by Rosie Scott
I wore nothing but the ring around my neck as I submerged myself in the water, its coolness an immediate relief from High Star's unrelenting heat. Usually I bathed with the water at my cabin by combining it and soap on a wash rag, but today I soaked and scrubbed freely in the stream. Sticky perspiration and grime floated away, leaving me feeling both cleaner and lighter. I felt more relaxed than I'd been in years.
Perhaps I should've taken that as a sign. It was impossible for me to enjoy anything without a double dosage of tragedy and inconvenience tagging along.
The first sign of trouble came in the form of snapping twigs and the dull murmur of conversation. I reacted quickly, eyes darting through the forest as I hurried nude out of the water and to the rock with my clothes and scythe. I tugged on my clothes and then my cuirass to protect my vital organs first and foremost. Mere moments later, mercenaries trickled out of the deeper forest, immediately spotting my hanging satchel farther up the bank and swarming it.
No, no, no...
My most important belongings were in there, including both death warrants and Kai's letter. I could only watch helplessly as they tugged the satchel off its knob and into their group. I estimated at least twenty mercenaries were here. Normally that wouldn't faze me, but I was an hour's walk away from my cabin and its strategically placed army of corpses.
I pulled on more armor pieces as silently as I could, for it took the group an embarrassingly long time to notice me dressing by the stream. When one of them spotted me, she pointed in my direction and blurted, “He's here! At the stream!”
I tightened the next strap of gear so quickly that I grimaced from the sudden pressure. A few mercenaries reacted to spotting me by preparing their weapons. I shoved my feet into my boots, leaving both gauntlets on the rock. I'd have to do without.
“Wait!”
A chill rolled down my spine at the voice that echoed out amid the crowd and stopped the other mercenaries from rushing to attack. That voice was prevalent in most memories I had and didn't want to keep. Every time I had self-doubts, I heard his taunts. His mockery. His hatred. Agreeing with the doubt and adding to its destructive power.
For three years I'd anticipated coming across this bastard again. I'd fantasized about how I would kill him and cause just a smidgen of the pain and inconvenience he'd introduced into my life. I looked forward to violently spilling his blood. The last thing I expected to feel when hearing his voice, then, was panic.
But that's what I felt.
“Cerin,” Kenady called out of the crowd, framing it like a mockery. I couldn't even see him yet and I already recognized his cruel smirk. “Meet me in the library come nightfall on the eve of the new year if you have no other plans.”
I froze with dread at the familiar wording, glaring at the mercenaries with a stare that could kill until they made way, directing my attention to the man who stood beside my hanging satchel and held Kai's letter. Kenady's cold gray eyes returned my stare with smugness and hatred. He was three years older but just as ugly, though he adorned himself in a costly set of armor his parents no doubt purchased. His face glistened with sweat from the ceaseless heat, but he otherwise seemed calm and collected.
Because of course he was. Kenady lived a wonderful life of luxury in Sera despite doing everything necessary to ruin what little I'd ever had. I shook with anger as I pulled on my gauntlets, taking advantage of the group's hesitation to finish dressing.
“I apologize for being so busy with all my classes, but I'd like to make it up to you,” Kenady continued reading in a mocking, sing-song voice. “The stars are most beautiful while viewing them from the northeastern wall. I want to celebrate the new year with you and take you out for a night on the town.” He hesitated and laughed as another mercenary made an exaggerated wolf whistle. “Most shops and restaurants are open all night for the holiday. We'll stay out as late as possible if you can keep awake for it. I hope to see you there. If you don't show, I'll understand. But I'll miss you.” Kenady smiled coldly at me and finished, “Signed Kai.”
“Kai who?” another mercenary asked.
“Kai Sera, of course,” Kenady replied, though he still stared at me. As the others murmured with gossip behind him, he called out, “How was your nice night out with Kai, necromancer? Did she buy your poor ass everything you needed? Did you manage to finally get your dick wet?” He tilted his head dramatically and glanced back down at the note. “Wait. This letter's from the 79th of Dark Star, 410. That date rings a bell. Why? Hmm...” He grinned with pride. “Oh, that's right! That's the night me and a buddy of mine found out about your sick secret and you ran from the university like a bitch. I guess this fun little night never happened. Guess we don't need the note, then.”
Kenady lifted the note, one hand on either side of its center crease.
“Leave it be.” The hoarse words escaped my lips in frantic trembles of rage and panic.
Kenady hesitated before he laughed shortly. “Wow, how pathetic. You've still got a hard-on for royalty after all this time. Carrying her note with you when it's no longer relevant.”
“Not only that,” another mercenary sneered, “but that woman's a mess.”
“Who, Kai Sera?” a younger woman asked.
“Yeah.”
I felt a dull tug at my heart. Kai's still alive.
Kenady gave me a cruelly amused look and said, “Yeah, that's true. You're pining away for a broad who isn't even worth it. Kai forgot all about you, you know. She's got some Celd by her side at all times now, probably warming her bed.”
“Silas Galan,” the younger mercenary said dreamily. “Handsome guy. Celdic royalty, too.”
“Royalty attracts royalty,” Kenady mused, looking me over as I tugged on my weapon's belt. “It's almost cute how you thought you ever had a chance.” He lifted the note again. “And that's twice as sad because Kai's still a pathetic fucking drunk.”
As the tearing of the note reverberated harshly through the forest, I snapped.
“Leave the fucking note!” I screamed, pulling the scythe up from the rock with a shing.
Kenady glared at me as the others grabbed their weapons. Overlapping the two torn pieces of the note, he said nothing as he tore it again. Red tinged my vision as he handed the pieces to a fire mage nearby.
“Burn it,” Kenady demanded, tugging a flail from his belt.
“Don't!” It was a warning, a plea, a desperate cry. Kenady ripped the note, but I could still put the pieces back together to read it. Just as long as I had it. I released death magic to raise any corpses this forest could offer me, my eyes stuck on the fire mage as he summoned fire in one hand and held the ripped note with the other. “Leave it! It's all I have left!”
Raw pain shredded my heart as Kai's note curled in the flames, an inescapable charred blackness crawling over her words of interest and hope. Her unique handwriting distorted and disappeared, removing the last connection I had to the only person I loved who still lived. As the fire worked through the parchment and degraded it into nothing but rolling gray smoke, I felt such mourning that they might as well have told me Kai committed suicide.
The earth trembled almost as badly as I did, handing nearby corpses over to my care as I rushed to meet the mercenaries in battle with more gusto than they had. Kenady stood near the back of the group, using his life magic to give the others shields. It reminded me that I hadn't yet protected myself, so I generated both a shield and ward, zoning in on the younger woman in the front since she had no magical guards.
The mercenary held a small buckler with her left hand and a short sword in the right. Her eyes widened as I reached her, intimidated by the rage I exuded. I pulled my scythe to the side, and she prepared to parry the hit with her buckler. I swung my weapon wide, arcing it around the exterior of the buckler and jerking the handle back, rolling the curved blade over her guard like a hook. I violently tugged my scythe toward me, and its grasp over her buckler encouraged it to come along.
Crack!
The woman squealed in pain as two of her fingers holding the guard broke from the sudden blow. She swung her sword at my shield frantically in defense, but I paid it no mind since the magic held strong. I regained control of my scythe and launched it at the woman's neck from the side. The curved blade passed over her left shoulder and sliced through the flesh at the back of her neck in one smooth movement. Fear overwhelmed her eyes as she shook in place, too shocked to move as blood and cut locks of her hair fell to the forest floor behind her. Keeping the scythe in the flesh wound, I kicked a boot into her stomach, keeping her standing against the pressure as I ripped the blade toward me until it punctured the spine. She went still with death. I stepped aside to avoid her body as it fell.
“Fucking hell,” another mercenary breathed, watching his comrade bleed out over the pine needles. His shock over the brutal kill turned to fear as the still-bleeding corpse rose to meet my demands.
“Focus on Cerin!” Kenady screamed, which made me realize that other mercenaries battled corpses. There weren't nearly as many here as there were back at my cabin, but there were enough to keep me from being surrounded.
I leeched from one man while parrying the weapon swings of another, seeking a leeching high. By the time I killed Kenady, I wanted to be strong enough to turn him into mush.
One life leeched. Two. Three. I raised their corpses as soon as they fell, adding to my numbers and to the panic of my foes. As the fourth mercenary fatigued before me, the ground under my boots suddenly gave way.
I fell backwards, landing in a heap of adrenaline within a crater of magically lowered earth. The mercenary I'd been fighting followed to finish me off, but the corpse of a comrade hobbled up behind him. The minion's mace met the mercenary's skull with a sickly crunch, and an arc of shattered bone and bloodied hairy scalp flesh spewed forth over me. I sent black magic into the corpse, and he rose just as quickly as he'd fallen. I protected my new soldier with a shield as soon as I stood.
Then, I tumbled back again as a new crater indented beneath my feet. I cursed with frustration and scanned the area for the culprit. Kenady laughed at my misfortune as he generated a new shield for a mercenary who lost the last one to my minions.
“Lose your step?” he taunted, protecting another comrade before focusing on me as I stood to meet him.
It took everything I had not to respond with equal mockery, for Kenady's strategies in battle left a lot to be desired. He wasted precious energy toying with me with his earth magic when he should have conserved it. Mocking him for that would only make him realize it, so I said nothing. Kenady had no way of regenerating like I did. I could eventually win this just by wearing him down.
Kenady shoved his left hand toward the ground at my boots, and I braced myself to avoid falling back again. This time, however, a sturdy pillar of stone jolted up beneath my feet, knocking me up in the air until gravity coaxed me with its flirtations. My lungs deflated from the sudden landing, expelling air from my nostrils in a violent burst.
“It's quite sad that you get this sentimental over a stupid note,” Kenady mused, his voice coming closer as I tried to regain my bearings. My eyesight shook with a mixture of rage and aftershock from my landing, but I saw my scythe some feet away from where it fell out of my grip. Kenady kicked it farther from my reach. “Of course, if nothing but corpses always surrounded me, I guess just the thought of a warm body could become a fetish.”
I scrambled to stand again, reaching out to leech from Kenady's chest with both hands. The black funnels connected to his magical ward, chipping away at its strength. I stepped to the side, trying to retrieve my scythe. Kenady sidestepped to block me. He summoned no magic, but he held a flail in his right hand. The weapon had a thick chain connecting the handle to its cylindrical head, which boasted multiple nail-like protrusions. Facing a weapon with the ability to both puncture and bash was intimidating all on its own.
“How is necrophilia working out for you, Cerin?” Kenady asked viciously, preparing to swing his flail as he eyed my face, imagining the two meeting in an explosion of blood. “Do you even get to come before it goes limp from the cold?”
The rage that bubbled over in my chest from his taunts almost killed me, for I barely noticed I had no magical protections. After they broke from the battery of Kenady's stone wall, his insults distracted me so badly I hadn't regenerated them. I had no time to now, and I didn't have my scythe to parry with. As the head of Kenady's flail flew at the side of my skull, I vertically lifted my arm to protect it as a last resort.
The flail's head flew past the limb before the chain wrapped around my forearm just beside the elbow in a death grip. A flash of annoyance passed over Kenady's features before he smiled with a new idea. Keeping the flail wrapped around my arm, he tugged it back. The chain tightened, sinking the nails of the weapon's head through my armor until they impaled my arm, their sharp points scraping off the radius and ulna bones beneath.
“Fuck!” The pained curse escaped my lips against my will. I glanced past Kenady, scanning over mercenaries fighting minions. The young woman who'd been my first victim ganged up on a mercenary with an orc skeleton. I mentally willed her back to me. Sensing my direction, the corpse spun and hurried past ally and foe without a care, her focus on Kenady.
Kenady grinned with the satisfaction that he'd started to best me. His eyes rolled over my fatigued face before catching on something around my neck. A jolt of panic clenched my gut as I realized what he found.
Kenady reached up to my throat, tugging the necklace from my neck with the snap of a broken clasp. He dangled the ring my parents gave me between us from the broken chain. “Did Kai give you this, too?”
“No,” I growled. “My parents.”
“Ah,” he huffed, jamming the jewelry through an open flap of a pouch on his belt when I tried to grab it with my free hand. “The dead ones, I assume.” He noted the renewed pain in my gaze with a look of satisfaction.
The points of Kenady's weapon were stuck in my arm, and blood drizzled from multiple wounds and ran down to my fingertips like rain. For as long as Kenady held his weapon like this he couldn't use it, and I couldn't get away to use mine. But we were close enough to each other that I was within his life shield, rendering it useless. So I did what I'd wanted to do to Kenady ever since he'd first humiliated me at the university five years ago.
I rolled my right hand into a fist and threw everything I had into punching his face. The steel of multiple rings shone from my knuckles before clashing into the protrusion of his left upper cheekbone. The same curse I'd uttered only moments ago repeated in Kenady's voice as his head caved to the hit. Spittle sprayed off to the side after loosing from gritted teeth. My hand immediately felt inflamed from the brutal punch, but I ignored its protests, instead focusing on worsening the purple bruise sprouting on Kenady's face. I cranked my arm back and punched him a second time, a rush of ecstasy flowing through me when his flesh split from the prodding of a ring band, releasing hot blood to trickle down to his jaw.
Kenady's rage rose to meet my own, and he grabbed the handle of his flail with a second hand, jerking the weapon away from me. With the flail's protrusions still embedded in my arm, the weapon didn't budge from its nestling place. Instead, it convinced my forearm to flee the rest of my body, and my elbow snapped out of socket.
A rush of nausea flooded through me at the added trauma, and bright lights flashed around the edges of my vision. Panic overcame me as I tried to figure a way out of this.
Shing!
Kenady coughed and jerked forward, glaring down at his gut in surprise. The tip of a sword dripped with blood after traveling through his torso from the back. The corpse I'd willed over earlier tugged the weapon back, releasing a fresh stream of blood tinged with yellowed digestive acids.
Kenady let go of his flail, and I stumbled back from the sudden lack of resistance. I immediately tugged the weapon's nails out of my flesh with a grunt and unraveled the chain from my arm. I dropped the flail to th
e ground before hurrying to grab my scythe. Meanwhile, Kenady released a barrage of metal blades at my minion. It fell when one zipped through the skull at the nasal bone, partially decapitating it.
The forest suddenly seemed so quiet. As I retrieved my scythe off the ground, I scanned the area. Only two mercenaries other than Kenady were left, and they both battled corpses. I released more death magic to raise bodies new and old to overwhelm them, and then I refocused on Kenady.
The bastard was running. Kenady jogged northwest with an injured, wobbling gait, life magic spreading over his stab wound from one hand as he used the other to push off trees and rocks for support. My left elbow was still out of socket, but I endured the throbbing pain as I pursued Kenady with a furious pace, hopping over fallen logs and dodging tree branches. He glanced back as he heard the rustling foliage, and immense satisfaction filled me when I recognized fear in his eyes.
“All that talk, and now it's you running like a bitch,” I called hoarsely, shaking with the anticipation of killing him.
Kenady glanced back again with alarm as he realized my pace was much quicker than his. He looked around frantically for some saving grace. As I neared him, I assumed he hadn't found one.
I was wrong.
Kenady thrust one hand toward me as I prepared to swing my scythe. The sharp whirling noise of metal met my ears just before a scalding pain punched me in the side. I flew backward, slamming into a tree trunk. My skull snapped back abruptly with whiplash, hitting bark with a thunk.
Everything went black.
*
A chorus of chirps from tens of thousands of insects echoed through the dark forest. I blinked heavily, fighting a combination of fatigue and deep aching pain. When a dozen shadowy humanoid forms creepily appeared in my clearing vision, I snapped to attention and tried to figure out my surroundings.
