I wonder if my new form is faster or slower than my last, he pondered. He assumed that a dragon would be faster than an elf with wings, but the rules of Somnium were strange and hard to predict.
As he was thinking, Serena opened her eyes. She sprung to her feet and grinned widely. The expression displayed her razor-sharp fangs in all of their savage glory. She bound at him faster than he could react and pressed her mouth roughly against his. He blinked, surprised by her affection, and he allowed himself to relax into the kiss. Her lips were soft, and her breath tasted like honeyed wine. She slowly broke the kiss and looked deeply into his eyes.
I’ve been waiting a long time to do that, she said happily. Slate considered the statement. He wasn’t sure that he required the same display of affection—his mind didn’t work that way—but he appreciated the fact that she felt the way she did. It wasn’t just the physical kiss that he enjoyed. It was the sense of love and loyalty that spread throughout the Scourgemind. It was something different from the commitment he received from the Queen of the Scourge. Serena didn’t kiss him because she wanted to lead the Scourge. She kissed him because she wanted to be with him.
He glanced down as he noticed that Serena was just as naked as he was. The half-reptile-half-elf figure of the Paramour did not lend itself to being clothed. Her bare and plentiful chest was pressing against his own, and he could feel the hardened pebbles on his skin. He couldn’t help but stare at her hungrily, as a sincere and primal feeling uncoiled itself from his heart.
She is mine, he thought fiercely. The thought surprised him, as he had always been possessive. It was deeply attached to his obsession with loyalty. However, this was something different. He could imagine a world where dragons lay upon mountains of gold and were attended by gorgeous women.
He kissed Serena once more, and her body melted against his own. She wrapped her wings around them as he explored her new figure, and he was examined in turn. They kept their Aspects active, and the warmth kept them comfortable in the winter chill. They remained wrapped in each other’s embrace until the sun began to peek out from the horizon, and its orange and pink light began to grace the edges of the sky.
When Serena noticed the lightening sky, she woke Slate. He had been lightly dozing in her arms, and she had been unwilling to wake him. It wasn’t often that she got to see him in such a vulnerable state. She would probably need to get used to it.
My King, she greeted him unironically. It’s a big day.
Slate roused immediately and noticed the light in the sky. He sighed at its presence. I could’ve slept for twelve more hours; the stress is starting to wear on me. He felt as if he could’ve slept for another twelve hours. He could tell that the pressure was wearing on him. He was weary, but the world waited for its conqueror. He stood up and released himself from Serena’s embrace. She rose to her feet to join him and stretched to shake the sleep and the cold from her bones before looking to him for her next instructions.
Gather the others. It’s time to put our plan into motion. Slate looked down at his naked form. Also, see if you can get me some fucking clothes. I can’t keep my Aspect activated forever.
CHAPTER 23: THE QUEEN'S REVENGE
SHALE’S TALONS PIERCED through armor and flesh, grasping the spinal cord underneath. The man screamed in pain and fear as he tried to flee the silver reptilian monster that had come upon his patrol. What was supposed to be a routine delivery of materials from Ithicus to a scouting outpost to the west had become a deadly ambush. They had posted themselves a couple of miles outside of the city to intercept any enemy forces that make be making their way to the city’s boundaries. Away from the roads, the land was heavily forested, and the enemy scouts that Shale had been intercepting used the road instead of venturing too far off the beaten path. It was a trend that Shale intended to exploit.
Shale planted her feet in the earth and wrenched the soldier’s body until she could feel the spine crack and splinter. A couple of vertebrae were jarred loose from the rest, and Shale threw them to the side in disgust. Removing a piece of his spine caused the man to collapse immediately. She savaged his lumbar region, which meant the man still could scream. The sound was music to Shale’s ears. She was so tired of Collective forces that just the sight of their banner—a skull with a dagger plunged down the center—was enough to ignite her fury.
Around her, her troops slaughtered the remains of the patrol that had stumbled within their range. Shale knew they needed to move on quickly. Whoever was in charge of the Collective forces had adapted rapidly to the Scourge’s hit and run tactics over the last week. For every group similarly sized as the one they had ambushed, there was another that had more numbers than Shale was confident in attacking. The Paramour didn’t mind when those forces stuck to the road, clearly inviting an attack. When they started to spread through the woods, Shale grew nervous that the army would discover the various places the Scourge used to hide and recover between ambushes. Every day, more forces were released from the city of Ithicus, and as a result, she had to choose her targets carefully. Deliveries like the one they just destroyed often carried essential sources of information. Sometimes, the deliveries held missives for various country high lords. The messages ordered them to muster their troops and return to Ithicus. Shale took great pleasure in destroying these. More often, the words commanded ordinary village leaders or landowners to round up the citizenry. Shale was increasingly growing frustrated at the tactic. No matter how much they intervened, the Collective forces continued to snatch up more of the citizenry than Shale was able to save. The Scourge’s potential valuable servants being turned into fuel for the Collective’s soul weapons.
From every group of people that the Scourge saved, they spread the same message: safety lay to the west; they would find peace in Bastion. Shale wasn’t sure it was a lie or not, but she felt duty-bound to reveal the information that she did. She knew the Scourge needed to be better than the Collective; otherwise, the value of her crusade became shallow. It wasn’t enough to be the best warrior in the Scourge; she wanted to be the best warrior in Somnium. One didn’t become the best by slaying peasants and raiding farmsteads. Strength came from facing one’s weakness from both within and without. Her irritation at the ignorance of the Collective only grew the more she witnessed the Collective’s use of fear instead of strength and growth. These were tactics of pathetic weaklings.
Beyond saving the citizens from the Collective when their government sought to draft and sacrifice them, Shale was proud of the fact that the main army hadn’t been able to leave the walls of Ithicus. Every time a force sallied forth in the direction of Bastion, Shale had used a combination of tactics, terrain, and brutal efficiency to destroy them utterly. Now, the Collective only dispatched scouting forces. It was clear they were searching for the enemy ambushing them while they built their strength within the city. When Shale had entered Ithicus to scout out its interior, she found a wasteland. Every building aside from the citadel in the center had been leveled, and a small force of Collective regulars were rounding up slaves into pens or impromptu holding areas. There were Cultists working day and night to transform the citizens—every man woman and child—into soul-forged creations. Slate recognized the Poppers, Brute, Collectors, and Corrupters from Standur, but there were other monsters she had never seen before. They were mostly humanoid, with their flesh wholly removed. They walked around the city in meandering circles. She had seen one wail once it had found a rabbit in the brush. It had sprinted toward it and brought a foot smashing down on the back end of the rabbit. Shale’s advance hearing could pick up the squeals of the small mammal as the flayed man reach down and picked up the struggling creature. She watched the man, entranced as he put the head of the rabbit in his mouth and bit down with enough force to sever the rabbits head from its body. She watched him as he shook his head like a dog with a toy and let the tendons in the rabbit’s neck drip from his maw.
That wasn’t the only horrific thing she saw. She witnes
sed flayed beings that had their spines open with their insides exposed to the open air. Within each chest cavity, a purple gem closed with malicious light. Shale had seen captives carried toward the creatures and saw that when ordinary people were exposed to the light, their flesh peeled from their bodies of its own accord, and then they became exactly like the flayed man from before.
Shale was dumbfounded when she initially saw them. They possessed such numbers that she knew her tiny force didn’t stand a chance of making a dent in such a force. The best they could do was make the enemy general uncertain and try their hardest to delay the inevitable. To that end, she had been marginally successful, and she knew Slate would be proud of the work that they had accomplished. She merely hoped that the time she had bought would be enough for her mate to pull off an impossible victory. At the very least, her small army of ambushers was becoming more skilled every day. When they were returned to the rest of their brethren, their memories and experiences would be used to train the rest of their forces. Slate’s army was learning how to topple cities while Shale’s military was learning how to use hit-and-run tactics to defeat a stationary enemy.
The Paramour could feel that they were reaching a tipping point. The countryside had grown scant of people as of late, and even Shale knew the damage the Collective wrought in this fight would take years to recover. From her observations, she knew the Collective army would move on from their positions once they realized their ranging parties stopped returning, and they had converted all the people they could find. Once that happened, Shale knew that her forces would need to return to Bastion, her band of warriors couldn’t hold back a tide in the thousands like the one hidden within the walls of Ithicus.
She wasn’t entirely sure what kind of capabilities the soul-forged army possessed. The type the Cultists were creating differed from the ones she had faced in Standur, and the time they were spending to create such a force worried her on an intuitive level. Still, she wasn’t positive that she wanted to face them in open battle. It would only take one mistake for them to chew through her numbers and remove a vital asset for the Scourge. They had already suffered a catastrophic loss once, and the people they lost then, troubled Shale even now. Shale had burned Merus’ expression into her heart the day that he had been laid on the funeral pyre. She wouldn’t be remembered like that, a dead memory unable to overcome the new adversities Slate would face.
The light had already fallen by the time that her forces cleaned up the site of their ambush. They made a habit of completely removing all traces of their presence, the corpses, the damage, even the natural forest brush upon the forest floor. If they were lucky, the enemy would think that their forces simply disappeared. Or, at least, they would be left with the fear, doubt, and anxiety of never knowing how their comrades died. Well, for the Vallyr, it would be safer to say they worried and feared an unexpected death they couldn’t see. It didn’t matter to her, as long as her prey felt fear, it didn’t matter how disgusting their reasons were.
As Shale was traveling with their troops on their way back to their temporary outpost hidden deep within the natural cover, Bastion spoke into her ear.
“My Lady, the castle is under attack.” Bastion’s calm, monotone, and a flehm-filled voice echoed several times in her ears. Shale stopped abruptly; the sounds of the forest seemed to go silent even as the irritating voice of the stronghold’s avatar echoed in her ear. Her heart thumped against her chest, and all she could think about was the clutch she left behind in the city.
“Are my children safe?” She choked out. Her claws extended to their limits, and her senses sharpened to an unnatural level as her instincts prepared her to defend her progeny.
“They are, my Lady.” Bastion said dryly, “The attacker appears rather arrogant, concerned only with making a show of killing individual Guardians. It is entirely inefficient and without purpose as the morale of the Guardians cannot be broken by such means. It is to our benefit that the adversary is ignorant of this fact, and time is being bought with minimal losses, for now.”
Shale couldn’t help but feel relieved. Even as a part of her warrior’s spirit felt guilt, even disgust at her relief at the expense of her loyal comrades, she couldn’t help it. She was happy, almost thrilled, that it was the Guardians that were dying and not the Scourge, not her children. But, as Bastion’s words carried through her mind again, a realization broke through her fear and relief. “Wait, you’re saying it’s only one person?” Shale’s calmed expression now tensed sharply.
“Correct,” Bastion was brief, unlike how he usually acted. She ignored the slight by withholding her honorifics as she cared little for them, she realized that the avatar had recognized the severity of the situation and was being serious for once.
“I’m on my way,” she told him before breaking the line with Bastion. She knew that she would need to stop by Refuge and pick up the forces that were garrisoned there. The Scourge were venturing out in rotations to keep their troops from becoming exhausted from constant warfare. While this meant they couldn’t hunt down as many of the enemy’s forces as they would have liked, it did mean they were well-rested at all times. Exhaustion made the sharpest blades dull, and Shale preferred quality over quantity as a matter of her philosophy in war. The more she fought the Collective, the more she cemented this law in her heart and in her warriors. Besides, attempting to compete in numbers with the Collective was suicide from the beginning.
Her thoughts were interrupted by one of the Lurkers.
Paramour, there’s a party of Collective soldiers on horseback heading this way.
Shale looked up. The scout was about a mile away from her current position between her and the city. He was precisely placed there to give the Scourge enough time to move away from the road if more forces were coming. It wasn’t exactly strange for the troops in Ithicus to send a sally from the city when the Scourge ambushed one of their groups. From her gathered scouting information, Shale could tell that the leader of this Collective force in Ithicus could immediately recognize when their forces were killed, but not the manner. They had shown this in the past by launching incredibly well-timed counterattacks the moment her forces launched theirs. This time, their timing was strange. Usually, their counterattack would come the moment the first Vallyr died, but this one was delayed. They had waited this time and the deviation from their normal behavior sent alarm bells through her mind. She couldn’t articulate why she was worried, but sometimes, a warrior just needed to trust their gut.
Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to be here when the reinforcements arrive. She ordered, Gather the troops. We make for Refuge. Her eyes burned with confidence as she looked on.
She felt a wave of assent from the Scourgemind as the rest of the Scourge began to sprint in a northwesterly direction. They kept to the trees, and soon their entire party was propelling itself through the trees like swinging primates. This mode of travel wasn’t much faster than simply running, but the Scourge had grown used to this form of travel, so they didn’t leave tracks when ambushing the enemy. Shale had a difficult time travelling in such a way. The missing limb forced her to use her tail as a surrogate arm. She considered merely flying, but she felt safer among her kind. She enjoyed flying more than any other way of traveling, but it wasn’t practical in their current fight. She could always fly with Slate later, now it was time to kill Vallyr, and there were too many things that could go wrong when one was alone.
A few hours from the time they left, the scout shadowing the adversary broke into the Scourgemind again.
Paramour, the Collective hasn’t turned back. Once they reached the site of the ambush, they dismounted, and left their horses on the road. They’re making their way through the forest on foot. There was a pause that filled Shale’s heart with dread. Their moving very quickly. They’re going to catch up to us.
Shale frowned. The Scourge weren’t moving at their fastest possible pace, but they still should’ve been able to outpace ordinary Collective
soldiers easily. She hadn’t seen anything so far to indicate that the Collective could move at even a fraction of the speed that her forces could. She remembered the rate of travel for the Vallyr that she had fought when defending her first clutch, but she hadn’t seen any Vallyr like him since that engagement. Typically, the Vallyr were only about as strong and fast as the standard Guardian. It made the two races well matched with each other and considerably weaker in comparison to the Scourge.
How many are there? She asked the scout as she allowed herself to alight on the ground from her last leap. She would run normally. There was no sense in intentionally slowing their pace.
There are about forty, Lady Paramour, the scout answered.
Shale didn’t slow as she thought about the scout’s information. She had initially set out with about a hundred members of the Scourge. That number had been cut by a quarter when they attacked the Cultists a couple weeks earlier. Right now, she only had about half of her remaining forces. That meant they were only slightly outnumbered by the enemy.
Are they heading in our direction? Her eyes squinted as she asked for clarification. They don’t seem like they’re guessing, and they’re actively pursuing us?
She could feel the confusion from the Scout through their connection. Yes, Lady Paramour. It’s like they can see through the trees and know your exact location.
Shale cursed out loud. If I continue, then I’ll be leading the Collective right to Refuge, she thought. It was paramount that they kept the location a secret. She knew it would become an essential location for the Scourge in the future. The Scourge did not want to be so attached to Bastion that they couldn’t survive without it. Refuge gave them a backup plan in case the conflict with the Collective didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to.
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