The King of the Fallen

by David Dalglish

  The maelstrom ceased. Celestia’s light dimmed. She suddenly looked so mortal, so very elvish. She bent down, her hands gently cupping Aurelia’s face, and she whispered now instead of roaring. Her eyes, solid black windows into an infinite void, locked her in their gaze.

  “If you would have my power, then take it. I am here as always, my child. Do not blame the river for your thirst if you are not willing to walk the harsh road to its banks. Do you desire the wings of my daughters? Scream that desire. Bellow to the heavens your rage. Make me believe, and I shall reward you with a gift to make the mortal realms tremble.”

  The physical manifestation of the goddess vanished, but her presence remained. Aurelia felt it in the air. She heard it in the rustle of leaves and grass. Chills coursed up and down her spine. Her heart felt ready to explode out from her chest, for she felt herself standing on a precipice. One more step and the fury of a goddess would be hers.

  “Not yet,” she whispered. “Do not give it to me yet.”

  Destination firmly in mind, she opened another portal. Aurelia left the ruins of Dezerea behind and crossed many more miles to the waters of the Rigon.

  26

  Two grand towers loomed before Aurelia Tun. On the eastern side of the river was the crimson tower of the apprentices. On the western side, darker than the night itself, the black spire belonging to the masters. The single bridge linking them rose high above the rivers, the red and black bricks interlocking in a checkered pattern. From within these two buildings the Council of Mages taught, trained, and plotted.

  Aurelia strode deliberately toward the towers, her feet sinking into the muddy soil of the Rigon’s banks. Wind blew about her, and only her. The magical wards defending the twin towers were visible to her eyes, and they were innumerable. They would turn aside all teleportation magic, reflect all elemental attacks, and render useless attempts to manipulate the earth or warp the stone. But Celestia was the source of all magic, the birthing river of its power, and it cared not for even the most intricately carved rune. Those within did not realize her presence, not yet.

  But they would.

  “The elite of humanity,” she whispered into the night. “Can you withstand the disdain of a god?”

  The maelstrom of the goddess returned to her. Aurelia reached deep within herself, drawing in power for her spells. She would not assault the towers themselves. She would rip them apart at their very foundations. Within her mind’s eye she saw the twin buildings’ foundations, dug deep into the soil and protected with arcane wards. Ancient words rolled off her tongue, and she knew only half of what came out of her mouth. The rest sprang from her soul itself, from a knowledge that seemed to belong only to her.

  The words ended, the first wave of spells flowing out of her to assault those protective runes. Dozens shattered, the writing upon the stone melting away like wax in a kiln.

  Lamps and candles lit throughout many of the towers’ windows. “Do you feel the world tremble beneath your feet?” Aurelia asked the unseen mages. “Do you hear the stone crack, and the muddy earth groan?”

  They knew her presence now, and they were not amused. Multiple balls of flame burst from the windows, accompanied by ice lances that were nearly invisible as they streaked through the night sky. Aurelia crossed her arms and summoned a magical shield about her body. Fire and ice thundered against the magical dome she’d crated, and upon that impact, lightning unleashed from the sky. The elements swirled about her, seeming so quaint to her eyes. Celestia’s presence overwhelmed her now, almost impatient for its use. Aurelia dared tap into but a tiny sliver.

  “Do you seek fire?” she asked, and from her palms burst a stream to make a dragon jealous. The flames spread higher, higher, so grand it rivaled the height of the towers themselves. The night sky became bright as day as the flames washed over the crimson side of the apprentice’s tower. Faint white light burst and popped all along the windows, the people within enacting spells to aid the runes carved into the tower. After a moment the fire ceased; the silence following its roar felt deeply unnerving.

  Such a display should have left Aurelia drained and unable to stand. Instead her hands shook, not from exhaustion, but from the struggle to contain the rising tide of power within her.

  Limitless, Tessanna had once declared. The well is limitless.

  For the first time in her life, Aurelia understood, truly understood, and it humbled her knowing that the daughter of balance had held together for so long despite her traumatic life. Another barrage of spells lashed out at her, trying to crush her with an overwhelming display. Aurelia crossed her arms and summoned her shield. Cities might have crumbled, but she withstood, with such ease that it excited and frightened her in equal measure.

  When the attack passed, she looked to the towers and saw pitiful human playthings, no more special or imposing than Aubrienna’s and Gregory’s playthings. The comparison put a grim smile to her face, and she half-sung a song as she cast her next spell. That Tessanna often behaved similarly did not go unnoticed to her.

  “And all the castles and all the keeps came tumbling, tumbling, tumbling down...”

  Aurelia dropped to her knees and slammed her palms to the damp earth. Magic flowed through her fingers, intense enough to steal the words from her mouth. The land split. Cracks veered in all directions like a great spiderweb. The towers might have seemed impervious to magic, but she would tear them out at the roots, excising them from Dezrel like a stubborn weed. She did not embrace Celestia’s gift, not completely, but she felt it hovering about her, strengthening her. The remaining wards protecting the stones of the towers’ foundations popped and sparked. The paint burned to ash. Her fingers hooked. Her grin spread.

  “Down, down, down.”

  She rose to her feet, and the towers began to fall. Their bases cracked. It started slowly at first, just the slightest wobble. The Apprentices’ Tower toppled first, its red stones splashing into the Rigon as the bridge linking the two towers snapped like a twig, raining bricks both red and black. Aurelia expected the same of the Masters’ Tower, but the mages within were more resourceful than she anticipated. Jagged lances of stone ripped free of the earth and slammed into the base of the massive structure. The largest halted the initial fall, and then several more poked out like gargantuan fingers to steady the sides and support each and every direction. It soon became a tremendous web, crisscrossing pillars of brown earth locking the tower in place.

  Aurelia grinned. It seemed the masters would not give up their home so easily. The fools. If they wanted to survive, they should have fled.

  “Bellow to the heavens your rage,” Aurelia said, echoing the words of her goddess. “Do your ears detect my cry now, Celestia? Do you sense my anger amongst the stars?”

  Her body felt weightless. Her mind ached with understanding. Though the night was dark now that her fire was gone, her eyes saw every little wisp of the ethereal essence of magic, and it was blinding. The surviving masters gathered another barrage, and they unleashed it all at once, in a display to make Dezrel tremble. Fire, ice, lightning, even stone and pure magical essence: it all flew toward her, but she felt not afraid. She remembered the assassins who had come to kill her daughter in Mordeina. She remembered Avlimar’s fall. She remembered the final moments of Tessanna’s life, when she lowered her hands and smiled to the heavens, relinquishing her tormented soul so that she might be with the only one she ever loved.

  “Give them to me,” she whispered, her calm voice belying her infinite ferocity. “Give me my wings.”

  Aurelia’s feet lifted from the ground, the earth holding no sway upon her any longer. She drifted as if amid ocean waves, her hair floating, her clothes billowing in unseen, unfelt winds. Though they bore no physical connection to her flesh, she gasped as two ethereal wings burst from between her shoulders. They shimmered and swirled with smoke and light. The left wing, brilliant white, brighter than the sun, purer than the moon. The right wing darker than midnight,
its feathers glimmering shards of the infinite space beyond the stars. Those wings stretched out behind her as she rose, twenty feet in wingspan, forty, one hundred, until it felt like all the world would be swallowed, the wing tips reaching the very ends of the horizon.

  Fire and lightning shattered against a barrier she summoned with but a thought. She saw the ice and stone flying toward her with intent to kill, and she broke it all as easily as she might pull a blade of grass up from dry soil. The magic seemed so childish to her now, so inconsequential.

  “You slew a daughter,” she spoke, but the words, the voice, did not feel like they belonged to her. “Face a mother’s wrath.”

  She lifted her hands to the heavens, the great distance seeming inconsequential now. Size, space, time; it all crumbled and broke loose. Far, far away, she clutched a chunk of stone flinging through the cosmos within her grasp. Her fingers curled as if she held it in her actual flesh and bone hands. Power flowed from her, but it was an inconsequential speck. With each steady beat of her wings she felt renewed. One pull, and she tore the celestial stone from its path. She guided it home.

  A star shimmered in the sky above.

  “Send your spells,” she laughed as another barrage launched from the windows of the tower. This time they did not strike her invisible barrier. They merely faded away, absorbed into the swirling light and shadow that her wings had flooded the surrounding landscape with. The very rules of magic were breaking, she their new master. The elf envisioned the stars, and the chunk of ore she’d grabbed, and pulled harder. Her teeth clenched and her back arched from a sudden spike of pain. The effort only angered her, and she shrieked out her furious denial.

  “END. IT. ALL.”

  One moment, it was a distant, sparkling star. The next, the meteor lit the sky with fire as it came crashing down. It struck the Masters’ Tower, the burning chunk of stone thrice its size. It made a mockery of their wards and protections as it blasted their foundations to rubble and carved a mile-long gash across the earth. The waters of the Rigon churned and spilled eastward as it attempted to follow the meteor’s wake. The land roiled, a shockwave blasting out in all directions, but Aurelia was high above it. Dirt and stone shifted, the rubble soon hidden by a cloud that hung in the air like smoke over a forest fire. The sound, at first deafening from the cracking earth, breaking stone, and swirling waters, slowly eased as the destruction ceased.

  Amid that silence, Aurelia’s wings faded away. Her sight shifted, her awareness shrinking, her mental grasp of the world returning to that of a mere mortal. The elf slowly drifted until her feet touched down on cool grass. Aurelia looked upon the destruction she had wrought and felt complete and total horror—not at her own actions, but the future they had all narrowly avoided. Her husband had told her of Tessanna’s pain, of her quiet confession in the awful night following her beloved Qurrah’s death.

  I want to slaughter everything and everyone until I create a land of corpses, Tessanna had said. It wasn’t folly, or beyond her reach. The end of all Dezrel had truly been within her grasp, and yet she had chosen a different path. She had given up her life, perhaps because the last reason she had to live it had left her.

  I’m coming home, she had whispered before the Councils’ spells had torn her apart.

  Home. To where her beloved Qurrah waited.

  “Home,” Aurelia echoed. The elf looked to the stars, and she no longer saw the infinite space beyond them, nor felt control over those celestial bodies. Somewhere up there, she knew Celestia watched, and listened.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, shivering. “But never again. Not to me. Not to anyone.”

  Her fingers waggled, and she ripped open a portal to Ahaesarus’s camp, where Harruq and Aubrienna waited. To step through felt akin to escaping a dream. The heavy aura of magic that had enveloped her slipped away, removed like an unneeded suit of armor. The portal took her to the army’s encampment, just outside the rows of tents. A dizzy spell overcame her when she exited, but it quickly passed. Once recovered, she re-orientated herself and headed for her family’s tent. Despite the late hour, it seemed something were amiss, given how many soldiers were awake and softly murmuring among themselves.

  Harruq was not asleep when she returned, nor was she surprised by this fact. Instead, her husband waited at the entrance to their tent, one of his swords laid out across his lap as he steadily sharpened it with a whetstone. Upon her arrival, he rose to his feet and smiled with relief.

  “You had me worried,” he said, sheathing the blade.

  “I thought I told you not to worry.”

  He slid an arm around her waist and kissed her lips. “Yes, but then the hours kept on passing without you. That, and the earthquake that just hit the camp. Felt like all of Dezrel was suddenly pissed.”

  “Did it now?” Despite her exhaustion, she could not keep a hint of amusement and playfulness from her voice. Harruq detected it immediately, and his eyes narrowed.

  “That...that wasn’t you, was it?” he asked.

  Aurelia smiled, kissed his cheek, and entered the tent without saying a word.

  27

  Deathmask perched along the same southern edge of Mordeina’s outer wall from which he and Veliana had watched the fallen army march out to face Ahaesarus’s angels. The same place where they had observed Azariah’s army come limping back several days ago, signs of defeat upon every flutter of every black wing. The fallen’s’ return had only heightened Deathmask’s excitement. An assault upon the city would follow. Ahaesarus would absolutely give chase after a victory, and the sight of an army marching over the grasslands confirmed his belief.

  “Hardly the numbers I was expecting,” Veliana said beside him. They didn’t bother to hide themselves in shadow this time. With how few Azariah had left to defend the city—the bulk of them being undead—the King of the Fallen had seemingly abandoned the outer wall entirely. Mordeina was guarded by two walls, the narrow space between them meant to be a killing lane should the city ever be invaded. The wings of angels nullified much of those defenses, so Azariah was keeping his forces bunched together at the entrance to the interior wall. That was same reason Deathmask suspected Azariah had forfeited Devlimar entirely. Too open. Too difficult to defend.

  As for Ahaesarus, it seemed the angel cared not for the golden city either, not even to take it as a symbolic victory. They marched straight for Mordeina, eager to fight.

  “That is a far cry from the army Thulos brought against this city years ago,” Deathmask said.

  Veliana glanced to the perfectly still rows and rows of undead. “It is the same for the defenders. Last time, the defense bore a bit more a pulse.”

  “The angels appear evenly matched,” Deathmask muttered. He rubbed his chin and squinted against the midday sun, whose light made it difficult to count the winged figures flying amid the clear sky. “Ground forces appear even as well. If anything, Azariah has more undead. Not exactly the numbers advantage you would expect from a besieging force.”

  “They won’t lay siege, though. They’re going to assault immediately. These angels have the patience of children.”

  “Either that, or a traditional siege means nothing when the besieged can fly out at night for clean water and smuggled food. Plus, most of Azariah’s army doesn’t need to eat. How do you starve out the dead? The only ones who would suffer are Mordeina’s citizens...and they’d only join the army upon their deaths.”

  It was a grim thought, but it mirrored what they had seen nonstop since Azariah’s return. The king of the fallen had begun pillaging every single graveyard in both the city and the surrounding villages to supplement his undead army. The Night of Black Wings had perversely aided him in this regard. The fallen angel’s forces were more skeleton than rotted flesh, but that wouldn’t be all of it. Oh no. Azariah had his surprise ready for the defenders, which meant Deathmask’s own additional surprise awaited. Truth be told, Deathmask was giddy as a school child about it.
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br />   The human army marched toward the outer gate of Mordeina. No beast-men among them, Deathmask noted, which ran counter to the rumors he’d heard describing the make-up of Ahaesarus’s army. Had they fled? Been killed in the battle reportedly fought at Hemman Field? Getting information about that fight had proven maddeningly difficult, and what few human soldiers he’d questioned in taverns after returning from defeat had been spotty and nonsensical. Supposedly, the goddess Celestia herself had come to condemn both armies.

  “No siege weaponry,” Veliana remarked. She casually leaned over the battlement wall, her chin resting on her fist as if observing a play in a park.

  “I suspect their spellcasters are their siege weaponry. That, or they expect the angels to open the gates for them.”

  Veliana glanced to the sky full of black wings and the undead army gathered near the entrance, no doubt ready to bury any angel who attempted to land.

  “Good luck with that, I suppose.”

  A sudden roar shook the city. Deathmask grinned behind the cloud of ash hovering about his face.

  “There it is,” he said, turning to gaze at the distant castle. He felt a pull on his mind as the runes he’d modified flared to life. “Come grace us with your presence, Rakkar.”

  Though it’d only been five years since its last summoning, it seemed a beast of a different lifetime burst forth from the royal gardens. Deathmask could not see it, but he could imagine it. Had he not witnessed its birth once before, when the priest-king Melorak had ruled over this very city? A creature of pure shadow, so deep it seemed to swallow all light. Its wings were like a bat’s, its face reptilian and full of obsidian teeth. It was foul magic given life, and it reeked of Karak.