by Sean Rodden
“Here we go.”
And then together, their words a white whisper of mist mimicking the sound of their swords sliding from their sheaths –
“Let’s do it.”
And like their Prince before them, the pair of Shields reined their renders around, placing their backs to Drogul and the Daradur, to the dusts and ash and billowing smoke of Doomfall. They raised their swords in seamless synchronicity, and discordant dawnlight shimmered like jagged jade ghosts along the bared blades. And they sought the eyes of their fellow Black Shields even as the Halflord had sought their own.
Stand with us.
In the still beyond the next heartbeat, and in perfect unison, three entire units of elite Black Shield guardians manoeuvered their mounts around to face the five flawless lines of Bloodspawn warriors. For a time, no one moved. Neither select Shield nor ’Spawn regular, but only murmurations of ambiguous dragons recklessly winging into the broken sky. And then the voice of the Halflord carried across the stone, soft yet strong, a wind in the mountains calling ancestral spirits to war.
“I am Kor ben Dor. I am the First Prince of the Bloodspawn. I am the only son of slain Shar’eth, who was shaman of shamans to the Graniants under Earthfall.” A pause. “And I am the second son of lost Amarien, Eleventh Lord of the Fiannar – and thus I am half-brother to noble Alvarion, who even now leads his fierce folk at the Seven Hills in defence of Light and liberty.” Another pause. “I unequivocally reject the Blood King. I refuse the path of Darkness.” One final clenched-teethed silence. “And I seek recompense.”
And no sound, not the huff of a render, neither the clink of metal nor the squeak of leather, disturbed the hush that seized the souls of those who had been requested to discard all they had known, to abandon all they had ever believed, their sense of identity and their very selves. And for what?
For loyalty. For love.
Stand. With. Us.
And as though they were but one creature, or many with a single mind, six hundred Bloodspawn warriors turned away from Doomfall to face the dichotomous dawn, the weeping wall of the dead, and the remainder of the Red Wraith’s army.
We stand with you, Prince Kor ben Dor.
We. All. Stand. With. You.
Somewhere in the smoke and steam behind the Prince of the grey-skinned giants, the Lord of Doomfall grunted into his beard.
“So that’s what we’re doing here.”
“No! No! No!” shrieked the little boy, ripping at his golden curls as he pranced frantically atop the macabre bulwark of stacked corpses. “That did not just happen, not happen! No, it didn’t, didn’t, didn’t!”
The Black Jack of the Bloodspawn soared so very vaingloriously in the deathly still over the killing ground, upthrust like a phallic finger in the face – a brash new standard in the wickedness of betrayal and treachery. Conflictingly, the crimson banners of the Red Wraith hung limp and flaccid, hugging their poles impotently, soft wet worthless things withering away. The air had taken an arctic chill, and the light of morning was suffused with invisible crystals of ice that stabbed at the eyes and lacerated the lungs. Above the Killer Krux, a vague yellowish band arced through the churning miasma of Doomfall.
Urchin’s little fists flailed the air, beat his thighs, pressed the sides of his head.
“Not fair, not fair, not fair, fair, fair!”
The formation of traitorous oversized half-breeds parted smoothly down its centre, pulling back and away, and along the cleared path approached two of the most formidable warriors that had ever walked the lands of Second Earth. The Prince of the Bloodspawn rode his render at a walk, his black armour shining, his aura humming with extraordinary efficacy, an energy both dark and light, cold and scorching. Drogul the kirun-tar strode in silence, his huge war-axe resting upon one shoulder, its black steel and his midnight eyes devouring the dusty light of the dawn. His vigour was subtler than the Halflord’s, more contained, but no less there, no less real, and far more terrible.
The boy ceased his maniacal dance, and bared his teeth as a yappy lapdog might do toward a pair of huge and mangy mongrels. He actually growled.
“Traitor! Treacher! Prince of turncoats! I will peel your soul from your spine, and you will burn, burn, burn!”
The Daradun Chieftain trudged to a stop. Dust and ash puffed up about his steelshod boots like the breath of crushed mummies.
“I think he means you, giant.”
To the Darad’s right, the Halflord’s mar-render huffed and clawed the stone where it stood. Kor ben Dor sat astride the beast, his great mace in hand, as still and statuesque as a god-image sculpted of steel.
“You are welcome to try, blutsauger.”
Urchin seethed and sputtered atop the wall of corpses. His legs were stained with blood to the knobby knees, his little fists balled at his sides, chest heaving. His large round eyes burned bright and brilliantly blue.
Softly, dangerously, “I will destroy you all. I will, I will.”
The Halflord rolled one shoulder, felt the bones grind pleasingly.
More softly, so much more dangerously, “Again, blutsauger. Make the attempt. I happily encourage this.”
“Traitor! Faithless little shit! You will burn and you will scream! Those years of pain will be as ecstasy beside what I will do to you. I will rend your flesh. I will snap your bones. I will – ”
“Silence.”
The Mighty One’s simple solitary command carried so much authority and impact that the ageless Leech’s voice left him, and he stood stupefied, jaw slack and hanging open, tiny pink tongue lolling uselessly. He felt so frail, so meek, so… mortal. And something strange and discomfiting sent a quiver to his lower lip. An awkward alien sensation. Anxiety? Apprehension? What was this sorcery?
Fear.
“This is Doomfall, demon,” grated Drogul. “You’ve wandered too close to the Heart of the Mother. You have no power here.”
Urchin whimpered.
“And despite the vastness of the Red Wraith’s host,” the Halflord said quietly, white wyverns winging from his flared nostrils, “it cannot stand against the combined might of the Bloodspawn and the Wandering Guard. And you – yes, you specifically, Urchin – you cannot fight. And you are not fleet enough to flee.” The Prince slowly rolled both shoulders, cricked his thick neck, stared. “Your doom, blutsauger, is come.”
The little boy squealed and took a step back, caught his foot amid twisted limbs, almost tumbled upon his face. Righting himself, he held up both hands, bloody palms outward, fending or beseeching, perhaps both.
“No, wait! No, no! Wait, wait, wait!”
“Some say patience is a virtuous thing, Son of Amarien,” rumbled the Mighty One, “and that good fortune finds those who wait.”
Kor ben Dor sniffed. “Others insist waiting gives Evil time.”
Drogul nodded. “There is that.” He lowered his war-axe from his shoulder, took the haft in a two-fisted grip, stepped forward.
Urchin stamped, unceremoniously spattering himself with indeterminable bodily fluids of the fallen. He sputtered in fury. He could have sworn he heard his sister howling.
“You will stop! You will stop, stop, stop! This field, or whatever it is, was to be won and lost this day in a battle of champions. My champion against the Lord of Doomfall. It should have been beautiful, glorious, a battle for the ages! But that beauty, that glory, was taken from me in an act of faithlessness and treachery. I am betrayed! But I am not beaten. I am not defeated. The laws of war are quite clear on the matter – I will have my battle of champions! Yes, I will. I will, I will!”
The Prince and the Chieftain looked at one another, then back at the demon.
“For that, blutsauger, you will need a champion,” the Halflord advised. He waved one muscular arm toward the Blood King’s army massed upon the other side of the rampart. “And I see none that qualify here.” The little boy grinned. His oversized teeth made his mouth seem enormous, his smile threatening to slice his head in half.
The Halflord and the kirun-tar exchanged another glance. The giant scowled, the raven’s talons contracting across his countenance, darkening the grey of his skin, tightening his lips. The Mighty One simply shrugged.
The fingers of Urchin’s right hand curved into claws. He dragged his nails down the cold hard air before him, and a screech like a knife slicing through teeth tore the morning to tatters. Far to the east and slightly south, where the bloodier half of the dawn mounted the earth, five vertical lines ripped the sky – terrible tears in the fabric of time and space, great rifts in the reality of the world. Swirling wafts of inky blackness seeped through the wounds, worms of unlight coiling into the morn, oozing over the Northern Plains like smoke on still waters.
The little boy cackled. He turned atop the wall of death, gesticulating to the long black lacerations above the horizon.
“I may have no power here, but I have plenty of power there. Oh yes, plenty of power, plenty, plenty!”
There. New Ungloth, surely. Ugloch Nur. The Bloodshards.
And all that lay beneath.
Urchin whirled back to face the two warriors. His face was flushed with pleasure, cherubic features contorted in almost carnal ecstasy, and something foul and unutterable dribbled down his thin thighs. He made a grand sweeping motion with one spindly arm, and instantly the rips in existence moved from the distant horizon to the heart of the Red Wraith’s army at Doomfall. The host scattered. The dawn darkened. Blackness bled from the soaring slashes, and within them thunder roared and darkness and lightless fire exalted.
The boy giggled, his azure eyes ablaze. He rubbed his bloodstained hands together in absolute glee. And he spoke. One word only. A name.
A most ancient and abominable name.
“Kh’arsh.”
And the gashes in the air burst apart in an explosion of noise and fury. Those minions of the Blood King who remained too proximate to the detonation were immediately incinerated; others were blown ignominiously away like so many motes of meaningless dust. The grasses burned. Rock melted. The earth bucked like a beast trying to throw an unwanted rider. And from the miasma of smoke and ash and cinders of stone stepped a fiend from another time, another world, from the very depths of Hell itself.
A kuarok.
Huge and heinous, it was, this greatest of servants of Unluvin. And it was more than merely a gigantic winged demon of darkness and flame, so much more. Empowered by white fire stolen from young stars and by the utter nihility in the hollow wake of dead ones, the kuarokur were entities of both energy and entropy, of matter and oblivion, of all things and nothing. They were of the highest ranks of Hiathir who had stood, had fallen and had risen again with Unluvin the Deceiver. Most of the kuarokur had eventually been destroyed in the wars that had devastated the First Earth, but some had escaped the scouring and purging of that ruined land – a few only – and these, it was known, had come to the Second World, where at whiles and for whatever diabolical reasons of their own, they had thrown their might behind the Wraithren.
And now, it appeared, one of their number had answered the call of a Leech.
Urchin danced like a lunatic atop the wall of corpses. The kuarok loomed behind him, a colossal darkness blotting out the light of morning. A din of flame and power erupted from the beast, constant, unceasing, battering at the ears, pounding the flesh and beating the breath from the breast. The membranes of its outstretched wings had been burned or torn away, only rags remained, and wisps of fire and shadow flitted within the vast frames of blackened bones. Its head was huge and misshapen and laden with coiling horns; its eyes were gashes of infernal fire; its maw was a roaring furnace, a ravenous and cavernous crematorium fenced with fangs of blazing black iron. Much of the beast’s body and limbs was wrought of flame and total darkness, constantly morphing between the two, flaring sinew and seared bone phasing in and out of being. At its back thrashed a long plated half-skeletal tail. A generous length of charred chain was manacled to one wrist, looped about the forearm and grasped in a tremendous bony fist. The other blackened hand was closed about the haft of a mace that made the Halflord’s weapon seem like a child’s toy.
The little boy convulsed in rapture.
Kor ben Dor peered up at the towering demon. The Prince’s eyes glowed like twin moons. He hissed softly, the air whistling slightly between his tight lips. Beneath him, he felt the flanks of his marrender tremble. At his side, Drogul the kirun-tar had not moved. The Darad remained as he was, war-axe in a two-handed grip, stout legs planted firmly, his bearded face a mask of inscrutable stone. A dark wind born of the beast buffeted him where he stood, but he seemed not to feel it, and not a hair of his rusty mane quivered.
“I brought this thing upon you, Drogul of Doomfall,” the Halflord said quietly. “I will fight this fiend in your stead.”
“Fuck that, Half-fucker,” came a harsh voice behind them. “This demon shit is mine.” And then to Drogul, “I fuckin’ got this, brother.”
“No, Darad,” interjected a terse female voice. “I have this. For although the Stone Lords have no women of their own, surely even in darkest holes of Ora Undar they are familiar with the phrase ‘ladies first’.”
“Have at it, Ev,” spoke a male ’Spawn, more than a modicum of relief to his tremulous tone. There was the sound of a sword being sheathed. “This one’s all yours.”
“Fuck that, Bloodfuckers – ”
“Enough,” rumbled the Chieftain of the Wandering Guard. He still had not moved. “Only at Doomfall would old friends and new bicker over the honour of engaging in single combat with a kuarok. But your arguments are all moot. The demon came for me,” the Darad growled. His jet eyes shone strangely. “And it shall have me.”
And at long last the Mighty One moved.
There are conflicts, there are battles, there are worldwide wars – and there are individual bouts between superhuman souls that decide who lives and who dies, which kingdom rises and which empire falls, that determine the peoples who write history and those who become, at best, footnotes on faded pages, or at worst, completely forgotten. Some contests, regardless of scope, change the world forever, while others stubbornly uphold the status quo. A few defy or define destiny. But never in the tale of Second Earth had there been a clash of two titans like that which raged beneath darksome Doomfall that dread morning – an apotheosis of violence, brutal and primal, that surely could only culminate in the soaring triumph or crushing defeat of Light and love and liberty.
Urchin cackled maniacally and scampered away along the wall of carcasses as Drogul the kirun-tar approached. Moments later the section of the horrible bulwark where the Leech had stood burst asunder; broken bodies, twisted iron, ragged red standards erupted outward before the irresistible force and fury of the Chieftain’s great black war-axe. And then the lone Darad strode through the breach, solid and sure, his gore-smeared weapon held loosely at one side, his eyes darker than night in a world without stars.
The kuarok roared. The ground shuddered, the air shivered. Reality itself seemed to stutter, waver and shrivel away. Pulses of raw power assaulted the Lord of Doomfall as he advanced, waves of dark energy that might have toppled towers, shattered walls as thick as a man is tall, brought down small mountains of granite. But upon the armour and flesh of the Mighty One it was less than a gust of wind – a fleeting breeze, insignificant and transitory, sufficient perhaps to briefly stir hair on the skin, yet not enough to have been felt to be doing so.
A short distance from the demon the Darad halted. Folded his massive arms, leaned on the butt of his axe. He gazed up at the beast expressionlessly. Less concerned than carved stone. Even the darkness in his eyes was leaden and laconic. He did not speak. He did not move. He but stood there, staring. A tower in the tempest, unbending, unyielding. Silent and
certain while all about him the mad, mad world was screaming.
Kh’arsh’s chain flailed at the sky and its mace came down like a meteor striking the stony earth. Sparks showered upward and the very air was set ablaze. Terrestrial thunder pealed. The impact sent the rock heaving and rolling in all directions.
But where stood the Lord of Doomfall all was quiet and still, an island of tranquility in a turbulent sea. Impervious, unassailable.
The kuarok lashed out with its chain. As thick as a thigh and terminating in a mass of vicious blades, the chain streaked like steel lightning for the Darad. The morning air howled through the hurtling links, a thousand voices shrieking, shrill and chill, promising pain, demanding death.
The Mighty One leaned slightly to his right, ducked his head a little as the chain passed harmlessly by his left ear. He almost seemed bored.
Kh’arsh bellowed. Fire and blackness coughed from the furnace of its throat. Brutal rage assailed the air. The demon pulled violently back on the chain, and the bladed end wailed wildly toward the back of Drogul’s head. But without even turning, the Darad simply squatted as the wicked length of scorched steel screeched past above him, innocuously returning whence it had come.
The Lord of Doomfall placed his war-axe across his knees, his eyes upon the earth, aloof and remote. Absolutely disinterested.
The kuarok stomped in fury. The ground quaked.
Remaining in his crouch, his gaze yet cast groundward, the great Chieftain reached toward a lonely pebble at his feet, a single thick finger touching it, making it wobble. His mind immediately drifted to a place of fire and blood. And for the briefest of instants, the little stone took a scarlet sheen, then flashed scintillatingly white, and fell still once more, smooth and grey and unremarkable. Drogul the kirun-tar withdrew his hand, closed his eyes, felt a stirring, a shaking, a shattering within him.
The demon screamed. Or was it a shriek of laughter? The appalling amalgam of sound clawed the morning like talons tearing through tender flesh.
And then the Mighty One rose.
