by Ben Galley
To those watching, the surprise was painfully obvious. Valefor’s hungry grin evaporated in a split-second as the ice to his left gave way to an enormous, shimmering whale, half-black, half white, and pink jaws open very wide indeed. The strangest thing was that there seemed to be a red and gold man clinging to its towering fin, holding on for dear life as the creature launched itself from the water and through the air.
Valefor squealed as the whale’s jaws clamped down on his neck, half severing his head in the first strike. The whale bore him down to the snow, through the ice, and into the water with a crash and a damp hiss. All that remained in their wake was the red-gold man rolling through the snow to safety.
Modren let his mouth hang wide open as he watched the man stand up, shake the water off, and then march straight towards him. Modren didn’t know whether to hug him or skewer him. Only the armour stopped him, that old familiar armour…
‘Farden!’ Modren cried. Durnus leapt up from the snow at the sound of his name.
‘Where?’ Durnus yelled.
‘Right here.’
Durnus followed the sound of the voice, reaching out with his steaming hands. He found the metal of Farden’s chest, and smiled. ‘You did it.’
Modren barged in, grabbing him by the shoulders, caring nothing for the armour. ‘Did you? Did you do it?’ he demanded.
Farden raised his visor, exposing a wet and bedraggled face, but a stone-cold honest face at that. ‘I did,’ he said, barely finishing his words before Modren clasped him tightly around the neck. He said nothing, but Farden knew.
All around them, they could hear the cracking of the ice and the booming of whales, the roaring of daemons and the screams of everything else. Farden slammed his visor shut. ‘I need a sword,’ he barked, holding out a hand. It was Inwick that pressed one into his palm. She was trying on a smile for size. It didn’t suit her, but at least she was trying. Farden nodded to her.
‘She’s summoned Orion, Farden. He is coming,’ Durnus pointed to the sky. Farden looked up through the smoke to see a bright orb glinting in the morning sky, getting bigger every second. They did not have long at all.
‘Stay behind me. Far behind me.’
Farden was a whirlwind. Fire sprang from the cracks in his armour as he waded into the smoke like a man who had never heard of death. Farden would have cackled at that. As he had said to Hel, he knew it better than most.
The first daemon he came across was a monstrous bastard. It was in the midst of flaying the skin from a band of helpless snowmads. Farden beat his sword against his breastplate to get its attention. He got it almost instantly, much to the daemon’s horror. The creature stumbled backwards as he saw the shining knight striding towards him, sword in one gauntlet, a ball of fire in the other. He could smell the armour, and something in it terrified him. He scrabbled to get away, but he didn’t get far. Farden hacked the muscles of his legs into ribbons, and then cut him open across the stomach. The daemon burbled and wailed as Farden marched on, leaving him for the others.
‘Godblood!’ went up the cry, as another two daemons spotted him. They backed away from him, roaring at the top of their voices to warn the others. Two giant wolves lunged forward in their stead, so big they took Farden’s breath away for a dark moment. But the armour had made him feel invincible. Whether he truly was or not, he could test that later.
The first wolf swiped a paw the size of a seat cushion at his head, catching a glancing blow across his helmet. The force made Farden stumble and he fell to the snow. The wolves dove upon him, jaws snapping at his limbs, trying to crack and pierce his armour. Farden fought back the urge to laugh after his initial panic faded. The sound of their fangs sliding uselessly off the metal was almost comical.
An old habit called to him, and he slammed his vambraces together with a joyous cry. A wall of magick punched outwards from his skin, and the wolves were sent flying. One landed in a nearby crack in the ice, and was quickly snatched into the water by something long and sleek. The other was seen to by Shivertread, who strangled it in his lithe coils.
So it went. Daemon to daemon, beast to beast, Farden went, slashing, hacking, chopping, burning, and unleashing every pent-up ounce of his long-dead magick. Fire pulsed from every crack and pore in his skin as if it were dying to escape. Farden could feel his Book burning white-hot on his back. It was like nothing he had ever felt, not in all the years he could remember being a mage. He loved every burning second of it.
North he strode. Towards the hill he knew his daughter stood on. He could still feel her magick washing over the battlefield like an angry sea. Behind and around him, sensing the momentary turn in the tide, the pitiful few survivors began to swarm and clump together. Pitiful few indeed, and they were battered and bloodied but grim-faced, every single one ready to see this business finished. They walked in the mage’s wake, pointing, cheering. Farden simply marched on, oblivious to all.
Another daemon dared to challenge him, a two-headed creature with long-flowing locks of black hair. Farden barely broke his pace as the daemon towered over him, swiping with her claws. Farden punched the air and sent her staggering with a shaft of lightning to her midriff. A sword followed quickly after, burying itself in her neck with a shiver of blue fire. Farden rode the beast to the ground as she toppled, and wrenched his sword free before she hit the ground. Farden grimaced. The bitch’s spine had split the blade down the middle.
‘Farden! Eyes to the sky!’
‘Shit!’ Farden cursed. Orion was falling fast now, a behemoth of fire and brimstone, hurtling towards earth. He could hear the roar over the crowd. The battle noise fell to a lull as every eye turned to watch the king of daemons fall. Both sides took a breath, and waited.
Farden broke into a jog. An idea had formed in his mind. A stupid, rash idea, but an idea nonetheless. A little inkling, a little gem of a chance. Could it work? Was he mad? Probably. Was he invincible? He had wanted to test it. Not so soon!
Farden’s jog turned into a run. The star was plummeting faster now. The air was growing hot. The ground shuddered and cracked even more. Farden looked up and down, measuring where the star was going to hit. The foot of the hill. Right on the main stage.
Farden’s run broken into a sprint. Daemons snarled as he passed. Farden flailed his sword at every one that dared try to grope or snag him. Severed claws and howls chased him across the snow. ‘Foot of the hill!’ he gasped. Was he really going to do this?
A daemon on the hill was pointing at him and yelling something, its eyes wild pinpricks of urgent fire. A dragon roared as it swooped down to grab him. Farden threw a hand in the air and sparks flew. The dragon swerved away.
Orion flashed past the peaks. The world had turned a blinding white. Farden hurtled on. Was he really going to do this?
‘Stop him!’ came the daemons’ cries. He could hear them now. It was too late. Nothing was close enough. Arrows clattered off his back.
‘Am I really going to do this?!’ Farden yelled to himself, tasting his own panic.
He could feel the searing heat of Orion, painfully close above him.
Farden grit his teeth.
Too late now.
Farden let a roar rip from his throat as he threw himself into a desperate slide, directly into the star’s path. Farden raised his sword above his head and clenched with every scrap of muscle and magick his body knew. In the moments before Orion collided with him, he dared to crack open an eye. Just before the fire blinded him, he swore he saw the daemon’s face, a sour look pasted on it, one very much like fear.
The impact was indescribable. Farden would later try, on late evenings and drunken nights slouched in armchairs, or quietly to himself, in the darkened hours of restless morning. All he felt was the most incredible battering of his life. There was fire, he knew that. Thunder too. All the battlefield saw was a blinding flash of light.
The aftermath, once the fire had died away, and once the mage had prized himself from the hole, was simple enough to des
cribe. It was a bloody mess, and it made the heart of every daemon present, for they do indeed have hearts, rise into their mouths and stick there like a fish-bone.
No eye could tear itself away from the gloriously grotesque sight: a mage cradling a molten sword, his glittering armour now charred and blackened by soot and burnt rock, kneeling in the snow, two halves of a gigantic daemon carcass lying either side of him. Bones and black blood arranged in a tortured little spiral, the work of some morbid artist. A face frozen in death, fanged maw open almost as wide as the eyes, staring up at the sky, as if they were wishing they had never come down at all.
Chapter 33
“If sorrow were a season, it would be winter - the numb blue of the ice, and the keen edge of the wind in your gut.”
Old Albion saying
Farden’s boots crunched on the cooling stone. Half of it had turned to glass.
‘Hello, Farden,’ spat the curled-up little creature in the centre of the mess. Farden twisted off his helmet and set it down. He perched on a scorched lump of rock.
‘Samara,’ Farden looked at his daughter. She was a shivering wreck. Half her clothes had been burnt to rags. Her hair was tangled and scorched. He swore he could see a bone sticking from the skin of her left leg and her knees were twisted in a way that brought bile into the back of his throat.
‘Come to gloat?’
Farden shook his head. He ran a gauntlet through his sweaty, lank hair, noting how his daughter’s hair colour was the same as his own. ‘No, I’ve come to see you.’
Samara lifted up a hand as if to try to summon something to burn him, or shock him, or pierce him, but she was too weak, too spent. She let her hand fall, useless. ‘You’ve ruined everything!’ she hissed, venomous as a snake. Had her mouth not been scorched and parched she would have spat at him. Everything she had worked for, lived for, and dreamt of had ended in that last blinding flash. No applause for her. No parading around on shoulders. No shower of praise. No worshipping. Nothing. She had been deserted. A broken tool, left to rot alone.
Farden looked out over the battlefield. The smoke had cleared a little. For the first time, it was possible to see what carnage had been left by the fighting. It too made the bile rise. Black specks and shapes, some big, some small, littered the dirty snow, stretching into the distance. He sighed. ‘Look at what you’ve done, Samara.’
‘You deserved it, you and all your kind!’
Farden shook his head at the blind fury, wondering how many lies had been told for it to sink this deep. ‘What have we ever done?’
‘You? You killed my father Vice, my mother Cheska. You and the others. That uncle of yours, and Ruin! You all conspired to kill them. Murderers and thieves, worshipping those fake gods!’
Farden got to his feet, a deep frown on his dirty brow and a strange feeling lodged in his chest. ‘We what?’ he whispered.
‘You heard me, mage. Thieves and murderers!’ she yelled, thrashing around. Tears squeezed themselves from the corners of her eyes. The pain was easy to see. Farden watched her carefully. Her eyes shivered between colours, turning green as he stared at them, then to an angry red. Her back was broken. He could tell by the way she was curled. He dreaded to think what the black bruises on her side said about her ribs and lungs. He wondered how much time she had. No spell could save her. He realised then that she had been bred for one purpose only. She had never been meant to survive this.
‘Samara,’ Farden said slowly. ‘Vice wasn’t your father. I am.’
The look on her face was positively acidic. ‘Lies.’
‘Vice was the murderer. Cheska was his niece. He was not your father.’
‘Lies!’
Farden stamped his foot, making her flinch. He could see the pain bubbling beneath her skin. He crouched down by her side. ‘You know as well as I do what the daemons wanted you for, don’t you?’
‘A weapon,’ Samara hissed, bravely, it had to be said.
‘A tool,’ Farden shook his head. He could see her eyes, his eyes, glinting with crimson anger at first, and then a reluctant truth, regal purple, then a crystal icy blue, like her mother’s. He swallowed. ‘That spell was never meant for surviving.’
Samara bared her teeth.
Farden sat down again. ‘Fifteen years, and we barely get fifteen minutes together,’ he sighed, plucking a splinter of glass from the ground. ‘I looked everywhere for you. We all did, but I looked and I looked. Years went by and not a sign. Vice hid you well.’
Samara looked as if she were about to yell another round of ‘Lies!’ at him, but instead she held her tongue. Farden could feel her gaze roving over his battered features, looking at his hair, his grey-green eyes, his jaw. ‘I loved your mother with everything I had. Loved her even though she worked with Vice to betray me, to create you. Would have loved you too, if I had managed to stop him hiding you away.’ Farden smiled. ‘I would have had no idea how, but I would have managed it.’
Samara tried to scowl. Her eyelids were fluttering now, weakly. There was something in Farden’s voice that made her listen. Something she had never experienced before. Kindness. ‘You would have, have… loved me…’ The word was a lump of ash on her tongue, but her question was true enough. ‘…even though I was this? This tool?’
Farden took the chance to hold her wrist. She struggled at first but then relented. She was too weak. So weak. Farden tried to shove the similarities between this and another death from his mind. Farden talked between counting her pulse. It was sluggish. ‘Durnus, you probably know him as Ruin, once asked me a question. He asked me are we the people we’re born, or the people we grow up to be? I choose to believe the latter.’
‘What were you born as?’
‘Brawler. Drug addict. Bloody good with magick.’
‘And now?’
Farden looked over his shoulder. ‘Now they call me a hero.’
‘I know what I was born to be. I’ve done my job. Now it’s over,’ she snorted. ‘Some reward this is.’ She knew now. Her whole life had been the product of a lie, of ten thousand lies. She wondered if she should be bitter about it, angry even. What was done was done. She had never been given a chance. Something caught in her throat. ‘It’s not my fault,’ she whispered.
‘Samara,’ Farden said, leaning close. Did he dare touch her face? He did and she closed her eyes. She looked so small all of a sudden, like the fifteen year-old she truly was. She’d never had a chance, Farden thought, as he clenched a fist. ‘You did what you were told to do. You knew no better.’
‘Mhm,’ Samara mumbled.
‘Do you believe me now?’
Samara winced. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Father.’
‘Tell me,’ Farden whispered. ‘Who fed you these lies?’
A single finger unfurled from Samara’s hand and pointed to the flat face of the cliff behind them, where the hill crept up to join the mountain, where a ragged, crooked figure was crouching, clutching a thick book to her chest. The woman’s face turned pale as the mage met her eyes.
‘She did,’ Samara mumbled.
Farden was after her like a bolt from a bow.
‘Stay away!’ screamed Lilith as she sprinted down the hillside, all thoughts of aches and pain and age suddenly, instantly forgotten. She could hear the clanking of the dreaded mage behind her. She flailed her hands behind her head, expecting a sharp pain in her spine at any moment. Her heart was in her mouth, trying to make good its escape. It didn’t want to be a part of this debacle.
‘Stop running!’ barked Farden.
‘Stay away, murderer!’
Farden had had enough of running for one day. He skidded to a halt and flicked his hand in a blade-like motion. The air wavered in front of it, a little wave spreading outwards, catching the woman square in the back and sending her flailing into the snow at the foot of the hill. She fell with a crunch, and fell very still indeed.
Farden made it to her side. He dug the toe of his sabaton under her shoulder and lifted her. He frowned
when he saw the blood, and the broken sword blade that had caused it. It had gone straight through her ribs. Her frail old fingers were clasping it. She coughed, hard, and blood filled her mouth. Her eyes, mad with fear and pain, swivelled to meet his. Surprisingly she laughed.
‘Just as I saw it,’ she cackled, through a mouthful of blood. Farden noticed three stones lying in the snow, underneath her elbow. One white, one red, one black. A seer, then. ‘Just as I saw it. Everything ends. And so will you, Farden, in good time!’
Farden was about to ask her who she was when she coughed once more and then fell still, her mad eyes still glaring up at him. Farden shrugged. ‘And good riddance to bad poison,’ he said.
Farden wandered back to the top of the hill to find his daughter had drifted away also. Her eyes were closed and peaceful. He sighed a shuddering sigh. It was hard to know whether to feel pain, or guilt, or gladness. Maybe all three would do, in equal measure. She had known him in the end, and that was the most important thing. She had known him as a father, albeit for a brief moment.
Farden watched her for a while and then walked away. Three goodbyes were too much for one day.
He found Ilios sitting halfway down the hillside, all quiet and watchful. The gryphon looked dishevelled, to put it politely. Farden slumped down by his side and plucked a frayed feather from his shoulder. The gryphon looked down and clacked his beak. Farden met his golden eyes, and he saw a sadness in them he knew very well indeed. The mage nodded, and Ilios turned away. Gryphons never cry. They cannot, to speak the truth, but like every other animal they have a heart that bleeds, and in that moment it was bleeding double for Tyrfing.
In any case, Farden let the tears flow for both of them.
When at long last he was done, when he had no more tears to shed, Farden leant back against the cold rock. He felt his armour grate on the stone, and took a deep, deep breath. It was all too much to think about. ‘Sing me to sleep, Ilios,’ he whispered. ‘Sing me to sleep.’
