by Dylan Doose
“It looks heavy, unwieldy,” said the gray-haired man from his place just outside the open door to the treasury.
Theron walked to meet him, passing the sad knight’s corpse in a still growing pool of blood.
“Oh no, it’s wieldy, all right,” Theron said, and in one hand he twirled the blade twice as if it were a short sword. The muscles in his forearm bulged and contracted to control the movement. “I could show you how much so, but I started my morning with killing on a white floor not unlike this one many miles away, and in between here and there I did more killing in the woods. I killed this sad knight here, and I killed two happy ones upstairs. I don’t know who you are. I assume you are on Dammar’s side by your appearance, but then maybe the Patriarch hired you to deal with me just in case I went rogue.
“Turn around and head up those stairs, find someone else to kill, or I’m going to add you to the list of today’s lives that I’ve claimed.”
“The day’s over. Midnight has struck,” said the gray-haired man.
They stared at each other a moment longer, and then, the sound of the wind chimes and the thudding of skin drums echoed through Theron’s skull, and when he heard it, something next to him moaned. He looked down at the pool of blood around the sad knight, and in it whirling and squirming was a face, a morbid human visage.
The gray-haired man with the crescent moon knives gave a bestial roar. His clothing tore, his flesh burst, and a spray of blood and gore exploded from the man. When Theron blinked the blood from his eye and spat it from his mouth, he gazed at a silver furred man-ape with an underbite of jagged teeth and two terrible tusks. It was a thing twice the size of the man that had stood before him moments ago.
The creature sprang forth and slashed at Theron with the crescent moon knives that were preposterously small in the ape’s now massive hands. The attacks came too quick to block, but Theron managed to sidestep under the first wide right-handed slash. He would prefer a better position, one that offered an advantage.
He jolted past the ape and ran for the stairs. He ran as fast as his feet would carry him and took the stairs three at a time. The stairway was a narrower space than the hall and would not give the ape much room to avoid Theron’s blade. He could hear the beast reach the steps behind him. Theron was on the tenth when he twisted around with a hard backslash, which should have taken off the top of the ape’s skull, but he was fast and managed to pull back so that only the tip of Theron’s sword caught him, opening a large gash above his eyes. It was not deadly, but the wound cascaded blood into the beast’s vision. Enraged, he unleashed a flurry of swings up the stairs at Theron, who stayed just out of range and stabbed at the ape’s hands and knives with his sword as he back-stepped up the stairs.
“Who are you?” inquired the ape, panting, his bestial voice booming in the stairway. “Why are you here? Are you a thief?”
Theron stepped forward as an answer and stabbed at the silver brute’s chest. His attack was deflected, but the ape lost his footing and fell slightly forward. Theron cut at its left hand and landed a glancing blow, taking off a finger.
The ape roared once again, its rage heightening as it came up the stairs, faster than before, careless in its fury. The blood from the wound on the brute’s forehead poured into its eyes. Theron swung his sword in a wide arc, hoping to catch his enemy in the wrist, but he connected with one of the crescent moon blades instead. Had the thing been the light farming tool that it appeared, Theron’s sword would have cut it in two, and half the ape’s arm would have been split with it. But this was not a farming tool. This was a killing tool, a masterfully crafted one, formed of a formidable alloy.
The curved blade caught his sword; if he held on and tried to continue with the follow-through, his wrist would snap and his blade would come flinging back at him, along with the crescent scythe.
So Theron released the heavy blade and again slipped under one of the brute’s deadly blows. The claymore smashed into the wall behind him. The beast half turned, expecting him to dive for it, but Theron drew his sister’s sword. With a backward swing he caught his foe on its unguarded side, ducked past, and nicked the ape-man in his hamstring as he went.
Theron’s feet slapped against the tile then he spun back round to face the beast. It paced side to side at the base of the stairs, not moving forward, just assessing Theron. It was limping, and it raised its unwounded hand to wipe the blood from its eyes once again. Its gray face was painted red. Heavy, labored breaths pushed past the jagged tusks, its mouth agape, red droplets forming and falling from fanged teeth.
“You could have asked me who I was before you turned into a fucking monkey and tried to kill me,” Theron said, fighting to control his own labored breathing. “I would have told you. I would have said I’m Theron Ward…I’m Theron Ward, and I kill monsters. Destiny itself puts me on their trails and I run them down, to their caves, and their bogs, through dark tunnels, and blood-slick city streets. I find them, and I am their end… You could have heard that, and saved yourself the thrashing.”
Theron walked forward, and the ape-man remained where he was, his knives at his sides, his slashed leg shaking, blood in his eyes soaking his face and beard.
“You know why you lost? Because you gave up being a man to be a beast. You lowered yourself for animal brutality and strength. You thought it would make you a better killer. It made you stupid. It made you clumsy!”
“You’llllll…beeeee…dead, by…morrrrrning, hunter!” said the ape. The words were far harder to understand this time, as if he were becoming more a beast by the moment.
“Well, come on, then. Get it done, you damned dirty ape,” Theron roared, much like a beast himself. But the silver-furred brute turned away—with speed that Theron could not imagine matching—and on all fours, knives clenched in its heavy fists, bounded up the stairs and disappeared.
Theron did not chase. His head was in torment from the exertion, and he felt so dizzy that he might puke. He took off his helmet, placed it on the ground, and took a moment to sit on it and catch his breath before he went back to the main chamber. He needed to find Aldous and Ken. He needed to discover the cause of the screaming and crashing above, like a storm was raging within the Basilica.
And through it all, he still heard the wind chimes and the drums.
He was once again next to the corpse of the sad knight, and the face of coagulated blood was still swirling and moaning in the center of it.
A blood curse, Theron realized as he stared again at the crimson phantom. The sad knight was still there, looking at him—in a manner of speaking, at least.
“You’re stuck here,” Theron said to the face in the blood pool. “Until Dammar is dead, your blood will never dry, your soul will drown in its red misery, and you will belong to him.”
And as Theron said this, he heard the demon’s voice. It was upstairs, in the chapel, and he heard the words echoing through his mind, like a memory that he never had.
“You are the same as I, we are one, oh children of mine. The red cloud follows your path; the rain never stops and it is always blood. You could choose the truth. But you lie, you tell yourselves about purpose, about right and wrong, about justice, and redemption, but the truth is simpler. You are the very same maggot as infection; you are the wolf of hunger, the vulture of thirst; you are the energy of war; you, the messengers of death, and your deluge of slaughter has formed rivers. They flow into my great sea.”
As the demon spoke, the sad knight’s pool of blood began to flow toward the stairs.
“The sea in my cauldron. Kill me, my children, slit my throat, and pour me in.”
When the blood reached the stairs it formed hundreds of fingers of coagulated protoplasm, and, like a centipede of gore, the blood phantom scaled the steps.
“But know this: after it is stirred and the fire dies, you will do what you can to turn away, to refuse the starvation, but you will break, and you will drink it dry. That is the destiny of your ilk. The change is in
your blood.”
Theron stood, lifted his helm to his head, and walked toward the stairs, to his claymore that lay at the foot.
He saw his mother standing before him, smiling, in a sky-blue dress, a laurel of purple Moon’s Widow petals around her head like a crown. It was how she looked when last he saw her.
“Be more than your father,” she said as he passed.
Theron said nothing; he just kept his eye on his sword at the foot of the stairs.
His father appeared next. He was drunk—an unusual thing, that—leaning against the wall, a spiked hammer held loosely in his powerful, veiny fist.
“I’ll kill the bitch,” he said in a wistful hush, staring vacantly into nothing. He too was just as Theron had seen him last. “After what she’s done, it is best I be the one to do it.” Just then Theron’s father set eyes on his son. “It’s only right, my boy, and so hardly a choice. I’m responsible, you see?”
Theron shouldered past his father’s image. The hammer clattered to the floor and Alexander Ward disappeared.
Manifested before him now was his dearest Chayse, her phantom next to the stairway. She held her decapitated head by her beautiful blond hair and said, “You’re a good man, Theron.” Tears filled his eye, and he reached down to lift his blade from the floor. The blade that his father had left him. The blade he had sworn to a man he adopted as a second father and then took away. The blade that saw him through Norburg and Dentin, the one that he reclaimed from the abysmal cave. The one he used to kill the swine that morning in Romaria’s woods.
He loved that sword.
“You’re a good man, Theron,” his sister said again.
His head pounded against the iron of his helm. He began his ascent, up the stairway, toward the corridor that would take him back to the chapel.
“Keep telling yourself that, Theron, that you’re a good man.”
And then Chayse was gone, and all Theron could hear was his own voice in the back of his head screaming, Kill, kill, kill.
Part III
After Midnight
* * *
In my long life, a length I have come to find tedious, I have had but a single meaningful relation with the fairer sex that did not end in tragedy, death, murder, betrayal, or sabotage. And I have had many relations with the fairer sex, rest assured. I am too wise a man to ever use anecdotal evidence to make claims on matters beyond my own life, so I will not say that women and terrible things are one and the same. However, I will say that up until the Night of the Pyres and for many, many years after, relations with women and terrible things were one and the same for me.
A young disciple of mine once came to me in a state of terrible melancholy, and he told me that his lass, the girl he loved most dear, had finally gotten horribly drunk with him at a feast, and she gave him a tug and a ride in a lonely corridor in the academy. Tragically, for whatever reason, perhaps bad pork the day before or sheer nerves and a weak stomach, my dear disciple went and lost his bowels at the moment of climax. It was his first time, and for him it would shape all times to come. I told him, “There, there, my good man. It could have been worse.”
I did not tell him how much worse.
I rarely think on that night out of choice, but it comes to me in dreams even now, all these years later, all these miles away from that dim corner in a wine cellar of the Patriarch’s Basilica.
A part of me believes that I knew from the moment I saw her and looked into the tragic eyes of Dalia that she was the demon. Not through magic—for I could not sense the magic pulse of the demon until it was too late—but through intuition, perhaps, I knew. A hunter’s intuition that the woman I took as a lover concealed a demon. It was locked away in her and she used me to set it free. I’ve never told it to a soul, but I could have stopped everything that transpired that night. I could have burned her to ash right there before the demon was released.
Instead, I chose to wait. Instead, I chose to hope.
By the time I had her alone with me in a corner, her spell was cast and I was kneeling before her, sitting back on my heels with my dick in my hand. How weak I was, how weak and foolish I so often remained.
When she lowered herself onto me, the world shifted; the stone walls and casks seemed to melt away, dripping off what lay behind. The woods.
The Basilica was gone. There were no sounds but the chimes and the drums and our moaning that echoed across the forest floor, and then we were flying, soaring through the sky and branches together like a single bird. With every thrust the environment shifted, the leaves fell from the trees, and in their place were blazing fires formed as the leaves had been. Ashes drifted through the sky, upward like some sinister mirror image of snow.
Beneath us ran a river of blood.
I felt the warmth of the fiery leaves and I felt the flakes of ash caress my skin.
In a blink we transported again, and she was riding me, moaning. I lay flat beneath her. Her skin began to glow purple, and my ecstasy was so intense I could hardly recognize the madness that was taking place around me.
We were in the city center of Brasov now, though we were in no such place, and ashes still drifted through a night sky, but there was a different smell, a smell I have come to know so very well, for fire is my nature, and that nature is to burn.
Next to us men and women were impaled on pikes, sliding down them toward blazing pyres. A screaming mob hurled rotten fruit and vegetables at the bodies, and at the two of us, fucking like dogs in heat at the heart of it.
I tried to focus only on Dalia, only her as she rhythmically swayed on top of me. She was looking up and straight ahead. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
I felt her desolation run through her and into me. Her whole body glowed purple, and as I climaxed I saw through her eyes. She was staring at the body of a tall boy with hair of golden ringlets, sliding down a pike into the fire. Beyond him, standing on the balcony of the Basilica, orchestrating the brutality, was the Patriarch in his suit of golden armor. Arms at his sides, bent at the elbow, palms up toward the sun, he recited his prayers.
Next to him was a black-haired boy wearing the face of pain and torment and innocence lost.
In an instant it was over. We had returned to the wine cellar. I did not think it then, I was in no state to think it, but I realize now that whatever I witnessed in that vision was the justification for Dalia’s pact with Dammar.
Her body still glowing purple, even after the visions had halted, Dalia slid off my dick, which had gone limp. My balls felt as if a mule had just kicked them, and my stomach was turning with a hunger that caused burning bile to seep up into my mouth. I could no longer feel the forces around me. I mean to say, I sensed no magic. I had been drained of it.
“I am sorry,” she said, tears running as she looked down at me in a way that made me certain of her intent. It was the look I had seen many a time in many eyes. She meant to kill me.
In my state of complete depletion, I was certain she would succeed.
And even if she didn’t, how could I ever face Theron or Ken? I had failed once again, colossally. When I am alone and drunk, unable to sleep, which is often, I find it hard to see myself as the hero that many have come to see me as. If only they knew the truth of things. If only they knew my failures, the countless number of them. If only they knew the loss that resulted from my inaction and poor actions, perhaps they would not celebrate those few bright victories that are swallowed by my darkness.
I dragged myself away from her and unsheathed my sword—Chayse’s sword. Ironic that she was my only chance of survival, even then.
I cut my naked buttock as I freed the blade. The short sword felt as heavy as a battle-axe in my hand, and it took all my effort to raise the blade.
Dalia leaned over and picked up the solid tool she had dropped on her bear fur cloak, a small pickaxe that she meant to cudgel my brains out with.
She was horrifying. She was beautiful. I don’t know what it was then, and indeed what it still is…but on
e of the key things I find myself uncontrollably attracted to in a woman is her ability to kill me. This is certainly a key ingredient to my multiple…misfortunes with the fairer sex.
I tried to stand, but could not. My legs felt like molten iron. And when she raised the weapon above her head, about to bring it down, I was just hoping I’d die in a single blow.
She hesitated but an instant, and something like regret flickered in her expression. Then her face distorted in supreme agony and the weapon dropped from her hand, clattering to the floor. She gripped her abdomen, and before my eyes it began to swell and grow. In a matter of seconds it looked like a fully developed pregnant belly. She screamed and fell to her knees.
This was my moment. This was my chance.
I was invigorated now by the sudden twist of roles on destiny’s stage, and I changed my direction to crawl back toward her, instead of away, Chayse’s sword clutched in my fist, though my fingers were so numb they couldn’t feel it.
“Dammar,” she said, the word like both a prayer and a curse, her eyes wild.
The thing swelling in her womb was Dammar, and somehow what I had just done, what we had just done, made me his papa.
I clawed my way toward her, my intent to stab him through the chest before he was ever reborn into this world. My fingertips were electrified with pain as they pulled me across the stone floor, for they were already bruised, and the nails ripped back from the rockface I had climbed earlier on that cursed day.
I was before her now. Her eyes tracked me. I waved the short sword at her at such a slow speed she could have batted it away like a fly.
Again she howled from her demonic affliction as her stomach continued to grow. She fell to her back, dragging herself away, and kicked me hard in the face for my efforts with the sword.
