Darkblade Savior

by Andy Peloquin

  “Word was sent throughout Einan, and the Serenii came from every corner of this world to the one great Conclave, the uniting of minds to face the threat that imperiled our very existence.” Kharna met his gaze, and a hint of fear sparkled in the god’s eyes. “The Devourer could not be reasoned with, could not be swayed from its singular purpose. It sought only the end of order and a return to entropy.”

  The vision changed and the Hunter found himself in an enormous circular chamber cut into the heart of a mountain. Seventy grey-skinned Serenii stood in silent communion, speaking directly to each other’s minds just as Kharna spoke to him.

  “In the end, we faced a simple choice: fight or flee. Logic dictated that resistance would prove futile, and we who prided ourselves on logic fell prey to the most human emotion of all: fear. In our fear, my people believed there was only one rational choice. They chose to flee.”

  “Flee?” The Hunter’s brow furrowed. “If this Devourer was going to destroy all of Einan, where could you flee to?”

  “Another world,” Kharna replied. “A world untouched by intelligent hands, where the Serenii could start over without threat of annihilation. Or so they thought.”

  The Hunter cocked his head. “You say ‘they’. Does that mean you chose to stay?”

  Kharna brought the Hunter back to the towertop chamber where he’d first seen the Serenii watching the humans. The same thirteen stood in a circle, and the Hunter could feel the dread that emanated from the immortal beings.

  “My brothers and I believed that fleeing would only prolong the inevitable. The Devourer had followed the Abiarazi to this world, so what would prevent it from following us to the next, and the next? No matter how far we fled, evidence indicated that we would never truly outrun the End of All Things. After all, there must be a beginning and an end. What is born must die eventually to give way to new life. Even the Serenii lifespan, though it is numbered in millions of what you humans call years, does ultimately culminate with the decomposition of our physical forms.”

  The Hunter sucked in a breath. He couldn’t imagine a life lasting millions of years—hells, his own five thousand year lifespan was far longer than anything he’d believed possible.

  “Yet, perhaps logic alone did not influence our choice,” Kharna continued. “While many Serenii counseled isolationism, we thirteen had spent time among the humans that shared our world. We saw their joy and pain, their exhilaration and sorrow, their love and hate, their short lives and inevitable deaths. In them, we came to learn that life could hold more than just logic. They saw beauty in the world around them, while we saw only knowledge to be gained. Through our interaction with them, we came to understand that emotion held value—an inconstant, a variable that could never truly be factored into our calculations, yet value nonetheless. I believe it was that emotion that led us to make the choice to stay. To fight, to save the humans that had taught us something a thousand thousand years of learning had failed to teach.”

  The world wheeled by beneath the Hunter’s feet until he stood in the top of a tower. Sunlight streamed through windows and walls made of transparent gemstone, but the seething, swirling portal into chaos devoured the brilliance and filled the chamber with shadow.

  “We knew we had no chance to defeat the Devourer of Worlds, yet our calculations and theorizing led us to believe we could perhaps stop it, close the way to prevent it from destroying our world. My brother Deneen, the most impetuous of our kind, attempted to save the world on his own.”

  A Serenii strode toward the blackened portal with confidence. He wore a necklace that looked like two crossed daggers. The lengths of metal glowed bright blue as he reached into the bowels of Einan to harness its power. Bright blue, red, green, and violet light streamed from his hands and swirled toward the rift. The creature within screamed, its tendrils retreating from the pulsing magick.

  “His battle with the Devourer shook Einan to its foundation. The power he wielded was truly terrible to behold, and the world was forever scarred.”

  The Hunter found himself hovering above the world, watching as it was torn apart. The single unified continent split into six separate land masses—the largest he recognized as Einan, and the one to the south as Fehl. Water swirled into the chasms to form oceans that divided the lands. The sundering drove a massive crack through Einan, forming the world-spanning canyon known as the Chasm of the Lost. Mountains thrust up from the earth as the might of the Serenii magick and the unstoppable force of chaos clashed.

  “Too late, we sought to come to his aid.”

  Two more Serenii rushed into the towertop—Kharna and another, this one female. The Hunter could feel the horror radiating from the female Serenii, hear her cries of misery as she watched the tall, confident Serenii dragged shrieking into the portal into chaos. Tendrils of darkness seeped into the creature’s face, turning his eyes an impossible, empty black. Chaos consumed him one cell at a time until nothing remained of the grey-skinned giant—nothing but the necklace that lay smoking and charred on the floor of the towertop.

  “Deneen, whom your people have dubbed the Swordsman, fell in battle with the Devourer. Yet his death bought us a reprieve.”

  A concussive force ripped from the portal as the Serenii was consumed, and a tidal wave of magick washed across the world. The rift began to shrink, the inky tendrils pushed back. Yet it did not close fully. A hair-thin crack into chaos remained.

  “The gate was not sealed, yet the Devourer could not enter our world fully. We had time—how long, we did not know—to find another means to block it forever. Yet we used what time we had to construct this place, Enarium, the city built to kill the Devourer of Worlds.”

  Before the Hunter’s eyes, the city of Enarium sprang to life around the massive tower at its center. The blue gemstone Keeps seemed to rise from the ground, like sapphire quills sprouting from the back of some monstrous being.

  “Twenty-four towers to harness the power of the Er’hato Tashat, to direct the energy into one singular place to be used to seal the rift between our world and the world of the Abiarazi, a world consumed by the Devourer.”

  Humans labored beside the Serenii as Enarium continued to grow. Years passed in the span of a few seconds, and the city expanded outward.

  “But as we built, we soon discovered that our power would not suffice to close the way to the Devourer. We twelve alone would fail. In vain, we entreated our brethren to join us, but they turned a deaf ear as they fled. We turned to the Abiarazi, the ones we had saved, only to discover they had been tainted by the touch of the Devourer.”

  The scene flashed back to the warring demons and narrowed in on them. Their eyes bore the same inky blackness the Hunter had glimpsed through the rift.

  “The seeds of chaos had taken root in their minds and souls.” Kharna’s voice took on a sorrowful note. “The Devourer had twisted, inflamed, and tainted their passions and desires. Their physical prowess far surpassed ours, and they used weapons of war where we sought peace and reasonable discourse. Many of my brethren fell to their cruelty and bloodlust. We twelve knew that we could not save the world from the Devourer and fight the Abiarazi at the same time. Our only choice was to find a way to win the war and use their power—power that, in many ways, rivaled our own—to defeat the Devourer. Thus, we built Khar’nath.”

  The Hunter hung in the air high above Enarium, staring down at the massive crater he knew as Khar’nath. However, it was empty, without the shelters and structures, without the prisoners. Simply a deep pit with walls lined with glowing red crystals.

  “We could not fight them physically, yet the powers we wielded—powers you humans call ‘magick’—gave us an advantage they could not defeat. They relied on the strength of their arms and the passions burning within them, and we turned those things against them.”

  A single Serenii wielding a staff topped with red-glowing crystals faced a horde of Abiarazi. The grey-skinned creature made no move as the demons raced toward him, but just befor
e they fell upon him, his staff flared blindingly bright. The demons shrieked and tried to retreat, but too late. The crystals drained their strength, and with it their sanity. The Abiarazi grew more bestial, more savage, their primitive urges amplified until they were the mindless monsters the Hunter had encountered outside Enarium.

  “The Abiarazi learned to be wary of direct confrontation, so they sought a new way to battle. Instead of fighting us themselves, they enslaved or conscripted humans to fight beside them. Humans that shared the lust for battle and blood, the desire for conquest and wealth.”

  Men in crude hide armor and carrying weapons of wood, iron, and stone marched before the Abiarazi. A wild light shone in their eyes, and they raced toward the field of battle, as eager for blood as the demonic masters they followed.

  “We had no desire to harm those the Creators had entrusted into our care, but we could not let them destroy what we had built—built out of a desire to save them. We sought aid from the humans we had brought into our cities, those we had sheltered and with whom we shared the knowledge we had gained.”

  The Hunter watched as two Serenii spoke to a gathering of primitive men and women. The people seemed in awe of them, as if they were…

  “Gods, they called us,” Kharna continued. “They revered us, worshipped us, and made sacrifices to us. We did not ask lightly, yet logic dictated that we required their aid. Thus, man warred against man. Bloodshed and death held Einan in a grip we could not break.”

  The Serenii-led armies marched toward the combined forces of Abiarazi and humans. They carried swords, spears, and shields of steel, bronze, and metals the Hunter had never seen before. Some carried weapons that resembled the Scorchslayers, weapons that harnessed the power of Einan itself against the enemy. The Abiarazi commanded from the rear and the Serenii watched from their high towers as men fought men, and rivers of human blood stained the face of the world.

  “We lent mankind what aid we could, yet we had our primary concern: to defeat the Devourer. As we built Enarium, we came to understand the importance of the humans. We needed them to win not only the war against the Abiarazi, but against the Devourer as well. We were but twelve, yet humans numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Though their lives were short, the force of their emotions caused them to burn far brighter than any beast or creature on Einan. The Abiarazi’s passions had led them to breed with the humans, both to satiate their lusts and in a desire to populate their ranks with more soldiers to fight for them. We did the same, for it was the logical choice. Though human blood diluted our own, we believed the proliferation of mankind could multiply our power sufficiently to defeat the Devourer.”

  The battles continued to rage, drawing closer and closer to the mountains. The human armies of the Serenii retreated and the forces of the Abiarazi advanced.

  “Then came the moment when we could delay no longer. The Er’hato Tashat approached, and with it, the power of our sun would be amplified a thousandfold. The time had come for us to make the sacrifice for which we had prepared.”

  The sky turned a bright red, painting the world a deep crimson. The human armies ceased their war in fear of what was happening. They fell to their knees and beseeched their gods—Abiarazi and Serenii—to protect them.

  “Our offspring, those you call Elivasti, were far too few to turn the tide. Thus, we had no choice but to use the Abiarazi and their offspring to aid us against the Devourer.”

  The Abiarazi suddenly froze where they stood, their eyes going blank, as if their minds had been turned to ash. The human armies fled in terror, but the demons could not move. At the command of some invisible force, they moved in unison toward the open gates of Enarium. Their offspring, the Bucelarii, strode beside them as they shuffled through the city and descended into Khar’nath.

  “Deneen, the one you call the Swordsman, was the strongest of us, with the ability to harness the forces of nature to shape this world to his will. With his death, it fell to me to serve as the shield against the Devourer.”

  The Hunter’s jaw dropped as his vision changed and he stood in the room beneath the Illumina. The creature he knew as Kharna lay on an altar made of a single black stone. His arms were crossed over his chest, his expression resigned yet resolute. Eleven figures stood around his altar, their too-long, multi-jointed fingers moving with unhurried grace as they tethered him to the same flexible, transparent tubes from the Chambers of Sustenance.

  “Direct confrontation with the Devourer would prove fatal, but if we could harness the power of Enarium, our power, and that of the Abiarazi against the rift, there was a chance we could seal it against the Devourer of Worlds.”

  The Hunter watched as the eleven Serenii connected Kharna to the tubes, and Kharna’s eyes met his before they closed. Sorrow burned within those impossibly violet eyes, and the force of that emotion sent a shiver down the Hunter’s spine. Then Kharna closed his eyes and the black gemstone lid was closed. Runes glowed brilliant azure all around the black stone room, so bright the Hunter had to shield his face. When the light faded, the obsidian altar lowered into an opening in the floor. Stone closed over the silent, still body of the Serenii and the floor sealed itself above him until it was as flat and featureless as the rest of the room.

  “But I was not the only one to make the sacrifice that day.”

  The Hunter found himself following the eleven remaining Serenii climbing the stairs to the top of the Illumina, where eleven Chambers of Sustenance waited. Ten of the stately, grey-skinned figures watched as the eleventh, one who appeared somehow older than the rest of the timeless creatures, traced glowing runes in the air.

  Crimson light filled the air to the east, and the Hunter felt a surge of power flooding from Khar’nath. He watched in horror as lightning arced throughout the entire Pit, a thousand white-hot threads of power crackling between the multitude of crystals protruding from the wall. It was into this raging inferno of energy that the entranced Abiarazi and their offspring marched.

  Horror froze the blood in the Hunter’s veins. He was down there, somewhere, beside Taiana. He, like the rest of his kind, marched to their deaths.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Yet he hadn’t died. Something had stopped the Bucelarii from dying that night.

  As if Kharna read his thoughts—he very likely had, given that the Hunter was somehow in the god’s vision—the Serenii’s ageless, echoing voice continued.

  “My brothers sacrificed themselves that day. Their power flowed through me, amplified by the power of the Er’hato Tashat and Khar’nath to seal the rift against the Devourer.”

  The eleventh Serenii strode toward a low stone altar covered with glowing blue runes and gemstones, inserted the two halves of the Swordsman’s necklace into two slots, and twisted both in unison. The Keeps around Enarium flared to life and, beyond the outer rim of the city, the red crystal-lined walls of Khar’nath glowed with blinding brilliance. Power streamed from the floor of the towertop room, surging toward the rift into chaos. The light of the magick pushed back against the crack, sealing it slowly closed like two sheets of metal forged by an invisible hammer.

  “Yet it was not enough.” A note of sorrow echoed in Kharna’s voice. “The rift could not be sealed. Even as my father, the one you call the Master, prepared to join us in our eternal struggle, the humans of Enarium came to him. They offered their aid once again, to give of their lives to seal the rift. They, too, knew the danger they faced from the Devourer of Worlds.”

  Armor-clad humans climbed the steps of the tower to the upper room to speak to the grey-skinned Serenii in front of the altar.

  “My father, in his wisdom, sealed a bargain with the humans—both the Elivasti, those who shared our blood, and those we had taken into our cities. Instead of using all the energy we’d gathered into Enarium in one blast that might not suffice to seal the rift, we would instead channel it into stabilizing and preventing the rift from expanding. We would shield the world with our lives, until the day they could add
their power to ours.” Kharna thrust a long, many-jointed finger toward Khar’nath. “By our calculation, the power of one million human souls added to that of the Abiarazi and our own would be enough.”

  The Hunter let out a long, slow breath. His mind boggled at the thought of a million people—that was more than the populations of all of southern Einan combined. Yet a million people dying all at once in that Pit? A shudder ran down his spine.

  Something Kharna said gave him pause. “Wait, you said only the human, Abiarazi, and Serenii lives. What about the Bucelarii?”

  According to the legends of the War of Gods, Kharna had been the one to plead with the other gods to save the Bucelarii from death. Many details of the legends had been true—the Swordsman’s death, the defeat of the demons by the Serenii “gods”, and more—albeit twisted by the passage of time. Was this another aspect that held a grain of truth?

  “Did you truly save us?” the Hunter asked, fixing the god with a hard look.

  “Yes.” Kharna spoke in the Hunter’s head. “My father was the one to speak to you, but it was I who determined the Bucelarii were best-suited to aiding our offspring, the Elivasti, in the quest to save the world.”

  A memory flashed before the Hunter’s eyes, yet it was more than a memory. He was there, reliving the experience as if it happened to him in that moment and not thousands of years before.

  A voice, deeper than the ocean and wider than the empty sky, rumbled through his thoughts, but he could not understand the words. Fear tinged its words—what could make a being of such immense power fear so?

  The knowledge of what he had to do sat like a mountain on his shoulders, but he had no choice but to bear the burden. He and all those of his kind. They alone could do what needed to be done. They alone could save mankind.

  The words crystallized. “THE DEVOURER OF WORLDS COMES.”

  The Hunter snapped out of the vivid memory with a gasp, and he found his heart hammering as he struggled to digest the information. “Why?” he managed to spit out after a long moment.