by C L Walker
“You will be remembered for this, and nothing else.” My words fell on deaf ears. He was too lost to his lust and his newfound power.
I looked away as he tore at her dress. I could see the future that was racing toward me, one in which I delivered more and more to the madman who held my prison, only to learn that it wasn’t enough. He would want greater thrills and more death, and I would bring them to him until he died. He would never be full, and the world would suffer for it. Worse, I knew it would make him happy even as it frustrated him, and so I would be forced to continue.
Phil screamed and I turned to protect him without thinking. Fletcher’s woman had a handful of his balls while she buried one of her long fingernails in his eye. He squirmed and tried to pull away, and I smiled even as I put a stop to it.
I pulled her off him carefully, trying not to hurt her while I protected my master. He’d bruised her and he’d promised more, and the look in her eye as I dragged her off him told me that she’d been prepared to give back worse than she got. She was a fighter, and Phil never stood a chance.
I shoved her back so that she fell to the ground, then stood over my master and offered him a hand. He looked up at me with his remaining eye, blood dribbling from his empty socket, and screamed.
“You should never underestimate the power of a woman, I find.” He wouldn’t appreciate my wisdom, but it felt good to offer it.
“Kill them first,” he said, pointing at the men in the room with one hand while cradling his balls with the other. “Make her watch.”
I turned to do his bidding. Fletcher and son were standing and holding hands, prepared for their fate. It was noble, and I regretted that it wouldn’t make the end any less certain.
They closed their eyes and squeezed each other’s hands tight. I took hold of their necks, one in each hand, and prepared to break them. It was the quickest way I could think to do it.
I heard Phil’s scream before the gunshot that caused it. I let the men go and turned to find the new threat: the woman had the gun.
Had I thrown her onto it on purpose, I wondered, or was that just a happy coincidence? I had no time to think about it as she fired again, taking the top of Phil’s head off and turning part of his brain into a fine mist.
She turned the gun on me next, but I was already on my knees, my hands open and held at my sides.
I caught the look on Phil’s face as the last of his life left him; though his eye danced a crazy jig in his head his lips had curled into a smile. Whatever damage had been done had forced on him the image of what he’d asked of me: happiness, however fake and fleeting, for the rest of his life.
Epilogue
When Fletcher withdrew the locket from Phil’s blood-spattered suit jacket I almost cried.
It was a simple thing, surprisingly mundane for something that had once adorned the neck of a princess and now carried in it a creature like me. It hung on a thin silver chain that had only been replaced a handful of times in all the years since her death. The locket itself was almost clumsily made, gold and jade arranged in miniature swirls around a single diamond, the hinges somehow hidden in the apparently messy edges of it.
Fletcher held it up to the light and I saw his thoughts flash across his face, his features twisting at the thought of what he held.
“You want to put me back,” I said. His eyes briefly flitted my way before returning to my prison as it spun in the dim and flickering light. “No man has ever gotten what he wanted from summoning me. Not one. Not entirely.”
“I could be the first.” His words were almost slurred, a murmur that would be lost anywhere but in the silence of that house.
“Maybe,” I replied, slowly getting to my feet. “Though, you are not the first man to think so.”
I wasn’t sure how the exchange was going to end, whether I would be sent on another mission to destroy people I cared little for or whether I’d be returned to my prison to wait out the end of the world. I wasn’t sure I cared, in that moment; I was tired and I knew that all I would get was a moment of rest either way. My time spent in the locket was lost to me as I traveled from one master to the next, one age to another.
“Put it away,” Fletcher’s wife said, putting her hand gingerly on his arm. When he didn’t react she was more forceful, squeezing his forearm and pulling him around to face her. “We don’t need this.”
“You don’t know what he can do.”
She looked down at the dead man, a man she had murdered herself, then back at her husband.
“Decide,” I said, resignation in the low growl of my voice.
He took another moment, let visions of conquest and glory dance in his mind’s eye for a little longer, then looked away and to his wife. His son moved to put his arm around, silently endorsing the decision.
Fletcher turned to me. “What do I do? How do I put you back?”
“Simply order me to return.” While it required certain words in a long dead language to draw me out and bind me, English would do fine to put me back.
I felt my heart begin to race before I consciously thought about what was coming next. They would see me vanish before them as though I was never there and a moment later the locket would contain my soul. I would be gone from their world without fanfare and they would move on.
I would see her, though. However briefly, for a heartbeat, a moment, I would get a vision of my beloved, wherever she was. I’d been summoned last in the midst of a great war and when I returned to my prison I had seen her in a tent, tending the wounded with a blade on her hip. Once I had seen her walking with another man on the shore of a remote island, hand in hand and happy. I had cried out in anger even as my heart soared to see her well.
It was the one gift left to me by the cleric, the one good thing that he’d offered me as a reward: return to your prison and you can see your wife, wherever she is in the great world. She, who was bound to me and kept eternally young, even though her godhood had been stripped.
Most of the time she was asleep, but even that was a joy to behold.
“Are you ready?” Fletcher said. I got the impression it wasn’t the first time he’d tried to get my attention. “Do you want to take a minute? Get a sandwich or something?”
“Do it.”
“Agmundr, return to the locket.”
She stood in a classroom, children looking up at her. She was still young, still beautiful, the sunlight streaming through the windows and catching in her hair. She had a halo framing her face, as though the sun itself was worshiping the sight of her.
She looked up at me and for a moment my heart hammered hard in my chest; could she see me? Would she smile at the sight of her long lost love, at the man who had changed the world in blood and gore to keep her alive? Would she even recognize me after all this time?
She looked away, smiling at one of the children in her care before turning to the blackboard to continue her lesson.
The warmth I had barely noticed filling me faded in an instant and I knew my time was done. I had received my reward, seen the one good thing that remained in the world, and now I had to return to my prison and await the next summons.
One day my wife would regain her power. One day the elder-god Ohm would once again walk the Earth and I would be at her side. We would unmake it all and put something fairer in its place, something more in her image and less in mine.
When the end of days came I would finally be free of my prison and we would be together again. Until then…
The world vanished as my prison enveloped me once more. One moment of rest before I heard the words again. It could have been a day or a million years. I couldn’t tell.
“Agmundr, vochex.”
Author’s Note
The Summoned series starts with Summoned to Defend, then Summoned to Destroy, then Summoned to Rule, and concludes with Summoned to Die.
If you liked the Summoned prequel novella (this story), please consider letting others know. A review on Amazon goes a long way, even if it
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Colin
Copyright © C.L. Walker 2017
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any process without written permission from the copyright holder.
Published by C.L. Walker
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Epilogue
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Epilogue
