaken.

The line of hills to the north lifted skyward. Magma sprayed into the air amid a rising pillar of smoke, rock, and ash. The earth shuddered even as the sound of the eruption swept over Raest in a fierce, hot wind. The Jaghut Tyrant smiled.

Raest spread his arms wide and unleashed his warren. His flesh split as power flowed into him. His arms shed skin like ash. He both felt and heard hills crack all around him, the snapping of stone, the sundering of crags. To all sides the horizons blurred as dust curtained skyward. He faced south. "This is my power! Come to me!"

A long minute passed. He frowned at the hills before him, then cried out and whirled to his right just as Silanah and the four black dragons, all less than ten feet above the ground, plunged over the summit of the hill he'd been climbing.

Raest screamed at the whirlwind of power battering him, his shrunken eyes locked on Silanah's blank, empty, deadly gaze-eyes as large as the Jaghut's head-as it bore down upon him with the speed of a springing viper. The red dragon's jaws opened wide and Raest found himself staring down the beast's throat.

He screamed a second time and released his power all at once.

The air detonated as the warrens collided. Jagged shards of rock ripped in all directions. Starvald Demelain and Kurald Galain warred with Omtose Phellack in a savage maelstrom of will. Grasses, earth, and rock withered to fine ash on all sides, and within the vortex stood Raest, his power roaring from him. Lashes of sorcery from the dragons lanced into his body, boring through his withered flesh.

The Jaghut Tyrant flayed his power like a scythe. Blood spattered the ground, sprayed in gouts. The dragons shrieked.

A wave of incandescent fire struck Raest from the right, solid as a battering fist. Howling, he was thrown through the air, landing in a bank of powdery ash. Silanah's fire raced over him, blackening what was left of his flesh. The Tyrant clambered upright, his body jerking uncontrollably as sorcery gouted from his right hand.

The ground shook as Raest's power hammered Silanah down, driving the dragon skidding and tumbling across the slope. The Tyrant's exultant roar was cut short as talons the length of a forearm crunched into him from behind. A second clawed foot joined the first, snapping through the bones of Raest's chest as if they were twigs. More talons flexed around him as a second dragon sought grip.

The Tyrant twisted helplessly as the claws lifted him into the air and started ripping his body apart. He dislocated his own shoulder in reaching round to dig his fingers into a sleek scaled shin. At the contact, Omtose Phellack surged into the dragon's leg, shattering bone, boiling blood. Raest laughed as the claws spasmed loose and he was flung away. More bones snapped as he struck the ground, but it did not matter. His power was absolute, the vessel that carried it had little relevance. If need be, the Tyrant would find other bodies. Bodies in the thousands.

He climbed once more to his feet. "Now", he whispered, "I deliver death."

-

'And now,' he said, through tattered lips, 'she will die.' Raest's flesh had been torn away, ravaged by the virulent power of the dragons, power that burst from their jaws like breath of fire. His brittle, yellowed bones were splintered, crushed and shattered. All that kept him upright and moving was his Omtose Phellack Warren.

Once the Finnest was in his hands, he would make his body anew, filling it with the vigour of health. And he was near his goal. One last ridge of hills and the city's walls would be visible, its fortifications all that stood between Raest and his greater powers.

The battle had laid waste to the hills, incinerating everything in the deadly clash of Warrens. And Raest had driven back the dragons. He'd listened to their cries of pain. Laughing, he'd flung dense clouds of earth and stone skyward to blind them. He ignited the air in the path of their flight. He filled clouds with fire. It was, he felt, good to be alive again.

As he walked, he continued to devastate the land around him. A single jerk of his head had shattered a stone bridge spanning a wide, shallow river. There had been a guardhouse there, and soldiers with iron weapons-odd creatures, taller than Imass, yet he sensed that they could be easily enslaved.

Jaghut were very different in another way-they did not flaunt their power. And many of their efforts in self-defense were...passive. Barriers of ice-glaciers-they swallowed the lands around them, even the seas, swallowed whole continents, making them impassable

-

At first he sought to subjugate other Jaghut, but more often than not they either escaped him or he was forced to kill them. Such contests held only momentary satisfaction. Raest gathered beasts around him, bending nature to his will. But nature withered and died in bondage, and so found an escape he could not control. In his anger he laid waste to the land, driving into extinction countless species. The earth resisted him, and its power was immense. Yet it was directionless and could not overwhelm Raest in its ageless tide. His was a focused power, precise in its destruction and pervasive in its effect.

Then into his path came the first of the Imass, creatures who struggled against his will, defying slavery and yet living on. Creatures of boundless, pitiful hope. For Raest, he had found in them the glory of domination, for with each Imass that broke he took another. Their link with nature was minimal, for the Imass themselves played the game of tyranny over their lands. They could not defeat him.

He fashioned an empire of sorts, bereft of cities yet plagued with the endless dramas of society, its pathetic victories and inevitable failure. The community of enslaved Imass thrived in this quagmire of pettiness. They even managed to convince themselves that they possessed freedom, a will of their own that could shape destiny. They elected champions. They tore down their champions once failure draped its shroud over them. They ran in endless circles and called it growth, emergence, knowledge. While over them all, a presence invisible to their eyes, Raest flexed his will. His greatest joy came when his slaves proclaimed him god—though they knew him not—and constructed temples to serve him and organized priesthoods whose activities mimicked Raest's tyranny with such cosmic irony that the Jaghut could only shake his head.

It should have been an empire to last for millennia, and its day of dying should have been by his own hand, when he at last tired of it. Raest had never imagined that other Jaghut would find his activities abhorrent, that they would risk themselves and their own power on behalf of these short-lived, small-minded Imass. Yet what astonished Raest more than anything else was that when the Jaghut came they came in numbers, in community. A community whose sole purpose of existence was to destroy his empire, to imprison him.

He had been unprepared.