The King of the Fallen

by David Dalglish

  “Good luck, Tarlak Eschaton,” the half-orc said. He lifted his hand for one last snap of his fingers. “Oh, and be forewarned...this will likely be very, very strange.”

  The snap boomed like a roll of thunder from the grandest storm ever recorded in the history of Dezrel. It shook Tarlak’s bones and rattled his teeth. Qurrah’s visage shattered, fading to dust as the blue sky turned black. The rest of those gathered were lost behind a gray fog that swarmed in from all sides. The chair vanished, and Tarlak found himself standing atop a field of smoke. It was a dream of some sorts, but unlike any dream he had experienced. There was a clarity to his senses that defied the vague looseness of a dream. He saw so clearly the individual curls of the mist. He felt a cold wind on his skin. When he looked to the sky, seeing darkness without stars or a moon, the vertigo threatened to twist his stomach and overwhelm his mind with a sensation of falling upwards.

  “Oh, oh, this is delicious,” said a disturbingly familiar voice that echoed from everywhere. “You’re here. You’re actually here.”

  Tarlak spun in place. The fog withdrew, yet it revealed only a strange, barren stone for him to stand upon. No speaker, not yet, but he knew Cecil was lurking somewhere nearby.

  “Of course I am,” Tarlak said. “Nowhere else I’d rather be but in my own mind. It’s nice and cozy compared to the rest of the absurd world out there.”

  “Your mind?”

  Tarlak stopped. There he was. Cecil Towerborn stood mere feet away, arms crossed over his chest. He still wore his red apprentice robes, and his hair was shaped in the plain bowl cut inflicted upon those still in training. His smug grin was worthy of a thousand slaps. Just seeing it reminded Tarlak why he’d tried to make the man’s life miserable every single waking second he had spent recovering within the Council towers.

  “Nice robes,” Tarlak said. “Even in a post-death existence, with your soul locked in stasis, it seems you’re still stuck as an apprentice.”

  Cecil flinched as if shot by an arrow. “At least they aren’t piss yellow.”

  Tarlak gestured to his multi-layered wizard robes containing over a dozen hidden pockets and pouches.

  “I like to think it’s the color of the sun. Warm and inviting, like a pleasant beacon to all, one might say.”

  “But haven’t you noticed? There’s no sun here.”

  The fog blasted outward with sudden intensity, and Tarlak’s vertigo was replaced by an overwhelming fear of the open space. Forever, he thought. The distance went on forever, in all directions, a gray ground sprawling out to infinity, never to touch a horizon marked with a pitch-black sky lacking stars, moon, or a sun.

  He felt small. He felt like he might fall upward, only for the world to spin on its head and slam him right back down. Nothing about this made sense, and yet it assaulted him with shocking, painful clarity. His legs wobbled, and despite his stubborn pride, he dropped to one knee.

  Stare at your hands, he decided, and focused on his clenched fists. They’re real. Ignore the rest. This is all illusion and make-believe. You’re trying to comprehend things far beyond the mortal realm.

  “Brutal, isn’t it?” Cecil said, the smugness in his voice intensifying. “Looking about this expanse and realizing just how insignificant and helpless you are. That’s how I felt when I first awoke after our duel. This crippling helplessness.”

  Cecil grabbed Tarlak by his chin and forced him to meet the gaze of his sky-blue eyes.

  “That’s why you managed control so easily at first,” he said. “That’s why you thought you had won. I needed time. I needed familiarity, and understanding, but I have that now, you bastard. This is my body. My mind. I want it back.”

  “Your body?” Tarlak said, fighting off an instinctual desire to look away. His stomach churned. “But you weren’t using it. Not very well, at least.”

  Cecil’s mouth twitched, a brief flash of teeth revealing the seething rage that lived underneath his mockery. “Your body? So strange. I remember it so well.”

  Tarlak felt himself falling into Cecil’s mind. The world shifted, the ground warping to match a blossoming memory. The dark sky became a world viewed from a cosmic set of eyes. Cecil was but a child, years ago abandoned at the Council steps by parents he never met. He was crying.

  “I can do it,” he was telling himself, scanning the words of a simple cantrip. Over and over he recited them, hour after hour, while doing everything he could to forget the teasing of his classmates. “I know I can do it, I know it!”

  His frustration slipped into Tarlak’s own conscious mind. He felt the feverish yearning to surpass his fellow students, crippled by a need to prove himself their better, to turn their mocking jests back on them.

  The memories shifted, one after another, but in so many ways they were all the same. Cecil giving his everything, and it never being enough. He felt jealousy for friends who left apprenticeship to become permanent residents of the Masters’ tower. He heard the laughs, the questions whispered just loud enough to reach his ears, wondering why he didn’t simply resign as a mage and accept his limitations. Tarlak crumpled beneath the emotions, falling to his knees within a world of memory.

  Get it together, he told himself. His memories are not yours. These emotions are...not...yours.

  “I’ve never understood,” Cecil said. His every word was a mocking lash on Tarlak’s strained mind. “Why yellow? It was always the first thing that anyone discussed in the rare times when conversation within the towers turned your way. Was it to stand out? Make yourself memorable? Or did you steal the robes from someone, just like you stole my body from me?”

  Tarlak witnessed their climactic duel atop the bridge connecting the two towers, only now from the opposite perspective. The vertigo of it—seeing himself being defeated by himself—threatened to crush his identity completely. Just who was he? This shame, he didn’t remember it. Were these feelings of inferiority actually his?

  Cecil lorded over him, laughing, somehow taking joy in his own failures, solely because he could now use them as a weapon. The attacks were savage and unrestrained, like a charging horde of soldiers without any discipline. For that’s what this was, a war of memories. Tiny pieces of the divine self squabbling over the impermanent flesh of the body. The strength of conviction mattered. The overwhelming force of a belief in belonging, in needing to continue, to remain in the land of Dezrel.

  And in that competition, Tarlak refused to entertain the possibility of losing. He stared down at himself, at his yellow robes, and remembered who he was.

  “You think, for even a moment, that you can challenge me?” he said. The sky roiled, and the memories shifted. Tarlak slowly rose to his feet. “You think your meager life can compare? You think your petty, cowardly crawl toward power withstands the light of mine when I have risked my life to save others?”

  Tarlak countered his opponent with memories of his own. Cecil’s time studying magic crumbled, replaced with the stench of blood and intestines. Together they walked through a war-torn battlefield, demons in red armor soaring through the skies as humanity’s frantic defenders fell. The view shifted, became morning, and they stood on the walls of Mordeina and watched the sky split above a kneeling half-orc praying alone in the field.

  “When I lived?” Tarlak exclaimed.

  Laughter filled the air, so full of life it made a mockery of Cecil’s bitter memories. Tarlak sat at a table in his tower, Harruq and Aurelia bickering at one end and taking out it on each other by throwing the steamed corn Tarlak had so carefully prepared. Delysia ducked and ran for cover, Brug cursed a storm, and Haern calmly deflected any occasionally errant kernels with his knife while reaching for a steaming slice of bread.

  “When I loved?”

  Taking his sister into his arms for the first time since escaping his Karak-worshipping teacher, Madral. Clapping Brug on the shoulder after successfully defending Veldaren from burning to the ground due to the Darkhand’s madness. Bouncing little
Aullienna on his knee as they sat beside the warm fire of his tower.

  “When I lost?”

  The infinite sky became a storm, and rumbling through it like thunder were his darkest memories. Kneeling over Brug in a cursed corner of the king’s forest. Clutching Delysia’s lifeless body, the word ‘Tun’ carved into her forehead. Haern, Aullienna, Antonil... so many beloved, now reduced to mere memories. There was power in the trauma, the shaping of a life from misery that Cecil could never understand in his sequestered, insular existence in the Council’s towers. Tarlak lashed him with the pain, but not just the pain.

  Every single moment he had carried on afterwards. Every spell he cast, every jovial word he spoke despite his heart breaking. When he stood tall while all the world seemed ready to die. He let that conviction burn through Cecil’s arrogance and self-pity. In the great tapestry that was his life, this feud with Cecil was nothing, an annoyance, a bothersome set of hiccups. He had dueled a daughter of balance. He had warred against a god. What was a sheltered, spoiled brat compared to them?

  Tarlak grabbed Cecil by the scruff of his shirt and yanked him close. He grinned like a madman, a savage thrill coursing through him. The surrounding world-scape trembled with remembrance.

  “Why yellow?” Tarlak asked. “I’ve told no one, but we’re intimate now, aren’t we? We’re the best of friends. We’re closer than lovers. You want to know, then know, Cecil. Know exactly why you will never win. Take a look. Live the memories as I lived them.”

  Together they shifted into one another, no different than when Cecil had commanded the memories. Time lost meaning and they again fell into the past, to when Tarlak returned home to Veldaren, having slain Madral for his role in destroying Ashhur’s Citadel. His every belonging was stuffed into a small sack he carried over one shoulder. His sister lived in a pitiful little home, a far cry from the mansion they had once occupied before their father gave away his wealth to join the priesthood. He knocked on the door, and his beloved sister emerged, looking radiant in the white and gold robes of an acolyte of Ashhur.

  “You’re home!” she’d cried, and wrapped her arms about him. She was so small yet so strong, and it made him feel like he was the younger. Time shifted as Delysia invited him inside. They shared tea, Tarlak unpacked his things, and soon they sat beside one another in front of a warm fire.

  “How did father die?” Tarlak asked, finally comfortable enough to brave the subject. He’d heard only rumors when it happened, what little information he obtained coming filtered through his teacher’s careful, biased tongue. Tarlak’s obligations had kept him away, even when his every desire had been to flee home and comfort his sister.

  “Preaching,” Delysia said. “I was...I was there when it happened. He was condemning the thief guilds. They knew he was dangerous, so they killed him. I don’t even know who did it, just someone with a knife and a quick hand. They sought my death as well, but the tale of my survival is a bit of a long one. Let us save that telling for another time.”

  Tarlak accepted her decision to withhold, instead ruminating on his father’s death.

  “He should have known,” he said. “This world would never accept the change he wanted.”

  “Of course he knew it would not accept,” Delysia said. “Of course he knew this hurting world would lash out. Do you think I don’t know it, too? Do you think we never hear the snickers or feel the glares of the guilty?” She stared into her cup of tea. It was an image Tarlak had never forgotten. She was so burdened by heartache from the reopened wound, yet her determination never wavered. Her faith was stronger than whatever torment life might throw at her.

  “Father felt the world could be better, so he acted on that belief. He gave away his fortune, his time, and eventually his life. The day he first put on Ashhur’s robes, I remember he was...” She sniffled and wiped away a few stubborn tears. “He was so proud. He came running into my room like a child, so eager to let me see them. I was so young then, so foolish. I told him he looked like he was wearing a dress. ‘They mean something,’ he told me when he was done laughing. ‘Even to those who don’t believe, they’ll know it took time and dedication to obtain them. And if that little bit helps, then I’ll wear them, and wear them with pride....even if it makes me look like I’m wearing a dress.’”

  Tarlak remembered looking upon his sister, who now wore the robes of a priestess, having followed in their father’s footsteps in a far better manner than he with his spells.

  “He was a good man,” Tarlak said. “A great man, even. But I dare say the outfit still looks better on you.”

  The memory shifted, guided by Tarlak’s overwhelming presence. He carried Cecil even further into the past, to a singular event inexorably linked to that previous memory. Tarlak sat at a desk in a candle-light library, one of Madral’s many books spread open before him.

  “There is power in color,” his cruel master lectured. “Symbolism can change minds before a single word is spoken. Red is blood, anger, and fury. It can be used to convey dedication, and willingness to both protect and destroy. Black encompasses all; it is the overwhelming certainty of Karak, the fearlessness of the night. Blue is the sky and the ocean, and it will inspire hope as well as loyalty. Green is most often associated with the elves, forests, and nature. There’s a humility to the color that is not possessed by those who wear a purple sash or crimson dress.”

  Tarlak leafed through the pages. During his entire apprenticeship, he had said nothing of his faith in Ashhur, or the pendant of the Golden Mountain his father had given to him in secret on the day Tarlak had been accepted for tutoring. The memories had remained, though, slowly shifting and molding as he learned. After scanning the symbols and explanations of the book, he settled on a single page.

  “What of yellow?” he asked.

  There was no hiding Madral’s disdain.

  “Yellow is the color most closely associated with Ashhur and his followers. His priests line their robes with it. His paladins gild their weapons and the edges of their armor, for they serve the Golden Mountain. Ashhur’s morality is the apotheosis of everything we wizards strive for. We seek knowledge, not limitations. We need not dress up selfish choices with words like mercy or forgiveness. The fate of others is irrelevant to the mastery of our own destinies.”

  Madral slammed the book shut.

  “I assure you, Tarlak, you will never, ever see a wizard of any worth wearing such a hideous color.”

  Tarlak put his hands atop that closed book, no longer a child, and no longer staring up at a master that had secretly worshiped Karak and helped bring the original Citadel tumbling to the ground. Cecil stood where Madral had been, and they were no different to him now. Bitter, angry men, clawing for power solely because they craved its hollow, false comfort. He did not fear them. He pitied them.

  “I have always known who I am,” Tarlak told the trembling image of an infinite soul. “And I have always known who I wanted to be. No matter who has doubted me, who has mocked me, or who has tried to stop me, I have succeeded. I’ll succeed in this too, Cecil. Mourn your foul luck if you wish. Complain to Karak how unfair your fate. Maybe he will give you the pity I will not. I excise you like a splinter. I banish you like a thief. Be gone like a disease burned away by fever. I’ve got shit to do, Cecil, and a world to make better.”

  Cecil was so small now, not in age or size but in his presence, so thin he approached translucent, so ephemeral he might be smoke from a snuffed campfire. Tarlak put a hand on the man’s chest and pushed, scattering him like the petals of a dandelion.

  “I am the wizard in yellow, and I want you gone.”

  Tarlak’s eyes snapped open. He drew in a long, singular gasp of air, as if his lungs had remained empty for millennia. Sparkling ethereal diamonds, like a shower of starlight, burst out his throat when he exhaled. Qurrah stood before him, haloed by the light Tarlak had breathed out. The half-orc grinned with devilish glee, his hands curling upwards.

 
“Finally,” he said, and crooked his fingers. The dust, the scattered essence of a soul, flung heavenward. Tarlak did not watch it go. He held no desire to witness the final disappearance of what had been Cecil Towerborn. He’d seen enough of him to last ten lifetimes.

  “So...is that it?” Harruq asked. “You back, Tar? Are you...you?”

  Qurrah certainly seemed to believe so, for he was busy undoing the knots tying Tarlak to his chair. Instead of answering, Tarlak took his freed right hand, dipped it into one of the pockets of his robes, and withdrew a long white handkerchief.

  “The idea of casting a spell sounds horrible right now,” he mumbled, vaguely aware he sounded heavily intoxicated. “Can you fill this with ice, Aurry?”

  Aurelia took the handkerchief without a word, summoned a small collection of smooth ice shards with a quick waggle of her fingers, and then tied the handkerchief shut to seal it in.

  “Thanks,” Tarlak said. He leaned back in the chair and set the ice against his forehead. He could tell the others were still worried or curious, but he couldn’t care less. He had done it. He was free.

  “And yes, it’s me, just me,” he said as he closed his eyes and let the ice do its work. “Now please, forgive me if I pass out for a few days. By Ashhur almighty, I have one Abyss of a headache.”

  14

  Lathaar watched the black wings gather from a window on the second floor of the Citadel.

  “Damn it, Jerico,” he muttered. “You just had to go out and be a hero, didn’t you?”

  He patted his sheathed swords. They might be without his dear friend’s shield, but they had his blades, and they had the great walls of the dark tower. It would be enough. It had to be enough.

  The door to his room barged open. Lathaar shot a look over his shoulder to find the oldest of his students, Samar, standing in the doorway. Fear tainted his jade eyes.

  “We don’t know what to…” Samar began, then gathered himself. “What are your orders?”