View Full Version : Epiphanies
Rain lashed the roof in slow, rolling strokes, almost in time with the pounding at Marcus Book’s temples. He had a great deal of difficulty getting drunk, perhaps as a result of the spiritual fire burning always within him, but it wasn’t impossible. It just required a great deal more alcohol.
Bottles littered the small room, dozens of bottles, and a single candle burned low and anemic on the window sill, puttering and spitting. He sat with his back to the wall, and his head lolled to one side. Oblivion at last. His bladder was fit to burst, but he was almost inebriated enough not to care if it did.
He heard pounding on the stairs outside, relentless, looming. He let his head roll across the wall, one shoulder to the other, so that he could crack his eyes open and regard a distant, shadowy blur. That was the door, right? He couldn’t tell. He thought so. He found that he didn’t care. He was so close to an epiphany about life – it’s all about love, isn’t it? He remembered the innkeeper’s daughter and how she’d avoided his gaze. Such pretense was silly, wasn’t it? Life is all about love. He felt that he must go downstairs and tell her his epiphany, and that she should come up to his room. We only live once.
Well, most of us. Marcus chuckled bitterly.
Thunder cracked, or so the templar thought. After a moment he decided it wasn’t thunder, but knocking at the door. So they’d found him – someone had, at least. There were so many people looking for him, so many enemies, and so many unfriendly shadows. He just didn’t care, because now he knew the truth of it – it’s all about love. If he died tonight it wouldn’t be tragic, just beautifully bittersweet. He was okay with that.
They ought to know too, though. “It’s all about love!” he tried to shout, but what came out didn’t even make sense to him. He laughed again, because that made it all the more bittersweet. He figured it out, but he’d be dead before he could tell anyone.
The door exploded inward in a spray of splinters, and two dark silhouettes entered. The candlelight gleamed on naked steel, and they stood poised in the doorway, looking down on him. Marcus decided he wouldn’t try to fight. That would be embarrassing. He raised his last bottle in salute, and then took a swig so he wouldn’t die thirsty. He tapped his chest, hoping they understood – stab me in the heart, I don’t want to die drowning on blood or anything else.
“Oh, my brother,” one of the silhouettes sighed. “Shame on you.”
Only now did he see that their eyes glinted and burned like embers floating in the dark.
“Ivan,” Marcus said as they lifted him off the floor. “Ivan, it’s all about love.”
“Take him to the carriage,” Ivan said to the other knight, nudging bottles aside with the edge of his boot. “Be gentle with him. He’s still our brother.”
The other knight slung the limp and ungainly form of Marcus Book over his shoulder, and then carried him out as Ivan continued to explore the room. Under the bed he discovered a large box, which he slid out and examined. It had a clasp, which he broke, and inside was a human skull stripped of all flesh, resting on velvet.
“What have you done, Marcus,” Ivan sighed. “What have you done?”
Marcus woke in a cell. It was a nice cell, with a mattress pad and several sheets, a pillow, and even a writing desk with a candle. The walls were stone, but the candlelight played off them luminously, giving the room a warm aspect. It was a fine place to live, but in the end a cell is a cell.
He shoved the sheets aside and gave his head a firm shake to rattle out the last bits of hangover nesting there. They’d taken his good leathers and replaced them with luxurious cloth – a blend of something soft and thin – but there wasn’t much he could do about that. He pulled the shirt off overhead and shredded it into thin strips, then wrapped the strips around his knuckles and flexed his fingers.
He was in one of three places, gauging from where they’d taken him and what his eyes and ears could gather from his surroundings. None of them were places he wanted to be, but none of them were held by anybody that wanted him dead. He was relatively safe. A reasonable man would have stayed put, answered for his crimes and accepted his forgiveness.
Marcus Book was a restless man. He had never known what he wanted, but he always knew what he didn’t want, and right now he didn’t want to be here. He searched the desk and found nothing. Time to go.
The door was tough, but Marcus was big and he was relentless. He laid into it with three solid kicks before the jamb splintered from the stone, and there it was. He stepped out into the hallway, and found a tall woman in heavy golden armor waiting for him, with a taller but narrower man behind her.
“Where are you going?” Anya said.
“Out,” Marcus said after a moment. He felt shame on his face, and hated himself for it.
“Afraid not, brother,” Ivan said. “Get back in. Let’s talk.”
Book sneered, but obeyed. As far as he’d come, he still had the physical strength of a child compared to the senior knights of his order, and he didn’t much feel like being manhandled.
He sat himself down in bed and watched as the pair entered. Anya was his mentor, and Ivan was her shield-brother. As far as the Brotherhood was concerned, she was his adoptive mother, and Ivan might be considered an uncle. Like most families, the paladins had their disagreements, but in the end they were expected to obey the Patriarchs and stay in touch – attend the reunions, check in from time to time. Marcus hadn’t been doing his duty.
In fact, he figured he was in a fair bit of trouble.
“Whose head was in the box, Marcus?” Ivan started.
“Emien Harthworth,” he said. The stunned silence was worth the honest answer.
“The viceroy?”
Marcus nodded.
“I don’t,” Ivan began, and paused, shaking his head. “Marcus, we don’t get involved in politics. We don’t join revolutions, nor do we put them down. We don’t interfere. We unite and protect. We are nameless, faceless. You know all of this. You were taught from childhood alongside the rest of us. Your fosterer told you this. The Grandmasters told you this. Anya told you this. It’s one of our foremost tenets. Have you forgotten?”
“No,” Marcus said.
“Have you forgotten The Nameless One, how close we came to oblivion? Do you doubt the importance of this tenet?”
“No,” Marcus said.
“Then why? Why would you sell your sword like a common thug? And gods help me, Marcus, why would you then assassinate an internationally recognized political figure?”
“You’re oversimplifying things,” Marcus said evenly.
“Then please, enlighten me,” Ivan said, obviously through barely contained anger.
“Well, for one, I had to kill him or he’d come after me. And then inevitably the Brotherhood would try to protect me, and then we’d have the whole government of Corone coming down on us.”
“No,” Ivan said. “He was being overthrown and you know it. If you hadn’t killed him, the Rangers would have, if not the people of Radasanth. This story is simple. You sold your services to a tyrant, you had a disagreement with that tyrant, and then you murdered him for vengeance.”
“Self-defense, too,” Marcus said with a shrug. “He put a bounty on my head.”
“This isn’t a game,” Anya said sternly.
“And I’m not a fucking child,” Marcus said, calm but incredulous. “What is this? If I’ve become a liability to the Brotherhood, disown me. I didn’t ask to be brought here. I walked away. Maybe I’d prefer to be on my own.”
“You can never be on your own, Marcus,” Ivan said. “The evil of this world is arrayed against us. Our ability to fight it makes us like beacons in the dark. Alone we can never survive.”
“Beacons,” Marcus said dismissively, making a face. “I’m a templar, Ivan. I know what we are better than you do. I made the pilgrimage. It was unintentional, but I did it.”
Ivan paused, taken aback.
“They didn’t tell you?” Book asked, his mouth twisting into a small grin. He glanced between Ivan and Anya. “You have no idea, do you? That…makes so much more sense.”
“What are you talking about, Marcus?” Anya asked finally.
“Take a seat,” Marcus said, waving toward the desk. “Let me tell you the story. Let me tell you exactly what you are. Then maybe you’ll see why one of us might turn sell-sword and assassin.”
It began near Sulgoran’s Axe. (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?20856-The-Siege-of-Kaltgorod&highlight=)
The Brotherhood was called north, and it answered with forty-eight bodies, paladins and squires both. Ivan, Anya, and Marcus were among them. They didn’t know what they were up against, but they were used to that. A torchbearer becomes accustomed to never knowing what might come out of the dark.
In this case, it was a horde of the frozen dead, raised by three necromancers who were, by all accounts, nothing special. Their army was impressive though. There was a single battle, fought over two days, and great devastation was wrought. Marcus was separated from his companions in the chaos; thought lost in an icy abyss, and disappeared for some months.
He returned to the south some time after the Brotherhood earned their victory and purged the north of the walking dead and their masters. He had been aged by his experience, hardened, but he spoke little of what happened to him there until now. Ivan and Anya were attentive as he told the full story.
When he fell into the abyss, Marcus found himself at the bottom of a frosty ravine. He could still hear the battle raging above, but could not find a way back to it. He began to search for a way around and up, because he did not have any climbing equipment. If he had not been a paladin, he would have died from the cold in the first hour.
His search took him farther and farther from the battle, until the sounds of war faded completely. He was lost, and night came on fast so he sheltered in a cave. When morning came, it was impossible to tell where he’d come from or where he must go. He stayed in the cave, starting fires as best he could with what little there was to burn, and he waited for rescue that did not come.
After a week he was starving to death. Night fell on the ninth night, and a pale woman appeared at the mouth of the cave, dressed in tattered finery and dragging a dead goat by its throat. Marcus knew at once that she was his enemy, and they fought. In the course of their battle, he learned that she was the mastermind behind the undead army, and it had been her plan to destroy the Brotherhood, but she’d been foiled by the ineptitude of her allies. Marcus thought he killed her, and he ate the goat she’d brought.
The next night, though, she rose again. Again they fought, and again Marcus won, but this time he did not attempt to destroy her immediately. She gave herself a name – Stygia – and admitted that she could not defeat the squire now that he’d been fed, for there was nothing on which she could feed for strength, for she drank the blood of living men alone. The animals would not sustain her, and she could not take Marcus’ blood by force without immolating herself because he was a paladin.
And yet she laughed, because Marcus would starve to death before lack of blood made her too weak to wake at sunset.
Marcus tossed her body from his cave and down the steep hill that led to it, and brooded throughout the next day. At sunset she came again, and again they fought, but lack of a fresh meal made Marcus weaker and their battle closer to even.
This time they ended their battle not with broken bones, but with a kiss, and Marcus abandoned hope. He allowed the vampire to feed on him, as a swift death would be preferable to starving. Both were shocked at the end: she did not drain him of all life, and he did not immolate her. The sun rose and Stygia slept, and when Marcus woke after sunset that night, he found another goat waiting for him.
Thus they sustained and protected one another, finding a strange, wary alliance between love and lust and hate. The weeks dragged on, and they whiled away the hours alternatively arguing and making love. The days grew longer, and warmer.
One morning, Stygia told him how to escape the ravine, and at sunset the following night she was gone and did not return. Marcus followed her direction, and found his way home.
“She corrupted you,” Ivan said sympathetically. “All this time you’ve been struggling with what the witch did to you…why didn’t you tell us, Marcus? We could have helped you, purged her…”
Marcus shook his head. “She didn’t corrupt me. Well, not in the way you’re thinking.”
Marcus glanced at Anya, and shifted. The young templar had never admitted this to his brothers and sisters – not out loud – but he sensed that Anya would know the truth of it.
“I’ve never felt it,” Book said. “The zeal you and Anya feel, the sureness in our mission, the righteousness. Oh, I’ve felt the rage, because we all do. The two of you, though…you use it, but it doesn’t trouble you. The Light has its own hate and you can feel it, but you don’t have any of your own. I do. It’s all I have, that hate and that rage, and when I call on the Light, we just feed one another in an endless loop. I could go on burning and killing forever, and never feel the guilt of the act.”
“That’s not true,” Anya said.
“It is,” Marcus said sharply. “What you’ve seen in me isn’t a conscience, Anya; it’s love for you and the others. I don’t feel guilt for what I’ve done, I feel fear of disappointing you, and Ivan, and the Patriarchs. Without your disapproval, I would be no different from a raging demon. I would just go on fighting and killing forever, and never think twice about it.”
“The witch…” Ivan began.
“No,” Marcus said, dismissing the statement with a wave of his hand. “I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember. She didn’t plant the darkness in me; she just opened my eyes to the nature of the darkness outside me.”
“I don’t understand,” Anya said softly. “This darkness you speak of…you are not a thing of the dark, Marcus. You came back to us. You strayed, but you set the witch aside and returned home. You came back to us.”
“Yes,” Marcus said. “But I did so knowing there was something wrong with me, and I had to find out what it was. I had to find out what made me different.”
Marcus had not known much about what he was before the Brotherhood had found him. He had been told that his parents were dead, and that he had nearly died himself before the Brotherhood saved him from death’s jaws. He knew his father was a merchant of some renown from Salvar, and that his mother was a mysterious figure from the dusty island of Fallien.
He felt that the answer to his inner darkness lay somewhere in his past, before the Light and the Brotherhood found him. His father was a dead end – he didn’t even have a name or a city to start in – but he knew enough about his mother to begin a search.
He made a deal with a baffling monk of The Citadel, and in return for training an odd horned child in the art of swordplay (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?22609-Prudence) he was given the first breadcrumb on the trail to answers. He went to Fallien and recruited the help of an old friend, escaped the city of Irrakam, and ventured foolishly into the wastes. (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?22640-Things-Better-Left-Buried)
Death hounded him relentlessly in Fallien, even after he earned a place amongst a tribe of nomads. They taught him to live their ways and speak their language and to war the way they warred, and he grew strong and capable. In time he would fall in love with one of them. She was in fact the wife of his adoptive chief – even his healthy relationships were illicit – but he was ready to fade from the world, to accept a relatively normal life.
Of course, it didn’t happen that way. A demon of the wastes tracked his scent to his unborn child, and the monster tore it from his love’s womb and left her to die in fear and agony. Marcus hunted the monster, and fate led him to both his goals at once, so that revenge and answers came one after the other.
Marcus Book’s mother, Safia, was still alive, and had retired to a life of service to Suravani. She was a priestess of some renown by that point, and she revealed the truth Marcus sought.
His father had been a merchant, yes, but also a pirate and raider. His name had been Shestov, and Marcus’ mother fell in love with him and abandoned all that was good and holy in her life to go away with him. She bore him a son, a son he loved fiercely. Safia asked only that their newborn be baptized in the light of Suravani, but Shestov refused. They eventually argued, the heaviest argument they’d ever had, and Safia vowed that no god but Suravani would have her flesh and blood.
She drew a sword and attempted to kill the child. Shestov placed himself between his wife and child, and the blade passed through him and killed him instantly. Marcus had been saved, but he suffered a deadly wound. Stricken by grief and horror at what she’d done, Safia gathered him up and set out into the desert to commit a great sin.
Suravani had no magic strong enough to save the boy, but Safia had heard rumors, and knew of one hope to correct her grave mistake. The Cult of Mitra was said to have a temple deep in the wastes, amongst the sandblasted ruins of Fallien’s old cities, and there they still practiced fearsome and eldritch rites.
She carried her son through the endless wastes, weeping and wailing and cursing the gods, until she found herself on the steps of the Great Temple of Mitra, wreathed in the sun and half submerged in the sand.
But when she looked down at him, she saw that he was dead.
He’d been dead for weeks.
Anya and Ivan stared, and Marcus stared back.
“Is that a joke?” Ivan said, disgusted.
“No,” Marcus said. “I thought she was lying, so after I killed the demon that took Serjah and my son from me, I went to the Temple of Mitra she spoke of. There was a Brother there. He was old, unfathomably old, but he was one of us – one of the first. He had our eyes, and he knew my name. I guess they name us after old heroes. Did you know I'm only the fifth Marcus Book?”
Marcus paused and shook his head, realizing just how long he’d struggled with what he learned in that temple, how badly he had wished he could share those findings with someone else. He had been forbidden. He didn’t care anymore.
“The Light burning in us isn’t nameless at all, and it isn’t featureless or elemental or whatever else they’ve told us. It’s a god. His name is Mitra, and he’s been driven mad.”
“Marcus,” Ivan said, “you realize the blasphemy…”
“Don’t stick your head in the sand, Ivan,” Marcus growled. “We’ve been taught better than that. Look at yourself. Look at Anya, look at me. We’re not knights burning with some inner fire; we’re conduits for something bigger than all of us combined – something dangerous and angry. We use it as best we can to fight off the dark, but gods, how many human beings have you seen explode, Ivan? I’ve seen so many that I thought it was normal until I got outside the Shining Halls.”
“We should talk about this later,” Anya said half-heartedly.
“No, you wanted answers,” Marcus said, turning and beating the palm of his hand against the wall so that the slap echoed. “So gods-damn-it, here they are.”
The senior knights went silent, so Marcus continued, staring at them unblinking.
“I went to the Temple of Mitra, and there was a knight there. He told me I’d made the pilgrimage, that I was a templar now. And he confirmed what my mother told me, and told me everything else. That child was dead. He was long dead…gods, as far as I understand it, he still is, I'm just living in his body.”
“I don’t…”
“Shut up,” Marcus sighed. “Just listen to me; I’m trying to explain something I don’t fully understand. I don’t know how much you know about the gods of Fallien. There are two major ones: Suravani and Mitra. Almost everyone worships Suravani now – she’s the moon goddess – but it wasn’t always that way. Mitra used to be king, presiding over the day and all its creatures, and Suravani’s night-creatures and demons constantly sought to undermine him and corrupt the men of the day. Eventually it drove Mitra mad, and he incinerated Fallien and burnt everything. Suravani was stupefied at what she’d driven her brother to do, so that when he retreated from the world she stepped in to protect everyone that was left. She became queen, but she’d been tempered by grief and horror.
“There was an altar in the Temple of Mitra, and when he went mad it burst into spiritual flame. The guardian calls it The Font now. Apparently there are dozens of them around the world, all tied to that original altar.
“Every so often a child is born full of leylines, more than is normal, and they typically grow up to become powerful wizards or sorcerers or what-have-you, but when they die young the leylines remain…vacant, I suppose you’d say, unused and unfilled. If a normal person dies and you toss him into a Font, he just burns away with all his mortal impurity, but one of these dead children…sometimes when you throw one of them in, the fire fills the leylines before it burns them up, so that the fire and the child become one and the same and the impurity of death is burnt away.”
“Are you saying we’re dead? That this happened to us?” Anya said, barely whispering.
“Every one of us,” Marcus said. “A plague took you when you were four. They found a little red-headed girl crying over her mother and just…just watched until she died, and then they tossed her in The Font here in Salvar and you came out. Ivan was stillborn. Grandmaster Pyne died of an infected leg wound. Ora Sten drowned.”
Marcus paused to laugh, and he laughed and laughed until tears ran down his face, and the senior knights stared at him. They might have thought it was a sick joke, except they felt the truth of it, so they just watched him.
“Gods,” Marcus said. “It never occurred to me until just now. I’ve put down hundreds of walking dead. Hundreds. Never occurred to me that I was one of them.”
They sat in silence for a long time, each digesting the words Marcus Book had spoken. When he spoke again, his voice was soft and raw.
“When I got back from the Temple, they tried to kill me. The people of Irrakam, I mean. They tried to bring me before the Jya to be executed. One of my best friends betrayed me, and I killed him. I barely got out alive, they just…” he shook his head. “I realized that evil isn’t organized, Ivan. It isn’t ‘arrayed against us.’ There’s darkness out there, and bleak things, and monsters, but it’s not some vast conspiracy to swallow the world and drive us all to madness and chaos.
“It’s banal. It’s stupid. It’s not out to get us, it’s in us. Evil is born from mistakes, and ignorance, and confusion, and suffering. We’re not beacons of light holding back a tide of living blackness eager to swallow us. We’re fools in tin armor, waving lanterns at shadows, making mountains out of anthills. That’s why we can’t unite the innocent masses. That’s why young boys will throw rocks at young girls because they like them, and laugh at executions.
“This world isn’t just some tiny light in the middle of an ocean of black. And it’s not shades hiding from the sun. Sometimes it’s dawn and sometimes it’s dusk, but most of the time? Most of the time it’s just shades of grey, and who’s to say a man should die for the evil he did yesterday, or live for the good he might do tomorrow?”
Having only just escaped Irrakam with his life, his head swimming with horrible revelations, Marcus Book was adrift, homeless, and confused. He saw his old enemies in a new light, and saw the shadows on the faces of his friends. So he went somewhere new.
Radasanth.
He met Emien Harthworth – one of the three viceroys running the city during the bloody civil war – and he saw fit to sell his services as a fighter. Why not? He was every bit the same as the monsters he’d spent his life fighting, and if violence and bloodshed were his birthright, he would claim them.
The truth? The truth was that he wanted the simplicity of death, and an end to answerless questions.
So he did what he was hired to do. He fought battles, and murdered insurgents. He hunted the Am’aleh Seas and found love for a third time in the arms of a feisty she-pirate. He trained revolutionaries alongside an old frenemy (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23022-V-The-Jagged-Masquerade), and he put down an attempted coup (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23047-To-Us-These-Streets-Belong). He became cold and hard-hearted and numb, and he avoided his duties and friends and curses. He was lost in a nest of vipers, never more than an inch from inevitable betrayal and death.
It came to a head in the city of Serenti, when the Rangers and the Empire finally fought their war in the open fields and spent lives honestly, and spilled blood for all to see. The war was not righteous and it was not glorious, and at the end of that battle, by the light of their burning homes, the people of Corone saw clearly, and so did Marcus Book.
He’d made a friend while serving the Empire – a boy named Mycah Downing. He saved that boy’s life, and when Emien Harthworth sacrificed his mercenaries as pawns in a greater scheme, Mycah paid the debt back though it cost him everything.
Emien Harthworth outlawed Marcus Book for the crime of surviving where he was supposed to die. The Rangers outlawed him for serving the Empire so well. The people wanted his blood because he’d served the Butcher of Gisela without conscience. So Marcus faked his death and waited, and when the people turned on the viceroys, he struck.
Using secret tunnels he’d discovered during the Siege of the City Watch, Marcus snuck into Harthworth’s manor and took the viceroy’s head as a trophy, and then he narrowly escaped and fled north to Salvar. On he went, losing himself in drink until Ivan found him just beyond Knife’s Edge.
And here he was.
Alone, but for the skull of a politician.
“Stygia didn’t corrupt me,” Marcus said. “I’m the way I am because I was born when my mother killed my father, and because I’m a dead man walking. I killed Emien Harthworth because he tried to kill me, and because he deserved to die for what he did to Mycah. And I served him in the first place because I have no mission, no calling, no place. I’m not a light in the shadows. I’m not a torchbearer. I’m just a man who was never meant to be. And gods, Ivan. Anya. I don’t know what to do with that, so I just did what I did.”
Marcus shrugged.
“I’ve heard enough,” Ivan said after a long moment. He did not look at Anya, or Marcus. He stood, and he walked away without closing the door behind him, and he was gone.
“He doesn’t believe me,” Marcus said. “I guess I can’t blame him. I’m not even half his age, and look what it did to me.”
Anya shook her head. “You have it wrong,” she said.
“Which part?”
“The thought that our duty is somehow meaningless. Even if what you say is true, and it’s a lot to swallow, Marcus…a lot. But if it’s true, it changes nothing. We still have a duty.”
“How do you figure that, Anya? We’ve been lied to. The duty they’ve given us has been passed down and steeped in lies. This idea that we’re liberators, protectors, avengers…it’s pointless, Anya. Nothing changes. This is not a war we can win. The innocent are not innocent, they’re just people, and they don’t need us to save them. Whether they live or die, thrive or suffer, life will go on and good and evil will go on existing in the hearts of every man, with or without us. We have done nothing, and we will do nothing. Why take on this abstract burden?”
“Because you’re wrong,” Anya said after a moment. “I see what you’re saying Marcus, but you’re thinking about this the wrong way. It’s not a matter of winning the war, Marcus. You’re right about that – the war is unending, and no effort on our part is going to change that, but that doesn’t excuse us from fighting it. You balk at what happened to us, so you see the wrong in it – that I was left to die as a child, it galls you. Don’t you see? That battle was worth fighting to you. Would it have changed the war if you’d saved me? No. But Marcus, look at the good I’ve done. Look at the good you could have done. If you’d been there to save me, every happiness in my life would have been your legacy, along with every joy I gave. Isn’t that worth fighting for – that smallest chain of good – even if the war goes on raging?”
Marcus was silent for a long moment, and then he turned the embers in his eyes toward his mentor and said, “It isn’t a question of fighting the battles, Anya. It’s a question of making men soldiers to fight those battles, or letting those men face their private darkness alone.”
“Are you saying you would prefer to have been left dead?”
“I don’t know,” Marcus said. “Right now, I just don’t.”
She nodded slowly.
“I think you do, Marcus. I think you’re the one person, out of all of us, who has done the search and found the answer to that question.”
“Have I?”
“Of course,” she said with a chuckle. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“No.”
“Marcus,” she said with a sigh. “You’re still here, aren’t you?”
She kissed the top of his head and told him she loved him, and then she left and closed the broken door behind her. It drifted open a crack, and he heard her walk away and leave the room unguarded.
He lay down and went to sleep.
He dreamed of windblown Irrakam. The city was teeming, as always, the air thick with voices and the smell of spices and horse dung, and the air did not pierce the alleyways. It was high noon but the sun dimmed, and then continued to darken, and men turned their eyes skyward – when had it last rained in Irrakam? But there were the clouds, deep and black and roiling, and lightning sparked in the voluminous shadows as they swallowed the sun.
Marcus watched the sky for a time, and then the men began to scream and point and he realized they were pointing at him, and when they saw him their faces twisted up in hate and terror and they would shout. He watched dispassionately, aware of their hate and fear and part of him knew he was in danger, and part of him wondered why the sight of him universally inspired these feelings, and part of him wondered why he didn’t care. He wondered why he knew they were all going to die because of him, and he wondered why it wasn’t important to him. Why did he feel nothing?
And then he woke up with a gasp, and realized that the screams were real.
Adrenaline flooded his veins, reaching out through his shoulders and along his scalp from his spine, and he was on his feet before he knew anything at all. Some hours had passed since he’d fallen to sleep, he gauged, but not many. There were men running through the halls screaming, and blades were being drawn, and doors were being slammed and barred and battered. And something was raging through the halls, and it roared.
The door was still unlocked, and Marcus let himself out into the hall. He searched one way at a half crouch until he found a barred door, and then he searched another and found it open. He came upon a bloodied corpse and examined it quickly, and the answers came together but told a disjointed story.
He knew now that he was beneath the Grand Cathedral in Knife’s Edge, and he was a guest of the Church of the Ethereal Sway – they were allies to the Brotherhood, though they did not share a faith, strictly speaking. This man was a knight or a servant of an inquisitor, and he’d been killed by something man-sized but clawed. He had tried to draw a sword, but the hall was too narrow, and before he could draw a knife instead it was on him, and his neck was open.
Whatever it was, it howled, and Marcus moved on. He felt its presence before he saw it, and he began to doubt himself – a demon, here? In the heart of the city, deep beneath the most secure holy site in the known world? Impossible.
But there it was, hammering its red fists against a closed door, and men and women screamed as the wood began to buckle. Marcus came on it from behind, reached beneath its right arm, and shoved it against the nearby wall as it turned. The demon was confounded for a brief moment, blinking dull black eyes as it looked down on Marcus Book. He did not wait for it to understand. He shoved his forearm into its throat mercilessly so that it gagged, and then he grabbed it by the horns and forced its forehead down into his knee. The nose shattered and blood splashed onto his knee and sank into the delicate material of his pants, leaving the skin sticky and hot beneath. He slipped around behind the demon and wrapped his arm around its throat, and he squeezed, and between choking on its own blood and finding its airway compressed, it was soon dead.
“Let me in,” he whispered hoarsely, and they did. They were young men and women in severe habits and modest tunics, wide-eyed and thin – students, scholars, theologians. “Where are the knights?”
“They’ve all gone to the vaults, sir,” one of the women finally stammered out, “where it began.”
“Where what began?”
“The invasion,” a man said as if it were obvious. “You hear about the vault where the inquisitors keep things too dangerous or volatile to destroy. Unholy things. Someone must have figured one out, turned it on, let them through.”
“How many demons have you seen?”
“Just that one,” the first woman said.
“When did it start?” Marcus asked, searching the room as he spoke. He found a letter opener.
“Twenty minutes ago? Maybe a little longer…shouldn’t you take his sword?”
Marcus glanced at where the man pointed. Another knight lay dead just inside the door, his sword sheathed.
“It didn’t help him,” Marcus said.
It wasn’t hard to find his way to the vault. He followed the screams and the trail of bodies, and when he found streaks of blood he moved away from where they led. Eventually he found the first of the barricades, and the church’s knights let him through, filling him in quickly as he went.
They told him of how they'd pushed the demons back into the vault, with only a scant few slipping through before they’d set up the barricades. They didn’t know where the Brotherhood’s knights were, but someone had glimpsed Anya going into the vault some time before.
Nobody had heard anything from inside the vault for some time.
He came upon the vault door suddenly, and paused a moment, momentarily too awestruck to continue. It was a tremendous dehlar door, gilded and shimmering, moored at an angle as if it were the entrance to a god’s cellar. The Sway’s best formed a shield wall in the massive doorway, but the demons were pushing them back, led by a beast twelve feet tall and wider across than most men are tall.
A gap opened in the wall when the beast threw himself against the men, and they tumbled away like twigs. Marcus filled the gap, armed only with a letter opener, which he quickly lost when he stabbed the beast in the thigh and it wrenched away, taking the little knife with it.
“Fuck,” Marcus whispered, and the monster turned on him. Self-preservation trumped duty in the minds of the men to either side of him, and they backed away from the templar and left him to his fate.
The beast lumbered forward, intent on crushing Marcus underfoot. He saw death coming on slow and took a dive, thrilled by a fresh rush of adrenaline, and his bare feet slipped on a pool of blood and he fell and cursed as his hip hit the ground. The beast turned itself around and snorted, and Marcus recovered in a quick scramble, snatching up a fallen sword from one of his lost allies. The beast took a step forward, deliberately landing the footfall on one of the fallen knights, and he screamed before his ribs were ground to dust and his lungs popped inside his chest.
Marcus licked his lips, and added that to the list of ways he didn’t want to die.
The beast lunged, raising both of its trunk-thick arms overhead, and it brought them down together. Marcus charged forward, beneath the arms, and then to the right side. He gripped the beast’s right arm at the shoulder and hoisted himself up, one foot on its half-bent knee, and then he plunged his sword into its ribs and twisted, and drew the blade out, and stabbed again.
The beast roared and twisted at the hips, and grabbed Marcus around the middle in one hand, and lifted him as if he were nothing, and then it began to squeeze. Pain and panic set in as one, but even as his brain screamed in fear and his inner voice cried no no no, his body acted. He sliced the beast’s inner forearm and wrist, and then he stabbed and twisted again, and the demon deafened him with a roar and then its grip loosened.
Marcus landed on his feet, but his legs gave out from under him and he crumpled and fell to his ass and breathed in long, harsh breaths. His ribs ached and his lungs burned, but nothing was broken. The beast had its back turned to him now, and it cradled its arm to its chest, but its body language announced a building rage. Marcus knew the signs all too well – he’d felt them in himself more times than he could count – and he knew that when the hate reached its apex, no amount of pain or damage would stop the monster from taking its revenge.
He scrambled to his feet and he charged, raising the hilt of his bloodied sword to his shoulder, and then he stabbed with all his might. The blade pierced the beast’s leg at the back of the knee, and emerged on the other side at an angle, bending around the unyielding kneecap. The monster howled in wordless agony and lashed, spilling thick ropes of viscous black froth from its jaws, and it reached down in a desperate effort to free itself from such unholy pain.
Marcus let the blade go and danced away, and then he found another discarded sword and charged again as the beast turned to defend itself. It only had one dependable leg now, and the slightest movement caused it unspeakable anguish, so when the templar threw himself against its chest, it flailed and fell backward, drawing in a deep and ragged lungful of air. This time it did not scream – the pain was too much.
Book pressed the blade against the demon’s throat as it fell back against the stone floor, and then he pushed until the flesh gave way, and the monster gagged and lashed and drowned on its own blood. As it flailed, it tossed the young paladin away, and he hit the ground rolling and slipping, streaked in blood and gore. He lay still for what seemed like a long time, listening to the beast’s death throes, and then he heard a very human cheer go up.
Men surrounded him and hoisted him up off the floor as he coughed, and he leaned on a mailed shoulder when it was offered to him.
“Anya,” he wheezed. “Where are my Brothers? Where is Ivan?”
“Inside,” someone said close to his ear. “They’re still inside. Catch your breath boy. If they live, we’ll get to them.”
The resistance within the vault was thin, but Marcus could not shake the feeling that something deadly was looming just beyond sight – that despite their victories, hope for survival was diminishing with every passing half-instant.
The vault was tremendous, lined in dehlar and decorated with gleaming statues of knights with towering shields and wicked pikes, and there were hundreds of chambers sealed with locks as large as a man, and painted with glowing runes. Marcus could feel the things they kept locked up here, artifacts so evil that many of them had developed their own black sentience, their own pain and blood thirst.
But it all paled to what lay ahead.
There were two spires built from bones – human bones, bloodstained and impossibly twisted and bent, with daemonic text painstakingly carved into every surface. They stood perhaps ten feet tall, and were topped by violet crystals, and each emitted a stream of energy, and it was as if the atmosphere itself was full of the essence of decay and fear and shame. Where the streams met, reality was torn and drew in upon itself where it collapsed and pulled inward, and on the other side one could only see glimpses of something molten concealed in smoke and shadow. Marcus had never felt such revulsion and hopelessness, and he might have fallen to his knees and despaired and welcomed death if he weren’t stunned into inaction. It could only be one place.
“Haidia,” he whispered.
“Yes,” Ivan said. He emerged from beyond the leftmost spire, carrying his massive flanged mace across one shoulder. He was fully armored, and his eyes were grim. “You made it, Brother.”
“Barely,” Marcus said. “What the hell happened? Where’s Anya?”
“I haven’t seen Anya in some time. The first wave of demons was overwhelming; she retreated from them deeper into the vault. As for the portal? The inquisition didn’t even know what these things were when they found them; they just took them and buried them down here. Imagine if someone else had found them first, Marcus. The ability to rip holes between here and Haidia, anywhere in the world. Can you imagine the chaos; if the demons could flood into our world, strike en masse from anywhere?”
“We won’t have to,” Marcus said. “Looks like we got here in time. The portal feels…unstable. They must have only been able to slip through a scouting party before it destabilized again.”
“Yes,” Ivan said, turning to look at the tear between Althanas and its hell. “But rest assured, Marcus, it will stabilize again, especially when a greater evil discovers the gate and pulls it open from that side. There will be no stopping them then. Without us, they will wash over Knife’s Edge like a tide.”
“Let’s get this done, then,” Book said, turning to the spires.
“Indeed.”
Ivan lifted one massive steel boot and shoved it into the small of Marcus’ back, sending him sprawling forward. His jaw smacked against the stone floor and blood burst from his mouth, and he watched a solitary tooth rattle across the flagstones, white streaked with red. He groaned, dazed, concussed, and he struggled to find the strength and coordination to lift himself again.
Ivan did it for him, grabbing him by the back of the neck, and he effortlessly lifted the templar from the floor. His limbs hung loose, and he struggled to maintain consciousness.
“They’ve always needed us, Marcus,” Ivan said, “because that was always out there, waiting. Always. How close have we come to the end, over and over and over. The Forgotten Ones, the wizards, the sleeping gods. Gods, Marcus, it was less than a year ago when some dead thing woke up and rearranged the entire island of Scara Brae. An island. What are we against such devastation?”
Marcus growled and reached up, gripping Ivan by the forearm, but it was useless. For all his strength, Ivan was stronger – infinitely stronger. The older knight’s eyes burned bright with Mitra’s Light, gleaming like twin fires in the vault’s gloom.
“We’re nothing,” Ivan said. “Alone, we’re absolutely powerless. That is why we unite the people, Marcus. Together, we’ve been able to beat back these monsters. Look at it, Marcus. Look at the gash, the hole in our world, and look beyond it, and tell me they’re not arrayed against us. Tell me they’re not a plague that will wipe us out. Look at that and tell me again that evil is banal, that it isn’t vast and that it isn’t perched on the edge of all that is good, ready to swallow the world.”
Marcus growled and clenched Ivan’s arm, spitting blood into his brother’s face when he said, “Why?”
Ivan scoffed, outraged, and he searched Marcus’ face as if he could not believe the man was serious. “You were going to tear us apart!” he roared. “Your stories your…your blasphemies! I won’t let you do it, you petulant little shit. They need us. They need the Light, we’re the only things holding that back, and I’m not going to let you undermine us.”
“By killing everyone you’re claiming to protect? Knife’s Edge isn’t ready for this, Ivan…nobody is ready for this. If you don’t stop this now, we all die – hundreds of thousands will die in the first hour.”
“But the rest will unite,” Ivan said. “The civil wars will stop. When the options are unite or die, men will unite, and the Brotherhood will lead them, and it will be proud and unbroken, and sure in its mission. I don’t want this, Marcus – I don’t – but if we need an age of darkness to bring about an age of unity and prosperity, I don’t see a gods-damn choice. You forced my hand.”
“Fine,” Marcus said. “Fine. I won’t say anything. I won’t speak of…I won’t blaspheme. I won’t undermine the Brotherhood. Kill me, and there will be no one left to say the things I said. You don’t need to do this. Break the link, Ivan, the Brotherhood can go back to the way it was, we can go on as we were. We can fix the world without this.”
Ivan scoffed. “Don’t you see, Marcus? You’re going to die anyway. We all are. It’s not just you; it’s me, and every man in this cathedral – in the city. You’ve polluted us with your blasphemy, you’ve…you’ve corrupted everything. No, it’s too late. This is the way it happens, old friend. This is how it ends, and how a better world begins.”
Marcus growled desperately and struggled against Ivan’s grip, lifting himself and shoving his bare feet together into Ivan’s armored chest, but it was futile. The elder knight did not budge.
“Look at you,” he said. “Suddenly you regret your solitude. Now you see why you need the Brotherhood. You shouldn’t have betrayed us, Marcus. You wanted to live alone, and now you’ll die alone.”
Ivan threw Marcus to the ground brutally, and the younger knight wheezed as he struck the stones, and he curled up, hugging his ribs. Ivan lifted one boot high and prepared to bring it down on the templar’s head, but an arrow struck him in the shoulder and ricocheted off the armor.
“Get away from him,” one of the Sway knights said, nocking another arrow. His fellows gathered to either side of him, brandishing their weapons unsurely.
“You are noble and commendable,” Ivan said regretfully. “The world could have made good use of you in the days to come.”
He stepped away from where Marcus lay and let his mace drop from his shoulder, and then he lifted it high and charged. The men balked, and every one of them realized at once that when he swung – just once – they would all die.
The mace went high, and then it came down.
And then it fell loose, and the stone floor crumbled where it met the flanges, and the knights all stared at it where it lay, ownerless and discarded. And then, one by one, they looked up, and watched as Anya shoved a mailed fist into Ivan’s face and broke his nose.
Ivan once threw a full-grown ox through the window of an inn, and he was well-known for resisting the pull of up to six desperate horses. Ravenous demons broke their bodies on his armor and he did not budge. How many secret wars had he seen? More than he could remember. He had more than two lifetimes to his name, and the years did not weary him. He was a champion’s champion.
And he’d always felt a little bit intimidated by Anya Shea when she was protecting someone.
At the moment, she was lifting him overhead, and now she threw him to the ground so fiercely that his armor bent and dented.
He kicked her in the stomach, which set her back two steps – just long enough for him to crawl to his feet again. She punched him in the back of the head, and he nearly bit his tongue in half. He turned and shoved her head into a stone pillar, but it did not give her pause. She lifted him bodily and shoved him through the pillar, and as it crumbled around him and he fell, he began to feel a bit desperate.
Marcus found that he was beginning to be able to breathe again without the pain blinding him. One of the Sway knights came to his side, and he snaked his arm around the man’s neck as they moved to their feet. He tried to draw Marcus away from the paladins as they fought, but he shook his head.
“The spires,” he said, coughing.
Book steadied his legs and lurched toward the rightmost spire. He hesitated before touching the thing, and then he pushed, but it did not budge.
“NO!” Ivan shouted. Anya grabbed him by the back of his armor, turned him around, and floored him with a haymaker.
Marcus tried to lift the spire out of its moorings, but it would not move. He realized that it was bound to the portal, and that no physical force would move it.
So he called on something more ethereal.
The Light erupted through him, burning away his injuries. It was painful, but he felt his strength returning, his bruised bones mending, and his lungs relaxing. He flexed his fingers, and then he grasped the spire and channeled Mitra’s fire and hate into it, and the effect was immediate. The stream of unholy energy sputtered and emitted an ear-splitting screech, and the stream sparked and wavered, spilling tongues of witchfire into the air as the spire dissolved. The second spire tipped, launching its own snakes of energy in every direction, and it caught fire.
The edges of the portal rippled and contracted, and then shuddered and stretched, and the portal widened.
“No,” Marcus breathed. “Oh, fuck no.”
“Why isn’t it closing?” the Sway knight said, all color draining from his face.
“Because something on the other side is holding it open,” Marcus said.
Ivan hit the ground rolling, and his armor sent a spray of sparks dancing across the floor where steel met stone. He stopped himself not far from his mace, reclaimed it, and shoved the end of it into Anya’s stomach. She doubled over, and then he kicked her and sent her sprawling.
His eyes were burning like beacons, and sweat rolled down his bloodied cheeks in rivulets. His teeth were red when he smiled, but the smile was brief, and his breathing grew shallow.
Ivan roared with hate and fury – not his own, but that of Mitra himself. He raised his mace high, and then he brought it down on the floor with such force that the entire vault shuddered and swayed and the ground exploded, and a crater widened where the flanges met the stones. The room was divided, the far side collapsing into a pit opened up by the crater, and the portal side was shoved upward as the ledge descended beneath it.
Ivan fell to one knee and struggled to breathe, to contain himself, but a dawning horror played across his face. Marcus was on the portal side with the Sway knight and Ivan. Anya was on the far side with the rest. She got to her feet and paused a moment to catch her breath, staring helplessly up at her foe.
They both knew the fight was over though. Marcus could see it too. Ivan had gone too far, called on the Light too recklessly, and now he couldn’t contain it again. It was filling him, pushing outward on him from within, and it would inevitably and unstoppably burn him away in an explosion of celestial force. They’d all seen it happen before, but always to squires – always to men no older than twenty, new to channeling. When it happened to them, it was devastating. Bits of bone lodge themselves in solid stone and hardened steel. Houses collapse and ignite. Men are disintegrated.
Ivan was old, and he was a powerful channeler.
Marcus stared at him, and he stared back vacantly.
“Jump!” Anya roared. “Jump down! We’ll close the vault, it will buy us time! Gods damn it, Marcus, jump!”
Marcus looked at her dumbly, and then turned and looked at the portal. It would be stable soon, he could feel it, and just beyond it he could see the demonic masses collecting, preparing, looming. The Sway knight gave himself a running start and jumped the gap, landing heavily on the far side, and his fellows gathered around him and hurried away.
“JUMP!”
Marcus spat, and bent down, lifting Ivan bodily over his shoulders with a harsh grunt.
“Hold on, Brother,” he whispered. “Just hold it together a little longer.”
“Marcus,” Anya cried, shaking her head. “Don’t throw down your duty. Jump down Marcus, please.”
“I’m not,” Marcus yelled back across the chasm, grinning hardly. “I’m doing my duty. I get it now, Anya. Go.”
“What are you doing?” she cried, clenching her fists and pressing them to her head.
“Found a battle worth fighting,” he shouted back.
“You don’t have to do this!” she shrieked.
“I do, Anya,” he said. “I’m still here, aren’t I? Go!”
He turned and began to walk toward the portal, grunting with the effort of carrying a fully armored paladin. Ivan groaned and grasped at the templar’s back, whispering, “Hurry, Marcus. Hurry.”
“Marcus,” Anya cried desperately, one last time.
“Go,” Marcus shouted back over his shoulder, and then he paused, and turned, grinning wider. “Anya,” he said, “Anya, it’s all about love. Tell people that, when they ask. Go!”
And then he leapt through the portal.
The first thing he felt was the heat, pressing in on him like a wall, crushing every inch. The air was thin and smelled so strongly of brimstone that he felt himself go lightheaded. He dropped Ivan heavily, and fell to one knee.
The elder knight took a shivery breath, and lifted his mace high. “Take it,” he wheezed.
Marcus took the weapon, and grunted at its weight as he got himself to his feet.
“What have I done,” Ivan whimpered. “What have I done?”
“Evil,” Marcus replied, looking out over the smoky black, where faces loomed and fires burned.
“How did I think…how did it come…”
“I told you, Ivan,” Marcus said. “Evil is mistakes. It’s passion and madness and ignorance and pain. It’s banal, and it’s in all of us. And I forgive you.”
“Mitra,” Ivan sighed. “Gods, you were right. I can feel him, his hate. Gods help us, Marcus, his hate…he hates us all, and he knows your name. What have I done?”
“Ivan?” Marcus said.
“Yes.”
“Shut up, yes?”
Ivan was quiet a moment, and then he began to laugh, and Marcus joined him, and the sound rang out clear throughout the molten wastes of Haidia and echoed throughout its cruel caverns and across its smoky lakes.
“What’s going to happen to me, Marcus?” he said, when the laughter subsided.
“You’re going to be a spark in the dark, Brother,” Marcus said, “and you’re going to set hell on fire.”
They were lashing ladders together on Anya’s orders, creating a bridge.
“Hurry, damn you,” she hissed at them.
They were hurrying, but their hands were shaking to a man.
Anya saw through the portal as the first of the demons emerged from the dark, followed soon after by another, and a third, and they leapt upon Marcus as one. He battered them with Ivan’s mace, twisting and turning, burning with Mitra’s Light.
They tried to extend the ladder across the chasm, but it fell short. They called for another and more rope.
A demon raked its claws across Marcus’ back and he went down, but only for an instant. The bodies began to pile up. They began to try going around him while he was distracted, but Marcus always caught them.
A hulk emerged from the smoke, carrying a club made from the bodies of other demons. Marcus raised his middle finger at it, and the minions closed in around him.
And then Ivan exploded in a blazing rush of holy light, a wave that seared the eye for an instant, and in that moment frozen in time, Anya could see hundreds of demons dissolve into fire and ash in a fraction of a second.
And when the light faded, the portal was gone, and the vault was cavernous and silent and empty but for Anya and the knights of the Sway.
Revenant
07-11-12, 03:42 PM
Plot: 22 – This was a very interesting story and very well executed. Posts flowed well one into the next and the entire thread moved solidly. To have earned a higher score here I would have liked to have had more feeling put into fleshing out the portal chamber, as it felt like a generic location.
Character: 23 – The conversation felt very natural and the introduction and Marcus’ story really drew me into the thread and did an excellent job of setting up the second half of the thread.
Prose: 22 – Nothing really jumped out to break flow of the thread.
Wildcard: 8
TOTAL: 75
Amen gains 1830 exp and 225 gp.
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