Soul Stealer: Legacy of the Blade

by Joseph J. Bailey

  So, in sum, he was unlike a fire even though his appearance brought to mind qualities of fire.

  Or, perhaps more accurately, he was like living light.

  With a beard.

  That he might or might not be able to shave.

  And luminous armor with a blazing holy sword the size of wooden bar across a high lord’s locked castle door or a beam in a not-so-modest cottage.

  Whether he was more like a fire or light, he was transparent, which I suppose also made him a bit like glass but of the molten variety given his fluidity.

  Which is not necessarily transparent but often shares colors with fires.

  As I have so eloquently elucidated, the leader of the Empyrean Guard resembled nothing more than a campfire of molten glass cast from living light.

  I am perhaps a better experiencer of the divine than its describer.

  Especially when I rely on made-up words to make my point.

  Apparently I was delusional.

  And I had not eaten any mushrooms of the magic variety.

  Which meant I was in serious need of rest.

  Or its equivalent.

  If I were able to focus my mind for more than an instant, I would cast a spell to restore myself.

  Beginning my incantation, I muttered a few words before falling face first onto the crystalline floor.

  The luminous tile mosaic was, I decided, surprisingly warm.

  Second Impressions

  I was flying.

  Clouds streamed by in pearlescent tufts, the vapor cool on my skin as it rushed past.

  The ground was far below, a lush carpet of green unsullied by smoke, demons, or ruin.

  I was as light as the air and as free as the sunlight warming my back.

  As I swooped through the clouds, my grin was so wide I worried my cheeks might cramp from overexertion.

  My smile muscles were rather atrophied and unused to being called into action, especially without a good warmup first.

  The minutiae of life on the ground was of no concern, trivialities left far behind and away. I had no care or concern other than this moment of flight, of blissful exhilaration and untroubled abandon.

  This, I decided, was heaven.

  I never wanted to leave.

  “Saedeus.”

  The wind whispered my name.

  I ignored it.

  “Saedeus.”

  The earth below called me.

  I tuned it out.

  “Saedeus.”

  The sun above beckoned.

  I had better things to do.

  “Saedeus!”

  My eyes jumped open in alarm as my pulse raced.

  I was flying.

  At least that had not been a dream.

  I was floating above the floor in the vast chamber within the heart of Kerraboer.

  The shimmering floor wavered and shone with innumerous lights coalescing in and out of shapes I could almost recognize, from subtle geometries to whimsical patterns.

  Lord Chalmeire waited before me patiently, as indescribably radiant as ever.

  I certainly hoped he had not been only waiting for me.

  Given what I now understood of the interlinkages between Empyrean Knights, I was fairly certain he had not been unoccupied.

  With the decidedly preternatural clarity of mind of one roused far too quickly from slumber, I also determined that he did indeed have a beard.

  I further decided something else.

  I was embarrassed.

  I had fallen flat on my face in exhaustion before arguably the most important person in the length and breadth of Uërth.

  At least I was consistent.

  No one could claim that I treated meeting him any differently than I did almost any other significant event in my life thus far.

  So, instead of being embarrassed, I should probably be proud.

  I was egalitarian in the grandest sense of the word.

  Even if by accident.

  Wiping the drool off my chin decisively, I wondered exactly how long I had been out.

  “But moments, Saedeus.

  “Lord Chalmeire refreshed you since you did not do so yourself.

  “He also gave you the gift of a complete restful sleep over a much shorter time than normal.”

  Alric’s words were of little comfort.

  I still could not figure out how he cut that beard.

  Maybe that was what his great sword was for.

  I could see Lord Chalmeire’s bright smile and knew then and there that he, too, was reading my mind.

  Could no one stay out of my head?

  Was it as open and drafty as my old hovel?

  “If you let your guard down and open your doors to guests, they will come in, Saedeus.”

  Was I not entitled to the sanctity of my own mind?

  “If you scream out at the top of your lungs, anyone nearby will hear what you have to say.”

  Alric had a point.

  I reined my mental dross in and stilled myself.

  The time had come to make a better second impression than I had with my first.

  I opened my mouth to begin, but Lord Chalmeire beat me to it. “Loer’allon has shown us much of you, Saedeus.

  “We are honored to welcome you into the fold.”

  I was taken aback.

  I had expected to be tolerated.

  At best.

  Not respected.

  I cleared my throat, embarrassed once more.

  “Lord Chalmeire, you honor me by your consideration and esteem.

  “In all honesty, all I had originally intended to do was try to return Loer’allon to her rightful bearers after Alric fell. I wanted to honor Alric’s memory by passing Loer’allon on to one worthy of bearing her.”

  I cracked a half-smile. “I guess I failed in that.”

  Catching myself, I added quickly, “My lord.”

  “Loer’allon alone is the judge of who may bear her.

  “She has chosen.

  “I trust her wisdom, for it is far greater than my own.”

  Talk about humility.

  After that compliment, I was not exactly feeling humble.

  But I could pretend.

  Lord Chalmeire could command the entirety of the Empyrean Guard with a single utterance, and he had deferred to the sword on my back.

  I trusted her judgment as well.

  If I had learned one thing on this trip, it was that many were far wiser than I.

  My sword included.

  My pet rock, on the other hand…well, I did not plan on deferring to Lucius any time soon.

  Earthworm Knights had to have a little self-respect, after all.

  “What would you do now that you have returned to Kerraboer bearing the wisdom of Alric upon your brow and the heft of Loer’allon upon your back?”

  That was an easy one.

  “I will charge the maw of Chaos and make it choke upon its own blood.”

  By the look on Lord Chalmeire’s lambent face, I think my second impression made up for my first.

  A Battle Waged and Lost

  After my rather understated offer to volunteer, I did not get to stay in Kerraboer to partake of her copious wonders for long.

  I was not surprised in the slightest.

  I just wished that for once I had kept my mouth shut or tempered my enthusiasm a bit.

  Though I could recall and experience the marvels of Kerraboer through Alric’s memory, I wanted to do so through my own eyes.

  My mouth, however, had cut that opportunity short.

  Already bearing an Angel Sword and a Sigil Shield, there was little to be done for me in the way of provisioning. I was, however, offered what I thought of as a last meal in the commissary.

  The dining hall itself was far grander than any temple to the Light had any right to be. If knightly dining halls were this fine, I could not imagine what the Empyrean Knights’ halls of worship were like.

  That was not true…I knew exactly what the Emp
yrean Guards’ halls of worship were like. They varied as much as the people who employed them, ranging from the heavenly—suitable for the direct expression of the majesty of the divine—to the simple, reflecting the presence and actuality of spirituality in each moment.

  I took the opportunity to worship the glory of food presented before me.

  Although I knew every morsel I consumed had been summoned, created, and refined with arcane Craft—there was no time or place for fields and harvesting with an army of Chaos flooding your lands and spilling around your gates—I imagined the dishes had been lovingly grown and prepared by the hands of farmers and passed on to skilled artisans with all the love I had once given to my fine mushrooms.

  After I slew the beast of Chaos, mayhap I would go home and retire to a life of fungiculture. There was nothing quite so nice as eating what you yourself had grown or procured.

  Much to my surprise, instead of preparing me for the battle ahead, the heaping plate of steaming food made me pine for home.

  Not one for sentimentality, at least not when every fiber of my being cried out against the foolishness of my intended course of action, I wolfed down my meal and left the hall as quickly as possible, no longer as awed, or distracted, by its miracles.

  Food, it seemed, was the great equalizer.

  It grounded me in the past and helped me realize the significance of the present.

  I was about to risk throwing my life away, regardless of whether it was for a noble cause or any other justification, losing access to my past and all its joys and travails, without proper appreciation and reflection.

  A bit of rest and a full stomach had cured that.

  Now I was not only so scared that I had to run to the nearest facility to relieve my bowels, but I was missing the very things I had once blithely disregarded.

  So much for my carefree pronouncements and predilections about battle.

  I was just another chicken who wanted to go home.

  Sadly, home was too far away to matter.

  And, more importantly, if I did not act on my original intent, however crazy this resolve might be, there would not be a home to go back to soon enough.

  So it was with a newfound sense of purpose fueled by an overwhelming urgency that I charged into the gentlemen’s room prior to taking the field of battle for the most momentous event of my life.

  If I rushed the front lines like I did the bathroom, the throngs of Chaos were in for a rude awakening indeed.

  On the Front

  The army of the Empyrean Guard and their allies were unlike anything I had ever considered as a child, even one growing up in a world of magic. As a youngster, I had imagined troops, movements, formations, and battalions arrayed in shining colors, heroes clashing at the fore against the malevolence of Chaos, but this army held very little of that imagery.

  True, there were troops to be seen, myriad warriors arrayed across the field of battle, fantastical forms alight in arcane energies, but those were the exception. Rather, the allied armies of Light appeared as unencumbered lightning flashing beneath ominous storm clouds, Empyrean Knights who danced with Darkness in Light.

  Overlooking the battlefield, occasionally surfacing from this tempest of Light, mighty dragons whose auras shone like the sun, resplendent sidhe wreathed in the glory of yaera’l, and flickering dryads wrought of snowflakes and stardust, among many others, soared overhead while the massed, luminescent troops of numerous races and peoples seethed in bursts of brilliance below.

  I looked out upon a sea of purpose, one whose realization was ever eluded as the hordes of Darkness slowly impeded upon their shores.

  Stepping out onto Kerraboer’s parapets, I felt the Empyrean Mantle settle over me, a web of force too expansive to encompass in a glance or feel its limits. I was a single link in a vast chain coat, joined with, connected to, and bolstered by my brethren in arms. Armed and armored, I was part of this purpose, awash in this power, as the Light danced within and around me, cradling and buoying my essence as It did so many others.

  I knew then that I could willingly take this power into myself, that I could draw deeply upon this strength, letting its heavenly might become my own, allowing me to become the Light’s champion, Heaven’s chosen actor on the field of strife.

  This desire was a thirst without end, a gaping well without bottom, and I would not risk my allies to increase my strength at their expense. Their survival depended upon this protection and I could not take it for myself.

  The Light’s chosen had survived so long beneath this mantle exactly because its aegis sheltered them all.

  If I took this bulwark upon myself for my own ends, however vaunted, I would be as cruel and heartless as the minions I sought to overthrow.

  Letting this divine power flow through me untouched, I left the unbroken ward of the Angel Swords joined together in unified purpose.

  Others needed their safeguard more than I.

  I hoped.

  Deeply.

  Such presumption in a coward was rather brave.

  If I do say so myself.

  Being presumptuous, I did.

  And agreed wholeheartedly with my sentiment.

  However warped and contrary to my screaming survival instincts this resolve might be.

  “In looking out for others first, you look out for yourself.”

  Even Alric’s psychobabble could not faze me.

  I was already such a tangled bundle of frayed nerves that he could not add any more confusion to the emotions fluttering from my mind to my gut and outward in nauseous waves.

  “Mostly I was looking at, as opposed to looking after.”

  My retort was weak and Alric knew it.

  Thankfully, he did not argue.

  I was grateful for that at least.

  Lord Chalmeire had said I was free to do as I wished on the field of battle, that I could make no mistake in acting from my heart with a clear intent and positive vision.

  Seeing the massed troops and the roiling Shadows of Chaos striking against the army’s periphery, I felt anything but clear of mind or purpose.

  I felt more like a sodden pile of mashed potatoes left to cool and eventually dry out, abandoned on the tabletop, my determination leaking away along with my heat as I grew turgid and cold.

  “Stop wallowing in self-pity and be about your business!

  “We have faces to smash and ichor to spill!”

  Lucius was right.

  And, really, who in their right mind could argue with a pet rock?

  Into the Night

  Leaping boldly from the parapets, flying forward with dizzying abandon toward the Front, I let the Empyrean Mantle fall from me, a silken kerchief drifting away in the breeze, its passage left to the troops passing below me.

  Not a being of the Light like the Empyrean Knights or the Heavenly Host, in whose stead the Knights and their allies now fought the massed horrors from the Abyss, or a creature of the Darkness like the fell demons and their allies, I fell somewhere in between.

  Just as I would not sully the Light and tarnish Its essence, so, too, would I not succumb to Darkness.

  I would, as always, find my own way.

  Existing somewhere between Darkness and Light, I persisted in a liminal state, defining myself and my future.

  I would choose my own way.

  The Empyrean Mantle dissipated, a bittersweet memory of what could have been, as I stepped forward, sword drawn, into Darkness.

  Gouts of necrotic power spurted in bruised gashes through the air, leaving afterimages of sickly indigo, foul ochre, and heinous olive green on my eyes.

  My mind flicked longingly over the luminous Empyrean Mantle sheltering the troops behind me. So much for security...and safety in numbers.

  Wistful reminisces disappeared in a blur of savage claws and fangs, a growl that rumbled through my bowels presaging the sweeping talons lashing towards home.

  As I ducked instinctively, Loer’allon surged to life and the slaughter bega
n. Black ichor splashed over me in a noxious plume. Stifling the urge to retch, I waded forward, the Chaos Gate a fever dream too distant to consider.

  The demon lunging viciously for me looked like the unfortunate union of a massive, misshapen bat, a giant crusty crab vomited up from the depths of a polluted sea, and a massive diseased cockroach.

  I called him Fred the Wretched.

  Fred had the annoying habit of regenerating all the hoary limbs I kept lopping off.

  Instantly.

  Fred was like a contaminated hydra that had been spit out from a nightmarish zoological meat grinder.

  One that refused to die.

  Fred and I both had something in common, however.

  We both refused to play fair.

  If Fred would not stop replacing loathsome appendages after Loer’allon sliced them off, then I would cut Master Wretched off at the source.

  No more regeneration for you!

  Loer’allon's radiance a luminous torch searing through Fred’s blurred, multilimbed attack, I wrenched the demon's essence into that flame, where it burned and charred to nothing.

  Above and ahead, the Chaos Gate writhed unwholesomely, a rotten dark star insatiably slurping in Uërth’s Light. The Chaos Gate existed from one side only, that facing the Keep of Kerraboer.

  On the other side, only the sullen, maligned sky was visible.

  A vision of the Chaos Gate popped into my mind’s eye from Alric’s memory. Black clouds of demons spewed forth from its gullet as the infernals descended upon the mass of troops in torrent after torrent of horrors.

  Today, however, the Chaos Gate was still, its churning surface unmarred by emerging hellspawn.

  The Empyrean Mantle was a luminous wave front that refused to break, arcing behind me in both directions and ultimately encircling the Gate above from below. Within this crest, moving constellations flowed freely, each an Empyrean Guard or one of their allies.

  Ahead, ringed by the shimmering Front curving into the far distance, the blasted and pitted landscape hunched beneath the looming Chaos Gate, living Shadows quavering and darting of their own volition. Other Shadows shifted between forms, becoming demons prowling the war-ravaged earth in search of prey. Fell magics left a cloying haze across the entirety of the region, a vile film that risked any who might venture within.