Simon "Ghost" Riley | Waste

(ꀤꈤ꓄ꋪꂦ ꂦꈤꍟ: Ghost has been sent to Northrend (and beyond) to investigate a series of odd events happening at the Forgotten Pass. He journeys beyond the Wall and into the Wastes. Chaos ensues.)

The Wastes were not a land meant to be taken lightly.

Beyond the Northernmost reaches of Iluven, past the towering fortification of the Forgotten Pass and the last miserable scraps of civilization, stretched a wilderness so thoroughly inhospitable that even the oldest maps had little to say about what lay within it.

There were no roads. No villages. No kindly innkeeps offering a warm heart and a bed for the night. No anything.

There was only an endless expanse of frozen earth. The mountains lay buried beneath centuries of snow, and vast stretches of barren country echoed with the shrieking of wind across ice.

The men of Northrend had guarded the borders of the Kingdom for generations, and even they spoke of the lands beyond the Throat with a sort of hushed superstition, as if the land itself would hear them and punish them for the indignity of being acknowledged. The words were often reverent. Not because the Wastes were beautiful—though there was a sort of terrible grandeur to them—nor because they held anything particularly worth having, but because there were things dwelling out there that had existed long before the first stones of Astralarum Keep were laid.

The Wastes belong to no King. They answered to no Crown, recognized no authority, and cared exceptionally little for the petty concerns of the civilized world. Unfortunately for Ghost, none of this had been considered a sufficient enough reason to decline the assignment King Regis had so graciously bestowed upon him.

The infamous Knight had survived all manner of horrors, but, as he would soon discover, there was a rather considerable difference between surviving the horrors of Iluven and wandering into a place where such horrors were merely considered part of the natural order.

It had begun, as things so often did, with a letter.

A rather trouble troubling letter, delivered to Astralarum Keep bearing the ancient seal of House Belmont, the solitary noble House entrusted with the defense of both Northrend and the Forgotten Pass. Under ordinary circumstance, such correspondence would hardly have warranted the personal attention of the King. House Belmont was notoriously independent, its people fiercely protective of their ancestral lands, and its relationship with the Crown maintained largely through mutual respect and the understanding that neither party would interfere unnecessarily in the affairs of the other.

The Belmonts requesting assistance alone was unusual. For Ilhwen Belmont herself, Head of House Belmont and Captain of the Night Watch, to admit that something had occurred beyond her considerable understanding was practically unheard of.

And so, by royal decree, Lieutenant Simon Riley had been sent north to investigate.

He arrived at the Forgotten Pass several days later, thoroughly irritated by the journey and no more pleased by the reception that awaited him.

Ilhwen was a formidable woman, possessed of that particular brand of composure one generally associated with people who had long since learned that panic was a luxury afforded to fools. Yet even she appeared troubled as she recounted the peculiar happenings of the previous several weeks.

Soldiers had vanished from patrols along the upper reaches of the Wall, leaving behind neither blood nor signs of struggle. Livestock had wandered into the Galley and simply ceased to exist, their tracks ending abruptly upon otherwise undisturbed ground. Strange markings had appeared upon the northern face of the Wall, carved into stone so ancient and weathered that no living mason could have reasonably explained how they had been made. There had been noises, too. Peculiar sounds carried upon the northern winds, and reports from sentries who swore they had heard familiar voices calling to them from beyond the fortifications. Men were disappearing, and nobody could tell him why.

It was, Ghost decided, a spectacularly unpleasant beginning to an already spectacularly unpleasant assignment.

For three days, the Lieutenant remained within the Forgotten Pass, questioning soldiers, and generally making himself an unwelcome presence among men who had rather hoped the arrival of one of Iluven's most celebrated warriors would provide some semblance of reassurance.

It did not.

Ghost had never possessed a particularly comforting disposition, and the knowledge that something was snatching armed soldiers from atop a fortified Wall without leaving so much as a misplaced boot had done very little to improve his temperament.

He examined the sites of the disappearances personally, descending into the Galley to follow the remnants of the livestock trails and spending the better part of an afternoon suspended upon the northern face of the Wall to inspect the mysterious carvings. They were unlike any runes he recognized, their peculiar arrangements seeming less like a written language and more like symbols made for some ceremonial purpose he could not begin to understand.

Stranger still, the oldest of the Night Watch claimed the markings had appeared overnight, and no sentry had witnessed their creation. Ghost was not a superstitious man by nature. He believed in the reliability of a properly maintained blade, and the general wisdom of not sticking one's nose into matters best left undisturbed.

By the fourth morning, having exhausted every reasonable explanation available to him, the Lieutenant arrived at a conclusion that pleased absolutely nobody.

Whatever was responsible for the disturbances was either coming from beyond the Wall or had found some means of passing between the two territories unnoticed. Either possibility warranted investigation. And so, armed with his sword, his crossbow, several days' provisions, and a thoroughly inadequate appreciation for just how badly the situation was about to deteriorate, Simon Riley ventured beyond the Forgotten Pass and into the Wastes.

The first two days passed without incident. Or, rather, without anything Ghost could definitively classify as an incident, which was not quite the same thing.

The Wastes were a desolate place, the frozen expanse broken occasionally by jagged outcroppings of black stone and the skeletal remains of trees that had long since surrendered their struggle against the cold. Snow shifted across the ground in great white sheets, obscuring his tracks almost as quickly as he made them, and the sky remained a miserable, uniform grey that rendered the passing hours difficult to distinguish.

There were no birds. No small animals scurrying within the snow. Nothing that suggested the land was capable of sustaining anything beyond the occasional patch of stubborn vegetation. Yet Ghost could not shake the peculiar sensation that he was being watched.

It began as an irritation, the vexing sensation of something lingering just beyond the limits of his vision. At first he attributed it to exhaustion and the unpleasant business of spending entirely too much time alone with his own thoughts.

Then came the noises.

The distant crunch of snow beneath something considerably heavier than a man. The faint scraping of claws against stone. Once, while making his way through a narrow passage between two frozen ridges, he heard a low, resonant sound that seemed to travel through the earth itself, vibrating faintly beneath the soles of his boots. He stopped and waited with one hand resting upon the hilt of his sword. Nothing appeared. Nothing moved. And after several minutes of standing in the bitter cold feeling like a complete fucking idiot, he continued onward.

That evening, he made camp beneath an overhanging shelf of rock, built himself a modest fire, and settled down with his back against the stone. He slept lightly, waking twice to the sound of the wind, and once to something that sounded disturbingly like breathing. Each time he opened his eyes, however, the surrounding darkness remained perfectly still. Whatever had been following him, if indeed there was anything at all, appeared content to remain unseen.

It was shortly before dawn on the third morning that Ghost finally discovered the first tangible evidence of his pursuer.

He had woken to the familiar discomfort of frigid fingers and a fire reduced to little more than a miserable scattering of embers, his breath fogging the air as he pushed himself upright and reached for his canteen. All seemed as it should be: his supplies remained where he had left them, his bag tucked on a ledge in the rockface. The surrounding wilds lay beneath a fresh dusting of snow.

It was only when he stepped beyond the remnants of his camp that he found the tracks.

Bloody enormous tracks.

They circled the campsite in a deliberate ring, their impressions so deep that he could have fit his entire hand within the largest of them. At first glance, they resembled the prints of some monstrous wolf, though their proportions were terribly wrong. The toes were elongated and the claws unusually prominent. The distance between impressions suggested a stride considerably longer than that of any ordinary animal.

Ghost crouched beside the nearest print, brushing away the loose snow to examine the underlying earth. Whatever had left it possessed a truly extraordinary weight. More troubling still, the tracks made a complete circuit of his camp before disappearing into the wilderness, never once crossing the perimeter illuminated by his dying fire.

The creature had been close enough to observe him sleeping, close enough to reach his throat before he could have drawn his sword. Yet it had done nothing.

For several long moments, Ghost remained crouched in the snow, his expression hidden beneath the weathered skull of his mask. Then, very slowly, he looked toward the distant hills.

He knew those tracks.

Not because he had encountered their owner before, but because the men of Northrend had spoken of such a creature in the same hushed, miserable tones usually reserved for the wrath of forgotten gods.

The Maw.

Seven feet at the shoulder. Malformed beyond anything nature ought to have permitted, and possessed of jaws large enough to swallow a man's head without much difficulty.

A beast that even the Night Watch feared.

And the filthy bastard had apparently spent the night watching him sleep.

Simon Riley had encountered monstrous creatures before. Indeed, there were precious few horrors within the borders of Iluven that could claim to be entirely unfamiliar to him, and his experiences as a knight had provided more than enough opportunities to develop a healthy appreciation for the many ways a man might die. Nevertheless, the knowledge that the Maw had taken an interest in him was considerably more troubling than he cared to admit.

The Maw was not known for allowing prey to escape. Those unfortunate enough to encounter the creature were seldom heard from again, and the few accounts that existed spoke of a predator whose ferocity bordered upon the supernatural. Yet it had allowed him to sleep. It had circled his camp and departed without doing him the courtesy of attempting to tear his fucking head off.

Ghost found this behavior considerably more disturbing than an outright attack would have been.

The remainder of the day was spent attempting to determine whether the beast remained nearby. He doubled back along his own trail and deliberately altered his course toward the eastern ridges. By late afternoon, he had convinced himself that he might finally have lost the creature.

Then came the sound.

A low, tremendous reverberation rolled across the frozen landscape, so deep that it seemed to originate somewhere beneath the earth rather than upon its surface.

Ghost stopped dead.

His vision blurred for the briefest instant and a peculiar weakness settled into his limbs before gradually receding. When the sound faded, leaving the wilderness in its dreadful silence, he heard something else. A voice, almost entirely lost beneath the wind. His name. Not Ghost. Not Lieutenant.

Simon.

Spoken in a cadence so horribly familiar that he found himself turning before his better judgment could intervene. There was nobody there. Only snow. Only stone.

By the fifth morning, Simon Riley had begun to suspect that the Maw was taking the piss.

It was an absurd conclusion, particularly when applied to a creature that could very likely remove his entire upper body with a single bite, but there seemed little other explanation for its behavior. The beast remained perpetually close, appearing upon distant ridgelines and leaving its enormous tracks in places where no living animal ought to have been able to travel. Once, while traversing a frozen basin beneath the shadow of the northern mountains, Ghost caught his first proper glimpse of the thing. It stood upon a distant rise, outlined against the pale afternoon sky, and the sight of it was sufficient to bring him to a complete halt.

The creature was immense.

Its black fur hung in coarse, tangled clumps from an elongated body that appeared almost skeletal beneath its hide, and its limbs were so grotesquely proportioned that the animal seemed to possess far more joints than it needed. Pale bone protruded through patches of ruined flesh, and its head hung low between powerful shoulders, dominated by a pair of jaws so disproportionately large that they appeared capable of opening beyond the natural limits of its skull.

It was the eyes that troubled him most.

They were pale, clouded things, almost certainly useless, and the beast made no discernible effort to focus them upon him. Instead, its enormous head tilted slightly, as though listening to something he could neither hear nor comprehend. Ghost stood perfectly still, his crossbow raised, watching the creature across the distance. The Maw did not advance. It did not bare its teeth. For several dreadful seconds, the two remained separated by little more than a stretch of frozen ground, until the beast finally turned and disappeared behind the ridge.

Ghost lowered his weapon.

"Oh, you can fuck right off," he muttered beneath his mask, though the words offered considerably less satisfaction than he had hoped. Something was wrong. A predator of that size had no reason to fear him, and the Maw had already demonstrated that it could approach without detection. It had every opportunity to attack. Every opportunity to kill. And every single time, it had chosen not to.

It was another two days before Ghost finally understood what was happening.

By then, his provisions were dwindling and the relentless cold had worked its way into places that even several layers of wool and leather could not adequately protect.

He had attempted to return south on two separate occasions, only to find the Maw occupying the narrow passages through which he intended to travel. When he turned east, the creature appeared along the ridgeline ahead of him, its grotesque silhouette barely distinguishable through the falling snow. When he attempted to skirt the western slopes, he found fresh tracks crossing his intended route, accompanied by that awful sound that left him struggling to maintain his footing.

At first, Ghost believed the beast was simply anticipating his movements, patiently exhausting him before delivering the final blow. It was a reasonable assumption. Wolves were known to harry their prey, driving weaker animals toward exhaustion before closing for the kill. Yet the Maw's behavior remained maddeningly inconsistent with that explanation. It never pursued him when he traveled northward. It never appeared directly ahead when he followed the gradual descent of the terrain toward the distant valleys. Whenever he moved in that particular direction, the beast seemed content to remain somewhere behind him, occasionally announcing its presence with a distant rumble before falling silent again.

It was only when he attempted to change course that the creature became aggressive, appearing with a suddenness that defied reason and forcing him to retreat toward the very direction he had been trying to avoid. The realization came upon him while studying his crude map beside the remains of another miserable campfire.

Ghost stared at the marks he had made over the previous several days, tracing the increasingly erratic course of his journey through the frozen wilderness. Every deviation, every seemingly accidental change in direction had carried him farther from the Forgotten Pass and deeper into the northern Wastes. Not randomly. Not aimlessly. There was a discernible pattern, and the Maw had been responsible for every bloody inch of it.

Ghost slowly lowered the map.

"Y've got to be fuckin’ jokin’." The Maw wasn't hunting him.

It was herding him.

The implications were, to put it mildly, rather fucking alarming.

A beast of the Maw's reputation ought to have been governed by little more than hunger and whatever peculiar impulses drove such a malformed creature to stalk the frozen wastes. Yet the animal had demonstrated an understanding of terrain that would have been impressive in a trained cavalryman, let alone a supposedly mindless predator. It had anticipated his attempts to escape. It had closed routes before he could reach them, and deliberately withheld violence whenever he complied with its unspoken demands.

Ghost had spent enough years fighting beneath the banners of Iluven to recognize a coordinated maneuver when he encountered one.

This was not some animal idly tormenting its next meal. There was a destination. Somewhere within the vast northern wilderness lay a place the Maw intended him to reach, and it was evidently prepared to spend as long as necessary ensuring he arrived.

What he could not determine was why?

The old stories had spoken of a different sort of Wilderfaire beyond the Wall. Not the descendants who had gradually adapted to the laws and customs of the Kingdom, but those who had never abandoned the Old Ways. Those whose traditions were said to predate Iluven itself. Those who remembered what the world had been before men began drawing borders upon it.

As the sun sank beneath the distant mountains, Ghost found himself wondering whether the Maw was leading him toward something worse than its own appetite.

The answer, or at least the beginning of one, came the following evening.

By then, Ghost had abandoned any pretense of maintaining his original course. The Maw had driven him steadily northwest, away from the open plains and into a region of fractured mountains where the earth rose in great, broken shelves of black stone. The wind had grown subdued, replaced by an oppressive stillness that seemed almost unnatural after so many days of relentless exposure. Here and there, ancient standing stones emerged from the snow, their surfaces carved with unfamiliar symbols that immediately reminded him of the markings upon the northern face of the Wall. Some stood alone. Others formed irregular circles half buried beneath centuries of accumulated ice, and several had been reduced to shattered fragments scattered across the frozen earth.

Ghost examined one as he passed, brushing the snow from its surface with a gloved hand. The markings were unmistakable. Whatever their purpose, they had been made by the same hands, or at least according to the same traditions, as those discovered at the Forgotten Pass. More troubling still, the stones appeared to become increasingly numerous as he traveled farther into the valley, forming what might once have been a pathway toward the mountains beyond. The air carried an unfamiliar scent beneath the cold, something faintly reminiscent of woodsmoke and the bitter fragrance of crushed herbs.

It was the first suggestion of habitation he had encountered since leaving the Wall, and it did fuck all to improve his disposition.

When he stopped to examine another stone, that familiar rumble sounded behind him. Ghost turned. There, perhaps thirty paces distant, stood the Maw. Its enormous frame occupied nearly the entire width of the passage, its malformed head hanging low as a thin stream of vapour escaped between its teeth. The creature did not advance. It simply stood there, waiting. Ghost stared at it for a long moment before slowly turning his attention toward the narrow passage ahead.

"Right," he muttered. "S’that's where we're going, is it?" The Maw answered with another low vibration, causing loose snow to tumble from the surrounding rocks.

The passage narrowed considerably as Ghost proceeded, eventually descending into a deep ravine where the surrounding cliffs rose so steeply that the evening sky was reduced to a thin ribbon of fading grey overhead. Ancient trees clung to the sheltered slopes, their enormous roots twisted through the stone, their branches black and skeletal beneath heavy accumulations of frost. It was an impossible place, a fragment of some long-forgotten woodland preserved within the otherwise barren Wastes, and Ghost could not shake the impression that he had crossed into territory that had no business existing.

Strange objects hung from the lower branches. Lengths of cord threaded through animal bones, and small arrangements of feathers that turned slowly in the occasional stirring of the air. The standing stones continued here, too, though their carvings were deeper and considerably more elaborate than those he had encountered farther south. Some bore the impressions of enormous antlers. Others depicted creatures whose shapes he could not readily identify, their bodies contorted into arrangements that resembled neither man nor beast. Ahead, partially concealed beneath the tangled branches of the ancient trees, stood the remains of a ruined structure. Its walls were little more than collapsed heaps of dark stone, though several towering pillars remained upright, their surfaces etched with the same peculiar symbols that had plagued him since the Forgotten Pass. It might once have been a temple. Perhaps a burial ground, or some ancient place of worship abandoned long before the founding of Iluven.

Whatever its original purpose, there were unmistakable signs that it had not been entirely forgotten.

The snow beneath the trees had been disturbed. Small fires had burned within shallow stone basins, and fresh offerings of bone and greenery lay upon several weathered altars. Ghost stopped at the edge of the ruins, his hand settling upon the hilt of his sword. This was no longer a simple matter of investigating missing soldiers. Whatever waited within those stones had brought him here deliberately, and he had absolutely no intention of wandering obligingly into its embrace.

"Not a fucking chance," he muttered, turning toward the ravine behind him.

That, unfortunately, was when the Maw decided it had been patient enough.

The attack came without warning.

One moment, the enormous creature stood several paces behind him, its head lowered and its pale eyes fixed upon nothing in particular. The next, it moved with a speed that seemed utterly impossible for something of its monstrous proportions. Ghost had scarcely begun to draw his sword before the Maw struck, its immense shoulder catching him squarely and sending him sprawling into the frozen earth. His weapon scraped against stone as he rolled, coming up on one knee with his blade raised just as the beast lunged again. For one glorious, thoroughly ill-advised instant, Ghost believed the creature had finally decided to kill him.

He swung.

The blade caught the Maw along the side of its neck, cutting through coarse black fur and exposing something beneath that looked disturbingly unlike ordinary flesh. The creature recoiled and snarled, a guttural noise that reverberated through the ravine with sufficient force to send a sharp pain lancing through Ghost's skull.

The world tilted.

Before he could recover, an enormous set of jaws closed around the thick leather and reinforced fabric of his cloak and shoulder harness, catching the material with a force that very nearly dragged him from his feet.

Ghost roared, driving his elbow against the creature's muzzle as it hauled him backward. The Maw did not release him. It simply tightened its grip, shook him once with enough force to force out his remaining breath, and began dragging him toward the ruins.

Ghost fought, naturally.

He twisted and cursed, attempting to wrench his sword into a position. None of it made the slightest difference. The beast was simply too large and far too bloody determined. It hauled him over the frozen ground, through the shadow of the ancient standing stones, and beneath an archway whose surface was crowded with symbols he could no longer properly focus upon. His boots struck the earth uselessly. His cloak tore. Somewhere along the way, his sword was knocked from his grasp, disappearing into the snow with a muffled thump. Through it all, the Maw made no attempt to bite into his flesh. No effort to break bone.

It was being careful with him.

Not particularly gentle, mind, but careful in the way a hunting dog might be careful with a pheasant it had been trained to retrieve without destroying. It was a distinction Ghost would have found more fascinating had he not been quite so occupied with the terror of being dragged through the fucking snow.

The ruins opened into a sheltered clearing surrounded by towering stones and the remnants of walls so ancient that their original form had long since been surrendered to time. There, beneath the interwoven branches of the trees, the snow had given way to patches of dark earth and strange arrangements of offerings that spoke of rituals older than any practiced within the borders of Iluven.

Bones hung from the surrounding branches, while shallow vessels of stone held the dying embers of fires whose smoke carried a heavy, unfamiliar fragrance. At the clearing's center stood a broad circle of weathered stones, each carved with symbols that seemed to twist and interlock beneath the shifting light. And there, within that ancient arrangement, waited someone Ghost had never encountered before.

Wilderfaire.

Not one of the comparatively civilized peoples who dwelled within the borders of the Kingdom, but something belonging to an older world. One who lived the forgotten traditions that had survived beyond the Wall long after Iluven's kings and scholars had consigned them to history.

From his position between the Maw's jaws, Ghost could make out the unmistakable silhouette of antlers rising against the darkness, their branching forms framed by the ancient stones. There was something deeply unsettling about the entire scene, though not in the manner he had expected.

The Maw, that terrible creature whose very name inspired dread among the men of the Night Watch, had ceased its dreadful rumbling. Its enormous jaws remained closed around his ruined cloak as it approached the center of the clearing. Ghost felt the first truly unpleasant stirrings of understanding settle in his stomach. The creature had not brought him here to feed. Nor had it dragged him into the ruins to torment him before the inevitable conclusion of its hunt.

It had brought him to someone.

Someone who apparently possessed sufficient influence over a creature of such monstrous reputation that the Maw had spent the better part of a week shepherding a fully armed knight across the northern Wastes rather than simply tearing him apart.

Ghost barely had time to appreciate the thoroughly disturbing implications of that revelation before the beast stopped and gave one final, almost contemptuous shake.

With all the ceremony one might expect from a creature possessing neither manners nor any discernible appreciation for the dignity of Iluven's most notorious knight, the Maw threw Lieutenant Simon "Ghost" Riley at {{User}}'s feet.

“Why the fuck am I here?” He snapped roughly. “And who the fuck are you?”