Continued from here, I present the concluding second part of Black Heart of the Petrified God, an episodic solo used to show off the wonderfulness of Jaws of the Six Serpents. In this one, Thordis gets into a dire scrap or two. Pulpy, unbridled action awaits!
page 7, panels 25-27
“What’s wrong?” she barked, raising her blade. “Can’t swim?”
The golem marched forward, uncaring, stepping straight into the pool. Acid surged around its legs with a furious hiss, steam and bubbling froth rising as the liquid found seams in its armor. The gears shrieked and the plating smoked, but it pressed forward through the pain, each motion slower, more tortured than the last.
It reached the far bank and swung. The mace came low and fast, catching Thordis on the retreat—she hit the ground hard, wind blasted from her lungs. Her side flared with pain as the guardian thudded up onto dry stone again, joints whining in agony. She scrambled to her feet, one knee buckling, and in that moment… she heard it. The tick.
In Evelok, long ago, she'd seen one of these things—an automaton built by alchemists for a mad king. A warrior found the clockwork heart… and stopped it.
page 8, panels 28-31
The giant thrashed, arms reaching back, but its range was limited. It turned and rammed its back against a support column with crushing force—stone cracked, dust flew. Thordis grit her teeth through the jolt and held fast, her eyes scanning. The ticking was louder now. There—at the base of the neck, a thin panel.
She tore it open with a savage grunt, exposing snarled copper guts. Viscous black fluid sprayed her as she thrust her blade deep, severing tubing and grinding through steel. Her fingers ripped upward, wires trailing, until the great ticking motor was revealed. The colossus reared back for one last blow—too late. Thordis leapt clear, and the thing smashed into a pillar and crumpled beneath the falling masonry.
But the tremor spread. Cracks webbed across the ceiling, stone dust fell in sheets, and the sanctum groaned like a dying beast. Thordis rolled to her feet, bloodied and breathless, as the roof threatened to collapse and bury god, guardian, and barbarian all in one final tomb.
page 9, panels 32-34
She slammed her shoulder against the sarcophagus—but it did not budge. Her eyes caught a strange glint: a black amulet on a golden chain, pulsing with menace against the sorcerer-king’s chest. As she reached for it, winded and bloodied, the impossible happened—Ar-Saren’s eyes opened. Cold. Black. A curse made flesh.
The sanctum buckled. Petrified ribs broke loose from the ceiling and crashed down like thunder. The priests—no longer statues—hissed as one, rising to strike. Thordis gasped, instinct cutting through her terror, and threw herself down the dais as claws raked the air behind her. The Heart was lost. One of her blades ruined. The tomb collapsing. With only her boots, her breath, and one blade left, she fled for the god’s throat—stone crashing all around her.
page 10, panels 35-37
The entry chamber yawned ahead, already collapsing. The arch gave way behind her in a groaning roar of crumbling stone, but she hurled herself through the breach just before it sealed shut. A single heartbeat slower and she'd have been buried with the priests. Outside, the air hit her like a slap—the mist, the wind, the swinging vines. She didn’t pause.
She leapt for the vines as the floating corpse trembled beneath her. Acid pools ruptured, stone cracked, and jungle cries rose in the distance. As she swung down, the vine snapped her into the cliffside—another wound for the gods to count—but she held fast. Then her eyes widened. A hand—withered, jeweled, impossibly strong—latched onto her wrist from above. Ar-Saren had followed. Dead eyes gleamed as he leaned over the edge and began to pull.
page 11, panels 38-41
Tal-Orh, the city of bells and blind prophets, where theocratic pigs ruled from towers of obsidian and smoke. She and Tijeni Toh, the silver-tongued rogue with a crooked grin and nothing to lose, had slipped into the manse of one such priest-lord, hoping to plunder a hoard fat with relics and gold. They found the vault, all right—laced in runes, bathed in silence. But the master of the house was not asleep.
He rose from his stone bed like mist rising over a barrow. Tijeni froze. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Thordis saw it—how the thing fed on fear like meat. Her gut screamed at her to run, but her instincts pulled her forward. She struck, dragged her friend clear by the collar, left her sword in the creature’s side. They escaped. But they never spoke again of what they’d seen… nor what Tijeni had whispered as the fangs pierced his skin.
Now, in the shadow of the sky-god’s broken skull, those same dead eyes stared down at her. Ar-Saren had followed her from a tomb not unlike that one. But this time, she didn’t freeze. The fear was there, but it had nowhere to go—so it became fire. And that fire became rage.
page 12, panels 42-45
The dead sorcerer hauled her closer, the other hand rising for her throat with the patience of nightmares. But Thordis writhed like a serpent, her instincts firing in wild defiance. She slipped past the second grip, chest to chest with the abomination, her trapped arm burning with numbness—but her other hand free and deadly.
With her offhand, she drew her last blade and howled. The strike came from her very soul—rage, fear, fury, and survival all twisted into steel. The scimitar bit deep, cleaving through rotted sinew, bone, and the black-throbbing heart that still hung from the chain in her right hand. The head flew free. Ar-Saren teetered backward—headless, lifeless, but somehow still standing.
Thordis fell. The chain flailed in the air. Somehow, she kept hold of both the amulet and her blade. Wind screamed in her ears as she plummeted backward into the green fog below. Above her, the corpse-king’s body swayed as stone and bone cracked and began to collapse. She vanished into the jungle mists like a crimson comet—bloody with burning embers of rage.
page 13, panels 46-49
From a stony ridge overlooking the jungle canopy, Zoryn and Videric surveyed the devastation. Where once a petrified god hovered above the trees, now only ruin remained—scattered bones and pulverized temple buried beneath fresh foliage and choking dust. “She’s gone,” Zoryn spat, eyes wild with rage. “No body. No blade. No heart.” Videric’s jaw clenched in silence. Ana, still bound, kept her gaze low—but her eyes searched the treeline for the impossible.
Then it happened. Leaves rustled. A shadow limped from the brush. Thordis—battered, bloodied, barely standing—emerged with the pulsing black heart clutched in one hand and a blade dragging in the other. Zoryn shrieked and yanked Ana close like a shield. Videric’s hand drifted to his sword. “Learning not to trust sorcerers now, eh?” Thordis growled through cracked lips.
Zoryn hissed, “Give me the heart or she dies!”
Thordis raised it slowly, letting the thing pulse in the firelight. “Kill her,” she said, voice low and sharp, “and your life ends before you draw your next breath.”
She dangled it with a bloody grin. “Let her go…”
But then, in the distance—the hoots. The trees behind them stirred. The ape-men were returning, and their rage had reawakened.
page 14, panels 50-52
“Nice try,” Videric sneered. “Still two against one.”
But the hoots were closer now. The jungle pulsed with movement. Something big was coming.
“Here,” Thordis said, raising her hand. “Catch.”
She flung the amulet high into the air—an arc of glinting black fire—straight toward the sound of the approaching ape-men. Both men's heads snapped toward it. Zoryn shrieked, lunging wildly, arms outstretched toward the trinket and the peril behind it. In that single heartbeat, Thordis moved like lightning.
She seized Ana’s wrist and tore off into the jungle in the opposite direction, boots hammering earth. Behind them, Zoryn vanished into the brush with a scream, lost to shadow and madness. Videric stood frozen, sword half-drawn, caught between gold, girl, and grave.
Epilogue
The road was rough, the sun low and mean. Thordis and Ana trudged through the red dust toward the outskirts of a shanty town pressed against the jungle’s edge—no name, just a scattering of lean-tos and planked hovels crawling with refugees, smugglers, and the lost. Both women looked half-dead: clothes torn, faces streaked with dirt and blood, shadows under their eyes deep as wells. Thordis limped with every step, one hand never far from her remaining blade.
Ana glanced up, voice soft but certain. “You saved my life. I owe you everything.”
Thordis snorted. “We’ve got to break this habit.”
Ana smiled faintly. “I’ll be fine.”
Thordis didn’t answer right away. Her eyes swept the settlement—watchful, instinctive. She smelled desperation in the air, like old meat and wet coin. And somewhere out there, behind them in the trees or already inside the walls, Videric might be watching too. She shifted the weight of her scimitar on her hip, grimacing.
“No,” she said. “You’re not fine. You’re staying close. Right where I can see you.”
They walked on—two figures cut from different cloth, but bound now by blood, fire, and the black heart of a god.
