Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1)

by J. Edward Neill

  At midwinter, he ceased watching from his window and gave up ringing his bell. No one’s coming, he knew. My friends are gone and dead. I’ll have better luck looking for their faces in the stars.

  Rather than stare upon the eastern gate, he walked Minec’s streets at ease, plodding through the snow almost contentedly. He brought books back to his tower, tomes claimed from a hundred other dwellings. He learned how Minec came to be, who its heroes had been, what lords had ruled it, and what vast wealth had been mined from the mountains to build it. He came to know the names of every statue, no matter that most were buried up to their chins in snow. He visited libraries and ballrooms, guild halls and smithies, and even once found a chapel built in memory of a god whose name no one remembered.

  And then one eve, the last night of his seventeenth week in the city, he returned to his window. The air was not so bitter now, for the season was spring, and the snows beginning to melt. The sky was clear for a rarity, and the city below awash in the full moon’s light. He felt more a beast than a man anymore, for his beard was thick as a goat’s, his hair lank as a horse’s mane, and his blankets bundled around him in the shape of a bear’s burly shoulders. Not minding the wind, he sat in the sill and stared into the heavens. The stars, he thought. The moon. I envy you. You watched over this war and a thousand others, and yet you’re unchanged. What’s it like to see but never feel? Will the Furies return here? Would you even tell me if you knew?

  He was not sure why, but he rang the bell that night. He felt its final echoes in his bones as he lay to sleep, a pile of blankets like a mountain atop him. His food was dwindling and his hope all gone, but before he closed his eyes, he knew what it was to be at peace. When he dreamed, he saw Andelusia for the first time in months. She looked somehow more beautiful than ever, not as merry as in Gryphon, but happy all the same. He wandered the woods with her, bathed in the pool she had named Mirror, supped with her on a table of leaves, and made love to her in the snow. To imagine her was no longer torment, but a reward for another day in the city he came to think of as his own.

  At the crack of dawn, he heard shouting.

  Months ago, the sound of another living thing in Minec would have sent him sprinting onto the streets, but no more. Yawning, he plucked up one of the swords borrowed from Minec’s armory and ambled down the stairs. The shouts reached his ears through the tower windows. “Rellen!” a lad was saying. “Rellen Gryphon! Are you the one who rang the bell?”

  Sword loose in his hand, he pushed the tower door open. Sunlight flooded the antechamber, turning the room white as snow, gilding the marble steps down to the street. He saw a young man standing beside a horse, bundled in enough furs to line the skins of a dozen wolves. “Who is there?” He took three steps down.

  “Rellen Gryphon?” the lad called up to him. “Is that you? Uncle said you were younger.”

  “Younger?” He smiled. “Do I look so ancient? Must be the beard.”

  “The beard, yes,” the lad said. “So you’re Lord Gryphon?”

  The wheels in his mind spun. The lad was thin and earthen-haired, his eyes bright and blue. “You said uncle.” He took five steps down. “You’re from House Graf? One of Marcus’s family?”

  “Aye. The last living Graf, if you’d know. Name’s Ulev, same as my father, uncle’s brother. Before uncle died, he told me about you. He said you’d be here. Gave me a chest of gold if I promised to come find you.”

  The news of Marcus’s death did not sting as much as he expected. The old man’s grief had been powerful, if well-hidden. It was not age that had killed him, Rellen knew. “Seems your uncle was right,’ he said. “Here I am. Your gold is earned. You have my sympathies, of course. Marcus was a friend. Were I a better man, I wouldn’t have left him so soon.”

  Ulev led his horse twenty steps up the stairs, meeting Rellen midway. If the lad was sorrowful for his lost uncle, he showed nothing. He looked tired, pale, and red-nosed from too many hours in the sun, but more than anything, he looked excited. “Lord Rellen…” he panted.

  “Just Rellen.” He put his sword away. “If I’m the lord of anything, it’d be Minec. And if you noticed, no one’s here but me.”

  “Aye,” said Ulev. “Uncle said you’d say that. But he also said you’d not stay here forever.”

  “And why is that?”

  Ulev’s smile was too broad, his cheeks flushed beyond anything the morning air would warrant. “He said one thing could get you back to Gryphon, and one thing only.”

  Rellen’s smile fell from his face. He imagined himself right back in House Graf, in the dark, dank hall he had stammered out all his sorrows to Marcus. “One thing…” All the breath left him. “What one thing?”

  “A girl,” said Ulev. “Prettiest any of us have ever seen. Now if you’d be so kind as to follow, I’ve another horse ready and waiting. I’ve been on the road for ten days, and I’d love nothing more than to go home.”

  The World Left Behind

  Smoke drifted across the fields of Mooreye.

  It was the eve of Furyon’s fall, and in the hours following the Emperor’s death, the fields were captured by a silence so absolute, so devoid of life, it was as though there had never been a battle at all. Sunken in the grass, the dead slept. The bodies had been abandoned by the soldiers of Graehelm, who had fled fearing their enemy might rise again. But no rebirth came, no second life for the truly slain. The night descended upon swift wings, smearing out the sunshine, and the dead stayed where they belonged.

  It was summer still. The evening was humid, and the crows plentiful. As he came to, Daćin heard the black birds cawing all around him, fighting for the eyeballs of his dead brothers. He lifted his hands to his eyes, and in the starlight his fingers looked black with blood, his own and that of the dead piled all around him. His bones creaking, he rose to his knees. He knelt in a lake of dead men, and his body shook with soundless grief. By the time his tears and rage began to wane, the moon was out, its pallid shine so powerful he squinted his eyes against it. His skull throbbed. His brain sloshed in his head like warm wine in a cracked goblet. His flesh was riddled with bruises, marks made by the booted feet of those who had trampled him. He had no weapons, no food, nothing becoming of a Furyon knight.

  When he rose to his feet, wavering upon stagnant legs, he felt like a tatter in the wind, a blade of broken grass standing alone in a vast and gruesome graveyard.

  How he came to walk, he never knew. After striding many thousand steps beneath the impossibly bright starlight, he hunkered against Mooreye City’s western wall and waited out the night. He wanted to eat, but knew his stomach would betray him. He wanted to die, but his body did not care to hear it. The next morn, when the sun shattered the darkness, he arose again. The Furyon war-camp was in ruin. Through an ocean of blackened tents and bodies melting in the mud, he staggered and found his tent. The pitiful pavilion was burned and trampled. His house banner lay broken in the grass, a severed Furyon head mounted in place of a flag. He scavenged beneath a twisted knot of blackened canvas, and he found a pot of cool water, a jar of mead, and a strand of salted meat not yet pilfered by the crows.

  In silence, he ate and drank. His tent had been in the heart of the camp, and his vantage of the slaughter was more than he wanted to see. None of my brothers live, he knew. The Grae have repaid us for our cruelty. He wept wherever he saw his dead countrymen, remembering them not for the way they had been at Mooreye, but for the men they had been before leaving Furyon. Some he saw speared to the earth, broken hafts jutting from their corpses at horrific angles. Others were drowned in shallow pools of blood-red rain, nearly naked in the sunlight. Still others were burned, hewn into pieces, and lying amid great piles of Dageni ash, slaughtered in the same places their weapons had failed them.

  That night, after binding his wounds, dressing in a bundle of rags, and gathering as many foodstuffs as he could bear to carry, he left the battlefield behind. The stars told him which way was east, and so he shambled beneath the m
oonlight, a shadow of a shadow. Mooreye City fell behind him. The fields of dead men turned to grass, green and sweeping, untouched by Furyon boots. The sounds of fighting crows vanished, replaced by chirruping crickets. The moon wheeled over his head, an eye as pale as Archmyr’s face, judging him for daring to survive.

  He walked and walked. When will the Grae catch me? He felt like a wandering ghost in all his rags. When will another bone break and the earth swallow me?

  He came to a village in the darkness, but it was one Archmyr had visited, and all that remained were the skeletons of the burned. We lost because of you, he cursed the vile Thillrian. What might have been if you’d done as you were told? But after the village was behind him, he realized the Pale Knight’s deeds had only been possible because of the Emperor. Chakran knew the weapon he wielded. What made him do it? Why promote a monster to such glory?

  Why drop Tyberia’s fate into a foreign man’s claws?

  He arrived at no answers. The deeper into the night he walked, the more he cursed his own existence. He shivered with rage and stopped several times to kneel and force himself not to weep. He halted in a thicket and pounded the trunk of a tree until its bark ran red. Much later, his physical pain was lost, muted by the tempest in his mind. That one as proud as he should live when all his brethren were destroyed devoured his insides. Had he a blade, he would have fell upon it. Had he a rope, he would have strung himself up by his neck.

  Hopeful though he was for an end, he did not die. When the sun erupted over the ocean of grass, he knelt for the hundredth time and opened his palms to the sky. What will you do with me? He lost himself in dawn’s crimson glory. Why do I live? The sun’s light exploded into the heavens, making molten streaks where grey clouds had lived. The fire in the sky was red, so very red, and it was in those moments a fragment of the past screamed to life in his mind. He tried to recall the last time he had felt emotion such as now, and he remembered what had happened in Orye.

  The girl, he recalled her. The one with fire in her hair. The one Vom and Chakran coveted.

  He laid down into the grass, too tired to go another step without step. She was the only good I did. I’m the same as Archmyr, save for her. My men were butchers, just as his were. I killed cleaner, but kill I did, and lost not nearly enough sleep for it. But the girl, she was a good thing I did. I could’ve fed her to my men or taken her into my tent. But no, not her. She was different.

  Did she make it to Furyon?

  Does she wait in my house even now, wondering where I am?

  Does she despise me?

  Will I see her again?

  Sleep took him. No matter that the day became hot and the sun beat on his rags from dawn until dusk, he fell as far from the world as a man could without dying. His fever roasting inside him, he dreamed of wild things and dark places, and the red-haired girl populated them all. He saw mountains burning, the flames shivering like shocks of her hair. He battled knights in black armor, dying to each one, and each set of eyes behind their visors were hers. When he awoke beneath the stars, his body hurt again. His arm was swollen from ant-bites and his wounds seeping beneath their bindings, but his fever was gone. Hard to kill a Dageni man, he thought when he arose, his mind clear and sharp again. Unless the Grae catch me, I’ll live.

  He fled eastward. Casting all thoughts of suicide and self-pity aside, he ran like a beast into the Dales. The nights were hard, the days harder. He found food in the homes of families Archmyr had slain, and drank from streams no Grae were left to sip from. Some nights, he slept in the ruins of barns and burned-out houses, and others out beneath the open sky, where the ghosts of the Grae could not haunt him. After a time, he knew no Graehelm soldiers would find him. They’re in the mountains, he knew. Routing the last of my men, no doubt. Ending the Emperor’s dream.

  During his first week, he felt terrible shame for living, but as the days went on he began to wonder if he alone had been meant to live, the same as I was the only one not afflicted by whatever lives in Malog.

  Though at first he meant to go east, he found himself straying north. His pack full of scavenged food, he wandered where the grasses of the Dales dwindled against the thirsty plain of Nimis. Like a wolf he continued, marching on when men less hardy might have died. He shucked the leaves of nameless plants to supplement his food and drank from pools that were more mud than water. After many weeks, with his rags drooping from his skin and his face scalded red by the unmerciful sun, he arrived upon the northernmost threshold of Mormist, a place where few of the savageries of war had come. On that eve, the sun braised the sky fiery orange. The wind from the mountains roared through the trees, and the lake he camped beside shined like burnished silver.

  Darkness fell.

  While lying in the shadow of an evergreen tree, the moonlight glimmering on the water, he felt the change wash over him. He had always lived as a loyal subject of Furyon, a student of its wars, and a servant of its laws, but no longer. I’m not of Furyon. The poison from Malog failed to take me. I must be somewhat else. I grew up in Dageni. I’m taller than any Furyon, darker of skin and broader of shoulder. I must be one of them, one of the Davin Kal. Can it be true?

  This whole time, Chakran had not one foreign commander, but two?

  After a last night of dwelling in shadow, he concluded he would never return to Furyon, nor Graehelm, nor any land I’ve been before. The next dawn, he awakened beside the silver lake a changed creature. For the first time in his life, he was glad to have no sword. The very idea of one disgusted him, for what blade has Furyon ever fashioned not meant for the necks of its neighbors? He was ashamed to ever have led men into war, and sorrowful for what he had done to Graehelm and Davin Kal.

  The old him had died in the night.

  The new him stood taller.

  As the sun crept over the mountains, its light washed over him, burning away the darkness of Dageni, the fires of Velum, and the stench of death from Mooreye. He gathered his things, rounded the lake to its eastern side, and stood upon a grassy slope leading toward the peaks of northern Mormist. The air was crisp, but not chilling, and fresher than any he had ever breathed. Standing on the slope beneath the trees felt like sinking into a bath of the purest water, the wind cleansing him of all the evils he had worked. He felt small, yet at peace, for as he looked to the sky he found comfort in his defeat. If we’d won, these mountains would be topped with storms, these trees would grin at me like ghouls, and this lake would be filled with blood.

  Better that Furyon should fall than the world turn black with our desire.

  Better that I should live long beyond today, and never again take a sword into my hands.

  About the author

  A reader of mass quantities of fantasy and sci-fi, J Edward Neill became obsessed with writing fiction in early 2001. On one bitterly cold morning in the lowest corridor of his candlelit man-cave, he set pen fingers to keyboard) and began hammering away on what would become a much larger project than he ever imagined. Since that day, J Edward has spent nearly all his free time lost in his daydreams, conjuring ways to write the kind of stories he always loved as a child. When he's not glooming in front of his laptop or iPad, J Edward masterminds the fantasy strategy game Kings, now in its umpteenth iteration. While writing is his prime passion, he also has a powerful affinity for visual arts, quirky foreign films, and his seven-string Ibanez guitar, Beelzebub. J Edward currently lives in the 'burbs of North Georgia, where he moonlights as a foodie, a sipper of too much pinot noir, and the most cantankerous member of his small but beloved family.

  Also available…

  Fiction

  Dark Moon Daughter – Book II in the Tyrants of the Dead Trilogy

  Nether Kingdom – Book III in the Tyrants of the Dead Trilogy

  Hollow Empire – Night of Knives

  The Sleepers – A Sci-Fi Horror Short Story

  Old Man of Tessera – A Horror Short Story

  Non-Fiction

  101 Questions for Humanity – Coffee
Table Philosophy

  101 Questions for Men

  101 Questions for Women

  101 Questions for Midnight

  And coming soon…

  Darkness Between the Stars

  Let the Bodies

  DownTheDarkPath.com

  TesseraGuild.com

  Table of Contents

  The Dark Banner Sails

  The Red-Haired Girl

  Leaving

  The Restless

  Winter

  The Message

  A Walk in the Woods

  A Sanctuary for Swords

  The Pale

  Emun’s Table

  Secrets

  Promises

  Three Days

  Treading Lightly

  The Bog

  Rain

  Whispers from the West

  Three Blasts

  The Only

  Doom

  Barrok

  Black Tide

  Blood

  Jaded

  The Dark Path

  Awakening

  A New Oath

  Rebirth

  Watchful

  The Little Man

  The Breaking

  The Long Way Around

  Glooms

  Verod

  The Fey

  Path of Most Resistance

  The Graveless Guardian

  Lamb of Furyon

  The Shadower

  The Orb of Souls

  Scorn of Mooreye

  Bogheart

  Wanderer of the Moor

  House Thure

  The Bottom

  Thirty

  Knight of Two Faces

  The Pale Tower

  Trials of Niviliath

  No Turning Back

  Five Brave Fools

  Illyoc