Darkblade Guardian

by Andy Peloquin

  The Hunter’s gut clenched as he recognized the creature: a Serenii, identical to the statue he’d seen in the twin temples of Kara-ket.

  “You wish to see?” the figure asked. He—that it was male, the Hunter had no doubt—spoke in a voice that no longer threatened to shatter worlds, but it still echoed with the same gravitas and ageless immutability.

  “First, tell me who you are.” The Hunter found himself surprised by his own stubbornness. He’d never believed the gods existed, much less that he would meet one. Yet he would not accept what anyone said—not man, demon, or deity—without a healthy dose of the cynicism that had kept him alive all these years. “Who am I speaking to?”

  “To the men of Einan, I am known as Kharna,” the Serenii-looking god spoke the words without inflection.

  The Hunter drew in a sharp breath and reached for a sword, Soulhunger, anything to defend himself. Dread coiled like a serpent in his gut as he found himself clad in a simple belted robe, without any weapons. Evidently, the god—Kharna—hadn’t bothered to bring anything sharp or pointed into this vision.

  “Destroyer!” The Hunter backed away from the grey-skinned creature, acid surging in his throat. “I will not hear your lies—”

  The Hunter cried out as agony tore through every fiber of his being. It felt as if he were torn apart and pieced together a thousand times, yet all in the space of a single instant. The torment passed as quickly as it came. The Serenii-looking figure hadn’t moved, but a hint of something dangerous cracked through its long-suffering expression.

  “Torture me all you want.” The Hunter clenched his fist and steeled himself. “I will not give you what you desire.”

  Something that could have been a smile creased the Serenii’s too-thin lips. “And how do you know what I desire?”

  “The same thing all beings desire,” the Hunter snarled. “Freedom.”

  “That is what all human beings desire,” Kharna said. “To know the truth, you must be willing to listen.”

  “And how can I know that it actually is the truth?” The Hunter raised an eyebrow. “What’s to stop you from lying? Isn’t that what you do?”

  “Deceit is a tool created by mortal man.” Kharna’s eyes revealed no anger—they held no emotion. “But you are right to question the truth. After all, truth is a matter of perspective, twisted by the passage of time. Let me, therefore, offer you a glimpse at reality. Fact, unadulterated and uncolored by opinion or emotion. The only immutable truth.”

  With effort, the Hunter stopped himself from spitting a retort. When in the presence of a god, he decided, perhaps it was better to hold his tongue. “Show me.”

  Kharna swept an arm toward the landscape far below. “Behold, the world of Einan as it once was.”

  A vast landscape stretched out beneath him, and it seemed the Hunter could see the entire world at once—from the jagged peaks of the Empty Mountains to the blue expanse of the Frozen Sea, with all the rolling hills, wild forests, and rich grasslands between. Everything was pristine, untamed, untouched by the hand of human or Serenii.

  “Einan was a masterpiece, fashioned by the hands of beings far wiser and older than what you know as gods.” Kharna no longer spoke in a physical voice, but the words echoed in the Hunter’s thoughts. “We were simply placed here to be its guardians, its caretakers.”

  The Hunter’s view narrowed in on tall, grey-skinned creatures striding across the verdant landscape. Beasts of the earth, air, and sea flocked to the newcomers, welcoming them as equals instead of masters. The Serenii--somehow, he simply knew what they were, perhaps Kharna’s consciousness filtering into his—made their homes in the trees of the forests, the fast-flowing rivers, and the deep places beneath the mountains.

  “As we learned more of this world’s wonders, we found ways to harness its power.”

  Towers rose from the earth, taking the shape of structures that bore strong resemblances to the Black Spire in Praamis, Lord Apus’ tower in Malandria, the twin temples in Kara-ket, and many more the likes of which he’d never seen, never even imagined.

  “The power of the sun and winds, the moon and stars, of gravity and motion.”

  The towers of the Serenii grew more numerous until they dotted every corner of the vast landscape that was the world of Einan. The sheer scope of it stole his breath—these creatures truly had mastered the world.

  “Time beyond your imagining passed, and Einan knew only peace and prosperity. Serenii lived in harmony with the other beings that shared our world—beasts of the earth, fowls of the air, fish of the sea.”

  Years seemed to flow by in the space of a few seconds. Vast forests turned from green to red, yellow, and orange, lost their leaves, then bloomed with new life. Grassy landscapes turned to yellow deserts, ice-covered tundras, then once more to verdant pastures. A hundred times, a thousand, more than the Hunter could count.

  “Then the Creators of our world gave us the gift of a new life: the life of man. Not our equals, but above the beasts of land, ocean, and air. A beast created to bring change to Einan.”

  New figures walked the earth, these human. They ate fruit from the trees, then sharpened stones into axes to cut down those trees for warmth and shelter. Men, women, and children spread across the face of Einan, welcomed by the animals—animals that served as clothing, food, companions, and servants.

  “At first, we did not understand the reason for this change. We sought to question our Creators, but our entreaties fell on deaf ears. We could not know the answer.”

  The Hunter’s view narrowed in on one of the towers, where a handful of the ancient Serenii watched the humans roaming the land that had been their domain for time beyond time.

  “Despite our incomprehension, we trusted the wisdom of our Creators, and thus we joined hands with mankind in caring for this world.”

  All across Einan, Serenii descended from the lofty heights of their towers to meet with the humans. The Hunter felt the benevolence of the Serenii, the instinctive fear of the humans. Slowly, the fear faded and both races found harmony in sharing the world.

  “These short-lived beings offered a fresh perspective on our world. We, in turn, shared with them the secrets we had learned. Secrets what you humans call ‘magick’ but is, in fact, simply an understanding of the laws that govern our world and how they can be manipulated.”

  The Hunter’s breath caught in his throat as he watched a human woman shooting bright flames out of her hands, and a young man lifted a boulder thrice his size without apparent effort. The Serenii had taught the ancient humans their magick. Everyone on Einan knew the Serenii had wielded tremendous power—enough to challenge the very gods, it was said. Yet beyond mention of their “Creators”, Kharna had not yet spoken of anything resembling the thirteen gods of Einan.

  “And what about the gods?” the Hunter asked. “The Master, the Swordsman, Derelana, all the others?”

  “Patience,” Kharna said, and that smile-like expression returned to his face. “Time passes not as we will it, but as it wills.”

  Again, the Hunter forced himself not to retort. Evidently, men like Father Reverentus had inherited their knack for being cryptic from the Serenii.

  “Our search for knowledge led us to explore the secrets not only of this world,” Kharna continued, turning back to study the landscape below, “but worlds that exist parallel to ours.”

  The Hunter didn’t bother pretending he understood how that worked. He was fast reaching his limit for mind-boggling revelations just by talking with Kharna, a god that was supposed to be locked in an eternal prison deep within the bowels of Einan.

  “On these parallel worlds, we discovered the existence of creatures similar to us.” Kharna turned to the Hunter. ”In human terms, you would call them ‘relatives’.”

  The Hunter couldn’t help a disbelieving snorting. The image of Serenii sitting around a family dinner with cousins, uncles, aunts, and in-laws seemed almost too much to process.

  “After much debate,
we concluded that it was in the best interest of our world to establish contact with these creatures.”

  The Hunter’s view of the world centered on the top of a massive, shining tower taller than the clouds. Thirteen Serenii figures stood in a circle within the towertop, their hands joined and power crackling between their bodies. The air in their midst solidified, twisted, buckled, and split open with a deafening sound. A fiery hole rent reality and a gateway into another existence opened in front of them.

  “We welcomed them with open arms, sought to give them a home on our world. They accepted our offer and came through the gates we opened.” For the first time, Kharna’s voice echoed with emotion: anger. “They called themselves Abiarazi.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The Hunter’s breath caught in his throat. Abiarazi? The demons are related to the Serenii? The thought set his stomach roiling.

  His mind flashed back to the statues he’d seen in Kara-ket. It seemed hard to believe the creature he’d seen there—or the one standing before him—had anything in common with the bestial Abiarazi he’d seen beneath Voramis or the Stone Guardians he’d fought on the trail to Enarium. Yet, looking closer, he could see some similarities. They were roughly the same size, nearly twice the Hunter’s height, and though the Serenii lacked the demons’ brawn, they had similar multi-jointed limbs. There could be some familial resemblance between the two, similar to the way wolves shared a species with the puffy-haired, calf-height dogs popular among the nobility of Voramis.

  “We soon learned that they shared more in common with the humans than with us.” Kharna continued, seeming not to notice or simply ignoring the Hunter’s perplexity. “They, too, were creatures driven by their passions, a stark contrast to our adherence to logic above all. They allowed their desires to shape their moralities.”

  Turmoil gripped the once-peaceful land of Einan as the creatures the Hunter knew as demons warred with each other. It seemed the Abiarazi were divided into clans, each from a different part of their world, and those clans battled for dominance, resources, or the sheer pleasure of bloodshed. For the first time since its creation, blood and death spread across the face of the world.

  “All too soon, we discovered the truth of why they had accepted our offer to come to our world. They fled in fear of the Devourer of Worlds.”

  The Hunter’s brow furrowed. “They were afraid of you?”

  “No.” Weariness echoed in Kharna’s voice. “They were afraid of the Devourer. Devourer of Worlds, the Beginning and End of All Things.”

  Once again, the Hunter’s vision narrowed into the same towertop to watch the Serenii open a portal to another world. But this time, the portal did not close. Tendrils of inky blackness, deeper than the darkest night, slithered from the tear in reality. Through the gateway, the Hunter could see something that defied his understanding. Swirling, changing, decaying. A void where light, breath, and life died.

  “A being of chaos, seeking to return the universe to its natural state of entropy before the Creators imposed order upon it.” Was that fear in Kharna’s violet eyes? “A being far more powerful than even we could predict.”

  A single drip of the swirling blackness fell onto the floor of the tower, and immediately the stone crumbled away into nothingness. The drop kept eating down, down through the entire structure, and tendrils of chaos seeped throughout the tower. Within heartbeats—it could have been minutes, hours, or years in real time—the tower crumbled to nothingness. The threads of chaos delved into the bowels of Einan itself, until only a gaping void remained.

  The Hunter shuddered; he’d only seen one such massive hole before. Had he just witnessed the creation of what the people of Voramis knew as the Midden?

  “Word was sent throughout Einan, and the Serenii came from every corner of this world to the one great Conclave, the uniting of minds to face the threat that imperiled our very existence.” Kharna met his gaze, and a hint of fear sparkled in the god’s eyes. “The Devourer could not be reasoned with, could not be swayed from its singular purpose. It sought only the end of order and a return to entropy.”

  The vision changed and the Hunter found himself in an enormous circular chamber cut into the heart of a mountain. Seventy grey-skinned Serenii stood in silent communion, speaking directly to each other’s minds just as Kharna spoke to him.

  “In the end, we faced a simple choice: fight or flee. Logic dictated that resistance would prove futile, and we who prided ourselves on logic fell prey to the most human emotion of all: fear. In our fear, my people believed there was only one rational choice. They chose to flee.”

  “Flee?” The Hunter’s brow furrowed. “If this Devourer was going to destroy all of Einan, where could you flee to?”

  “Another world,” Kharna replied. “A world untouched by intelligent hands, where the Serenii could start over without threat of annihilation. Or so they thought.”

  The Hunter cocked his head. “You say ‘they’. Does that mean you chose to stay?”

  Kharna brought the Hunter back to the towertop chamber where he’d first seen the Serenii watching the humans. The same thirteen stood in a circle, and the Hunter could feel the dread that emanated from the immortal beings.

  “My brothers and I believed that fleeing would only prolong the inevitable. The Devourer had followed the Abiarazi to this world, so what would prevent it from following us to the next, and the next? No matter how far we fled, evidence indicated that we would never truly outrun the End of All Things. After all, there must be a beginning and an end. What is born must die eventually to give way to new life. Even the Serenii lifespan, though it is numbered in millions of what you humans call years, does ultimately culminate with the decomposition of our physical forms.”

  The Hunter sucked in a breath. He couldn’t imagine a life lasting millions of years—hells, his own five thousand year lifespan was far longer than anything he’d believed possible.

  “Yet, perhaps logic alone did not influence our choice,” Kharna continued. “While many Serenii counseled isolationism, we thirteen had spent time among the humans that shared our world. We saw their joy and pain, their exhilaration and sorrow, their love and hate, their short lives and inevitable deaths. In them, we came to learn that life could hold more than just logic. They saw beauty in the world around them, while we saw only knowledge to be gained. Through our interaction with them, we came to understand that emotion held value—an inconstant, a variable that could never truly be factored into our calculations, yet value nonetheless. I believe it was that emotion that led us to make the choice to stay. To fight, to save the humans that had taught us something a thousand thousand years of learning had failed to teach.”

  The world wheeled by beneath the Hunter’s feet until he stood in the top of a tower. Sunlight streamed through windows and walls made of transparent gemstone, but the seething, swirling portal into chaos devoured the brilliance and filled the chamber with shadow.

  “We knew we had no chance to defeat the Devourer of Worlds, yet our calculations and theorizing led us to believe we could perhaps stop it, close the way to prevent it from destroying our world. My brother Deneen, the most impetuous of our kind, attempted to save the world on his own.”

  A Serenii strode toward the blackened portal with confidence. He wore a necklace that looked like two crossed daggers. The lengths of metal glowed bright blue as he reached into the bowels of Einan to harness its power. Bright blue, red, green, and violet light streamed from his hands and swirled toward the rift. The creature within screamed, its tendrils retreating from the pulsing magick.

  “His battle with the Devourer shook Einan to its foundation. The power he wielded was truly terrible to behold, and the world was forever scarred.”

  The Hunter found himself hovering above the world, watching as it was torn apart. The single unified continent split into six separate land masses—the largest he recognized as Einan, and the one to the south as Fehl. Water swirled into the chasms to form oceans that
divided the lands. The sundering drove a massive crack through Einan, forming the world-spanning canyon known as the Chasm of the Lost. Mountains thrust up from the earth as the might of the Serenii magick and the unstoppable force of chaos clashed.

  “Too late, we sought to come to his aid.”

  Two more Serenii rushed into the towertop—Kharna and another, this one female. The Hunter could feel the horror radiating from the female Serenii, hear her cries of misery as she watched the tall, confident Serenii dragged shrieking into the portal into chaos. Tendrils of darkness seeped into the creature’s face, turning his eyes an impossible, empty black. Chaos consumed him one cell at a time until nothing remained of the grey-skinned giant—nothing but the necklace that lay smoking and charred on the floor of the towertop.

  “Deneen, whom your people have dubbed the Swordsman, fell in battle with the Devourer. Yet his death bought us a reprieve.”

  A concussive force ripped from the portal as the Serenii was consumed, and a tidal wave of magick washed across the world. The rift began to shrink, the inky tendrils pushed back. Yet it did not close fully. A hair-thin crack into chaos remained.

  “The gate was not sealed, yet the Devourer could not enter our world fully. We had time—how long, we did not know—to find another means to block it forever. Yet we used what time we had to construct this place, Enarium, the city built to kill the Devourer of Worlds.”

  Before the Hunter’s eyes, the city of Enarium sprang to life around the massive tower at its center. The blue gemstone Keeps seemed to rise from the ground, like sapphire quills sprouting from the back of some monstrous being.

  “Twenty-four towers to harness the power of the Er’hato Tashat, to direct the energy into one singular place to be used to seal the rift between our world and the world of the Abiarazi, a world consumed by the Devourer.”