by Dylan Doose
“Imbecile. There is no measure of time here.”
“We shall see who is the imbecile when you’re cooking on the end of my blade.” Theron was already moving, expecting retaliation. A strong blast of air slammed into him. In an instant, Aldous’s enchantment of fire was nullified, and the purple torches that lined the walls and pillars went out.
Theron was left in true darkness, blinded once again in the demon’s lair.
His other senses heightened. The scent of fresh blood. He could hear the breathing of all the trapped souls in the walls, and the echoing moans of the woeful floor that vibrated beneath his feet. His impulse was to stomp and stab at whatever was moving in the dark below him, but he knew it to be the mouths of the grotesquely enchanted floor, so he denied the impulse.
“Here, in this place, you are entirely alone, entirely at my mercy. The Emerald Witch was a student of mine, a student who, out of weakness, turned from me and reached out to Leviathan. She reached out to the Others and she met her end facing you, a mere mortal. She was but a novice in the arts, and she halved your nation and took everything you loved from you… So just try to imagine, Theron Ward, what I can do to you and those you love now.”
Theron shuddered; the demon was in his head, looking through his shelves of memory. He could feel him there, feel his claws picking apart every thought.
“The moment I entered the Basilica’s treasury and saw the golden coins with the Patriarch’s portrait on one side and the great Leviathan breaking the surface of the sea on the other, I knew you were not part of the order,” Theron said, resisting the urge to ask about all the other things the demon had said. That was what the demon wanted from him: interest, connection. So Theron denied him.
“You want to know, but you do not ask. A perverse denial… I will tell you regardless. Look into the dark…and listen.”
The Golden Sons loosed arrow after arrow from their longbows at will in a low arc over their own heavy infantry into the thinning herd of transformed pagans that frothed and squalled in the chapel’s center.
“Without Dammar, they’re sheep for the slaughter,” Ken said.
“Sheep are meant to be slaughtered,” Aldous replied, then looked away as Ken shot him a disapproving glance. That wasn’t something he would normally say, but the day had been…long.
A most impressive pile of corpses surrounded them, both dissuading anyone from attacking them only to join the pile, and offering them a clear view of the carnage.
“Go forth! Kill the heathen. May they feel the Luminescent’s bolt.” The Patriarch’s voice boomed over the rage and death; he towered above his soldiers in his immense armor, his head protected by what looked like a cage in the shape of a bell. On every crossbar protruded a golden spike. The mace in his hand was encircled with lightning. “May they know his light!” he roared. “Go forth for their blood. Ver es belek! Ver es belek!”
“Isn’t that what the swine said?” Aldous asked, thinking of other things the swine had said about blood and rivers and death.
“One and the same,” Ken replied.
A stream of electrified arrows continued to rain down from the eastern balcony, where the sun maiden had been playing the harp earlier in the night. She was there no longer; only the harp remained, bowstrings singing next to its silent shape.
“The demon has fled! The pagans’ bestial magic turns against them. The traitorous hunters are diminished. Kill them all. For Brasov, for the holy sun!” The Patriarch added emphasis to his words by extending his mace in both hands directly above his head, and released from it a bending whip of lightning that hit the herd at its center, creating an explosion of chunks and red mist that required at least two score of bodies to make.
“Guess he saw you cooking his men,” Ken muttered.
Aldous shrugged. What was there to say to that?
Beneath the balcony, part of the Patriarch’s force, now rallied by their prophet’s arrival and bolstered by his lightning that danced on their swords and spearheads, advanced toward Aldous and Ken.
Aldous focused on the heat in his belly, and he willed it to grow.
At Dentin after he unleashed the ravens, the fight had been done. His magic had been enough to make a decisive victory. Here in the Basilica, in minutes, he had killed hundreds, this time not just beasts. I killed those guests, those monks and sisters. I saw through the ravens’ eyes. I could have stopped them. Why didn’t I stop them? I would blame Dammar and the blood, but in the end it was my magic, my flames that struck them down.
He felt both shame and power, and that sense of power shamed him all the more.
“You going to do that dragon-puking thing again? Or am I going to have to cut them all down?” Kendrick’s voice pulled Aldous from the whirling maelstrom of guilt.
Advancing on them were over twenty of the smiling golden masks that had broken off the Enlightened’s right flank to engage Aldous and Ken. They came forth slowly, shields raised.
“There is no escape! They come through the eastern door!” a northern-accented man called from Aldous’s left. He turned to see the two northmen, the envoys from Blodjord that he had seen earlier, retreating toward the chapel from the eastern corridor. They had armed themselves now, and were leading a small group of surviving guests, all armed, and many of them looked deadly. With him were the muscular, dark-skinned men from Kehldesh. They guarded their purple-robed princess, or queen, whoever she was, at their center.
Through the archways behind them, more and more horned, taloned, and fang-snouted fiends came barreling onward, their hooves and clawed paws clopping and scratching over the white stone. A spear and then another hurled out from the fleeing guests. The accuracy with which they felled their targets made it clear why these individuals had survived so far in the madhouse of feuding gods.
Aldous turned back to the more immediate threat of the Patriarch’s advancing men. Their march turned to a jog, and in a second or two it would become a sprint, and seconds after that Ken and Aldous would be overrun.
So I will not allow them to get that close. He was beginning to understand that was how moral dilemmas ended; ethical disputes of justification within one’s own mind were always cut short before any philosophical answers could be reached. Kill or die. That was all there was in that moment. All that was left now was to keep killing until nothing was left in their way…kill or die.
He sought out magic, not only within himself but in the air around him, and in the space between space that was everywhere unseen. The words of Diana Ward’s scrolls and books that he had brought with him to Romaria and studied flashed in his mind. Again, as they had earlier, words in languages he did not know formed on his lips, and he felt the power of the demonic fluid he had sipped rising again. His neck tightened, his belly turned so strongly it forced him to his knees, and once more he spewed an endless river of smoldering magma.
They didn’t scream for long. They cooked in their armor, then their armor cooked into them. From their corpses, no phantoms formed.
“That’s a trick if I’ve ever seen one, wizard,” Ken said as the approaching men melted into a mix of molten gold, charred flesh, blood, and raging fire.
Still kneeling, Aldous lifted his head. Of the ten or so survivors, some were burned but not slain.
The others were unscathed, and they were upon them.
Ken dipped his head out of the way of an incoming spearhead, stepped forward, and slid Chayse’s burning sword over the top of the soldier’s golden shield and into the smile of his mask. Kendrick pushed the blade until it clicked on the back of the man’s helmet then pulled it free.
He kept Aldous behind him, not certain how much the spell had drained him. He’d already misplaced Theron in a portal; he had no intention of losing sight of the lad.
A sword encircled with thin, snaking bolts of electricity slashed at Ken’s head from the left. He met the blade with his own, and the elements of fire and lightning clashed. There was a small explosion where steel met steel,
the impact reverberating from his hand to his ribs, but that was the worst of it for him.
Had that occurred yesterday, my arm would have been knocked from the socket.
His foe lost grip of his sword, and it swung free from his hand, slicing back, hewing the wielder’s arm half off before clattering to the ground. He was about to scream out in agony, the first note of it rising out of his throat. Ken cut it short and turned to the next man.
Two swords and a spear slashed, hacked, and stabbed, one after the other.
Tilt right, widen stance.
Dip, throw arm, close fist.
Crack. Splash of red.
Find the neck. The flaming blade arced inward and upward as the golden head already leaking red tilted down and out from the body. Head comes off. On to the next.
A sword slashed high.
Tilt.
The spear shot for him as he came down.
Lunge left. Step in.
He was chest to chest now with the one wielding the spear. Too close to stab. Pressing his enemy’s shield arm into himself so that it was disabled, Ken reached his iron fingers, the ones given life by the demonic filth he’d drunk from Aldous’s bowl, around the chain mail covered throat, and he squeezed. His sword sank under the arm into the ribs.
Next.
Ken pulled his blade from the corpse, released his grip from the body, and let it fall, smoking, to the ground.
A flash of orange and red left behind smoldering gold on flesh charred black.
Aldous had eradicated the last one with a fireball.
More grinning, golden, angelic faces with blades at the ready closed in. Nearby, bolts of lightning blasted the pagans to pieces as the arrows continued to rain down on them under the chapel ceiling, with its painted cherubs gleefully hewing down Dammar’s people.
The parallel was not lost on Ken, and a glance up at the painted ceiling did not help reduce the feeling that the way in which this night was to end was already fated.
Three spears, two swords now.
Instinct, conditioning, and a lifetime of being the last man standing whirled in the perfect storm within his breast. He rode the hidden balance, resided in the eye of the storm.
The golden faces soon became mixed with those of the bleating, screaming pagans. They were added to the tally of those he and the wizard were sending to the lands of the dead. Dark magic flowed through Kendrick, the rhythm of death quickening its pace, the pool of blood beneath his feet growing deeper and deeper still. Man and fiend slipped and stumbled on the soaked white stone together, falling to the ground, where they rolled round with the same intensity and desire as young lovers.
Kendrick’s sword came down, cleaving a naked pagan yet to transform from left collarbone to right hip. He split in two with a dumbfounded look on his face and was added to the tally.
A female with the head of a white sheep looked up from the face of the corpse she was feeding on. Blood filled the gaps of her square teeth and poured down her chin and neck onto her still human breasts. Against his will—for such was the way of buried memories—the twisted sight before Ken conjured images of his dead wife.
Rat teeth. My child’s blood dripping down her neck onto her once beautiful nakedness, defiled by boils and the mutations of the Rata Plaga.
He was no stranger to twisted memories, no stranger to the horrors in his own mind. He buried her memory as he had buried her body.
The sheep’s skull split. The next throat was cut, the next hand severed, the next scream was in his ears as he charged through the next dying body that he sent to their heaven, or hell, or eternal wood…or just to the mess on the ground.
Battling at his back was Aldous, and ahead was the Patriarch, much closer than he had been moments before.
* * *
It is so strange, this feeling, this premonition that my own end is nigh, that powers I have long disturbed are to finally deliver the damnation many a time promised me.
I am afraid. I fear the coming agony, the misery that will destroy my wife and forever darken my son.
But the premonition is a double-edged sword, for beyond my pain, beyond my death, I see change is coming. I see the tree of righteousness is growing at the core of our rotted world and I see that my death will turn me to the seed…
…(illegible scrawl)…
…(Continues in a shaky hand)… Remarkable; they hammer on my manor’s doors this moment, with their heavy hands. My heart pounds and I see the fire… I see everything in its right place.
—Writing on a piece of parchment taken the night of Darcy Weaver’s arrest.
* * *
Chapter Twenty
Everything in Its Right Place
Theron sheathed his blade , removed his helm, and let it fall to the floor. Standing still, heart racing, he focused on the thing that watched him from the dark.
Here in this unknown place was something far stronger than the Emerald Witch, immensely older and incomparably wiser. In this moment, he had no control over his destiny, and he had no liking for that.
A pink dot appeared in the blackness, then another, and another, until there were hundreds loosely forming the shape of a stag skull with mighty pronged antlers that would span the length of a longship. The pink orbs hovering in black space were Dammar’s eyes. And the breadth of how far they spread told Theron that the demon had grown since they left the Basilica.
He saw it all, not with one eye, but with two. His vision was perfectly normal, perfectly perfect. It was both wonderful and terrible.
“Look into the dark. Listen to the silence. Come with me, hunter. Let me guide you…guide you a short while through space and time. Let me show you the unbearable weight of your insignificance.”
The eyes faded and again there was only darkness around him, and the slight movements and breathing of the nightmare cathedral. Then a purple fog manifested, near or far, Theron could not say, for in the utter darkness that surrounded him there was no way to perceive where it was.
Until it was touching him.
“Do not hold your breath. It will not harm you, hunter… Breathe it in, and think for me…of a world before the Enlightened…think for me of a time before that terrible disease…”
The words came from the fog itself, or perhaps Dammar was so deep in his mind now that the demon could communicate with Theron through thought alone. The difference between the two was hard to find.
Theron stopped resisting. If Dammar wanted him dead, he would have made it so already.
Of course, there were countless things worse than death, and for one that lives for eternity, one such as Dammar, those things would be far more entertaining than killing.
But there was no choice in it. He had to breathe, so he did. Long and deep through his nose. The vapor was moist and fresh as rain, cleansing and soothing. By the time he exhaled, the purple mist parted before him like a gateway into the cosmos. Theron burst from the vapor into black space, infinite and dotted with countless stars, distances of forever away.
Everything he saw was different. Strange. And only after a moment did he realize he saw it through one eye only. The eye that had been gouged from him at Dentin. The eye that drinking from Aldous’s bowl had restored to him.
An eye with true vision.
It truly is endless, you know…beyond and beyond and beyond, until you and I appear again, but it isn’t you and I, just a perfect reflection, with countless distorted reflections on the way. Every point is the point of no return. There will never be a way to get back to right now, and yet this has already happened and it will happen again… But that is all too much for you. You are nothing. Just the insignificant legendary hunter Theron Ward.
The black space, dotted with stars and pink cosmic waves, disappeared. A purple sphere fell through blue sky, and a globe of fire enveloped it as it plummeted toward the white clouds below. Theron’s stomach sank as he fell with it, the clouds bursting apart like a white sea of fluff as the flaming orb passed through them. Green
and blue, plots of yellow, and different greens and blues, teal and azure and cerulean, came into view as Theron stared at the world from the eyes of the highest-soaring birds.
The surface of the purple sphere began to warp outward in places, as if there were something, or some things, inside trying to get out. It burst, and from it fell thousands of smaller, fleshy purple spheres, and as they plummeted they spread further and further apart.
The peaks of mountains came into view far off, and the blue surface of the sea that the otherworldly objects plunged toward grew larger and larger. Until blue was the only thing to be seen.
He felt no sensation of wetness when the water’s surface was breached, just as he had not felt the wind battering on his eardrums as he fell. Theron was not there, and yet he was.
He could see only one of the orbs now. As it sank deeper into the darkness of the sea’s bottom, it began to glow from within. A shark circled nearby; a school of small fish spread apart and avoided its touch, an instinctual fear of the thing keeping them at bay. The dark blue waters became as black as the endless space, without the stars or pink cosmic streams to make the darkness bearable.
Theron wanted to escape the crush of the abyss, but he had no body and no will of his own. He was but a passenger.
The glowing ball drifted close to a wall of scales, and then the wall stirred and the water twisted and the glowing orb swirled and drifted away from whatever giant horror whose rest it had just disturbed.
It found stillness finally, in the decayed ribcage of a whale.
Obsidian eels feasted on the rotted gray flesh that remained on the carcass. Long fish with red scales and a jagged underbite, with teeth as long as swords and absurdly large white eyes, a long, bent rod of bone and scale, with a glowing egg-shaped light on the end protruding from their foreheads, joined the eels in the eating.
