by Dante King
“Undead troops too weak. Demogorgon eat all of them. Then Demogorgon start to eat villages, towns, cities… all of them. Nothing can stop Demogorgon and Blood God. Old broken clocks everywhere in dream.”
“Thank you, Drok,” I murmured. I didn’t like the sound of any of this. As I mulled over everything Drok had just told me, he placed one of his massive hands on my forearm and shot me an intense look.
“We need to go see Wise Woman, Vance,” he rumbled gravely. “We stay in Brakith too long, waste too much time. Please, Vance, we must go. She tell me, only you can fight Blood God, and now, in dream, I see Blood God grow very strong. Too strong. Soon, Blood God too strong to fight, even for you. Then, Blood God eat everyone, everything. Nobody can stop him. Not even you.”
I nodded. “I understand, my friend. And you’re right; perhaps we have wasted too much time here in Brakith. Yes, maybe I have. Shit. Things are getting worse than I realized. All right, all right, we’ll leave on our quest at first light tomorrow. I’ll tell everyone during the course of today. I just have a few last things to take care of here, but you’re right, Drok, we can’t waste any more time here. The Blood God must be taken care of before he becomes too powerful.”
A smile brightened Drok’s broad, grimy face, but it did little to alleviate the ugliness that afflicted his greasy features.
“Thank you Vance,” he said. “Wise Woman be happy to see you. She have special magic weapon for you, help you fight Blood God. She say to Drok, Vance cannot defeat Blood God without this weapon.”
“And do you have any idea what this weapon is?”
He shrugged and shook his head.
“She no say. She tell Drok she only tell you, Vance, what magic weapon is. But Drok think weapon is strong—very, very strong.”
“Okay, my filthy friend, you sharpen those battle axes of yours and get your grubby belongings packed up. Like I said, we’ll be leaving tomorrow.”
Chapter Two
I left Drok to get whatever preparations he needed to organize underway and headed over to Rollar’s chambers. He was my other northern barbarian ally, a former enemy who was now one of my closest friends. Rollar may have looked like Drok, but that was where the similarities between the two of them ended, even though they had the same cultural and linguistic background.
Unlike Drok, Rollar spoke the Common Tongue fluently, and since he’d infiltrated the Splendorous Army, working his way up to the rank of sergeant, he knew a great deal about the Lord of Light, as well as possessing a vat of knowledge about many of the Old Gods, whose relics he had traversed the length and breadth of Prand to track down. What was more, he believed that a prophecy had foretold my coming and that same prophecy bound him to serve me. More than almost anyone else in my inner circle, I could trust Rollar with my life, which was kind of weird to think about, considering how bent I’d been on sticking his head on a spike just a couple months ago. But times had changed, and I was used to adapting to far greater transformations than a powerful enemy becoming a powerful ally.
Without reservations, I rapped on Rollar’s door. “Rollar, it’s me. You awake?” I asked.
“Come in, Lord Vance,” he said.
I opened the door and saw he had gotten his day well underway. A candle was burning on the desk in his chamber, and a number of scrolls and tomes were spread out across it. He’d been scouring the libraries of Brakith for information about the Old Gods, particularly the Blood God and the Demogorgon.
“Have you managed to learn anything new in recent days?” I asked. “It sure as hell looks like you’ve been delving deep into this research.”
“Aye, Lord Vance. I did find out something interesting, something that you might find to be pertinent.”
“Go on.”
“There’s an ancient prophecy, all but forgotten,” he said. “I found it in an old tome that looked like it was last cracked open hundreds of years ago. It speaks of Death riding in from the sky on a great blue storm, his armies covering the land, but this prophecy tells of Death being a hero, who hopes to save the living from the scourge of the Red Sea, which has risen in a great tsunami, ready to crash across the shores of the living and drown the whole land in blood.”
“That sounds very pertinent indeed,” I remarked, idly stroking Grave Oath’s demon-head pommel as I spoke. “It sure as hell sounds like it’s gotta be a reference to me engaging in battle with the Blood God. But what does the imagery mean? I mean, there’s Death—likely me, right, the God of Death—riding in on a ‘blue storm’ out of the sky? What the fuck could that mean?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” Rollar admitted. “These old prophecies can be quite vague. I’m not sure how much of it to take literally and how much is just symbolic metaphor.”
“Did it say who wins the encounter?”
Rollar shook his head, the expression on his face grave. “The last pages of the tome have been devoured by rats or mice, and those are, unfortunately, the pages that tell of the outcome of this huge battle that the seer foresaw.”
“Shit. Do you think the ‘blue storm’ could have something to do with my harpy? I mean, she flies, she’s blue… could be something, right?”
Rollar shrugged. “It could be, but as large as your harpy is, it’d require a real stretch of the imagination to call her a ‘storm.’ Maybe if you had an army of undead harpies, yes, but they’re rare enough in the wilds these days. You were lucky to capture one of them, and I’m not sure how soon you’re going to be able to find another, let alone enough of them to look like any kind of storm in the sky.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I said. “Damn. Well, I wonder what the hell it could mean if it isn’t that?”
Rollar narrowed his eyes. “There is one more possibility. But… no, forget about it.”
“Tell me, Rollar. We have to consider all possibilities.”
“Well, it’s improbable, but it might be something else. Different creatures.”
“And what creature might that be?”
“Dragons,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, his eyes darting from side to side, as if the mere mention of these creatures would be enough to conjure one from thin air.
I scoffed; this was even more of an improbability than an army of harpies. “Rollar, come on. Dragons haven’t been seen in Prand for hundreds of years. Hell, maybe even thousands of years, depending on who you ask. They’re as good as extinct. And anyway, they’re not blue. No, you’re reaching way too far with that one, buddy, way too far.”
“Actually,” he said, with a slightly more confident voice now, “there was a species of blue dragon. Storm drakes, their scales electric blue, their eyes glowing a shade of violet. The largest of all dragons, they were said to be able to devour a mammoth in one bite and blast lightning from their mouths. One bolt of lightning from a storm drake, it was said, could turn even the stoutest stone tower into a pile of rubble in one blast.”
“And when, my friend, was one of these storm drakes last seen in Prand?” I asked, raising my eyebrow skeptically.
“They never existed in Prand,” he admitted. “But across the sea, in the Hailstorm Mountains of Yeng, they were last seen a mere few hundred years ago, according to the chronicler—”
“Rollar,” I said, “we don’t have time to waste on rumors of mythical beasts last seen, supposedly, across the ocean hundreds of years ago. That fucking asshole the Blood God is getting stronger by the day, and fuck knows where my uncle is after he escaped through that portal, but I think we both know that that scumbag has likely ramped up whatever evil shit he’s been doing on behalf of the Blood God. Rodrick, I’m guessing, ever since I kicked his ass, has been working double time on bringing the Demogorgon into this plane of existence.”
“Understood,” he said. “We have much greater problems to deal with.”
“That we do. And we’ll be starting tomorrow. We’re leaving Brakith at first light. Drok had another of his dreams, the ones he claims are messages from his W
ise Woman, and the meaning in this one was crystal fucking clear: time is running out, and the Blood God is getting stronger by the day. We have go to the Wastes and see this woman, and I need to get my hands on whatever potent magical weapon she’s got waiting for me.”
Rollar nodded once. “As you command, Lord Vance. I’ll be ready to leave at first light tomorrow. I just need to do a little more research today though, if you don’t mind.”
“Read away, my friend, read away,” I said as I turned to leave his chamber. “Just make sure that you’re ready to roll at dawn tomorrow.”
“I will be, Lord Vance.”
I gave him a curt nod and then left him to his scrolls and tomes. Perhaps he would find out something else about this mysterious prophecy, or perhaps he wouldn’t. I wasn’t about to pin my hopes on anything that vague though. No, I had been feeling a strong pull to the north for weeks now, and I intended to follow up on that hunch now.
I hoped my plate armor was ready; it would have been a shame to have had to leave Prand without it. I decided to go and check on the armorer’s progress before doing anything else.
I walked through the castle, being greeted by a ton of guards and servants along the way, all calling me “m’lord.” It was taking some getting used to. Though I was officially the lord of this town and the county around it, I still felt like an exiled assassin in some ways. Reality was taking a while to sink in.
I headed out of the castle and into town. As I was on my way to the market square, I saw some guards securing a bunch of prisoners in the stocks set up near the entrance to the town. Then they lowered the drawbridge to allow travelers, merchants, and peasants who lived outside the enormous city walls to enter. In these sets of stocks, a number of prisoners would always be held, with their heads sticking out of the heavy wooden blocks. That way, passersby could enjoy hurling insults—and rotten food, lots of rotten food—at the hapless criminals. Their position at the main entrance to Brakith was deliberate too. They served as a blunt reminder to any potential criminals of the justice that awaited them should they try to flout the laws of my city.
I paused when I saw the guards lead a man with a very familiar-looking face to the stocks. Indeed, the arrangement of the features on that face was so eerily familiar to me that staring at this particular jailbird felt like looking into a mirror.
“Edwin,” I muttered, shaking my head and glaring at him.
Every time I laid eyes on Edwin, I was amazed at just how striking the resemblance between him and myself was. Anyone who saw the pair of us together would have assumed that we were twin brothers. My uncle must have scoured Prand high and low to find this chump, an effete actor who had donned vampire makeup, hidden out in a ruined castle in the hills, and pretended to be me while I was away. Well, he pretended to be a vampirism-infected, murderous version of me, who supposedly abducted the virgin daughters of Brakithian townsfolk and sucked their blood in the ruins.
The reality, of course, had been that my uncle had been abducting these poor girls, sacrificing them to the Blood God, and burying their innocent, blood-drained corpses beneath the ruins. “Vance the vampire” had been a convenient scapegoat for my uncle’s crimes, and this devious actor who looked just like me had been the perfect accomplice to cement the supposed “truthfulness” of the lies my uncle concocted about me.
Of course, when I’d kicked Rodrick’s ass and taken back Brakith from him, I had also captured this asshole Edwin, and I’d forced him, along with some other prominent evildoing co-conspirators of my uncle, to confess their crimes in front of the entire town. This had effectively cleared my name and exposed my uncle for the evil, murderous snake he really was.
Edwin, to be fair, had known little about the true extent of my uncle’s crimes and certainly hadn’t known about the murders of the girls. Still, he had been party to the besmirching of my reputation. I might have been merciful, but I wasn’t about to let some jerk-off who had knowingly dragged my name through the mud get off the hook.
Thus, Edwin had been put in the stocks by the city gates every day, from sunrise to sunset, for passersby to insult and shower with rotten food and dung—did I mention the dung before? In Brakith, under my rule, you stir shit up, you get it flung in your face, literally.
“Lord Vance,” Edwin begged, sobbing as the guards manhandled him and shoved him roughly into the wooden clamps, “please, please release me! I’m begging you! I’ve learned my lesson, my lord. I’ve seen the error of my ways! Oh, by the light, please my lord, don’t make me go through another day in these awful stocks! Execute me if you must. Hang me from the battlements or lop my beautiful head off, but please, I can’t take another day of this! Why, just yesterday, a beggar, my lord, he, he crammed his feces into my, my—”
“A literal shit sandwich is exactly what you deserve for what you did, Edwin,” I said. “And just thinking about what you did makes me wanna leave you in those fucking stocks for another few years, just to make sure you really have learned some sort of lesson, as your glib, lying tongue is pretending to right now.”
“No, no, please, Lord Vance, no!” he wailed, crying like a little girl as the guards locked him in the stocks.
I was about to turn and head off when an idea popped into my head. Seeing as I was leaving the next day and heading off into dangerous territory, I got a notion in my mind that having someone who could pass as my twin—or, quite literally, me—might actually be kind of useful in certain situations.
“Actually,” I said, folding my arms across my chest as I fixed the actor with an icy gaze, my jaw set tight, “it’s been three months to the day since you first got your useless ass thrown into these stocks, Edwin. Maybe, just maybe you’ve been punished enough.”
Edwin’s eyes lit up with fresh, desperate hope.
“Lord Vance, please, by the light please, please let me go!” he wailed, wriggling and writhing futilely against the stocks.
“How do I know I can trust you, Edwin?”
“I’ll, I’ll swear on anything you want me to, Lord Vance,” he gasped. “Anything! I’ll sign anything you put in front of me, I’ll swear a blood oath, I’ll do anything, anything!”
“I’ll think about it.” I smiled coldly. “You’ll know my answer at the end of the day.”
“End of the… end of the day?! No, my lord, no, not another day, no, no, nooo!”
His voice trailed off, lost in the hubbub of the growing crowd as I strode briskly away. The fool couldn’t see the grin on my face, and he didn’t need to. One last day in the stocks would hopefully make him grateful enough to serve me with unquestionable loyalty after I freed him at sunset.
I headed over to the armorer’s workshop. The old man was there, adding the final touches to a beautiful full-face helm, a work of art if I’d ever seen one. It was shaped and styled like a skull, and the hardened steel was coated with glossy, rich black chrome.
“A fine helm, good sir,” I remarked as I walked in.
“Some o’ my best work, m’lord,” he croaked proudly. “Fit for a king… or a god, eh?”
I chuckled, folded my arms across my chest, and nodded. “Fit for a god indeed. If ever there was a helm worthy of the God of Death, it’d be this one. How’s the rest of the suit coming along?”
“All done, m’lord! I was just about to send a messenger to the Keep to let you know. It’s in the back room there, if you want to have a gander, m’lord. I just need to finish one or two things on the helm, but then it’ll be done too, and you can take it with you right now.”
I rubbed my hands together with eager anticipation. Last time I’d had a new set of plate armor, I’d been a teenage boy, and I had to admit, this tingly excitement made me feel a little like a kid again. I walked through to the back room and saw the rest of the suit of armor mounted on a dummy.
“Damn,” I murmured, staring in awe.
It was exquisite. The blackest armor I’d ever seen, it gleamed and shone as if it was made of liquid. Symbols of death had bee
n worked into every part of the armor, and the attention to detail was incredible. The shoulder pauldrons were shaped like two troll skulls, with sharpened teeth, while the armor that wrapped around and protected my elbows had been shaped like rotting zombie heads. The gauntlets were like two anatomically accurate skeletal hands, with the fingers looking like hollow bones. On the breastplate, an incredibly detailed battle scene had been embossed. This alone was a work of art worthy of a central place in a gallery or museum. The massive image of war featured my undead armies taking on the Blood God’s demons.
“It’s a work of art,” a sultry voice purred in my ear. “Just like the man—sorry, god—who’s going to be wearing it.”
I’d been so absorbed in staring at the armor that I hadn’t noticed her creeping up behind me.
“Anna.” I smiled as I took in the sight of her. “With stealth like that, you should be an enjarta instead of selling beauty products.”
Speaking of beauty products, this girl knew her makeup inside out. She was gorgeous to begin with, sans makeup, but when she painted that stuff on her face—no, no, applied it subtly, because Anna was no painted-face tavern hooker with seven caked-on layers—it took her to another level completely. She was the kind of girl wars would be started over.
For a few moments, I was taken with her stunning smile and those beguiling gray eyes, which were perfectly enhanced with just the right amount of eyeshadow and mascara. Her full, juicy lips looked just tasty, with a thin coat of apple-red lipstick gleaming on them. Her silky, jet-black hair cascaded around her slim shoulders, and man, was it cold in here, because the nipples of her pert, high-set breasts seemed to be pressing all too eagerly through the fabric of her scarlet, figure-hugging dress.
I was so taken with her that I had to wonder if she was secretly using Lucielle’s Mirror on me. Of course, I remembered that the Charm Goddess’s mirror couldn’t have any effect on someone with my powers, not the way it would on an average person anyway. Still, the instant effect her looks had on me had me wondering. She clearly noticed the way I was looking at her, but I didn’t care.