If I weren’t all alone in a tangled mass of rotting corpses, I might have been embarrassed. As it was, I could use a hug.
Just don’t tell anyone.
Loer’allon remained cradled in my palm, her lambent glow offering sanctuary from any more roving demons.
“Thank you as well,” I said, “for keeping me alive and watching me while I was down.”
After a moment’s reflection as I struggled to extricate myself from the bodies and get up despite the pain, I asked, “Why didn’t you heal me?”
Alric responded for her. “After this latest loss of consciousness, I felt a reminder of what happens when you make mistakes was in order.”
As if smelling like death and bathing in it were not bad enough.
“Thanks,” I grumbled.
I managed to get my feet under me, then gingerly picked my way out of the field of carnage.
Each slurping step took me past another horror.
Covered in blood, ichor, and other fluids that I decided were in my best interests not to consider further, I was not in much better shape.
I wanted a bath.
Badly.
The heavenly city at the valley’s bottom shimmered invitingly.
My quest had a new destination.
Theuron
The city was farther away than it looked.
Just as I smelled worse than I looked.
“I would not agree with that assessment.”
I snorted dismissively at Alric’s weak jest.
He was not the one who had to live with the stench.
His body was not covered in dried blood that even vigorous scrubbing with copious amounts of dirt would not remove.
And there was plenty of bare earth here to try with, believe me.
As lush and rich as the city ahead was—Alric called it Theuron—the land outside Theuron’s aegis was equally desolate.
The demons had razed the land as much to keep the people inside Theuron’s walls as to kill them off.
By the time I reached Theuron’s resplendent dome, my cloud of flies had grown into a barbarous, worshipful horde.
Two guards were waiting for me on the other side of the wall of magical force.
They looked like angels...or at least what I thought angels would look like if they had not all been killed by demons. They wore lambent plate that appeared to be made more of light and arcane energies than any form of physical protection I recognized. Although not Angel Swords, each held a glowing blade imbued with great power.
Rising up behind them, their roofs and minarets hazy and indistinct as though seen underwater or through a thick heat haze, the otherworldly spires of Theuron were hinted at but not quite visible.
The buildings of Theuron and the guards’ armor were of a kind.
“Please state your reason for visiting the fair city of Theuron.”
The welcome was firm and decidedly uninviting.
I thought my need was rather obvious. “I would like a bath.”
One of the guards gestured without making a sound.
The sky opened up immediately around me, the stinging drops of a powerful monsoon hammering into my exposed skin as I ducked my head in surprise at the onslaught of chill water.
When the rains stopped, I was surprisingly clean...if soaked.
“Do you have any other needs, traveler?”
“A towel?”
With another gesture, a swirling wall of wind engulfed me, whipping my clothing and hair in furious gusts.
When the gale stopped, I was completely dry if a bit wind-chapped.
“Anything else?” asked the second guard.
I was afraid to make another request.
After a moment’s pause, I offered hesitantly, “A horse?”
A small toy wooden horse appeared at my feet.
I got the impression I was not wanted.
“What’s this?”
“The only horse you’ll get here.”
The guards oozed civility.
My kind of people.
“How about a place to sleep for the night?”
Before one of the guards could gesture and summon a tent, lean-to, or a pile of stones for me to stack, all delivered conveniently on top of my head, I added quickly, “In an inn.
“I would also like to purchase some supplies and warm food as well.”
The right-hand guard—I named him Chuckles—squinted at me, taking my measure. “You have the looks of the demon about you.”
His friend, aptly named, at least in my world, Smiley, grimaced. “Agreed.”
“I should. I’ve killed my fair share, including the Ysigoth that was building an undead army on the outskirts of your valley. The same demon that was intercepting anyone it could approaching the fine walls of your fair city.”
The looks in their eyes changed quickly from disdain to consideration.
“We will assess the accuracy of your words.”
I waved backward nonchalantly. “Follow the flies. The bodies are over the hill.”
Both guards vanished.
They were true masters of Craft!
Which made me wonder why they had not teleported out before and killed the demon when its ravages had claimed so many.
Both reappeared within minutes.
I no longer wanted to go into their fair city.
“We would be honored to have you among us, citizen.”
“You know,” I said, “I think I’ll pass.”
I turned and began walking around the perimeter of the glorious city of Theuron.
I’d rather sleep outside on the dirt.
Walking
“That was bravely done, Saedeus.”
Alric’s voice was grave. “There are men every bit as evil as demons.”
He paused for a moment before continuing. “Whether they realize it or not.”
I did not want their city or their hospitality. I was certain that not everyone in Theuron had fallen under a pall of darkness. Like me, they were doing what they must, or felt they must, to survive.
But their keepers’ hearts were not as fair as their city.
I wanted none of it.
After all I had been through, the thought that men refused to help other men sickened me. That was a poison of which I did not wish to partake.
I wished them no ill will.
I hoped Theuron’s walls held.
I hoped that the hearts within did as well.
Several days southward along the river saw me in lands even more sere and desolate than those around Theuron.
The city appeared to have been cast off from a sea of spoliation, a remnant of dreams lost and long forgotten.
How distant Balde and its lush woods now felt.
If not for the stubborn river Adros whose banks had traversed this land for millennia uncounted, I do not know how I would have survived. As it was, the river grew narrower by the day, the denuded landscape a scalding boilerplate sapping the will from the land and its water.
I scurried along the banks like a crab refusing to venture far from shelter, trying to stay out of sight and unnoticed, ready to scurry back into my bunker at the slightest sign of danger.
Although Alric assured me my skill in arcana was progressing nicely, largely due to my dogged refusal to admit defeat, I still could not hide myself from my own eyes, much less the preternatural senses of a demon.
Wait...
Could I be that blind?
Or stupid?
I did not need to answer those questions.
I envisaged the concealment spell Alric had shown me just the day before, working to spread my essence as thinly as possible across my immediate environs, blending those energies distinctly my own with those intrinsic to the land.
With each breath, I pushed the magical energies representing my etheric self farther out, spreading them evenly in all directions.
I could still see myself.
I could see my corporeal manifestation as well as my energet
ic body.
Nothing had changed.
But would it?
I could see the essential with my mind’s eye. Would I no longer be able to do that if the spell were properly cast?
With most concealment spells, the enchantment worked on others, not the caster.
If the spell worked, would I no longer be able to see myself?
In fact, how would I know whether the spell worked at all without anyone to tell me?
I was a fool...not that this was a new insight.
I was constantly amazed by my ability to forget this fact, however.
Glancing upon the lazy, golden, sunlit waters of Adros, I gazed downward through the shallows to the river’s lustrous sandy bottom and upward to the depthless blue skies reflected above.
I was nowhere to be seen!
I awarded myself a Saedeus Award for Genius then and there, one of many honoring the boundless depths of my intelligence. I bore my many SAGs proudly, each one denoting the continued decline of anything remotely resembling intellectual capacity within my sad little mind.
“Alric,” I barked, “why didn’t you tell me the spell worked?”
Alric’s voice within my mind was far too chipper. “I knew you would figure it out eventually.
“Part of learning to work with magic is coming to understand its causes and effects, its expressions and ramifications.
“So I was letting you learn.
“You are, after all, your own best teacher.
“Were you in danger, I would have let you know. As events stood, however, you have cast that spell several times and have remained under its protection since you first learned yesterday.”
Before I could snarl a retort, he added, “A warrior must always remain vigilant. By keeping silent, I let your practice continue.”
I hated Alric for making me a better person.
I really and truly did.
Except that it kept me alive, so I did not hate it too much.
But I could dislike it a tad.
Again?
Nightmares spiraled overhead, the shadows of their misshapen forms flitting across the landscape in pools of vile, polluting fluids. Flying within palls of oozing Darkness, covered in writhing tentacles and unknowable appendages, with deformed bodies shaped by the demonic forces of the deepest hells, shorn and cast down from the highest ideals of Light and beauty, Uërth’s end savored the world’s demise.
I did not want to imagine why the demons scoured the skies like carrion birds searching for carcasses, for I already knew the answer.
My stomach sank and my heart lurched in fear with the knowledge.
The demons were looking for food, for souls to harvest, for lives to reap and destroy.
The demons were looking for stragglers, for survivors, for those humans who had not yet been culled or found safety.
The demons were looking for me.
Even from afar, I could sense their insatiable, sickening pull on Uërth’s essence, each a darkling void onto utter night.
Only with reflection did I realize the true scale of those demonic presences. Although the infernals appeared of a size with birds flying through the sky, they were, in fact, much higher, much farther away.
If I had to guess, and my mind was filled with guesses, I would estimate these creatures were roughly the size of dragons…perhaps not a mature wyrm whose mighty maw could swallow horses whole but a dragon nonetheless.
Never having seen a dragon, my conjecture had little grounding in fact but my fears did not need any sound reasoning or basis to run away at full gallop…down a rock-filled slope, on a bucking horse without reins or bridle, quickly approaching a sheer drop off a dizzying cliff.
The demons were big.
I was small.
They were searching for humans.
I was a human.
They wished to consume my soul.
I wanted to keep my soul.
The line of my reasoning was as clear and irrefutable as it was simple.
Keeping to the river’s meandering edge, I did my best to remain hidden.
“Maintain your calm, abide in the moment, and do not let your fears overcome you.”
I tried to let the import of Alric’s advice sink in, to distract me from my anxieties.
“Relax. Breathe. Be at ease.”
I tried.
My breathing was quick and shallow. The tightness in my chest reflected my stress and deep-felt apprehension.
“Focus on your intention, live your purpose. Dwell in freedom, abide in calm. Be the destiny you wish to achieve.”
Alric’s words were a mantra.
I did my best to listen.
“Believe in yourself, Saedeus. Your belief makes everything possible.”
Alric’s encouragements were well-intentioned, meant to reassure and guide me through a time of trouble, but they also came from a disembodied voice within my mind, the voice of one who had already died, one who dwelled in calm surety and did not live in fear of his body’s imminent end.
They were also his last.
A wall of concussive force blasted through the air, engulfing me in a shockwave so powerful, so loud I could not hear its passage.
Flung through the air, consciousness slipping before I hit the ground, I screamed out within my mind in a tumultuous mixture of desperation and concern, “Alric!”
Then, as was my lot in life, darkness consumed me and I knew no more.
Hunger without End
Light.
Form.
Flitting images I could not grasp or hold.
Unclear impressions.
Only the most notional sense of self.
Where was I?
Who was I?
What was I?
Floating in darkness, I knew not the passage of time or its content.
Hunger.
Need.
Earthquakes of sensation shook my world, the tremors of their excitation spiraling my small zone of relative stability into chaos.
I shuddered in fear and loathing at the awesome forces rushing around me, surging within me, seeking release.
Fleeing, shrinking farther into myself, I concealed my essence from the twisted malevolence giving those urges birth.
I was but a mote hiding within a wrathful god.
Vague images.
Hazy silhouettes.
A world beyond my own was gradually coming into focus…one seen distorted through a distant, watery gauze.
I could not touch or reach this outer world, but I knew it was there.
This realm was distinct from my own, the one that trapped me, the one I shared with the raging evil that wished to consume that exterior dimension, to defile it and subsume it, to drink its lifeblood dry.
I longed for that world.
Perhaps in that place I would find true safety from my imprisoner.
Perhaps there I could find surety and freedom.
I must reach it.
Cries of terror.
Victims fleeing.
Valiant prey fighting back. Falling.
Blood spilled.
Lives lost.
Carnage.
I was powerless.
Over and over my imprisoner unleashed its fury on innocents, never sated.
Its power grew with each life taken.
I could do nothing but wail at their loss.
I knew the true depths of despair—sorrow without bottom.
When would this torture end?
What could I do?
Trapped within a raging monster, unable to express my will, only able to experience loss, what was I?
Was I damned?
Had I been cast into the bowels of Hell itself, embodied within a soul worse even than my own, only to experience an eternity of torture and dismay?
Was there a way out?
Was I the antithesis of the demon that held me sealed away in its thrall or was I but a twisted part of its self that sought to deny the horror it inflicted?<
br />
Was I really so different from the monster that now imprisoned me?
Yes.
I was, am, a man.
I knew this in my core.
My humanity was a certainty I could not deny.
This truth resonated deeper, louder and louder, with each life I watched taken, each soul ravenously devoured by the beast animating the prison that locked me within.
Each death reinforced my fundamental difference.
Each death called for my release.
The demon must die.
There was a time before this hell.
My life was not always a disembodied nightmare seen through another’s twisted version of reality.
There was a life before.
I…had…a…life.
What was it?
Who was I?
Why did I not die like the others, the ones the demon consumed?
I hoped above all else to learn who and what I was.
Perhaps that would lead me to find a way out…
I…liked mushrooms?
Mushrooms?
Why did mushrooms of all things dance before my inner version?
How could mushrooms be my salvation from this living damnation?
Weren’t swords and angels the talismans of most heroes, the surest way to victory and the vanquishing of adversity?
Was I a great hero?
Or was I an unflappable farmer?
Who lived for mushrooms?
I…lived for mushrooms.
Saedeus lived for mushrooms!
I was Saedeus!
I am Saedeus!
Universes of experience opened to me then, many of them not mine, but made mine through the adoption of other lives, whether intentionally or inadvertently.
I was the coherence of many lives.
I was the future of these many tangled pasts brought together in one person.
I was the present, ready to actualize my will.
I was Djen’toth!
An abyss opened within me, one that had no limit or end, one that devoured and remade, one that was me and transfigured me, one that ate demons and shat out their filth.
Blooming like a flower of the apocalypse, the truth of what I was opened fully, hungrily.
Soul Stealer: Legacy of the Blade Page 10