Wraith Lord

by Phipps, C. T.

  Jassamine lifted her staff and then spoke. “Servant of the Darkness, creature of the World Below, in the name of the emperor and the Lawgiver, I command you to come forth! Know your evils will no longer be tolerated for we have come like the morning sun to banish the darkness.”

  Her words bound the demon by a powerful geas, compelling it to reveal itself. In front of the church, a miasma of green fog swirled together into the centaur-like form of the Nuckelavee. They could appear in many shapes and sizes, most horse-related, but this one had the lower body of a horse and the chest of a man with a head possessing two giant horns that jutted out from the sides. Its skin was gray and its eyes a sickly yellow with a thin layer of ice covering it entirely. Its right arm was a spear made of bone, jutting from one forearm. I was in the presence of pure evil.

  It wasn’t alone. Dozens of dead villagers, their skin translucent, their necks broken, and bodies bloated from the manner of their deaths, rose from the ground around us—those who had willingly sold themselves to the King Below and taken the Unspeakable Oath only to find that nothing but death and damnation awaited them.

  As if reading my mind, the creature laughed. “You will find there is no such thing as pure evil, King Below to Come and Bride of the Lawgiver. Good and evil are but labels we ascribe to what we love and hate. My master has chosen to embody evil for the love of his brother. Yet the Lawgiver is unworthy of such devotion and has made a mockery of everything good.”

  “I command you to stay and fight,” Jassamine said, continuing her spell. “You will be undone this evening, condemned to be less than a spirit’s shadow in the World Below.”

  “Death’s sweet sorrow is no punishment for one who has endured the horrors of becoming a demon,” the creature said. “It is a fate both of you will suffer. Yet, as one ascends to the light they will lose everything warm inside them even as the one who descends below shall gain love in ice.”

  “Enough!” I shouted, drawing my sword and charging.

  The Nuckelavee fired a bolt of black lightning from its spear. I knocked it away with a spell. Jassamine drained away its barrier right before I struck the creature through its neck with my blessed blade, killing it in one blow.

  It was an all-too-easy victory. Then I saw the creature was smiling. Staring into my eyes, a sword jutting from the top of its head, the creature said, “You will become as me.”

  I noticed my hands were covered in demonsteel gauntlets, forged in the fires of the World Below. My clothes had been replaced with black sackcloth, like the robes of a Dark Lord. I let go of my blade and the Nuckelavee’s body fell to the ground before vanishing. Gone was the village. Instead, in its place was an ashen battlefield where I saw all my comrades-in-arms spread across the ground. They bore the marks of torture from where they’d been executed by the Grand Temple.

  Turning to Jassamine, I saw she had been replaced by a burning angel, surrounded by the corpses of the villagers. She was naked in a nimbus of fire, a look of righteous bliss on her face even as dead children surrounded her.

  “No…” I whispered. “This is not real.”

  “It is, my love,” Jassamine said, her voice the voice of the Lawgiver. “You have become what you despise.”

  I reached up to my face and found I no longer had one.

  Somehow, I still screamed.

  Chapter Two

  I awoke, my eyelids flying open.

  I was in a bed many times the size of a normal one, enough for a half-dozen people, the candles to its sides extinguished. The room was massive but unadorned with only simple wooden furniture and a witchfire hearth to fill it. A set of glass-and-iron doors led to a balcony in front of the bed, open to the freezing cold outside. It was midnight with not a single bit of light to illuminate us, but I could see as if in daylight. I also felt not a single stirring of chill against my body. Indeed, the cold made me stronger. It was the benefit of being a Wraith Knight.

  Raising my hands up, I looked at them. They were olive, hardened by years of labor, and beautiful. Reaching up to touch my face, I felt the angular contours of my skin. It was my face, but not my original one. My old body was lying in some unmarked grave, somewhere, unmourned along with thousands of others forgotten in the aftermath of the Fourth Great Shadow War’s final battle. I was a ghost now, just one as solid as a man. No, not a ghost, a god. The new King Below. Yet I felt anything but divine.

  I felt a stirring beside me and I looked down at the beautiful forms lying beside me. To my right was Regina ni Whitetremor, a platinum-haired woman with skin the color of marble. She was elfblooded and surpassingly beautiful, her face marred only by a broken nose and a scar on her right lip. The rest of her body was well muscled and similarly marked, the signs of a warrior’s life. This just increased her attractiveness to me as I’d never found myself drawn to the dainty willows of the nobility’s courts.

  Regina was naked under the black silk sheets conjured by magic, sleeping the peace of the righteous. I struggled with how she was able to do so, lying with a monster. She was a Shadowguard, too, one sworn to fight the King Below and his minions. I’d managed to win her heart, but I worried I was dragging her down to my level.

  “Mmm,” a voice muttered beside me.

  My attention turned over to her opposite in appearance and temperament. Lying on my left was Serah Brightwaters, a woman with chocolate-brown skin and black curly hair falling down her back. Serah was a sorceress, like Jassamine, but one who had always been drawn to the dark and macabre. Regina’s lover, she had joined our cause to seek the King Below’s power, only to become our bride in the end. Serah was a plain woman without her glamours to cover them up, but her fierceness was what made me love her.

  Polygamy was not uncommon in the Southern Kingdoms or Shadowlands amongst the rich. Men took multiple brides to sire heirs and women took second husbands for amusement after marrying first husbands to seal alliances. The Path did not recognize marriages between the same sex, but I had lived too long not to realize the same love existed between my brides as their love did with me. It made my situation all the more confusing. I had only ever wanted to love one in my life.

  And now she was my enemy.

  I slipped slowly down between them, waking neither up before stepping my feet onto the cold, hard stone. Taking a deep breath, I walked to the balcony and placed my hands on the snowy bannister. Before me was the city of Everfrost. It was a land of steam, smoke, iron, and gears existing at the top of the world. Gigantic pipes pumped massive amounts of water into rune-covered turbines as a million citizens worked feverishly to build the devices I’d instructed them to construct. The citizens were building railroads, power lines, telegraph poles, and sewer systems throughout my territories. They were preparing for a coming invasion of the Southern Kingdoms. An invasion that would, hopefully, never come.

  “You can’t fool them forever,” the Trickster said, behind me. He took the form of a foppish, angular-faced man, wearing an elaborate ruffled coat and ascot of my era’s nobility. He looked like me, now, beautiful but false. “They will figure out you have no interest in waging war against the Southern Kingdoms. You gave them their freedom, but they don’t want a king of peace. They want a god of war.”

  “Silence, spirit, you are dead,” I said, shaking my head. “Worse than dead. You destroyed yourself utterly and do not even possess a soul.”

  “I gave you my divinity,” the Trickster said, shrugging. “So I am inside you now. Though, truly, I have to ask which is worse—talking to me or talking to yourself?”

  “The latter. I am not afraid of you.” I stared down at the massive statue they were constructing of me in full demonsteel armor. It was an extravagant waste of resources, yet the trappings of power were also the source of it. If I did not give the Shadowkind races a constant reminder of my presence in pageantry, I would have to give it in blood.

  “Then hear my counsel that building a nation is not a matter of giving them clocks, food, and parties. I spent centuries m
aking the Shadowkind hate each other only slightly less than the Lightborn species. They are bound together only by fear of you and promises of conquests abroad.”

  “You were a poor ruler.”

  “Yet I still ruled longer than any mortal monarch.” The Trickster rolled his eyes. “If you do not give them blood, they will take it from you.”

  “I have greater faith in people than you,” I said, lying. “Peace is addictive. Those who desire war are most often those who have nothing to lose or everything to gain. Those who have something to protect are more likely to use caution. It may take centuries but I intend to reverse the damage you have done to them.”

  “Because choosing to mold them into something you like is so very different from my molding them into something I liked.” The Trickster conjured a glass of wine and sat down on the balcony’s railing.

  I wished the Trickster would stop haunting me. The King Below had kept me for centuries as his slave and he still bedeviled me despite being a ghost. The Nine Heroes had killed the King Below six years ago, but while it had freed me from his control, it hadn’t removed his ghost from my mind. It was strange since my assumption of the King Below’s power should have meant the Trickster, the God of Evil’s favorite avatar, was no more. He, obviously, disagreed.

  “I am merely offering them a choice,” I said, sighing. “I believe people will choose progress over ignorance, prosperity over poverty.”

  The Trickster smiled. “Yet the Southern Kingdoms are ruled by tyrants they voluntarily placed into power.”

  I had no rebuttal for that.

  “The Nine Heroes will bring war to this place,” the Trickster said. “As soon as they have finished murdering everyone who disagrees with them, they will come here, and tear down all of your works. They will exterminate those races you seek to save. Jassamine promised you as much in your last battle.”

  “I know.”

  “Jacob, who are you talking to?” Regina’s voice spoke.

  The Trickster vanished.

  Frustrating creature.

  “Myself,” I answered.

  “You know they say people who talk to themselves are crazy,” Regina said, approaching the balcony.

  Regina had slipped on a white cotton robe and a pair of wooden sandals. Like me, she showed no sign of the cold. I had bestowed a portion of my divine essence upon her with our marriage and it was having an effect on her. The Shadowkind were already calling her the Unicorn Queen and Goddess of Starlight. Titles I felt fit her well.

  “I’ve declared myself the new King Below,” I said, shaking my head. “If that isn’t crazy, I don’t know what is.”

  Regina shrugged and leaned over the railing. “You’re a god now, Jacob. I’ve seen the miracles you perform. That you have inherited the mantle of an evil one is no different from a tyrant passing his crown to a just man.”

  “Am I a just man?”

  “Of course.”

  I knew better. “The locals may call me a god, Regina, but I think otherwise. All I gained from seizing the King Below’s title is the ability to conjure a body at will and a boost to my magical reserves. I’m not that much different than the Wraith Knight I was before, a wizard and a warrior who just happens to dead.”

  Regina leaned over and placed her hand on my shoulder before giving me a light peck on the cheek. “You don’t feel dead to me.”

  I smirked. “Because that would make you a necrophiliac?”

  Regina snorted and gave me a light punch to the shoulder. “I’m not one of those empty-headed lasses who swoon over books of romantic ghosts and strigoi carrying them off. I fell in love with you because you were, are, a builder and a soldier.”

  I took deep breath and sighed. My breath created so steam because it carried no warmth. “Perhaps you’re right. What’s the situation with the army?”

  I had made Regina Supreme Military Commander of the Iron Order. Not only because she was more than capable, but because I was more comfortable designing magitech devices and managing logistics than leading armies. Once, I had been capable and willing to make decisions even lord marshals would balk at, but those days were long past. War was a young man’s game, and Regina was full of a righteous confidence she could whip the divided Shadowkind’s armies into a single unified force.

  She’d exceeded all expectations.

  “We’ve won our fortieth battle against the rebels and I don’t foresee them being able to put up resistance for much longer. Discipline is still problematic but not overly so. I’ve had to hang several hundred rapists and looters but they’re starting to get the message,” Regina said, putting her hands on the railing. “In some ways, it’s a good thing they’re used to autocratic rule by an immortal god king. They’re used to obeying orders that make no sense to them.”

  “Instead of four Dark Lords, they answer to a Bright Lady.”

  “A queen of starlight married to a king and queen of shadows.” Regina smiled at that title. “We’ve managed to bring most of the Shadowkind in the North under our rule. Giving them back their free will has made it a costly conflict but I’m surprised to say many seem to welcome the new laws.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Well, they were races created by the God of Evil to be, well, evil.”

  I frowned. “You shouldn’t let them hear you say that.”

  “They take pride in being evil. It means something different to them.” Regina looked over at me. “Also, could you put on a pair of pants? You’re kind of distracting.”

  I looked down at my nakedness then over at Regina’s arousing form. I felt the blood rushing to my lower regions. “Perhaps I could distract you in other ways.”

  “You are insatiable. I approve.” Regina wrapped her arms around my neck, a hungry look in her eye. Then said look softened, becoming wistful. “When I lost my family, I thought would never be happy again. I would wake up crying, dreaming of Gewain, Ketra, and the others I lost. You and Serah have filled a void I never thought would be full again. I would thank the Lawgiver, but…”

  “I understand, I do.”

  “I shall thank the universe instead.”

  “There are better gods out there than he. We shall find them.”

  “Or be them.”

  Both of us were great believers in the Path, but the Lawgiver was responsible for Jassamine and the Nine Heroes’—no, Usurpers’—tyranny. The Lawgiver was the hidden hand behind their rise to power. While he had taught of concepts like justice, mercy, and tolerance—he’d never practiced them. Where did that leave his followers who believed in such over him?

  Abandoned, the Trickster said. But perhaps that’s what why the universe has given us a God of Evil who is good.

  “I would be lost without you,” I said, placing my left hand on her cheek. I wanted to take her again against the bannister. Regina gave me a smile and I knew such an advance would be welcome. Moving my hands to her robe, I heard a throat clear.

  Dammit.

  “Yes?” I asked, turning around to look at Serah.

  My other wife’s hair was hanging wildly around her neck and she had managed to conjure up a plain black dress around herself that I wondered about the nature of—was it an illusion or real? Serah’s ability with sorcery was such she could make illusions so real that, if she conjured a bridge, you could walk over it.

  “Am I interrupting something?” Serah asked.

  “Would you care to join in?” Regina flashed a wicked grin.

  “I fear that business will take me away from such,” Serah said, chuckling. “I also do not possess your same level of insatiability. Twice a night is more than my fill.”

  “A pity,” Regina said. “Insatiability should be the mark of all witches.”

  “Regina is exhausting even to gods,” I said, smiling at her and remembering the night before. “One of the many qualities I admire about her.”

  “And about me, husband? What do you admire?” Serah asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Your absol
ute indomitable will and ravenous lust for power.”

  Regina rolled her eyes.

  Serah, instead, just nodded, satisfied with my answer.

  “We have much to plan today,” Serah said, holding out her hand and summoning her demonsteel staff. It was topped with a black diamond the size of a man’s fist, which I’d retrieved on a visit to the now-empty World Below. I called it the Heart of Midnight and it was the most powerful wizard’s staff ever created. “You mentioned that we’ve managed to finally assimilate the remaining dissidents?”

  “If you mean I’ve finally killed all the bastards, blackguards, psychopaths, and warlords that won’t toe the line, yes,” Regina said, chuckling. “I joined the Shadowguard to kill the Shadowkind. Now I’m leading them and still killing more than I ever did with them.”

  I grimaced.

  So did Serah, surprisingly.

  “I’m just asking what the shape of the army is,” Serah said.

  “Stronger than it’s ever been, and I don’t mean under us,” Regina answered, closing her robe tight and tying a knot with her cloth belt. “The machines Jacob has designed are amazing, as good or better as anything the empire has. A few more months of training and their discipline will be up to snuff too.”

  “Good,” Serah said, her voice lowering.

  The black diamond on her staff twinkled, signaling she was channeling a large amount of magic.

  Serah’s power had reached the point where she could wield it unconsciously.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked, disturbed.

  “I believe it is time we discuss invading the Southern Kingdoms.”

  Chapter Three

  When are we invading the Southern Kingdoms? That was a question I had hoped not to hear. I’d witnessed the kind of chaos, destruction, and madness brought about by a King Below leading his armies to the Southern Kingdoms. Even knowing the Southern Kingdoms were now synonymous with the empire that occupied them, I was hesitant to repeat the evils of my predecessor. I did not want to become a murderer of innocents, and they were the always the first to die in war.