The demon drove at Tornin, trying to get past him to Lorace, but the guardsman blocked every swift attack and held his ground. The hall rang with the staccato of exchanged parries and ripostes. Tornin laughed in exhilaration and increased his speed, surpassing the demons own incredible reflexes and driving it back. Lorace could sense that this last demon was hesitant to strike at Tornin with its full strength and weight. It was obvious to Tornin as well.
“Are you too weighted down with souls of the fallen to kill me?” Tornin taunted. “You cannot kill me for you will fail in your mission to destroy my sworn lord or the Ritual Forge!”
“I do not have to kill you to remove you from my path, fool!” the demon returned with a leer then darted at Tornin, nearly matching the guardsman’s speed in a feint toward the man’s head with its large blocking claw.
Tornin’s sword was there in time to block the blow, but the true attack was delivered with the demon’s other claw. It slipped under Tornin’s guard to penetrate his chain armor and lance deep into the young man’s belly.
Tornin fell to the ground as the wall of dwarves tried to form up between the demon and Lorace, but the demon waded forward, batting them aside with his shield claw.
“Tornin!” Lorace cried out, but he could no longer see him through the press of dwarven defenders.
Without a sung command, dwarves before him dropped their shields and invited deathblows to themselves—willingly sacrificing everything to protect him.
“No!” Lorace shouted at them in desperation. “Do not do this!”
Commanding the air around him, he pushed the dwarves apart, shoving them up against the walls of the hall and clearing the path between him and the final demon. Lorace would not allow them to throw their lives away to protect him. He now faced the demon alone. He could hear Oen’s progress through his renewed Ritual of Banishment and knew it was still far from complete. To one side, the dwarven priest was pressing his hands to the wound in Tornin’s belly.
The demon lunged forward, only to meet a blast of air pushing it back. It roared in frustration, but continued to press into the shielding wind, working its way forward as Lorace weakened from the effort. He sagged to his knees as he continued commanding the air to slow the demon. His vision was dimming around the edges, but before he could black out, Tornin was front of him again, his wound still bleeding.
“I swore an oath to protect my Lord, demon!” Tornin raised his sword with both hands and fully released its desire to burst into blinding golden light.
The demon held up his shield-like claw and ducked back, stunned by the unrelenting radiance. Tornin stepped forward with a cry, and clove downward through its shield-claw, cutting it in half. Tornin slashed upward with the return stroke and the demon fell, its front portion severed from the rest of its body.
All were silent for a moment before a resounding cheer erupted from the dwarven defenders. Lorace staggered to Tornin as the light from his sword faded out, and the guardsman faltered to his knees.
“It called me a fool,” he murmured before his sword fell from his fingers.
chapter 13
the possession
Twenty- Sixth day of the Moon of the Thief
-in Vlaske K’Brak
Lorace caught Tornin and laid him down gently. He reached inwards, calling out to Jorune in his mind. Everything before him faded away, as though the unconsciousness that threatened during his struggle with the demon, had finally taken hold. In the darkness that followed, a vision appeared; his elder brother Jorune and eldest brother Bartalus stood before the statue of the Lady in the temple hall of their home.
“Look upon her and remember, Lorace,” Bartalus told him.
He looked closely at the statue of the woman, and his dream before waking on the beach returned to him. This was the same woman, tall and lovely, with eyes full of stars. The stone of the statue could not begin to do her justice, but the likeness was unmistakable.
The entirety of the dream came rushing back to him. She had handed him the godstone as she wept. Was it for this that she wept—the danger to his friends?
“I have held you close young warden, until the storm passed,” the Lady had said.
“Why do you weep, my Lady?” the child he was had asked.
“It is the destiny I set before you that causes me to weep. None should have to endure what you will endure, but all is at risk, and I cannot aid you further until your task is complete. Awaken, final warden of Vorallon!”
His brothers reached out to him, and light flowed from their hands to Lorace, golden light from Jorune and white tinged with blue from Bartalus.
He felt the divine energy flowing through him, down into Tornin, healing his wound. His brothers still remained, holding him in the memory, holding him in their presence.
“I am sorry, Lorace,” Bartalus said with a deep sadness to his voice. “I must awaken another memory to you, and it is going to hurt you a great deal.”
“Be strong,” Jorune said with a thin smile. The silver lock of hair hanging at his brow was the last of him Lorace saw as his brothers faded from sight.
“Come boy, face Tezzirax!” a shrill, vile voice rasped behind him.
Lorace turned around, still a young boy, and faced the long jawed demon from his nightmare memory. In its claws, it held the broken corpse of his mother.
The demon was only vaguely humanoid, in that he had two arms and two legs, but the long neck and lashing tail, gave him a decidedly serpentine aspect. His demon body was pure black from toothy snout to barbed tail. Scars covered his scaled hide in a pattern that disturbingly matched Lorace’s own. His back was stooped low just to fit within the hall.
Lorace stepped back into the pedestal that bore the statue of the Lady as the demon who named himself Tezzirax approached, now carrying the body of his mother close to his deep chest.
“Let her go!” Lorace cried out as he launched a bolt of air at the long, serpentine head.
The demon absorbed the attack with a gloating hiss. “You cannot harm me with your gifts and spells!”
The demon waved a long-taloned hand toward the path of destruction he had torn through Lorace’s home and life. “I am greater than any man. Look. Your defenders were nothing. Your life is nothing.”
In the destruction, Lorace saw a familiar form come running into the hall, dull silvery sword held bare before him.
“Here is another defender you have not faced demon!” the new arrival shouted in a bold voice. Tezzirax spun about, and Lorace saw the speaker clearly. It was the paladin, Sir Rindal, the familiar face from his previous memory. The child Lorace only focused on how his mother’s corpse flopped limply in the demon’s grip as it rounded upon the plate-armored paladin.
Sir Rindal circled the demon slowly, his godstone sword, Brakke Zahn, Heart of Destiny, slashing menacingly. Lorace saw the demon was hesitant to strike and knew immediately why; as with the final demon Tornin faced, it was full of the souls of the fallen, and Tezzirax showed the same hesitation. Sir Rindal saw this too and drove the demon backward, away from Lorace. With fluid, lethal swings of his massive sword, he placed himself firmly between the demon and the boy.
“Do you fear my blade demon? Surely it is nothing to one so powerful as yourself,” the paladin taunted, though his voice was choked with loss at the sight of his comrades—dear friends all—lying dead at this demon’s hands.
The demon was holding up Fara’s body, as if to ward off Sir Rindal’s blade with it. The paladin indeed withheld his blows to avoid harming the beloved woman any further.
“You will fail as well, lapdog,” Tezzirax’s long jaw parted in a toothy display. “Your blade cannot pierce me. Your magic cannot drive me back.”
“Then by all means, demon, strike me down or just walk right through me and take the boy,” the paladin returned.
Tezzirax shifted forward and swung at the paladin with the arm holding Lorace’s mother, in an effort to knock the knight out of the way. Sir Rindal was rea
dy for this cowardly attack and stepped inside the blow, with an easy grace that seemed to be more dance than lunge, before it could land. With a smooth sweep of his godstone sword, he severed the limb holding the precious body.
The reaction of the demon was immediate shock and dismay as he retreated from the fabled blade and the blonde haired man wielding it so adeptly.
Lorace reacted with a cry of his own as his mother fell with a crash at his feet, the taloned demon hand still gripping her tightly. Her eyes were open, and her face was untouched. Lorace wept and fell to his knees to cradle her head, holding it up off the bloodied floor. When he looked back up it was to find the paladin driving the demon back, step by step.
“I am your undoing, beast!” Sir Rindal cried. “The destiny of my blade is to take your life. It is empowered to cut through anything, and that includes your hide. Your claim to be proof against all magic is false!”
Tezzirax ducked his head low and a gleam of cunning entered his black eyes. “Strike me down then, you are my undoing, indeed. But know this, I will reform in Nefryt. It will take a year, but I will reform my body and return to claim the boy before he fulfills his destiny. I will not make the mistake of feeding to capacity before I do so. Strike me down.”
Now it was the paladin’s turn to hesitate as the demon stood before him and spread what remained of his arms wide.
“I am Tezzirax. I have a soul as do all demons, which are nothing more than incarnations of your most foul and corrupt selves,” taunted Tezzirax with his high, hissing voice. “I have walked this world before and others before it, I will walk it again and again long after you and this boy are dust, because my soul will endure. All your friends, the boy’s family, they all lie dead for no purpose other than to feed my hunger.”
This brought forth a painful cry of rage from the paladin’s lips, and he stepped forward swinging as the demon laughed in satisfaction.
The first stroke severed the demon’s leg out from under him, and the creature fell to one side, still laughing. “Can your sword cut my soul? You could truly kill me then.”
“Yes!” Sir Rindal cried. “I will destroy you utterly!”
The second stoke cut Tezzirax’s long neck, killing the demon’s body. The final stroke clove through the midsection of the demon.
There was a cracking detonation of energy and black demon flesh as Brakke Zahn destroyed the demon’s soul, blasting the paladin off his feet and sending him across the room to slide senseless to where Lorace knelt beside his mother’s corpse. Only the intervening form of the plate- armored paladin had kept the child from death, as the demon’s hard substance became so much shrapnel. The slightest of moans from Sir Rindal told Lorace that his last protector yet lived.
Rising up where the demon fell was a dim cloud of darkness.
Somewhere, Lorace heard a woman’s wail. It was a haunting sound, for it came from a perfect throat—never formed to make such a plaintive sound.
The cloud was drifting on its own toward the child Lorace. He howled in rage. All the emotion within him at seeing the slaughter of his parents and friends boiled over into a red fury that left him shaking, like he too was about to explode.
“Lorace! Listen to me,” the woman’s voice spoke and Lorace recognized the rich contralto from his dream upon the beach. “The demon is not dead, its spirit has been freed from its soul, and it descends upon you now. It is going to take your body and none can prevent that. I am sealing your spirit away—it is too important, too precious to be destroyed by that which called itself Tezzirax.”
A blank gray paleness covered his vision, and he could no longer feel the weight of his body. Before the cloud of darkness descended on him, he was adrift in an empty rage of devastation.
“Sleep Lorace, until you can be awakened to your destiny. I am sorry, child, for what has happened and what is yet to happen,” the Lady soothed before his world became silence.
Begrudgingly, Lorace let go of the pain and rage to drift in tranquility with the image of his mother’s face, untouched and unharmed. He released himself to sleep within a dull silvery void of nothingness.
It was not a dreamless sleep; a time of nightmares followed. His body, no longer his to control, reached down to stroke the demon’s claw that remained clutched tightly about his mother. His fingers dipped into the blood of the wounds that had been torn in his mother’s flesh, and brought that blood to his lips. He tasted of it and his lips curled, against his will, into a smile. Then Lorace stood and walked out into the sunlight, a seemingly carefree child.
Lorace came back to himself with a horrified sob. He paused only long enough to see Tornin beside him, healed and sleeping soundly before he scrambled to his feet and ran away in anguish. His feet scattered piles of black ash that was all that remained of the demons. Nightmares of murder flooded in upon him in an overwhelming tide.
“Lorace?” Oen called, running in his wake, while the dwarves stood back uncertainly. The priest grabbed him and swung him around to meet his wide gaze of horror.
“Whatever happened is over now,” Oen said. “You are here now, the demons are all dead, and your comrades are whole. There is nothing to be feared.”
Lorace sobbed into a burly shoulder as the priest’s strong arms wrapped him in a comforting embrace. He was inconsolable as the bits and pieces of his life, while possessed by the spirit of the demon, played out in his memory.
He remembered making his way out of the mountains where the home of his parents was secreted, eventually reaching the streets of Zed—the city of his dreadful manhunts. He remembered living on filth and death, killing so many other children who were likewise lost and orphaned upon its foul streets. He rose through the ranks of street thugs as he grew, to become an assassin, a noble of the city’s foul underbelly.
After a while, the scattered memories played out. Some were nightmares Lorace had already endured, and he could begin taking longer, slower breaths.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” Oen asked. “Your spirit is still pure but there is so much fear and rage within it now; you must let it go before it consumes you.”
“I have no memories other than those of my distant childhood, because I had been possessed by the unleashed spirit of a demon for the entire intervening period,” Lorace said with a voice straining to remain steady. “Sir Rindal, with Brakke Zahn, slew the demon and destroyed its soul, releasing its spirit to possess my flesh. My spirit was sealed away within a dull silvery expanse, and I slept while the demon used my body to do unspeakable things.”
Lorace clutched tightly at the robes covering his chest. “It scarred my body as its former body had been scarred. It killed many people while wearing my face, and did so just to inflict pain and suffering. Its hunger knew no bounds. Something freed me, somehow. The demon’s spirit is no longer within me, but I dreamed while it controlled me. In those dreams I saw what the demon was forcing my flesh to do.”
“I am sorry, son,” Oen consoled. “The demons are all gone now, and the demon’s spirit that possessed you as well. How were you sealed away?”
Lorace reached into his satchel and pulled forth the godstone sphere. “With this, the Lady sealed my spirit within it so that the demon’s spirit could not contaminate and destroy mine. When I awoke, she returned the godstone sphere to me, its original purpose fulfilled.”
Thryk approached, claiming his attention with his weighty presence. Many of the dwarven warriors stood discreetly behind the smith, listening to Lorace’s lament.
“Show them the godstone Lorace,” Thryk said. “You are the bearer.”
Lorace stepped back from Oen and held the perfect sphere up high. The dwarves looked upon it reverently before they relaxed and bowed to the stone floor.
“They honor the bearer of the godstone,” Thryk said. “Only those who are pure can touch the godstone in its raw state.”
“It has already been shaped by the Lady’s hands,” said Lorace with a shake of his head. “It is not raw.”
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br /> Thryk made a cutting gesture with one heavy hand. “It is raw until it is forged by the Ritual, to the destiny that Vorallon has declared. It has fulfilled the destiny that the Lady has put before it, safeguarding your spirit, but it awaits an even greater fate.”
“How do you know this?” Lorace was unsure whether the dwarf was being prideful, pious, or perhaps both.
Thryk gestured with his arms toward all the dwarves assembled patiently before them. “We all can feel Vorallon’s excitement, the stone beneath our feet and all around us hums with his anticipation of the Ritual of the Forge. That is how we know that there is still a great destiny before the godstone you hold.”
The richly carved and decorated stone remained cool and inert to his senses, but anticipation flowed from the dwarves as a palpable wave of energy. When he reached out with those same senses to the air that he had been manipulating, he could feel its excitement. From deep within the dwarven hold, a distant low note was vibrating through its eddying flow.
Lorace nodded weakly in understanding before he slipped the godstone sphere back into its satchel. He still shuddered with grim emotion, but Oen’s bracing arm gave him comfort and security.
While he cast off the oppressive memories, the valiant maul wielder stepped before him.
“May your foes all fall before your great wind, bearer. I am Prince Wralka,” the dwarf bowed low. “The people of Vlaske K’Brak owe you, the Guardian, and the brave wielder of light, a great deal for breaking this siege upon our home. Be welcome to our halls.”
Prince Wralka appeared younger than most, with a mighty aspect of chest and shoulder. More than any other, he carried himself with the bearing of a warrior born. His hair was blonde and his beard was too short to braid in the ornate style that many of the surrounding male dwarves wore. Other than his powerful maul, his plate armor was a pinnacle of artistry, detail, and function; the only signs of rank or nobility a dwarf need show.
The only other dwarf before him that stood out was their priest, who wore a black robe, heavily decorated with gold and silver embroidery. Where Prince Wralka beamed with the vitality of youth, the priest was ancient, older in appearance than Ralli, but no less solid and healthy.
Gifts of Vorallon: 01 - The Final Warden Page 14
