Supreme Leader Yun has spent centuries safeguarding his people from the wrath of a spiteful, hateful god.

  Today would be the greatest moment of his life.

  They sat chest deep in a pool of water within a grove of peach trees. Pressed to his wife’s side, he held her shoulders under her pale fur as her grip threatened to crush his other hand. Every groan made her squeeze harder somehow. He would let her hold him as hard as she needed. Her snout widened to howl her pain into the cold night sky, mixing with the chime of bells roped to the boughs.

  The other bray-shamans had been crushing herbs and mushrooms into powder that they poured into the pool. Others chanted, stamping their staves as they roared their prayers to the Ur-father: for protection, for strength, for blessings, for life.

  Ironhorns from every tribe brought forth offerings. Servants of the Anathema, agents of the death god, blind aquilans captured during raids. Some of them soldiers, some of them priests, many whatever riff-raff were that could be snatched up. They would be made blinder still when they were held down to the pool, their eyeballs plucked out to spill their blood as they screamed. The eyeballs were collected and pureed into another slurry to be added to the broth.

  She howled again. It pained Yun to hear, but it was inevitable. Mogala was strong. She could push. She could do this.

  The mixture of blood and powder had turned the water into a discolored, mucous concoction. When the Imperials were bled for all their worth, the ironhorns mangled their bodies into chunks and paste as more ingredients. They joined the Bray-shamans in chanting, professing their grisly efforts in the name of the Ur-father: their battles, their victories, their kills, their desecrations.

  Lily pads and flowers were brought from the great bog. They were lowered into the pool, where they drifted along the surface guided by the wind and the ripples caused by Mogala’s knees thrashing about.

  The shamaness between Mogala’s legs announced that the crown was out. She no longer needed to push, but to relax, to stretch rather than tear.

  She huffed through the contractions as the head came out, then the shoulders, then the body. She panted from exhaustion and relief. The shamaness brought up the baby, a girl, umbilical cord trailing from her front, to be brought into the arms of her mother.

  A daughter. Mogala, the Chief Bray-Shamaness, had given life to a daughter.

  The daughter cried out, the song of life, the proof of air in lungs, the voice of a beating heart. By her buds, she would share the same horns as her mother. Mogala, unable to speak, lethargic as she was, looked up to her husband and raised her arm toward him to say without words, ‘Look at our child, the fruit of our labor, isn’t she beautiful?’

  The baby was pacified on her mother’s teat. Weaker contractions would come to deliver the placenta, but Mogala would savor this momentary respite.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Yun left the pool, and the ironhorns followed him. They ascended the hillpath and emerged through a linen flap between the trees to overlook the encampment. The deathknells that had been waiting in front of the entrance sprang to their feet. Their mallets swung into their gongs, the booms alerting the other deathknells so that the whole tribe could hear.

  Those eating offal at the fire around the herdstone; those fashioning javelins, and sharpening axes, and loading bullets into magazines; those resting on cots of leather and fur that had to blink awake; pestigors locking antlers in the arena pits; toxhorns mixing their noxious brews; ungors shepherding livestock. All heard gongs that heralded the spawn of Chief Bray-Shamaness Mogala, sired by Supreme Leader Yun.

  The ironhorns raised their cleavers and chainswords and whips and brayed for the herd to follow, and follow they did as every hill across the encampment raised their arms and weapons and fetishes. They hooted and hollered and brayed and bleated and howled and roared and cheered in a discordant paean to a blessed birth. Whatever they had been doing before was meaningless as the herd broke open the casks and descended into a frenzied festival of drinking and fighting and rutting and feasting and dancing and defecating and singing and vomiting and urinating.

  Yun and the ironhorns did not join the revelry. They entered the tribe chieftain's tent. The one-eyed chieftain was gracious in treating the Supreme Leader and the ironhorn representatives, but this meeting was for more than niceties. The Ur-Father has sent a fallen angel. The Great Tree blooms with pustules. This world has once more been fertilized by rituals and tilling, once more prepared to be impregnated with the Plague Lord’s seed. The shamans have had dreams, visions, reading portents of life running wild, unbound, in abundance, as the veil of reality is thinned and the Ur-father reaches through.

  They must be prepared. When the Verdant Season arrived, the Sinui armies must be ready to march alongside the maggotkin.

  Of course, the herds were ready. Every gor longed for the call to fight and kill for the glory of the dark god, to defile the hated monuments of the Imperium and drag its defenders into hell. The hatred of the Imperium was one passed down through generations across all of Sinui, but no others were as embittered as the tribes who desired nothing less than to wreak carnage upon the aquilans. The ironhorns and chieftans would spread their forces across the west to needle at the defenses while sending their wargor detachments to the east as requested.

  But that was later. Right now, this chieftain wanted to see the newborn of the proud father.

  They returned to the grove, the chieftain picking a peach as a snack on the way. The shamans were devouring the placenta and umbilical cord, the afterbirth marinated by the pool broth. Still in the pool were Mogala and—

  “Kazha. Her name will be Kazha.”

  Kazha, drinking her mother’s milk.

  The Ur-father had blessed Yun with everlasting vitality in exchange for eternal service. It was a solemn path to see the world beyond the bog waste away into dust by the erosion of time. The original exodus he had led here had long passed into ancient ancestry. The world before the Imperium was gone forever. As the years passed more quickly, all attachments grew more fleeting.

  Then he met Mogala.

  All reason showed she was just another shaman. All sense said she was born long after him and would die long before him. All responsibilities demanded he not be distracted.

  Yet here Kazha was.

  They would remain in the grove for a few weeks to rest and let Kazha gain her strength. Then they would board a swamp dragon; ride it to meet with the leaders of Sinui, and show their daughter her world, as it was and as it could be.