The Black Priesthood prayed over the casket before retreating outside the ceremony. Dominus was the Dren’el family patron, his priests would handle the rest of the funeral. Prayers were had, tears were shed, all while peasant and merchant mourners shuffled in, ringing the southern part of the square. Kept away from the core group of friends, family, and nobility in attendance. The public was kept to the south so the temple doors wouldn’t be blocked during the ceremony. As Tulk scanned the northern portions of the city, he spotted something amis. A small group of peasants were approaching the funeral from the north.
“Sin’gin, why are the peasants I told you to divert south approaching from the north?” The lieutenant did not respond. “Sin’gin?” Nothing came back. After a moment of silence over communications, Tulk signaled another squad to intercept them. “Dar, take your squad from crowd control and head to the northern part of the square. A small group of peasants are headed in from that direction. Redirect them.”
“Aye commander, will do.” A small group of ten men led by Dar broke away from crowd control duty along the south side of the funeral. The powerfully built city watch captain wielded a wicked-looking halberd that Tulk knew he had experience using. Dar and his men headed north and intercepted the group, stopping them, directing them where they needed to go. After a moment, the group of peasants walked through the guards as they stood still as stone. Unmoving, unresponsive.
“Dar? Dar, what the hells is going on down there?” The peasants began moving faster towards the funeral. Tulk looked closer, enhancing his eyes through the power of the platform to see them clearly despite the distance.
The false mourners were cowled in a brown mourner’s hood and frock that reached to their ankles. They moved with a purpose as they wove between the unnaturally still watchmen. Tulk touched his speaking stone to divert another group, this one led by one of the few magi he had on staff. But the group moved with an almost unnatural speed, reaching the noble mourners in the few heartbeats it took Tulk to redirect the magi. The supposed peasants blended in with the nobles and clergy, doffing their brown mourners’ robes, leaving them unnoticed by those on guard duty.
“Magic…” Tulk spat as he called his three city magi into action. The three spellcasters began moving with their squads of apprentices and guards towards the central ceremony. But they were stopped by the three powerful Dreadknights. As Tulk’s men explained their intentions and the imminent threat they were responding to, the group of peasants were well and gone, hidden among the crowd.
Through his enhanced senses, standing atop the observation deck of the Grand Keep, Tulk could hear anywhere in the city. He moved his hearing through the crowd and enhanced his eye site with a flex of his will, examining each of the mourners in the much smaller crowd. If he had enough time he could spot the bastards, he knew he could. But time was against him.
“Let us open the casket, to allow the deceased one last touch of the sun before his eternal rest!” Said the high priest of Dominus as he motioned to the Duke. The Duke, as all fathers would in the ceremony of the sun god, opened the casket with one hand, revealing his child in serene repose.
“Sir Mar’drin, Sir Mar’drin do you hear me?” Tulk said into a second speaking stone meant only for emergencies. Emergencies like this.
“What is it? The revealing ceremony has begun!” hissed an angry sounding grizzled knight. The man was the captain of the Duke’s personal guard.
“Intruders have infiltrated the—” Before Tulk could finish explaining, a man in fine court clothing stepped forward, put a dart gun to his lips and let loose. The man was cut down by two of the powerful knights, but the attack had already struck. After a few moments of commotion, Tulk heard the captain in his ear again as his three magi could get to the body of nobles and past the Dreadknights.
“Excellent work Commander Tulk, the assassin has been captured. We’ll clear everyone out and—” Tulk stopped hearing the man as he watched the body of the young Baldrin twitch. Everyone there froze as they watched the body twitch again. Half a heartbeat later, the boy sucked in a breath of air.
“MY BOY!” shouted the Duke as he lunged forward over the casket. “My boy is alive!” He yelled, as the body convulsed more violently.
Several knights began moving, each knowing the potential dangers of whatever magic or natural oddity had reanimated the boy’s body. But they all moved far too slowly. White ivory teeth, unnaturally long and sharp, extended from the boy’s mouth as black tar covered hands gripped his father’s shoulders. Baldrin pulled the Duke in close. The teeth bit down. Blood and viscera covered everything as the savagery of the now undead Bardrin was unleashed on his own father.
Nobles panicked and began running, interfering with the knights as they attempted to save their now doomed lord while others worked to get his wife and surviving children to safety. Among the commotion of panicked blue bloods stood a handful of straight figures. Pillars in the shifting sea of bodies. They each pulled long black daggers and plunged them deep into their own bellies or hearts. A black tar-like substance quickly consumed them, turning their bodies into what was clear to Tulk where powerful undead.
As Tulk watched in horror, shocked by the sudden and brutal savagery, three of the still forms instead turned and plunged the daggers into his magi who were now in and among the crowd. Tulk’s magi apprentices cut down their master’s attackers, but they were far too late to stop what had been set in motion.
As clerics, priests, and knights began fighting for their lives, casting spells like stones, and hurling prayers like javelins, the beasts darted around the crowded city center. Felling and infecting as many as they could. What arose was not always the same black tar covered creatures. Many that rose from their deaths moaned and shuffled as simple, mindless undead. Waddling off into the crowds of surrounding city guards and peasants. Spreading the infection in a meticulous if much more easily contained fashion.
Those that the curse consumed as they died turned into the black creatures, only again to join their fellows in a macabre dance of death. Several surviving knights and high-level clerics created a circle of protection around the Duke’s wife and children. Spending their lives to protect the innocents behind them. They made purchase, felling more creatures than rose from the crowd of living death around them.
As Tulk shouted orders through multiple speaking stones to elements of the guard and army stationed around the city, he watched as they, the elite and powerful, began turning the tide. They turned zombies and tar covered undead to ash with spells, chopped them to pieces with blades, or crushed them under magical cudgels and maces. Tulk’s heart swelled with pride and hope that perhaps this infestation could be contained there, in the town square. His own guard units had begun containing the weaker zombies that shambled into their spear and halberd lines after all, perhaps. Just perhaps, things might not end on such a tragic note.
Until his three magi rose. They were covered in the same tar like substance as the ferals. But instead of jumping, crawling on hands and legs like dogs, these stood tall and proud. Their eyes had been consumed during the transformation, replaced by icy-blue eerie light. Atop their heads they each bore a crown of white bone, purple and blue flickering flame danced under the crowns where their hair had once been. They grinned like all skulls did, wide, lipless. They cackled soundlessly as they raised their staffs, now covered in the same tar-like corruption, and began coordinating the shambling, mindless undead.
“Undead magi…” Tulk whispered to himself as despair washed over him at the very sight of the lifeless abominations. He did not realize he was holding three speaking stones. One for the military elements surrounding the city, one for the city guard, and another emergency stone used to speak to every knight sworn to the Ducal service in the Northern Duchy. The last one Tulk had been given just in case something like this happened. It was normally in the Duke’s hands, but on days like this they gave it to the one who observed from the keep. That person wasn’t usually him, i
t was Sir Mar’din’s duty. But the man had asked for a favor. The task was seen by most as little more than a formality, and Tulk had obliged. As Tulk unknowingly held open the connection, his thoughts swam with despair, fear, and the sight of the Duke dead and dying at the very hands of his own undead son.
Across the entire northern duchy every noble sworn as a knight of every station felt, saw, and heard what Tulk did. They saw the City Guard overrun by now coordinated undead hordes; they saw the knights and high clerics fighting the undead fall one by one to their enemies’ teeth and claws. They watched as the skeletal magi took the three children from the now dead arms of their mother and whisked them away to some unknown fate.
They watched as the city was overrun.
They heard and saw the temple bell of Dominus fall to the earth, crushing the stone street below. And as the sun reached its full zenith, they all saw the city of Gul-Haven overrun with undead. All save the Keep which held the last survivors of the city.
They all watched as, overcome by the sights and sounds and magic of the emergency stone, Tulk threw himself from the tallest balcony.
They watched through his dying eyes and felt through skin as the teeming undead below began tearing at his flesh and gnawing at his bones. Finally, blissfully, the connection ended.
Tulk’s life snuffed out.
Prologue 2: Until The Last Leaf Falls
"It will never rain roses: If we want more roses, we must plant more roses." - George Eliot
Sorcerers Tower, Outskirts of City of Sowers Vale, 1st Novos, 2989 AoR, New Years Day - Nightfall
Pina’s arms were stiff, her joints ached, and her back spasmed. But all of that paled compared to the stinging along her belly. The cuts the madman child had carved into her flesh burned, as her sweat mixed with the blood and filled the gashes. Worst of the cuts were the deep ones, the ones he cut in his mad frenzies of rage. The ones that, by all rights, should have killed her as her life’s blood spilled onto the stone floor underneath her. But his magics kept her alive, kept her awake, kept her aware through every cut, every beating, and every violation.
Still, Pina was not without her mental defenses. She retreated, like she usually did into herself. Entering a fugue state as the blade cut deep and mixed with the salt in her sweat. Her meditation allowed her to be somewhere else. To feel and remember other things. Things like that night, like their flight from Sowers Vale. Like the hounds that howled in the darkness under the stars and whose cries still sent chills up her spine. Like Tol’geth, the brute and her guardian and friend who had stood against the beasts, slaying them to the last. The man who, after his fight was too spent to handle the sorcerer that pursued them. But whose bravery and honor refused any other course. That man she had lied to, the man she thought she had saved.
Tol’geth left her behind, following in the footsteps of their charge. It was then that Pina began a grand working. Magic infused the tiny moonlit grove in her memory. This place she had decided would be where she would make her stand. The trees responded, the grass knew her, and the animals and creatures of the forest answered her call. Her animal companion, faithful since the creature’s birth. Wildcat was a plain’s tiger, and just then she stalked the outer perimeter of the forest. Acting as Pina’s eyes and ears on the lookout for humans or other creatures with the smell of the petty spellslinger.
The tiger had smelled several humans in the forest, hunters and gatherers, woodcutters and farmers looking for lost livestock. Men and women of the land that Pina would leave unmolested. As she had woven her spell, Pina had lost all sense of what was immediately around her. The summoning circle connected with the earth layline and node buried deep in the ground beneath her feet. As she pulled mana and magic from deep beneath the earth, and weaved it into her spell, several large predators joined her. Watching her working from the edges of the clearing. Guarding her, protecting her from all threats.
Pina had given them a small trickle of her mana, forging a tiny connection with them so she could feel and hear their spirits. A large brown bear sat on its haunches. Watching the grass grow up to meet her, weaving around Pina’s body and creating a protective barrier between her and her enemy. The bird watched as the grass weaved itself on the outer edges of the clearing into the thick vines, growing and moving inwards towards her center. Through a cougar’s eyes from a small rocky outcropping to the east, Pina saw the enemy approaching fast. Wreathed in darkness and shrouded in a purple and black haze that spread on the ground and sped him faster. The cougar had thought the man smelled unnatural, unsafe to eat, poisonous or rancid.
Pina saw him through the eyes of the animals that were fixed in his direction. As she tried to gage whether she would finish her spell before he got to her, Pina felt a tiny prickle of panic feed into her thoughts. A moment later it went silent. A hare was caught in the sorcerer’s path, its life force swiftly snuffed out. She gaged his speed from the dead he left behind and she realized she wouldn’t be able to finish the working in time. Feeling a pang of guilt and grief, she asked her friends to intervene, and they responded.
The eagle high overhead was the first to answer to her plea. Diving, talons out, aimed like a arrow at the sorcerer’s eyes, the eagle screeched its mighty wrath. Something intercepted it mid dive, and the two lashed out at one another. Dark fangs and eagle talons racking, clawing, biting as skin and feather were torn asunder. The two combatants plummeted to the earth, their shrieks of mutual hatred breaking the silence of the night. The eagle let out a shriek of terror just before it impacted, and Pina lost her connection to it.
The cougar was the next to respond, leaping from rock to rock, heading for the enemy. As Pina watched, an impression filled her mind from her True Companion. Wildcat sent her an image of more humans on the far side of the forest. These smelled wrong. Wildcat was worried, they had somehow slipped past her net and headed for Pina. Pina couldn’t focus on that lesser threat, as the cougar pounced. Jumping from a high rock directly onto the enemy’s back. But the enemy was smoke, vapor, some magical aura of protection blurred the sorcerer’s image confusing the cougar as it attacked. The vapor filled the cougar’s nostrils, the poor creature couldn’t breathe. It panicked, heart racing, adrenaline pumping, and it took off into the forest, fear gripping its mind. Pina cut her connection to the creature, wishing it luck as she refocused on her task.
Wildcat was racing towards her, eating up ground faster than Pina had seen the creature move. But Pina knew the cat would never reach her in time. The Wildcat sent the impression of more human smells, stronger, more potent, more wrong. Closer.
The bear lumbered to the far end of the clearing, interposing itself between Pina and the enemy. Pina could sense that this creature was on the verge of evolving. Once it did, it would move on to more wild territory, far away from human civilization. But right now, the brown bear, large as it was, was nothing more than what it was. A mundane brown bear, powerful paws and corded muscles would be no match for the magical defenses and attacks of the sorcerer. Pina’s heart sank as the bear reared on its hind legs. It roared its challenge as the enemy appeared through the rocks and trees from the south.
Pina was almost finished, her heart raced, the bear roared, Wildcat ran for all she was worth to save her sister. The bear charged, and no mere double or smokey image could hide a person’s form enough to protect against such a massive creature. Its paw connected and sent the sorcerer flying into the rocks the cougar had leaped from. But the same vapor that had felled the cougar now filled the bear’s lunges. Panic gripped the poor beast’s heart. It dug, rubbing its nose in the dirt as it whined piteously. As the sorcerer gained his feet, he let loose a single dark orb that consumed the distracted bear in a moment. Seconds later, the beast was nothing more than clattering bones on the grassy knoll under foot.
“SORCERER! FEEL THE WRATH OF NATURE! FOR I HAVE SWORN TO PROTECT MY CHARGE UNTIL THE LAST LEAF FALLS ON THIS WORLD!” Pina’s voice boomed over the entire forest as she completed her spell. Vines
shot out from around her body and gripped the deadly sorcerer. Some withered away as they grew close, but the thicker ones protected by Pina’s projected aura wrapped around him and squeezed. Damage notifications rolled in, and for a moment Pina thought she might yet succeed despite being exhausted, hunted, and wounded from her earlier fight with the hellhounds.
The wildcat screamed for her attention through their link, but Pina was distracted. Controlling her spell and countering the sorcerer’s deathly magic took all of her concentration. She had nothing else to give. Pina didn’t notice the strange foreign man in drake scale armor lifting the blowgun to his lips. Or the woman with the vial of sleeping poison she had offered him.
As the vines crushed and the spell worked, Pina barely felt the bite in her neck as the dart landed home. She had almost instantly felt the poison work its magic, and her control of her spell ebbed with every blink of her eyes. Her eyelids grew heavy, her breathing slow. Despite all of her efforts after just a few moments she had fallen to the earth unable to do more than force her eyes open. The three servants of the sorcerer, his lackeys and puppets all stood over her a moment later, talking, whispering, before leaving her. Pina’s last sight had been the sorcerer looming over her, hate in his eyes.
“You think I was after that pathetic pointy eared elf?” His laugh had been bitter and long, and it had filled her nightmares as the sleep had taken her.
Pina shot out of the trance, the memory. The sorcerer stood off to one side of the room, panting as he cleaned the knife in his hands. He collected the blood off it, her blood, into a small jar. This was her signal, her sign he had finished. For now. She allowed the knot of pain and stress in her chest to ease. Her knees trembled, and she allowed the weight of her body to hang on the ropes that held her hands in place. As she did, her entire body lurched downward unexpectedly. The sorcerer looked back at her, and she stilled. He shook his head in disappointment before returning to his task. Pina looked up and found a slight amount of dust filling the surrounding air. She looked higher, where the ties met the stone in the ceiling and found that the apparatus that held her was slightly askew.
Ethria 3: The Liberator Page 2
