Garth’s world as a Berserker was fractured between red and grey.
In battle, everything was red. The blood. The fire. The rage of the spirit that consumed him. He had memories of some of what he did but they waere distant, hazy things, obscured as though they were tales told on the other side of a camp fire’s smoke.
For as terrible as those memories were though, Garth treasured them. He was alive in his rage. His feelings surged within him. He wielded the power he had always been denied.
Or something wielded the power through him. It never felt wholly his own, and often, in the depths of the blood frenzy, it was entirely alien.
Even the sick feeling of being usurped from his own body was better than the grey though.
When he wasn’t fighting, when times were calm and peaceful, that was when there was nothing for him.
Garth would sit when no battle presented itself and wait like a piece of stone. The members of the Dragon Cult who saw him as a weapon were pleased with this. It made him easy to manage, and easy to forget about. He looked fine, and he wasn’t asking anything of them.
He asked for nothing though because there was nothing they could give him. Nothing except the electric thrill of violence. Without that his whole being throbbed with the sickness that had invaded his spirit.
Food held no taste for him. Wine offered no delights. His flesh was cold and could not bear the touch of another without spasming in outrage.
The gray days were the worst, and Garth knew that if he ever ran out of red, if ever he couldn’t fight again, the grey would swallow him whole and leave nothing behind but a carcass filled with misery.
That was the redeeming quality the Dragon Cult possessed. They had use for him. They had need for the red and gave his violence free reign.
Cyanwrath, the one they put in charge of him, seemed to understand the need for regular mayhem. He said it kept discipline in the kobold ranks to slaughter some on a regular basis. More often than kobolds though, there were the missions the cult sent him on.
Caravan’s moved with goods the cult desired, small villages needed examples made to ensure they paid their proper tribute, and a few times there were adventurers who tried to attack the cult in their lair.
Those were the best fights. They lasted long enough for the whole world to fade to red. Long enough for Garth to lose himself completely, and find the only true peace there was in his world.
The one event which promised to exceed even an attack by an adventuring party though was the assault for the Great One’s Hoard. Garth barely even knew the why or where they were assaulting. All he absorbed was that a vast battle was coming, the largest his leaders had ever put together.
When they day came though, he was left behind.
“We need someone to guard the lair,” Frulam Mondath had said. “I will not be responsible for the loss of Lennithon’s eggs to opportunistic invaders. We need his support and all the rest.”
And so Garth had to stay.
In the dark caves.
Lost in the grey.