by Rory Surtain
FIREFANGED
A Demon in Exile Novel
By
Rory Surtain
Independently Published
Copyright © 2020 Rory Surtain
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 9781234567890
ISBN-10: 1477123456
Cover design by: Darren Cepulis
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309
Printed in the United States of America
—Demon in Exile Series—
Firefanged
The Scarred Man (Coming Soon)
Contents
FIREFANGED
Copyright
Prologue
Bar Sinister
Chapter 1
Bar Sinister
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Bar Sinister
Chapter 4
Bar Sinister
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Bar Sinister
Chapter 7
Bar Sinister
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Bar Sinister
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Bar Sinister
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Map of the Realm of Colivar
A demon in Exile. It wasn’t a gift; it was a message.
Prologue
Shadow Demon
“To the Barn! Run, Cy! Run!” yelled Katie as she leaped off the cedar post beneath the corner of our front porch.
Our eleven-year-old bodies flew across the barnyard in the deathly silence of mid-night, sprinting toward the dark maw of the tall, aging building. Back inside our house, we could barely make out the banging and rumbling of an unseen beast, until it suddenly reached the porch, and the harsh sound of the night-demon’s claws shredding the old wood planks brought new terror to our hearts.
The final, defiant scream of our mother had roused us moments before, telling us to go, before a screeching growl in the room below us signaled the demon’s triumph and its intention for more. We heard it clatter up the narrow stairs of our house as Katie and I slipped out the window of our bedroom. The shingles of our porch roof were wet with dew, our bare feet slipping on the wood as we scurried to the edge and slid down to the ground.
The heavy barn door was open, and my target was barely visible through the gloom. A heavy rope hung in the center of the barn, tied to the rafters more than twenty feet above us. I jumped as high as I could and started climbing, hands and feet alternating up the thick cable. Katie, my twin sister, followed on my heels as we shimmied upward together. It was a race we’d done many times that summer as we helped our father ready the loft for the upcoming harvest.
I was almost twenty feet up when a scuff on the dirt floor near the doorway drew my attention. The heavy rope began to sway erratically, but I hung on, finally daring to look down. My sister was gone, the thick line sheared off more than a dozen feet from the ground.
“Katie!” I sobbed. “Katie!!!”
An Infernal laugh answered me from somewhere below, but I saw nothing, nothing but shadows.
Bar Sinister
The edge of oblivion
I was a House of War, waiting to be reborn.
In the middle of nowhere leans a bar that never closes. There weren’t many worse places to spend eternity, but having Memeton as a drinking companion helped pass the Cycle. Memet, an Arch Priest of the Infernal Dominion, is the one connection I have to my late bellipotent father, Hal-Raekorn the Elder, Warlord of the Cycle and Stalwart to the Master of Infernal Reality. We demon-kind really are a poetic bunch when it comes to our names and titles. It helps pass the time between blood baths.
After Hal-Raekorn’s pivotal success at the Battle of the Black Sands, a summons from the High-Prince of Hell brought my father to the Infernal Courts to be honored, as was his due. The Elder was gifted the war-knife of General Hal-Noire, whom my father had beheaded to seal his triumph. The weapon had taken thousands of lives during the Cycle’s many campaigns, but it hosted only one soul, the powerful and angry essence of Hal-Noire. In accepting the gift, my father named the knife Exile. The High-Prince then anointed my father with a new title, Firefanged, and sealed the rite of power by burning him to ash. It ended the Elder’s existence in Hell and sparked mine into being, sitting in a dive bar on the outskirts of Oblivion.
“Younger, you know that if you were already a Plague, they would find you, burn you, and send you back without a chance for gain or redemption,” opined Memet.
He was leaning heavily on the bar over a mug of Perdition ale, a harsh blend of fermented sheep’s blood and avarice. Memeton loved to remind me of my nascent state of existence.
“Bloody Mary!” I yelled, ordering my next drink.
I had inherited the knowledge my father carried forward to his end. Well, most of it anyway, and being Hal-Raekorn the Younger is the first step in our House’s cycle of existence.
“Of course,” I responded to Memet. “Anyway, you'll have to thank Baron Maltheus for breaching the Outer Domain. His current quest for power may actually be doing me a favor this time.”
The Outer Domain was the universal counterpart to Hell. It ran on cycles too, both short and long, seasonal, annual, epochal. It was a realm of pseudo-mortal beings. Its elements of power: earth, air, fire, and water, were the building blocks for everything, but the spirits, schemes, and scars of the beings there defined the political landscape and the boundaries of each realm. Their gods were much more hands-off than mine.
Here, in Hell, our Infernal Cycle ran off a different thread of time than in the Outer Domain, with a cadence set by the High-Prince himself. It was on his word alone that the rules of our domain existed, and it was in his name that our Houses grew in stature or fell in ruin. Our elements, or Catalysts as they are known here: war, death, pestilence, and strife, are the tools of power that shape our Infernal Domain. Houses vie for the favor of the High-Prince, for greater control of their peers, for more significant, more potent allies, and greater access to the inner levels. The end goal, as always, was the assertion of one’s will in the building of Reality as the Cycle turned.
“I’m not sure Maltheus is looking to do you any favors. Rumor has it that he was following orders of Prince Kasaval, who now harbors an eternal grudge against the House of Hal-Raekorn. After all, it was your father, the esteemed Warlord, that blinded his horde at the Battle of Black Sands and routed them.”
I shook my head, “You’ll have to explain that to me someday. Blinding thousands of demons at once, that smells of the Cycle’s Darkest Magic.”
The Elder was never so skilled at the Arts of Unreality, preferring a Hellsword over illusion to wage his war. My recollection of the Battle is somewhat blank up to the point where he took off the head of Hal-Noire, ending any chance of Kasaval or his toad Maltheus of expanding their own Houses this Cycle.
My conjecture brought just the slightest of nods from Memet, with his eyes glued to his mug. I knew of his millennia-long relationship with my House, Hal-Raekorn
, but couldn’t see the driving force for the alliance.
“Well,” I continued, changing the subject. “My Elder’s sudden demise does seem a poor reward for an Annihilation done well. Come to think of it, Duke Sargon, little Lord of Pestilence, has yet to pay House Hal-Raekorn for the Warlord’s outstanding service. We have not forgiven that debt.”
As if we ever would.
“I’ll be sure to mention it to the Duke next time I’m in the Infernal Courts,” Memet said. “Let’s leave it at that. You should be enjoying all the strength that your strife in the Outer Domain brings you. In time, you’ll have a chance to reclaim your place in the Cycle of Hell with even greater power. And recall that your Elder’s titles are now yours, even if you don’t yet have the power to wield them. You are a Warlord of the Infernal Cycle. You are the House of Hal-Raekorn. And as such, you are also Firefanged.”
Firefanged. There’s a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one.
“Hmmph. Infernal titles aside for the moment, here I have Exile to remind me of my station, but nothing in the Outer Domain,” I replied. “This allows me to acquire all sorts of thrilling and painful moments on that road without too much risk, but it does me scant good when Baron Maltheus or one of his fiends comes hunting.”
Now Memet smiled, “The Baron Maltheus, another sniveling Lord of Pestilence, backs the Horde, but he doesn’t have the horns to travel. Not like you, anyway. I suspect Queen Lis-Xiana will soon become involved, so beware of her brood of assassins. A Death House carries the sharpest of claws.”
“Oh, black joy,” I offered.
Time for another drink.
Chapter 1
Storm on the horizon
The King’s vaunted Realm Guard led the long parade of troops, their steel-plated armor and surety of spirit, putting our frontier city at ease. For one warm afternoon, they pushed back the invisible cloud of fear and despair that had descended upon us all. The contingent of Realm Guard, though only six in number, rode massive mountain bears. They had the air of predators, confident and hungry, both rider and bear, and we all kept a polite distance as they strode past.
Corey nodded. “The farthest Guard is named Sir Tytus, and his bear is called Ganymede. I can’t imagine anything standing in the way of the Realm Guard when a battle starts.”
Corey’s father was the town blacksmith, and his family often worked doing repairs for the military in the area. Corey, having recently turned nineteen, was a year older than me, but we were of similar height as he tended toward stocky, and I tended toward tall. We both had an interest in the weapons his father produced at the forge. As the forge apprentice, Corey was quickly building up the muscle and frame needed to take on the work full-time.
My own interests varied. I didn’t have the patience for forge work, but helped test out the many weapons they produced, making sure they were properly balanced and sturdy enough to do the job. In the Fall, I always borrowed one of their axes and chopped extra wood in the surrounding logging camps for the winter stocks of the church and rectory. There was always plenty of work to be done around the city of Lockrun to survive the harsh winters.
“Most of the mounted knights are wearing the Duke’s red colors, but I don’t recognize those wearing the gray,” I pointed out the trailing rows of knights and footmen.
“Holy Shrike! Those are Paladins! You can tell by the gray tunics and the huge axes that they wield,” Corey said. “They only take to the field for one reason. Demons.”
His last word, demons, he whispered into my right ear so that my young friend Cat, standing to my left, wouldn’t hear it.
Most of the troops were wearing the red colors of the Duke of Stonnberg, our frontier city’s distant liege lord. A few dozen heavily armored Paladins and a large contingent of axe-wielding foot troops sported simple gray tunics with a sun-and-eye symbol stitched onto their right breast. Each of the gray soldiers carried a steel shield and a double-bladed axe. According to Corey, they were Sentinels of the Order of the Vigil. The gray soldiers smelled of determination and fear to me, and I certainly understood why.
The column of almost two thousand soldiers tromped through our city and out the eastern gate, heading onward to a camp a mile farther up the valley to the northeast. They were on their way into the foothills of the Everest Mountains to engage an enemy.
As if speaking about it would make it more real, no one in Lockrun ever mentioned who that enemy was, but there were those of us who knew the truth.
Lockrun is a small, frontier city situated in a valley on the southern edge of the Everest Mountains. It’s the farthest holding to the northeast of the Duke’s capital city of Stonnberg, and it hosts a few thousand rugged citizens for the Kingdom of Colivar. King Falbrenn of Colivar makes his home in the vast Royal city of Maidenhall, far out in the plains to the southwest of us. As such, we were used to depending on ourselves as threats arose. Most threats, anyway.
Weeks before the contingent of Ducal and Vigil troops arrived, Sir Gerald Ramsey, our Lord Mayor, had set every available person to repairing the old timber and mortar walls around the city. He had made it known that the curfew bell would ring an hour early each day to make sure folks were inside those walls well before dark. The militia began locking the gates each night.
The local militia, consisting of every able-bodied male, had been assembled in the town square. Hector Sims, the town Bailiff, was in charge. Sims tallied heads and weapons, choosing guards to watch the gates. Simple drills were performed. Being that I was on the sturdy side of seventeen years old, and by no means a child, I had joined in the muster.
Sims and I never got along. He was a largish man, a bachelor, and more of a bully than a bailiff. He couldn’t come within ten feet of me without picking a fight; there was something about me that always set him off. I didn’t go out of my way to threaten him, but I still perceived an underlying scent of anger from him whenever I was around. I guess there just wasn’t room for two alpha dogs on the same block, but I didn’t care. I kept my distance and watched my back. I had my own business to run.
To put it bluntly, I killed things for a living. I spent my nights hunting and trapping in the valley around Lockrun. I tended to work at night, going after the nocturnal predators and prey that filled the region. Farms in the area always had problems with wolves roaming down from the foothills, and the logging camps to the east were often set upon by mountain lions. The local streams hosted moon crabs as well as beavers and drew plenty of other critters into my snares. I didn’t trap and hunt for the fun of it; I did it to survive.
As a ward of the local Church of Saint Madge, I had spent the past eleven years living under its care and tutelage. With my eighteenth birthday on the horizon, I had begun supporting myself while also giving back to those that supported me all these years. The good Pastor Riley and Sister Kay had done their best to pound a solid education into my skull and an appreciation for hard work into the rest of me. It’s something that I’m thankful for to this day. Still, it was my innate skills that helped me make a living in and around the valley of Lockrun.
The Pastor once said that I had an eye for hunting, though in truth, more of a nose. While my eyesight was uncanny at night, my sense of smell could detect and discern predators and prey better than any hound. The moon crabs that I collected were well camouflaged, their shells coated with some kind of glue that would hold the sand and substance of the riverbank to their backs. Luckily for me, I could smell the buggers, sand or no, and I was fast enough to grab them before they dashed back to the bottom of the brook. On a good night, I’d snag two dozen, selling most to the kitchen at a local inn while saving a few crabs for Sister Kay and a few coins for the Church.
The town forge had a great reputation for the quality and durability of their steel, and I’d saved enough coin over the past year to pay off Corey’s dad for a first-rate hunting knife that he’d sold to me at cost. He knew about my nocturnal hunting excursions, and I think he was worried about me running into a real
predator without any extra protection. The fine hunting knife boasted a ten-inch blade that was good for stabbing or skinning, and as my prized possession, I carried it with me everywhere.
Pastor Riley had always kept a close eye on me over the years, and he marveled at my ability to read the moods and feelings of those around me, even strangers, calling it a strong sense of intuition. I think we both knew it was more than that, and looking back, I can see how he was protecting me with his simple explanations as I was growing up, but it left me totally unprepared for the events of that Spring.
More than a month before the contingent of soldiers marched through Lockrun, a deeper part of my mind, the nightmare part, had begun to notice something very wrong on the wind from the north. Like the smell of a corpse right outside your bedroom window, I had perceived a dreadful stench rolling in from many miles away where there should be nothing but trees and hills and eventually impassible mountains. A fetid scent, it brought to mind hunger, fear, and death.
In my dreams late at night, I had seen a dark cloud of affliction flowing down from the distant hills, invading our town, threatening, consuming, spreading like the plague, and I had struggled over what to do with these recurring visions. Finally, I had mentioned my concerns to Pastor Riley about a feeling of darkness brewing to the northeast, an evil storm. I couldn’t be more than vague, and I didn’t know what else to say, without sounding completely crazy, but I hoped the Pastor would know what to do for the good of our city and my sanity.
With my newfound nightmares ruining any chance of a good night’s sleep, I often ignored the town’s curfew bell and stayed out all night. It was late Spring, and the weather was turning mild. I knew the miles around Lockrun as well as anyone that had grown up here, and I had kept a distant watch for whatever my dreams were showing me while I continued to work at my nightly trapping and crabbing.
