The Alterator's Light

by Dan Brigman

  The Originator towered nearly a foot above the soldiers trotting alongside him. His ornate gray and black chain armor offered no resistance to his loping stride. His armor offered no distinguishing features from the other blight-generals Jaken had seen—his helmet and sword, though, offered any observer immediate recognition. The gray helmet encircled Stoutheart’s entire head with only stylized openings at his eyes and mouth, offering a partial glimpse of his face. The helmet would block none of the wearer’s peripheral vision and the mouth opening was clear for bellowed commands. A singular nosepiece drooped down to just below his sharp-ended nose.

  Jaken remembered a drawing of the helmet he had seen once. Sacclon’s armies posted flyers to illustrate the enemy—to give the enemy a face—something that had to stopped. The artist illustrating Stoutheart had drawn what had been described to him in perfect detail. The artist had not questioned the odd helmet, but Jaken posed a question to his commanding officer.

  “Captain, where do think he got the helmet?”

  Pok shrugged and muttered, “The Originator, Sol illuminate us, fancies himself after some mythical general who had died fighting enormous odds at a pass far from here. Don’t know who or where that was, but I don’t really care. If you see that man,” he pointed at the image, “you run, son. And never look back. You can’t fight an Originator and plan to live.”

  Jaken shook his head. While a well-aimed arrow or bolt could force its way through the opening, the low probability of that occurring bordered on lunacy. For a breath, though, he had considered a command of aiming at that spot—the only area presenting flesh.

  The man’s sword—a greatsword with a blade four feet long—brought a cringe of disgust to Jaken’s shoulders. Pangs of nausea throbbed in his gut at the sight of the sword known as Lighteater. Jaken could push down the panic chilling his bones, yet his stomach roiled. He felt bile tickle the back of his throat. If my soldiers see that blade, they’ll flee. I’ll have to move them myself. The thoughts pushed through the initial panic to bring him some semblance of calm.

  The grayish-black metal gleamed in the twilight and seemed to weigh nothing in the wielder’s hand. Jaken saw no blood upon the sharpened edge, yet he knew the blade would drink well today. Even from this distance, Jaken noticed streamers of light falling into the sword’s blade. He had to focus on the blade for several seconds to let his brain grasp the light’s disappearance. Jaken felt his eyes strain as if he had been awake for days. Sandpaper seemed to be brushing along his corneas.

  Despite a two-handed hilt, Stoutheart carried Lighteater in one hand, the other hand relaxed at his side. His empty hand could kill almost as easily as Lighteater. Realization of what Jaken viewed, in more detail than he had ever wanted, forced his hands to his side, the binoculars forgotten. Captain Pok ripped the rune-enhanced binoculars from Jaken’s hand; he nearly reprimanded the Sergeant then and there. But the younger man’s vacant stare held the Captain’s tongue.

  “I’ll deal with you later,” Pok muttered as he glanced back at the approaching horde. “Sergeant Jaken! Your soldiers are the van after the first volley.” He paused as Jaken turned his bloodshot eyes to Pok, Jaken’s fear plain. “You have to stop Stoutheart’s forces or we lose Sacclon.”

  “So, Captain,” Jaken whispered, forcing Pok to lean in closer to his subordinate. When Jaken realized he had the Captain’s attention, he continued, “You expect me to lead my soldiers to fight them.”

  “You will take every man and woman forward at my call. No hesitation.”

  Pok tore his gaze from Jaken’s to glance eastward. The skirmishers covered the distance with long strides—they could not be more than three hundred paces away at this point. Every breath spent standing here meant lost distance between them and the provincial army.

  “Holst,” Pok continued getting his subordinate’s full attention. “If we don’t stop that monster here, he’ll push on to Jasten by this evening.”

  Jaken nodded and loped back to his regiment. Pok followed his movement for a few breaths, then surveyed his two-thousand soldier army. Ravens were floating above the heads of his army, their black eyes patient, searching for the first meal.

  Caw. Caw. Caaaawwww.

  They cried out melodiously—when one finished, another picked up the rhythm. Pok looked higher and caught sight of turkey vultures, their red heads glowing and glinting in the falling sun. Sol’s Absolution, or so carrion eaters were known on the battlefield. Many men would be released from their duties in life for whatever followed death’s finality. Pok frowned, glancing back toward the sergeant, not certain the young man would follow his orders. He only had to wait a few moments before he had his answer.

  Jaken sprinted to the rear of his small contingent of soldiers and barked, “We lead the vanguard!”

  Grumbling and words blanketed with disgust followed Jaken’s order. He cut them off with a narrowed glance at any of the soldiers looking his direction. “We have our orders! But we have more than that to think of—it’s not just our lives. It’s the people of Sacclon. If we don’t stop that,” he continued while pointing at the black-clad man loping ahead of his troops, “then there won’t be anything left for our people. If that man, an Originator, gets through, then our names will be a stain upon humanity, no matter its current makeup.”

  “An Originator!” came a few cries, followed by, “Have you lost your mind?” Jaken even heard the whispered mutterings of a few soldiers. Are they praying? Jaken thought before pushing those distractions away.

  “Yes!” Jaken’s voice snapped across his line to catch the platoons on either side. His soldiers quieted, fear and disbelief marking their faces. Some of the men and women turned to look, and Jaken continued, his eyes on his Alterator. “Jast Four-Fingers will test the resolve of Lighteater’s maker!

  Jast’s wrinkled and tanned face beamed, as he lifted his right hand in the air. Jast smiled, the bright white teeth overshadowed the gaps of his few missing teeth, and his face reflected the light streaming from all four fingers. The light brightened as darkness fell around them. The smell of rain filled their nostrils, despite the clear sky marked only by the moons and a few early stars. Jaken grinned when all thirty-three soldiers turned and kneeled as one.

  The enemy continued their movement undaunted by the sight of the Alterator two hundred paces away.

  Within three heartbeats other Alterators began their own scribing down either side of the line. Jaken rubbed at his nose with the back of his hand, the ozone wrinkling it, nearly forcing a sneeze out. Darkness fell over some of the Scribers and expected temperature fluctuations pervaded near all the others. Even from his distance, Jaken noticed soldiers squinting to see through their shroud, while others either wiped sweat from their brows or pulled their cloaks tighter to fend off the cold.

  None of the formulated lines met the alacrity and piercing crispness of lines flowing from Jast’s four fingers. Jaken took just a moment to stare in wonder at the man’s fluid movements. His runes floated unmoving at chest level, and Jast’s eyes fixed on the enemy one hundred fifty paces away. Jaken knew the old man could scribe half-beaten, on the ground, covered in mud, but never had an Alterator outshone his colleagues in such a way.

  “Damn!” Jast blurted out, his concentration unhampered and brown eyes radiant from the runic glow. “They’ve got a Blighter.” With his free hand, Jast pointed to the left, his eyes still on Lighteater.

  Jaken and several of the soldiers closest to him scanned the focused area. Within a breath, Jaken caught numerous curses and heard another prayer muttered. They all caught sight of a Blighter. The gray black runes forming at the end of the Blighter’s hand portended their deaths. Jaken could not tell how many fingers, but more than two worked furiously. Jast’s voice broke through their shock.

  “Take that fiend down! I’ll handle Stoutheart. I want that sword.”

  Jaken felt a laugh bubble up at Jast’s nonchalance before he pushed it down. Not good to laugh now. It’ll sound desperate
and true. Instead, Jaken nodded.

  “Archers!” Jaken called out. A heartbeat later all thirty-three brought their arrows’ fletching to their cheeks. Not one strained under the weight of the bow’s pull. Those not able to pull the bow had been sent to the spear holders’ ranks—nothing negative put into their permanent files, other than archery should not be their preferred method of combat. “Target the Blighter! Take the bastard down. Jast, do what you came here to do!”

  The sergeant smiled as every arrow’s glistening tip aimed at the forward-moving leader, who could potentially kill every one of the two thousand standing in his way.

  “Loose!”

  The order rang out at the archers and Jast. The palpable release of energy sang in Jaken’s ears. The bows’ simultaneous twang, followed by the silent burst of the runic explosion, offered a sight which brought a slight faltering in the approaching skirmishers—all except Lighteater’s wielder.

  The man had been so focused on the soldiers further down the line from Jaken’s, he failed to see the arrows until the last possible moment. Jaken pursed his lips as the Blighter closed his eyes at the barrage’s definitive point, then pushed the floating runes forward two-handedly with palms forward. The runes obeyed. The runes, unreadable to Jaken, grew with each passing pace. By the rune’s halfway point to their unknown targets, they had grown to the size of a human.

  The Blighter worked to scribe another rune, but two of the falling arrows destroyed the scribing hand just as another ten arrows landed in his chest and head. Jaken saw from the now hundred paces away that the Blighter would never recover—brain trauma, lung collapse, and carotid artery pierced. The other arrows picked off a few of the adjacent skirmishers. All who took an arrow fell into the high sacc and out of sight.

  A resounding cheer erupted at the Blighter’s collapse. The other sergeants down the line ordered, “Focus,” and “Make a hole for those things!” But Jaken let his soldiers enjoy their brief victory. As they nocked new arrows, he noticed the path of the gray-black runes just as Jast’s own blend of Alteration reached Stoutheart. His soldiers fired three more times during the blight’s ensuing carnage.

  The gray-black runes had moved more slowly as they approached the line and had grown to four times the size of a human. Their reduced speed gave the soldiers time to create a gap. The men and women on either side of the massive runes, which seemed to nearly disappear from Jaken’s vantage point, watched derisively for a moment, then turned to their enemy. Jaken had no time to call out a warning. His eyes widened and his face paled at what came next…

  Runes towering over the soldiers rotated in a blink and swept out along the line, almost as if being pulled by an imaginary giant’s hand. The enemy ahead so absorbed the soldiers’ focus that the lingering Blighter’s energy went unnoticed. The soldiers had created a gap but failed to move forward or backward, thus springing the trap. When the runes contacted the living or dead flesh of anything, death took its time. The layers of organic matter rotted away, leaving nothing but a stump of blackened decay. When the runes contacted entire bodies, they pulsated and exploded a moment later. Jaken could remember seeing rotten harvest pumpkins exploding much the same way when smashed. With each brush of flesh, the massive runes paled and flickered, weakening. Within seconds, hundreds of soldiers lay dying or left as disintegrating blobs of black flesh. Many would leave the battlefield with limbs missing entirely. Only a blackened pus-filled stump or patch of flesh remained.

  The man at the far left of Jaken’s line took the final brunt just as the sergeant yelled out, “Back up, you fool!”

  The man’s attention riveted by the faltering rune paid no heed before the rune brushed his chest, bubbling away his thin armor just as the layer of flesh and bone grayed, then evaporated. He collapsed face-first onto other blackened bodies. Jaken heard vomiting all around him and felt himself rubbing the back of his hand across his mouth. Curious. I hadn’t even felt it come up. Tearing his gaze from the losses, Jaken froze when his eyes caught Jast’s runes just feet from reaching Lighteater. The Blighter’s effects paled at what his Alterator had unleashed.

  Twang!

  Thirty-two arrows flew toward the Originator and his soldiers. Only half struck home, bringing their targets to the ground. The lines to Jaken’s right poured arrows and bolts toward the enemy, now seventy-five paces away. From Jaken’s peripheral, the left line had broken after the onslaught. Hundreds of soldiers retreated in a near-blind frenzied maelstrom.

  Twang! Again. Again. Again.

  The white-hot runes blazed through the twilight leaving a blurred afterimage in their wake. The overpowering smell of rain washed over Jaken, enough that he pulled up his hood to keep it from drenching him. All eight of the runes floated unerringly toward Jonathon Stoutheart, who had sprinted ahead of his staggered lines. Lighteater danced in response to the unerring barrage. Jaken watched in awe, forgetting momentarily the other two hundred or so enemies barreling toward them. Stoutheart stopped, planted his feet, focused only on the runes designed, not to simply damage or injure, but to kill completely. Obliterate.

  Lighteater’s heft made no difference to its wielder, who waited patiently. The first two runes blinked out of existence upon contact with the blade—seemingly absorbed. The sword’s edges warped with the energy pulse, and everything around or behind the blade became distorted, as if light itself bent in toward the metal’s blackness. When the blade’s tip touched the ground to deflect a rune, a ribbon of soil and tall grass simply ceased to exist. By the third rune, either the sword had absorbed too much energy or Stoutheart could simply not keep up with the pace. Now the blade deflected the beautifully-scribed runes into the skirmishers rushing past their leader.

  The fourth and fifth runes followed the random deflection forward at impossible angles. Each of the last three runes altered further with the force of the blade’s parries, plowing into the ground less than ten paces from Stoutheart and under his soldiers’ feet. The blazing chaos of the rune’s path down shot pillars of light and soil upward and out of sight. For a breath, Jaken felt his rage boiling before turning to Jast Four-Fingers to curse Jast’s failing. He swallowed the words under a simultaneous triple blast wave of force intermixed with fire and ice.

  Jaken felt himself rock backward as the explosions threw bodies, soil, and grass into the air. The enemy humans’ armor, clothing, and hair had been incinerated upon the initial contact coming from three runes’ directions. As the waves of energy carried the bodies into the air, the dozens of screams of pain cut off, their flesh entirely melted away. At their apex, the bodies reflected the orange dying light of Sol’s twilight. On the downward arc, what remained of their skeletons connected only by tendons and bits of muscle landed in heaps.

  Screams, terror-filled and ear piercing, reached Jaken’s ears…sounds he could not have imagined a minute before. Soldiers far enough away from the initial blast stood radiating heat, rivulets of orange-red crisscrossing their features. Their flesh turned the consistency of lava, lumpy and gelatinous. Their clothes melted and armor dripped down their legs. Nearly a hundred of the enemy stood and burned from within for a blink, then cooled, remaining standing as pillars of blackened husks. Their arms and hands were clutching their faces in horror, despite the blackness obfuscating their features.

  The initial blast zone had concealed anything left in its wake. Grayish-brown smoke lingered like fog to blanket the field. Jaken stole a glance at Jast, and the older man seemed to have aged ten years in the past minute. The Alterator stood open-mouthed with a mask of confusion and relief at what he had wrought upon the Originator’s forces. Moans of pain echoed over the plains, failing to stifle the cries of “mama” flitting from the both sides. A feedback loop of cries for home. Again, Jaken wondered. Why do the dying always call for their mother?

  Jaken shook his head and glanced around to take in the carnage and the remnants of his own soldiers. To his surprise, only a few lay on the ground after that initial attack. The rest sto
od grimly waiting for what came from the blasted area. All who lay on their back or side appeared no more than wounded, blood seeping from their ears, nose, and eyes. All had pieces of armor and clothing ripped away, shredded and showing deep gashes from the blast wave’s cutting energy.

  The few in his platoon who still held their short bows had already nocked another arrow. They scanned the hidden area, and Jaken strode to Jast’s side. Grasping the Alterator’s shoulder, Jaken said, “Fine job! I’m not sure how you got the runes to do that, but it doesn’t matter. You’ve saved our lives.”

  The Alterator turned his gaze to Jaken. “I didn’t do that, Sergeant. The sword amplified the power. The runes were meant to kill that bastard. Rip him to pieces. But he batted them away like nothing more than gnats.” He paused, pulling his four fingers up to his face. “This power is too much, Sergeant. If I hadn’t set the runes to fizzle before reaching our soldiers, then he would have deflected the major runes our direction. Somehow.” Jast stopped, his face blank.

  Jaken waited for a heartbeat, then pushed, “Somehow what, Alterator?”

  Jast replied, his voice tinged with defeat. “Somehow he knew what would happen, and he didn’t care that his own troops would be killed.” He pointed with his famed four fingers and continued, “Like that. In all our missions and tours of duty, I never imagined that would be possible. Did you?”

  “How should I know, Alterator? That’s your business. I never bothered to pick up your—” Jaken’s words faded. Jast’s hand dropped, his eyes widened, prompting Jaken to follow the man’s focus.

  Sol’s drop below the horizon brought chilled winds in from the north. Enough to whisk the remnant streamers of smoke, gray, red and brown, from the battlefield. Relief flushed through Jaken’s mind. Behind him, Captain Pok yelled out, “Look ahead! Sacclon’s armies will never know defeat, even at the hands of an Originator. Even one bent on our destruction for reasons that will go the Ageless’s graves.”