The Devourer, Part 1

The village of Hammerforge had always been a peaceful place, tucked away in the northern valleys of the Blackrock Mountains. The dwarven miners dug for precious gems and ores, while the human farmers tended to the fertile soil high in the alpine meadows. It was a tough life, but one of simple dignity and backbreaking labor.

That all changed the day the Devourer came.

It began with a tremor that shook the entire valley, toppling chimneys and cracking foundations. Miners hundreds of feet below felt the mountain itself shift and groan. Then the roars began - a deafening bellow that sounded like the mountain was being torn asunder.

Dwalin Stonebeard, grizzled leader of the mining clan, scrambled up to the surface with his crew, fearing a catastrophic tunnel collapse. What he found was far, far worse.

A towering monster, at least 30 feet tall, had torn its way up from the deepest mines. It looked vaguely humanoid, with a bulky, thickly muscled body covered in craggy dark grey skin and bony protrusions. Its face was a twisted, fanged mess seemingly carved from cooled magma. Worst of all were its eyes, which burned like twin abysses of pure hatred.

"Troll!" one of the miners cried. "Mountain troll! Ancestors preserve us!"

But even the legendary tales of murderous mountain trolls did not prepare them for the sheer, wanton destruction this beast was capable of. With a deafening roar, it swept one massive arm through the center of the village, demolishing homes and tearing through stone as if it were paper.

The guards tried to respond, launching volleys of arrows and hurling spears and axes. But their weapons seemed to have no effect, simply embedding uselessly in the troll's rocklike hide or deflecting off at odd angles. A thrown javelin pierced one of its yellow eyes - but the Devourer didn't even seem to notice.

It simply continued its rampage, leaving a path of utter ruin in its wake. Those few who managed to evade its flailing limbs were crushed under heaping piles of rubble or struck by the shrapnel of shattered stone and timber.

As the onslaught continued, something even more disturbing began to happen. In the spots where the monster's inky black blood spilled on the ground, fissures would open and new horrors would emerge - smaller, leaner troll-like creatures just as twisted and violent as their forebear.

These new "spawn" trolls set about cutting down any survivors with sadistic glee, leaping from ruined homes and alleyways to ambush the stricken villagers. Their claws and fangs made short work of armed militia and cowering elderly alike.

Before long, the once-idyllic mountain town had been reduced to a haunting scene of devastation. Piles of corpses choked the streets, slaughtered victims crushing the last twitching survivors beneath their weight with their final, dying breaths. Scattered fires flickered amidst the rubble as thick, oily smoke choked the sky.

And in the epicenter of this charnel house, the gigantic Devourer crouched amidst the ruins, gashing itself and slicking its wounds to summon forth ever more replenishing waves of craven spawn. Its roars echoed through the valley in a bone-rattling dirge of dark victory.

Word of the tragedy spread like wildfire throughout the mountain realms. The kings and chieftains of the dwarven holdfasts and human strongholds alike put out the call - a rallying cry for all able warriors, mercenaries, and heroic souls to band together and uproot this evil.

A great host gathered within a sennight - dwarven axe-lords in iron-laced wargear binding alongside noble human paladins wreathed in holy sun-sigils. Elven rangers and barbarian tribes from the north pledged their feared archers and wildest berserkers to the cause.

At its head stood four figures - those proclaimed to be the greatest heroes the realms had ever known. Their legendary deeds and personal pivotal roles in saving the lands from apocalypse on multiple occasions were the stuff of songs and fireside tales.

Valkri Stormforged, son of kings and inheritor of an ancestral line of dragonslayers, hefted his terrible runeblade Hawkfang, reputed to have been quenched in the very fires of the Elemental Plane itself. The Daruk twins, undefeated shield-brothers of the Iron Peak dwarven honor-guard, spun their massive linked chain-hammers in complex figure-eight patterns.

And finally, the aged elven archer Tiberr Glaiveguard, hero of a hundred battles and blessed by the goddess of the hunt herself, pulled back the string of his yew longbow, his chest bedecked in glyphs and ancestral talismans.

These four paladins led the charge into the Blackrock Valley, thousands of armored boots shaking the very earth with each footfall. The greatest army the realms could muster, marching to face the apocalypse firsthand.

They swept into the ruins of Hammerforge with grim determination, slaughtering the horrific spawn trolls as they burst from every crack and crater. But as they drew closer to the towering crater where the Devourer crouched amidst its ever-refilling moat of reeking blood, they pulled up short in stunned dismay.

The power radiating from the monster was overwhelming, like an almost tangible weight of malice and suffering. Smaller trolls seemed to sprout from the ground around it in undulating waves, each lashing out with spike-tipped limbs and razored jaws. The heroes saw many of their bravest warriors cut down within moments of engaging, torn asunder by sheer ferocious numbers and brutality.

Steeling themselves, Valkri and the twins plunged into the carnage, their blessed weapons hewing through scores of foul flesh and splashing rancid troll-blood that only spawned more strife. Tiberr's hail of enchanted arrows felled dozens with bullseye headshots - but the Devourer simply shrugged off the few that struck its armored plates and corded sinew.

An agonizing hour of heroic battle raged. But for every troll felled, two more sprang up in its place. The Devourer simply bided its time, allowing the undulating tides of its spawn to separate, isolate, and slaughter the bravest of the attackers.

Finally, Tiberr managed to land an incredible shot - his final black-feathered arrow splitting the massive troll's remaining eye and burying itself to the fletchings in the beast's skull. Bellowing in rage and pain, the Devourer reared up and unleashed a deafening roar - a focused sonic blast that scattered the valorous warriors like toys, sundering armor and pulverizing any in its blast radius.

When the dust settled, the Daruk twins were sprawled amidst the ruin, one missing an arm and the other insensate with a ruined jaw. Valkri lay in a crumpled heap, Hawkfang shattered to pieces from the force of the impact. Tiberr had managed to duck behind a ruined wall, but hundreds of the army's best fighters lay dead or worse in the blast zone.

And still, the Devourer stood triumphant and undaunted. It let loose another defiant roar that shook the valley and summoned forth another wriggling deluge of freshly-birthed trolls - a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh, awful progeny to eradicate any who opposed it.

From their scattered positions around the periphery, the surviving heroes saw utter defeat in one another's eyes. There was no strategy, no courage or heroism that could avail them this day. No matter the power of their enchanted weapons or holy blessings, the corruption and evil of the Devourer was simply too much to overcome through conventional means.

A great shadow seemed to pass over the land itself. Hope died that day, strangled out in the Blackrock Valley under the gaze of those awful, reborn eyes of hatred. Darkness had won. Their gods and ancestors had forsaken them.

Unless... unless some new power could be summoned, some force heretofore unknown to these lands. For if the Devourer was indeed the apocalypse given form, then only an even greater power - a savior entity from beyond their reality - could hope to stand against it.

Battered and bloodied, leaning on his shattered bow for support, Tiberr chanted an ancient elven rite of summoning. His cadenced words echoed with desperation as he called out to the space between realities, begging any power that could hear his voice to intervene.

The other heroes looked on, battered but realizing this was their last, faint hope. The Devourer seemed to pause, sensing the shifting of forces as Tiberr's ritual built in intensity.

Suddenly, a shimmering rift opened in the air, its twisted nether energies causing the very laws of physics to bend and distort. A massive, vaguely humanoid shape stepped through, seeming to exist across multiple planes at once.

It was over 20 feet tall, with a muscular physique that made even the Devourer seem slight in comparison. Hooved feet and cloven hands suggested some lineage of demon or devil, yet there was also an almost angelic quality in its regal bearing and messianic gaze.

Most striking were the entity's four faces - one of an impassive stone visage, another a feral leonine snarl, the third a beautiful elven countenance, and the last an inscrutable void of swirling galaxies and the secrets of the cosmos.

"I am Xathoqqua," the being proclaimed in a thunderous voice that seemed to issue from every direction at once. "Ninth scion of the Unforged Planes, tasked with the culling of entropy and oblivion from this realm. I heed your call, elven summoner."

Tiberr fell to his knees in supplication. "Great Xathoqqua, we beseech you. Defeat this Devourer and its foul tide of spawn, for it is the vanguard of the end of all things."

Xathoqqua seemed to consider this for a moment, multiple eyes blinking across multiple realities. Then it shifted its cosmic gaze to the Devourer squatting amidst the carnage.

"So this is the corruption you speak of? Then it shall be unmade."

With surprising swiftness for its titanic size, Xathoqqua launched itself at the Devourer. The two ngars immediately became a whirlwind of fury, grappling and pummeling with enough force to shatter the very bedrock.

Massive fists collided with thunderous impacts, while bone spurs and bludgeoning limbs flailed in dire desperation. The energies unleashed by the two seemed to warp and distort the fabric of reality itself, as the Devourer's viscous blood rained down to corrupt the earth.

But Xathoqqua was undaunted. Wielding a colossal burning glaive, it hacked and slashed at the Devourer in a dizzying blurred frenzy. Wherever its blade scored a hit, the wounds would seal in uncorrupted flesh, any dark influence cauterized from the area.

The Devourer unleashed ear-splitting roars of hate and anguish as it was pushed back, inch by inch. Its bestial spawn swarmed at its divine attacker, only to be scattered into ashen vapors by the merest glancing blow or utterance of banishment.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity of apocalyptic struggle, Xathoqqua managed to pierce the Devourer's chest in a rain of cauterized entrails. Grasping the hideous troll by the neck, it wrenched backward - and with a sickening crunch of bone and viscera, tore the monster's head and a third of its torso free.

The Devourer's corpse slammed to the ground, already disintegrating as the dark forces animating it bled away. Its spawn howled in disharmonious shrieks as the foul energies imbuing them winked out like spent candle flames. Within moments, the entire valley had fallen into silence, with only drifting ashes and lingering scorches to mark the unholy conflict.

His manifestation complete, Xathoqqua stood serenely amidst the scorched remains. The four heroes stared in awe and no small amount of trepidation at this unfathomable power given form.

Finally, the celestial being spoke once more: "The souring has been clensed...for now. But you have been granted a boon, mortalkind - a glimpse at just how tenuous your Reality's grip over oblivion can be. Fortify your faiths and strengths, for this was but the vanguard of a far greater doom seeping through the cracks..."

With that ominous pronouncement, Xathoqqua turned and stepped back through the rift it had entered from. As it did, the very space around it seemed to twist and warp as higher dimensions compacted back down into the mundane laws of existence.

When the last echo of its passage had faded, the four battered heroes were left alone amidst the desolation, surrounded by the shattered remnants of their failed crusade. Yet in their hearts they carried a renewed kernel of hope - and perhaps, forewarning of even greater crises to come.

For if such unfathomable forces and entities held sway over their realms, then perhaps, with sufficient fortitude and bravery, any doom could be averted. Or at the very least, met with the courage and dignity befitting the greatest of mortal heroes.

Tiberr slowly rose to his feet, retrieving his shattered bow. He gave it an experimental pull, as if testing the strength of its knotted wood one last time.

"So..." he said, in a raspy voice tinged with equal parts grim weariness and wry hope. "When do we start preparing for the next apocalypse?"