Neirym came alive as the living fell slain on the battlefield. The ground trembled. The thunderclap of cavalry created a maelstrom of sound that arose to a crescendo. It penetrated miles in every direction. No sound alive could mimic it, but every man alive knew what it was. It was the sonance of Oussanean horsewomen.
Armed with their bows, the horsewomen bought Neirym time with hailstorms of arrows. Like a spider weaving its web, Neirym beckoned the lost energy of the dead with her blood magic staff. The staff’s jewel lured the confused souls into a vacuum and converted them into mana.
In her left hand, Neirym held a man-shaped effigy made of bone. She focused her vision on the shapes of the dead bodies, on the patterns of their twisted corpses. Her mind deciphered the patterns in a fraction of a moment. By process of elimination, she envisioned sigils compiled from the unique characteristics that each body made.
Neirym picked out the corpses that were best suited to host her lifeblood hexes. Like the brushstrokes of a painter, Neirym flicked her staff in the shapes of the sigils while aiming at the bodies. The unholy energy fired in streaks across the field and penetrated the corpses.
The Caliphians understood the gravity of the situation once they beheld the unnatural glow of Neirym’s targets. They attempted to flee as the bloated flesh burst around them. A putrid stench filled the air. Fluids from the corpses welled into pools of toxicity.
In the area-effect of the spells, the lifeblood hexes aged the Caliphians violently. It rotted them alive. The weight of their armor collapsed upon their sinew-deprived bodies. Their cheeks dissolved into strings of flesh, revealing their teeth. Their eyes corroded into the puss-spewing caverns of their vacant skulls.
As the lifeblood hexes scattered the Caliphians near the frontlines, Neirym used the opportunity to raise entirely new allies. She cast animation spells over dead. Giant spheres erupted with dark energy that embedded themselves in every nearby body.
The corpses transformed into creatures and rose like lions awakened from slumber. Their eyes glowed red. Their skeletal bodies, twice the size of the average Caliphian, were clad in armor. Their lust for vengeance was as insatiable as their appetites were ferocious. They were the Strömlös, the undead warriors of Caliphweald.
The Caliphians were forced to defend themselves against the fallen brothers they had not yet grieved for. The Strömlös shook the earth with each stride like two-footed oxen. They were deceptively acrobatic and their strength was to strike from the air. They executed flips over the Caliphians while attacking them from above. It not only trapped their targets into a constant defensive position, but it also created a state of disorientation. Their heavy blows severed entire bodies of men.
The Caliphians were not defenseless against the Strömlös. Their quickness allowed them to strike the Strömlös efficiently. Enough successful attacks destroyed the blood magic’s bind on the dead matter and brought the monsters back to the dust.
Once a Strömlös was destroyed, a wraith rose from the heap of its bones. Disciplined magi harvested these spirits and converted them into mana. Such apparitions, however, terrorized any undisciplined foot soldier that did not possess weapons of equipoise.
The Shadekin cast Wind Tempest, a spell that consumed groups of Oussaneans inside violent vortexes and flung their bodies over great expanses. Each corpse gifted Neirym an undead minion.
The Oussanean horsewomen’s hailstorms of arrows prevented the Caliphian army from maneuvering properly. Hordes of Strömlös flanked them and pounced upon the suppressed soldiers like wolves in a chicken coop.
Lugh witnessed the atrocity. “The archers, Aegnor! Desecrate them!”
Aegnor Ebonheart, a Shadekin elementalist, targeted the Oussanean archers. He commanded the earth on which he stood and summoned its violence.
“Jord,” he screamed. “Usstan lar dosst ssissilluk!”
Aegnor’s words caused the ground to quake violently. The archers were knocked down for the spell’s duration. He yelled at the earth to swallow them. “Mechrola mina, Jord!”
The spell devoured any Strömlös on the battlefield within earshot of the command.
Rusvi’menel was overwhelmed. He had not anticipated blood magic. The Oussaneans did not conventionally use equipoise, so the Caliphian army had few weapons coated in silver and even fewer wards against the undead.
He cast Aura of Solace, a protection spell that removed the lifeblood hexes from all those who entered its area effect. Rusvi’menel grew the spell as large as he could, every muscle in his body feeling like it was about to rip apart.
“Afflicted!” he shouted. “Come to me!”
The nearby Caliphians sought refuge in the Aura of Solace and replenished their health. Rusvi’menel orchestrated his use of Wakan to sooth them.
“Brothers,” he said. “The Devil invites thee to participate in his unnatural contest with his undeclared servants of evil!”
He cast Sheath of Life, a protection spell that warded off the undead. He led the Shadekin and the Caliphian soldiers under his protection towards the source of evil. The Strömlös crept around them but remained docile as Sheath of Life kept them at bay.
The Caliphians studied the hordes of undead.
Rusvi’menel reveled in the moment. “Thy fate carries thee! Coincidence is only spoken by the blind, who cannot behold thy levers and pulleys. If ye master the proper stratagems, ye may obtain thy purpose in this realm’s celestial course of action. There is no hell but to die afar from the person ye claimed to be, to take thy last breath absent of the person ye could have been. On me, my kinsmen! Let us journey into the heart of evil!”
______________________________
THE FEELING CARESSED HER like a warm butter wind. Olwyn smelled lilacs and roses and tasted honey blossoms. The Amori played a soothing melody with their instruments and cradled her with their harmonious chorus. She saw vanilla clouds floating upon the great expanses of boundless shining sky. Their pastel texture fluttered as she tried to maintain her focus.
Ellia sat beside Olwyn. She held Aithein so that he would be the last thing Olwyn saw before passing. Ellia took Olwyn’s hand and held it so that Aithein could touch her. He gave his mum a smile that calmed her soul and let her know that he was ready to live.
As Olwyn looked into her baby boy’s eyes, she heard Lugh’s voice speak through them. “If the dead may someday return to this world and sail unseen around those they love, I shall always be with thee; in the garish day and in the rayless night, amidst thy happiest moments and thy bleakest light. Always. And if there be a soft breeze upon thy cheek, it shall be my breath; or if the cool air fans thy throbbing temple, it shall be my spectral body passing by. If ever I not return to thee, my love, rest safe knowing I shall wait in the pastures of Melligarde, till the day ye may join me.”
Aithein was not even a day old. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t understand language, mathematics, or why men do the things they did. He was just a little boy who happened to be born on the morning of a war.
Olwyn could see the fabric of the aether. She could see the molecules of all matter interacting with each other like snowflakes that escaped the law of physics. Another world blended with her physical one.
Unfamiliar entities swirled in the molecules like smoke as they beckoned her. She was not afraid, but she was not confident either. She felt her center of gravity shift from the earth towards the heavens. Its unbearable weight tugged her soul upwards as though it were ripping her out of her body. She resisted. She did not want to leave her son just yet. She took Aithein’s hand and fought to be with him one last time. And then, everything was gone. She remembered nothing after that. It was like trying to recount the exact moment of falling asleep. Impossible.
Olwyn departed the world. Her eyes were still and vacant. Aithein stared at his mum, wanting to know where she went. He wanted her to take him with her. He felt the most terrible loss of the most important person on the first day of his life, a feeling he’d grow to hate the most
, the feeling of being left behind. It was a sensation that would tear at his heart forever. He kicked and screamed wildly as Ellia held him tight.
The Great War was the decisive moment of failure in Caliphweald’s history. It was the plague, a thief in the night. It was a war of attrition that only ended because there were no more soldiers left to be sold, no one to carry out the bidding of the masters of death.
The cost of a mother is too high a price for any child to bear. The cost of a father is an equally unreasonable burden. The Great War was wicked and corrupt. It levied both taxes upon Aithein and put him in everlasting debt.
______________________________
THE DISTANT ECHOES OF battle slowly faded away with the screams of pain. The man watched as the boy lay sleeping, trembling with battle fatigue. His forehead glistened with sweat and his eyes shot in rapid directions beneath their closed lids. He would be fine for now, and so the man quickly exited the room into the shadows, his cape silently flailing behind him.
He followed the same path through the estate that his wife did previously, and made his way north through the western wing of the manor. As he entered the south end of a massive corridor, he stopped.
He stared through the emptiness of the hallway, all the way down to the other end. The three-sided vaulted ceiling was coffered with expertly carved images in mahogany wood. Four giant, jewel-encrusted golden chandeliers hung from the beams. Thirty-six candles were lit on each one, works of creation. They illuminated paintings and sculptures on the walls that depicted figures crafting the heavens and stretching them out, cultivating the earth, and giving life to the beings that walk therein.
On the east side of the hallway, there were miniature archways and pillars at the top of the wall where they met with the base of the ceiling. They reflected the bigger arches below them. In the hollows of the wall, white pillars were erected with candle fixtures at their apex. Empty palatial benches sat in between each arched hollow, with tall candelabras between them.
“Empty,” the man muttered. “What a waste.”
He stared at their bareness. Sometimes he hated living here. His imagination saw ghosts of the people from his childhood, sitting on the empty benches, laughing at him for living this way, as though there had never been an invasion of Maebelfry and the Empyreal Chancel had never been entered.
He shook the images out of his head. They were just useless, empty benches whose only purpose was to serve as a comfortable reminder to his wife of the way she lived in childhood and the castle from whence she came. The massive empty hall, in its entire golden splendor as the western daylight flooded the hallway, only made him miss the forest and his former life even more.
The man’s pace was vacant as he walked toward the four marble pillars that stood between the end of the hallway and the staircase to the next floor. From afar they looked like prison bars. Marble prison bars. Strange, how the things you hold title to eventually end up holding title to you.
At the top of each pillar was a circle portrait, one for each member of his family: his son, his daughter, his wife, and him. As he walked between the pillars, he couldn’t help but wonder where his new guest would fit in that scene. Perhaps his wife would replace the painting of him with a portrait of the boy.
As he climbed the staircase to the next floor and made his way to his bedchamber, he struggled to chase away the feeling of helplessness. What was there to apologize for? What could be done to change the past? Nothing. Well, not quite, but altering history in that manner would undo the peace they knew now. But it seemed whatever peace existed was rapidly being chased away by the presence of their unexpected visitor. He knew that even though he was finished with the past, the past was not finished with him.
The door was locked.
The man knocked gently. “Love? May I?”
From the other side, the soft voice of the woman embodied her scorn yet her desire for him at the same time. “Open it yourself… never stopped you before.”
The man closed his eyes and hung his head. He let slip a quiet sigh. Shamefully, he opened his eyes and raised his hand to the doorknob.
“Pahntar whol uns’aa,” he commanded.
The lock mechanism clicked, the knob turned, and the door opened itself. He felt nervous walking into the room, like a child being called to receive his punishment.
All that melted away when he saw the anguish his wife suffered, huddled on the bed in an afflicted wreck. He quickly rushed to her and knelt before her, gently cupping her ankles and massaging them, working his way up to her calves, her thighs, and finally her hips.
She sniffled uncontrollably as she looked down at him through damp eyes and cheeks. “How could you allow him here? How could you suffer that scourge to destroy our family?”
“What was I to do?” the man replied. “Allow him to perish?”
“Aye!” she replied. “You’ve opened our doors to a wyvern! Have you learned nothing from the past?”
The man forcefully pulled his wife close, her legs sliding under his arms and around his chest. “Look at me. I didn’t come up here to duel.”
“You’re no different than my father!” the woman replied.
The man took offense. “How so?”
The woman curved her hands around the man’s face. “That boy has in him the same blood as the heartless basilisk from the desert, and you suffer his presence in our home just as my father did when we were children! How could you be so foolish?”
“That boy is also made of the same blood as the heartless monster from the forest,” the man responded, his tone delicate and melancholy. “The one you’ve shared your home and body with for all these years.”
“Don’t you dare say that,” the woman replied. “Don’t you dare degrade the honor of our sacrifices!”
“Have you ever seen what happens to those who become lost?” the man asked.
“What does that have to do with anything?” the woman asked scornfully.
“I’ve seen what happens to those that become lost,” the man said. “Life forced me to kill them before I could heal them. It was terrifying. Do you know what the worst parts of the memories are?”
The woman remained hurtfully silent as she stared back at her husband.
The man gently continued, “When I return to the past, I’m forced to see that I’m not much different than they were. In the forest they were recognizable. Scattered throughout the rest of the world, they blended in with everyone, dormant, lost in a sea of turmoil until the right major crisis turned them loose.”
The woman gritted her teeth as she thought of harm coming to her children. “Make your point.”
“The wicked ones we speak of all had one thing in common,” the man replied. “They were all fatherless.”
“I want him gone,” the woman said.
“Please,” the man begged. “He deserves to know the truth. Please allow him to stay long enough that I may show him, that I may alleviate his hatred towards me for abandoning him, for choosing you above all else.”
The woman tenderly stroked her husband’s face and gazed deep into his eyes. “Sometimes I wonder how much easier my life would have been, if the fabric of my soul wasn’t sewn by the thread of my love for you.”
CHAPTER 3
Heroes and Murderers
THE FOG OF THE past slowly dissipated and the boy returned to consciousness. The first thing that came into focus was his father’s face. The boy could sense the feeling in his limbs returning. There was no prickly sensation anywhere in his body. He moved his arms and took hold of his father.
The man hoisted the boy up and propped him onto the stool.
“So you see?” the man said. “War does not decide who is right. Only who is left.”
The boy was traumatized. He looked around the room and didn’t see any orbs of ether, static or excited, and there were no manifestations of spectral entities. He searched the floor for his chalice.
The man pointed to the side table. “It’s over
there. Take some time to get your bearings.”
“The man from the desert,” the boy said. “He looked like me.”
“He did,” the man solemnly replied.
“Were you able to behold what I saw?” the boy asked.
The man nodded. “Over and over I have.”
“I didn’t see how the war ended,” the boy said. “I only saw the first day.”
“The way that war ended is not relevant to what you wish to know about your mother and me,” the man responded. “The way it began is much more important.”
The boy hoped he didn’t have to witness more horrors. It was too unbearable of an experience. He could already feel himself changing. It wasn’t romantic like he had been led to believe. War was misery. War was a dungeon for the spiritually condemned.
“If it’s still the truth you seek,” the man said. “Then have another drink.”
The boy was unsure if he could relive that ordeal and still survive. His heart pounded at a dangerous speed. He looked around the room to buy himself time. He needed to distract the man with a conversation to avoid appearing as a coward.
There were tunics of different colors and designs strewn about the decorated walls. Some were light and designed for hunting or commerce. Others were covered in chainmail and armor, designed for battle. Entwined in one of them was a famous artifact, a lens known to decipher illusion magic.
“I know what that is,” the boy said. “Is it not foolhardy for it to be left unguarded?”
The man looked at the artifact in disgust. “Many men perished trying to obtain that. But it is foolhardy to presume that anything in my life is left unguarded.”
“Why did you need it?” the boy asked.
“My blood is not pure,” the man replied. “My father crafted that lens to awaken my senses, that I would use it until I could see through his illusions with my own eyes. When the time comes, each of my children shall do the same. Never again shall humanity be trapped by such a spell.”
The boy’s eyes shot back to the corner of the room, where a slingshot and a shield made from faelen wood rested amongst other odds and ends. Next to them was a gold bracelet with the symbol of the Dregon race etched into it, skewered by a jewel-encrusted ivory boomerang. The four items were small. Adults could not equip them.
The Tale of Onora: The Boy and the Peddler of Death Page 7
