The Last Ride of the Zen Jihad
Postcards From the Abyss




Alexander, on the Value of Training


Time slows down in the Abyss where they flayed me and flayed me and flayed with those bony bony hands like knives and I never got trained because of Doomsday who pulled Wendell out of the Temple when he possessed Banak's body and the bony fingers first plucked my eyes from my skull and laughed and asked "guess who?" but I couldn't see because of Orcus laughing as the rest of the party bampfed out of there and they closed in around me and I died as the lightning eternally fused my longsword to my hand but that was only until the resurrection but after the resurrection I died again and I have died so many times that I know death as I used to know the rising of the sun but its so cold and dark in the eyeless place of the bony hands like knives and the sun does not rise here but there are the pools of molten flame like the fireballs Doomsday used to kill us with for sport because he was the slave of the Deathgod and he was a mindless destroyer whose madness came as the bright light that burned and I remember the light as I remember the sun that will never shine into the ever-dimmed bony sockets like bony hands like knives that flay forever because time slows down in the Abyss.

Thirty years in the mountain of bone.

Now Pazunia with its frolicksome bat-things and a freshly-minted Jihad which has a Doomsday of course, but Berk is dead and Smith is dead and Herak is dead and Broomhilda is dead and Moose is dead and Thyatius is dead and Ivar is dead and Sligo is dead and Alanx is dead and of course I am dead dead dead and its hard to get trained when you're dead but at least I never trained with Shadow heh heh heh but I'll bet Shadow isn't dead unlike Berk and Smith and Herak and Broomhilda and Moose and Thyatius and Ivar and Sligo and Alanx and wow Alanx was kind of a fox and I used to be handsome and I remember thinking one day I could show her the nightlife in Heliogabulus but that was before I had worms all through my entrails and my skin hung around my waist like a sweaty workshirt on a hot day in the wheat field and before her impaled corpse wriggled from one of Orcus' standards but we didn't wind up like those other Jihad members they brought through the gate from Zhengyi's castle with their hindquarters all mis-shapen by demonic lust and their wriggling bodies all bloated like pus-filled wineskin sacks or pallid ticks full of demon-seed screaming screaming screaming well I guess they got trained too and now we're all about to be trained again and Ivar yawning like a gate oh lovely Kara can you heal these wounds for I was a handsome man a long time before the Valley of the Crypt-Things and the Necropolis of Dust and the City oh for a flagon but now hee hee hee it would just wash all the maggots out from between my bones and let's face it hee hee hee they're probably the only thing holding me together yes sirree its more of a bath than a drink and these silk clothes won't get me admitted to the King's Rest Inn anymore maybe the Eternal Unrest Inn or something so ready or not Orcus here we come and this time if I can get Doomsday to give me a magic item he'll remember me when he teleports out and then I'll get trained.




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