Dagliash …. another dead corner of a dead civilization.
The cliffs of Antareg loomed black over the booming surf, only to whisk beneath the timber deck. The Swayali about the perimeter began singing, and it was peculiar to be surrounded by feminine voices possessing no place. Like tiles in tipping succession, the Nuns stepped from the Raft onto the echo of the ground, where they wricked their billows open, and uncoiled into something greater for the beaming sun.
Saubon gawked with the others for the way the demented vista transformed their beauty into something rare and lapidary. The Urokkas had cut a region of vast clarity from the Shroud. Reeking sheets pinned every limit, strata of dust that craned and twined like film in water, decohered. And the distances beneath shook for agitation, like sand in the box of a racing wain. Sranc … everywhere they raged in scabrous mats that disintegrated and reformed about cloven ramps, clenched heights, and sprawling meadows alike. The mountain slopes burned as if slagged in bitumen, yet still the creatures could be glimpsed, in clots if not individually, scraping their way upward. Fishhook brilliance winked about the crown of mount Ingol adjacent, the razor-white so characteristic of Gnostic slaughter.
This … This was their Frame, a World of poisonous pins, as small and vicious in substance as in extent.
Kellhus stood with his back to the enormities, still facing the direction they had come, his hands yet extended to either side, as if welded to the golden discs that darkened them. He steered and slowed the Raft to better trail the expanding chevron of witches. The rotted bastions of Dagliash loomed ever more near. Saubon could clearly see the defenders brimming upon the walls, Sranc of a different breed clotted about battlements reduced to gumlines. Ensconced within serpentine coils of gold, the Nuns advanced on the decrepit fortifications, more than eighty gilded wildflowers thrown wide. Their keening, high and feminine, perforated the suffocating thunder. Sorcery glittered across the interval, lines like incandescent hairs. Blinking against the glare, Saubon saw walls and turrets ignite as torches, shedding sparks that flailed and screamed.
Even Sranc perished clawing for something …
Reaching.
Viri lay dead an age ere the Mangaecca—the most grasping of the ancient Gnostic Schools—came to its derelict halls. Using debris as their quarry, they raised a citadel about the legendary Well of Viri, the enormous shaft that plumbed the Mansion to its dregs. Nogaral, they dubbed their new stronghold, the “High Round”.
Their fellow Schoolmen had scoffed and sneered, called them “grave-robbers”, an affront without compare among the Cond, let alone the ?meri they strove to emulate. Despite their demonstrations of outrage, the Mangaecca secretly celebrated the appellation, for it concealed their far darker ambition. In sooth, Viri was nothing more than a brilliant misdirection, a false grave to obscure the true, a cover for the Mangaecca’s evacuation of Sauglish, not to mention the endless northward trickle of chattel and supplies. For all its immensity, Nogaral was nothing but artifice, a way to plunder the Inc?-Holoinas, the Ark itself, under the guise of ransacking Viri.
With the destruction of Nogaral, the ruse came to an end, and the cancer that had replaced the Mangaecca, the Unholy Consult of Shae?nanra, Cet’ingira, and Aurang, declared itself to those they would exterminate. And so Viri faded into shadow and scholarship once again, a grave marking the loss of a second innocence—the innocence of Men—and the rebirth of an original terror, Min-Uroikas, or as the High Norsirai would come to call it, Golgotterath.
Where greed for the Ark had moved Men to reclaim Viri as a sham the first time, then fear and hatred of the Ark would move them to reclaim the dead Mansion as a bulwark the second. After centuries of intermittent war between Golgotterath and the High Norsirai, Anas?rimbor Nanor-Mikhus, High-King of A?rsi, laid the foundations of Dagliash, or “Shieldhold”, the fortress whose fame would all but blot Viri from the fickle histories of Men.
As the nameless poet of the Kelmariad writes,
Set upon woe, hewn from deceit, garrisoned by hope,
Our Shield against the Legions of the Dying Sun,
Pray to her, our fortress, our House of Thousands,
Implore her as you would any other sacred idol!
For her miracles are numbered by our children.