by James Hunter
Oghma, the battle-axe wielding meathead, came flying through the billowing cloud of debris like he’d been fired from the smoking barrel of a friggin’ Howitzer—thanks to a ferocious right hook from the Morrigan. Big ol’ beefy bastard streaked through the air—doubled over in pain, back bowed, arms and legs streaming out in front of him—and bowled into Lugh, who stood with one arm raised, covering his eyes against the swirling rubbish. The brothers collided in a smack of flesh, but instead of tumbling to the ground in a pile of limbs, Lugh, who couldn’t have weighed more than a buck seventy-five, absorbed the impact without moving an inch.
Guy didn’t budge. Color me impressed.
As the dust and wood debris finally settled, I caught my first glimpse of the Fomorian army, and holy shit were we boned. Three hundred of ’em—maybe four? It was tough to tell—spread out across the now-familiar bleak gray desert-scape. I’d expected to be outnumbered, but we were talking three or four to one here. And we weren’t just facing Fomorians. I’d been prepared for the countless fish-faced dickheads, but there were others things occupying their ranks besides. Creatures I’d only ever read about in the Guild’s bestiaries:
Positioned at the rear of the sprawling formation was a small platoon of women, each and every one of ’em a knockout—hair dark, skin flawless and creamy, movements stately and regal. All sported long flowing gowns of white, and each held an instrument of one sort or another. They were obviously the source of the jams, and though I wasn’t sure what they were, I was putting my money on Bean Sidhe: cousins to the High Fae of Winter.
Next came a cadre of shriveled, pale-faced women—faces skeletal, eye sockets empty, noses sheared away from decay—who littered the ranks of the Fomorians, driving the battle squadrons onward with dangling whips of gleaming bone and bloody muscle and ropy sinew. They were Dearg Due. Exceedingly rare Irish vampires. The shrunken women loomed high above the others, twenty feet or more in the air, and crept about on ropy tentacles of black hair like a school of nightmarish octopi.
And then there were the hulking, quadrupedal sluagh. Frog-like beasts of muscle, scales, and bristly hair, which lurched along the uneven terrain, bearing Fomorian riders on their broad backs. The sluagh were stupid creatures that stared out on the world with vacant, bulbous yellow eyes, luminous in the night, which sat above wide gullets ringed with spikes and teeth. Not unlike the Cŵn Annwn—hellhounds of the Wild Hunt—the sluagh were said to track down the souls of the wicked who attempted to flee from judgment.
At the head of the encroaching army, like the tip of a thrusting spear, was the Morrigan, riding on one of the sluagh, curved scythe raised high, a small murder of crows circling overhead, their wings beating at the air with a steady rustle. As the battle music rolled over us, she slowly scanned the room, pausing for a moment as her implacable gaze met mine. A snarl blossomed on her face and then she was moving. With a gurgled roar, nearly lost beneath the waves of music, the sluagh charged.
Oghma, now back on his feet, and Lugh threw themselves at the Irish war goddess, weapons lashing and shouts of battle rising up as the trio began their dance. They moved like lightning and smoke, the three of them—striking, deflecting, ducking, dodging—so fast my eyes could hardly follow. Didn’t matter though, because I didn’t have time to watch anyway. The troops had arrived.
Dagda’s spectral warriors surged forward; a platoon of ghostly fighters encircled Lugh, Oghma, and the Morrigan—ensuring they would fight free from interference—while the rest crashed into onrushing ranks of Fomorians and other assorted horrors.
The carnage was intense and immediate. Ghostly green blades sliced through Fomorian armor, spilling strings of stinking guts to the ground. Fomorian weapons hacked through conjured limbs and yellow bone, leaving behind piles of ectoplasmic goop in their wake. Sluagh were split in two by great war axes. In turn, the sluagh slashed with razor-tipped talons, scoring deep gashes in the unlucky, or used their powerful jaws to rip away anything they could get their teeth on. And the vampiric Dearg Due—few in number, but deadly—swayed above the fray, lashing out with wicked bone-whips or lobbing shimmering red globs of acid. Blood magic.
Dagda’s Warriors of Renown fought better, harder, taking two or three Fomorians for every casualty, but there were casualties. Plenty of ’em.
“Engage!” James commanded, his voice booming out like a gun blast. “Hold the line.”
Then I went to work:
I murdered them wholesale.
Cutting ’em down with spears of white flame like a butcher at a slaughterhouse. Ripping hundred-pound hunks of stone from the ground and cannonballing them into onrushing enemies. Smashing bones, crushing skulls, scattering invaders wherever the boulders landed. I built mini cyclones of flame, which raged in the distance, killing scores of creatures, massacring them before they could ever dream of bringing the fight to us. I called up meteors of stone and rained down hot death from above.
Not pretty, that, but effective. Pragmatic.
I also caught snatches of the larger battle as I fought: Lugh, Oghma, and the Morrigan sparring—dancing back and forth—her sluagh mount dead and abandoned.
Sizzling balls of wobbly lightning, courtesy of James, descended into the midst of the enemies, wreaking havoc wherever they went. Leaving a trail of smoking bodies behind.
Ailia perched atop her frozen berm, a blue dome encircling her as she compelled a group of Fomorians ten strong. Commanding them to hold the left side. Turning them loose against one of the tentacle-haired Dearg Due. Forcing them to rip the rag doll woman apart like a swarm of ants taking down some larger insect.
And all the while the music thundered.
It was a mess. One bloody, chaotic, noisy mess. Impossible to keep track of all the moving bits and pieces, so mostly I kept my head down and focused on defending my little piece of the pie while James called out commands. Fomorians came by the bucket-load. So did the Dearg Due and sluagh. It didn’t matter, though, not with that scythe in my hand.
It was exhausting work, sure, but with the boon of Figol mac Mamois, the Firebrand, in my hand I felt like a god. The entirety of the Elder Council couldn’t have matched the power James, Ailia, and I were slinging—the utter destruction was without equal. It was revolting, stomach-churning work, but I put all that from my mind. Now wasn’t the time for conscience or regret. Too late for any of that. We were committed, and the only way out was for those monsters swarming the grass below me to die. Now was the time for action, for fire, and death.
And, for a time, we were winning. For a time, we were dominating:
James, Ailia, and I were serving up death in bulk, like the Costco of slaughter—delivering corpses by the pallet-load.
Dagda’s spectral warriors were beastly, holding the line, ensuring the Fomorians and their allies never gained the walls or breached the bottleneck. Shit, they gained ground, even if it was an inch at a time.
Lugh and Oghma didn’t seem the equal to the Morrigan, but neither did she seem up to the task of breaking their resolve to hold.
We were still outnumbered, sure, but in another fifteen or twenty minutes, there was a damn good chance the Fomorians would be holding the short stick when it came to forces. And once that happened, they would break.
Morale is just as important to a battle as numbers or weapons or terrain. Strip the enemy of their will to fight and that’s the end of the line.
Then, Lugh and Oghma fell before the Morrigan.
Damned if I know how it happened. One moment the three of them were duking it out—the clang of weapons ringing in the air as they landed titanic hits—then, in an eyeblink, the Morrigan loomed over the pair of godlings, who were suddenly buried under a mound of Fomorian bodies. My best guess was a sudden charge had managed to break through the ring of ghostly warriors, leaving the warring godlings’ flanks wide open. A simple mistake. But a terrible one. The kind of mistake that costs lives. The kind of mistake the Morrigan had surely been waiting for.
It felt like I was watching the first domino, in a very long run of dominos, topple.
Click.
Now unchallenged, the Morrigan bolted toward the bottleneck between our defensive berms, springing high into the air, then descending like a plague on Dagda’s ghostly warriors. The pale fighters rallied, but didn’t stand a chance. Not against her.
She moved through their ranks like a shadow, slipping from fighter to fighter; her reaper scythe flicked back and forth, dispatching the reserve of undead soldiers guarding the entryway. The Warriors of Renown—who’d proved to be resilient and damn effective against the Fomorians—gave way to the Morrigan like morning fog evaporating with the rising of the sun. As she carved her way through, her fish-faced soldiers, along with a handful of Dearg Due and sluagh, flooded past the defense, like water breaking through a hasty dam.
The breach of our defenses: click, the second domino.
James barked out commands—his voice boomed around me, amplified by weaves of fire and air—but the words were all gibberish in my head. There was just too much for my brain to process. Too much of everything, all crashing in on me at once. Too many noises. Too many enemies. Too many bits of information all flying at me from every angle, demanding my attention, demanding immediate action. Complete sensory overload.
My body switched onto autopilot, co-opting the controls, falling back on my years of training as a Marine, as a martial artist, as a killer for the Guild. I needed to stop the influx of enemies, so I turned my fraying attention toward the breach, hurling flame into the crowd, snatching up bodies with constructs of silver force, pulling the earth apart at the seams, and opening great craggy rifts that swallowed pockets of invaders whole. But there were too many of ’em. Like trying to patch the hole in the bottom of a ship’s hull with Scotch tape and superglue.
“Seal the gap, Yancy! The gap.” James’s words came again, finally piercing through the fog in my brain.
Of course. The bottleneck. I needed to close the bottleneck.
With a heave of will, I reached deep into the earth, tapping into one of the powerful ley lines deep below, using that river of unformed power to pull more magma up to the surface. A lot of it. Even more than I’d used to form the craggy black wall beneath my feet.
The ground trembled as I worked, the berm below me cracking, chunks of rock breaking free and falling. The earth buckled near the bottleneck, swelling up like a blister, and then the geyser of magma broke through the thin crust of surface. Thousands of pounds of molten rock—red and orange and black—vomited thirty feet into the air, before splashing down on the unlucky sons of bitches to either side of the opening. Maiming or killing indiscriminately, both the invaders and any of Dagda’s ghostly troops too near.
But the real goal wasn’t to kill, it was to halt the inrush of new bodies. To stop the hemorrhage in our battle line long enough to come up with a better plan. Basic triage care, really.
I threw out my left hand and huge swells of wind and water, summoned from the stream nearby, whooshed into the air, colliding into the magma in an explosion of melt-your-face-off steam. Howls and shrieks filled the air as creatures died. But one wail rose above the rest.
“Help! Someone!” The cry came from my left, from Ailia. It was a cry of desperation and panic. It took me only a moment to find her: she’d been knocked from her frozen barricade, and was standing face-to-face with the Morrigan. Ailia had a shimmering blue defensive barrier around her, temporarily protecting her from physical attacks, but that shield wouldn’t hold for long. The Morrigan was circling her, dealing punishing blow after punishing blow to the Vis-wrought shield with her wicked scythe. Flashes of blue-white light exploded with every hit.
My stomach turned, my vision narrowed, and sweat ran down my face as I watched. This was bad. Ailia was a lot of things, but she’d never hold her own in a knock-down-drag-out with someone like the Morrigan. Not in a million years.
James was occupied protecting Dagda—still immobile on his throne—and Lugh and Oghma were fighting their way free from the press of Fomorian bodies, which meant it was up to me. But the Morrigan was too damn close to Ailia for me to risk throwing any kinda big, flashy, Vis-conjured sucker punch. I needed to be closer. Intimate. There was nothing else to do. So I jumped, throwing myself from the wall and onto the grass below: click, the third domino toppling. My feet slammed into the ground, but I immediately dropped into a smooth, gliding roll, using the momentum of my fall to bring me back to my feet.
Ailia and the Morrigan weren’t far, maybe thirty feet, but between us were two dozen Fomorians, four or five sluagh, and a pair of Dearg Due.
“Gladium potestatis,” I whispered, conjuring up my Vis-wrought sword as I sprinted into the writhing mass of enemies. The creatures converged on me, but I didn’t care. I was a coiled spring, a trigger pulled just to the point of firing. My body was sharp, focused, filled with shaky-hand adrenaline as I reacted on instinct: gales of silver force tossed enemies from my path, scattering them like bowling pins. Spears of white-hot flame cut down a pair of sluagh on the left, leaving only smoldering bones behind.
My blade flashed out as though I were working through a kata: I was a hurricane of motion, spinning and bobbing, slashing and hacking, diving and rolling as I moved ever closer to Ailia. Claiming a Fomorian hand here—kesa giri—and an arm there—yoho giri. Conjuring flame and earthen spears with my other hand as I moved, unstoppable with the power of the boon working in me.
I was ten feet out, almost within striking distance, when that fourth domino clicked and fell. The Morrigan had pushed Ailia up against the wall, leaving her no room to maneuver, no room to get away, and all the while the vindictive war goddess was hammering away at Ailia’s shield. The blue light was fading in places, wearing thin under the tremendous strain of the Morrigan’s brutal assault. Not good.
Then, just as I broke free of the last of the enemy troops, something twisted around my ankle. A strand of black hair, thick as a rope, thanks to one of the strange Dearg Due. The fifth domino, click. The most important moment of my life, the moment everything hinged on, and some fucking monster tripped me. I stumbled forward, unbalanced, fighting desperately to regain my footing; my next step came down on a piece of wood—debris from the door—and that put an end to my fruitless struggle.
I pitched forward, face planting in the grass, teeth coming down hard on the tip of my tongue as my temple clipped a piece of gray stone which must’ve broken free during the battle. For what seemed like the gajillionth time, white pinpricks of light exploded in my vision and black stole in from the periphery. I closed my eyes, only for a second or so it seemed. I blinked my eyes open a moment later—the immense racket of the battle crashing over me like a wave—and wildly searched for Ailia.
I didn’t have to look long.
She was ten feet away, dangling from the Morrigan’s scythe blade: back arched, legs limp, arms splayed out, face a portrait of shock and pain.
Wide blue eyes—both fading and frantic—sought me out, finally ceasing their mad search when they landed on me. She held my gaze and, for that moment, everything else was gone. The battle, the dead Fomorians, the Morrigan, Lugh, James. All of it, vanished. For that split second everything in the world faded to black, until it was only us, sharing a long look. Our last look, which reminded me of that first look, so long ago, back into that smoky club.
That same look which said, you just gonna stand there, or are you gonna do something?
Except this time there wasn’t anything I could do. There wasn’t anything anyone could do.
She smiled at me, a frail, feeble thing, then mouthed the words I’m sorry. I love—
She didn’t finish saying it, though.
A horrible cough racked her body; dark-crimson blood frothed at her lips and poured down her chin and neck.
The Morrigan’s cawing laughter shattered the tenuous pause like a hammer smashing a lightbulb, and everything flooded back in: a tsunami of sound, explosions of battle, the
wails of the dying. A suffocating wave of smells—voided bowels, the coppery stink of blood, the scent of burnt meat and sulphurous fire. An explosion of sights—Dagda struggling to his feet from the throne; Lugh twirling his spear and slicing the throat of a Fomorian; James snarling, sword outthrust as a streak of silver force bowled into a trio of fish-faced beasts.
Then, everything was red.
Crimson—the color of roses, of love, of the blood dribbling from Ailia’s mouth—stole into my head, followed by a shriek of agony and madness. A shriek that I realized was coming from me. The power coursing into the scythe in my outstretched hand, surged, welled, and exploded, threatening to rip away everything that I was, everything I stood for.
With Ailia gone, the three boons were no longer in synch, so all that power was now divided between me and James. Too much power. A second later, I felt James’s boon fade, gutter, and die. He’d cut himself off from the Vis, and suddenly the power of all three boons rested on my shoulders. A crushing weight, which left me squirming on the ground.
As Dagda had mentioned, the boons needed to be used in concert. Anything else was too risky. Deadly, even. But I didn’t care. Didn’t care about caution or warning. I only needed to worry about those things if I wanted to walk away from this battle. And I didn’t want to walk away. Not anymore. I was death and destruction and the only thing that mattered now was ending the Morrigan. With a snarl, I pushed myself onto wobbly legs, lungs laboring for breath.
The power swelled in me, threatening to rip me apart like an overripe melon, and I let it.
Fire exploded from the floors and walls.
Grass burnt to ash.
Flowers vanished.
The gray stone slabs encircling us cracked, many melting to pools of black slag as ever more magma, conjured from deep within the earth, exploded out.
The throne room trembled at my wrath. A cloud of reds and golds coalesced overhead, churning high above the barren desert beyond the throne room. Globs of molten rock rained down on the remnants of the Morrigan’s tattered force—a hail of flaming arrows that slew any creature unlucky enough to be below.
