by Darius Hinks
Lightning flashed overhead and a ball of light began to form in the stone.
Clara opened her eyes and saw power stirring in the charred rock. She touched her head, channelling flames from the storm; flooding magic into her skull.
To her delight she felt a sentience entering her mind – something noble and powerful; something that heard her pleas. ‘I can help you, Clara,’ it seemed to say, as her vision filled with blinding light.
‘What must I do?’ she cried, straightening her tired old back as the magic grew stronger.
There was no reply but a face swam into view, haloed by the blazing lights. The face was benign and proud, and for a while Clara failed to notice that it was not human. Then, as her palms began to blister and throb, Clara realised that she was facing a stag – a white stag, of unbelievable beauty. As she held the creature’s gaze a new sensation entered her limbs. It was as though the animal’s sentience had charged her blood somehow and begun changing her body. It raced through her veins, filling her with vigour.
Then she realised the stag was about to speak to her.
‘Witch!’ screamed a hoarse voice and Clara felt something connect with the side of her head.
The power vanished and Clara found herself sprawled on her back, lying in the wet heather, staring up at the stars.
A face swam into view. For a second Clara thought she was still looking at the white stag, but as the blood cleared from her eyes she saw a furious peasant looming over her, clutching a brutal-looking club.
‘What have you done, witch?’ howled the peasant, gesturing at the storm.
There was another explosion of pain in Clara’s head and she lost consciousness.
‘She’s one of them. A daemon worshipper.’
Clara awoke with a start. She looked out across a moonlit, rain-lashed heath and realised she had no idea where she was, or who she was. Instinctively, she tried to reach for the bone in her sack, but the sack was gone and her arms were bound.
Fear gripped her as she discovered she was tied to a broken stump of white rock. She felt a flash of recognition at the sight of the peasants, huddled in the rain, rifling through her possessions. Her prized collection of animal skulls and wooden fetishes were scattered across the grass. One of the peasants, a hulking simpleton with a face like boiled meat, was holding her crook up into the moonlight, grinning idiotically at the runes carved along its length.
‘Nah, she’s just a lousy conjuror,’ he said, waving the crook at Clara. ‘Look at her! She’s senile. The only danger is that she might accidentally piss on you.’
Another peasant grabbed Clara’s hair and yanked her back, pointing at the side of her head.
‘Then what’s this?’
‘It’s where you hit her, you idiot.’
The man, not visible to Clara, sounded almost hysterical. ‘It’s the bloody rot is what it is. The mark of Chaos. She’s barely human. They’re all alike. It’s them what bring the rot down on our heads. With all their spells and books.’
At the mention of spells, Clara’s memory began to clear. An image of the white stag flashed into her mind and she felt a brief return of the sensation she had experienced before – an odd, exhilarating rushing feeling in her veins. The animal had touched her soul, she was sure of it. Could her spell have worked? Had she channelled the power of the Everwood?
Thunder rolled overhead and Clara remembered something else.
‘We need to leave,’ she said, through a mouthful of blood.
The man nearest to her stooped, so that his face was directly in front of hers.
‘The witch is trying to speak!’
Clara saw a sallow-faced youth with lank, straw-coloured hair and feverish, sunken eyes.
‘I told you we should have gagged her.’
The youth started looking around for a piece of cloth.
‘A storm is coming,’ Clara said, straining against her bonds.
The peasants jeered.
‘A storm is coming?’ cried the bald brute. He shoved the youth aside and waved at the columns of rain slamming into the hillside. ‘You need to work on your premonitions, old girl.’ He grinned at his friends. ‘I think the idea is to predict things before they happen.’
The other peasants laughed and then continued rummaging through Clara’s belongings.
Clara shook her head, sure that something dreadful was about to emerge from the trees. ‘Not that kind of storm,’ she said, but her words were drowned out by laughter and rain.
‘Here,’ cried the pale youth, ‘perhaps your magic bloody hat will shut you up.’ He rammed the stag hood down over Clara’s head, wrenching it so low that it covered her face.
Clara’s panic grew. Strands of power were tugging at her furs and ruffling her hair. She could feel the night straining at its seams.
‘We need to leave,’ she repeated, shaking her head so that the stag’s head fell back a little, enabling her to see.
The peasants had found her leather purse and their faces lit up as they poured out the coins.
‘I know you’re possessed,’ whispered the ill-looking youth who was still crouched by Clara’s side. His eyes were rolling with excitement and he had a butcher’s knife in his hand.
‘Maybe I should let these bloody daemons out?’ he said, his lips trembling as he raised the blade to Clara’s throat. ‘What do you think, old girl? Shall I rid you of them?’
Clara looked past the youth into the streams of power pouring from the trees. The peasants were clearly blind to the Aethyr but where the stone had previously stood, she saw a familiar thread of amber lights, snaking through the glare. She reached out to it with her mind.
Her body went into a violent spasm and her head jolted back, spilling pale fire from her eyes.
The youth gasped and backed away, lowering his knife.
Clara felt her bones starting to lengthen and she sighed, giving in to a pleasure she had long denied herself.
Lightning flashed right overhead and the youth began to scream.
Clara felt a grim satisfaction as her ribs broadened and cracked.
Then the other peasants began to scream and Clara opened her eyes to revel in their fear.
To her surprise, none of them were looking at her. They had dropped her belongings and were staring slack-jawed at the trees behind her.
The youth at her side was now crying. He had dropped his knife to the ground and was clutching at his face in shock.
Clara strained and twisted herself around the waystone until she could see what had scared them.
The forest was gone.
Clara’s breath caught in her throat. Where rows of trunks had once stood there was now a tsunami of leaves and light.
Clara moaned in fear. The scale of it was beyond comprehension. It was as though the realm of the gods had fallen into the mortal world. Branches, earth, rain and sky were all rolled into one glistening whole, tumbling towards her like an ocean, crackling with arcane power; but it was not this that made Clara groan. The wave of destruction was being ridden by an army – a host of wailing, blood-drenched daemons.
Clara joined her scream to those of the peasants. The figures racing towards her were impossible. They could not exist. Her mind crumbled in the face of such outlandish beings.
She saw a rain of maleficent imps, each no bigger than her fist, with leering, giggling faces and cruel, tiny blades. She saw the husks of dead trees, blazing with inner fire and reaching out with splintered claws. She saw animals of every kind; torn, bleeding and wild with hunger, but all clawing deliriously as they were carried along by the verdant storm. She saw pale, impossibly slender men, with almond-shaped eyes and hideously alien features. They were howling songs to the wind and they were all horribly wounded, trailing blood as they ran, but their faces were ecstatic, and as they tumbled towards her, Clara realised that
they were not men at all, but something beyond nature – something quite beyond her understanding.
The vanguard of this unholy parade was a group of figures even more horrific than the others: horned riders, adding to the roar of the storm with the sound of hunting horns and pounding drums. Some of them wore tall masks of splintered birchwood and rode pale horses, draped in bloody scalps; others sprinted on foot, tearing at the creatures nearest to them with long, curved talons.
And towering above everything was the spirit that finally caused Clara to scream a prayer and clamp her eyes shut. There was a giant leading the charge: an ivy-coloured monster, with tall, knotted antlers and the hindquarters of a stag. Its face was a mask of rage and its eyes were like braziers. Snapping around its heels was a pack of rangy hounds, their eyes flashing with the same unearthly light as those of their master.
Clara slumped in her bonds, abandoning all hope of escape.
The peasants were still screaming and she looked up to see that they were trying to flee through the grass. It was pointless and pitiful. The whole hillside was shuddering with the force of the storm. As the daemons tore from the trees and thundered through the grass, the peasants stumbled and fell, screaming for mercy as the immortal host crashed over them.
Clara’s frail body shook as the spirits smashed against the stump of rock she was tied to. She felt her skin blister as they screamed past, laughing and snarling as they went.
The peasants’ cries became hysterical as the spirits and animals dragged them from the ground, tearing their bodies to shreds as they thundered through the rain.
Clara’s bonds held her in place and, although it shook and creaked, the stone held firm. She dared a glimpse at the carnage and saw that the emerald giant had paused to attack one of the peasants, grunting and snarling as it skewered him with a spear.
The rest of the monsters continued flooding past the stone without even glancing at Clara and she began to wonder if she might survive after all. They were making for a cluster of distant lights on the far side of the valley: Garonne. Her stomach turned as she realised the carnage that would ensue once the daemons reached the fortified little town. Garonne’s defences would be meaningless against such beings.
Clara held her breath as the host roared past her, feeling more hopeful with every second that passed.
Then her heart stopped.
The antlered giant had turned to face her.
A peasant was still hanging from the giant’s spear as it stepped towards Clara, shouldering its way back against the tide of monsters and churning up the muddy field with its hooves.
Clara struggled desperately but her bonds were still too tight. She could do nothing but watch in horror as the giant approached.
She muttered a prayer as the monster came to a halt a few feet away and stared at her down the length of its nose.
‘Merciful gods!’ screamed the skewered peasant, clutching at the spear with one hand and reaching out to Clara with the other. His belly was torn wide open and he was trying desperately to force his steaming innards back into place. ‘Help me, you bloody witch! Do something! Don’t let it kill me!’ His voice became a hitching whine as his life spilled out onto the grass. ‘Please! By the gods!’
Clara was only vaguely aware of the man’s cries. The giant was still staring at her, oblivious to the man dying on its weapon, and Clara could see nothing but its blazing eyes.
Then, to Clara’s horror, the giant spoke. The idea that such a nightmarish creature would use language was even more grotesque than the sight of its violence. The giant’s voice was low and grinding, and the words were gibberish – a sing-song, meaningless doggerel – but something about the sound was oddly familiar. She knew she was about to die, but for some reason all she could think about was the odd poetry of the monster’s voice. She wracked her brains, trying to place where she had heard the low, rolling vowel sounds before.
The monster pointed at her head and spoke again.
The strange language conjured an image in Clara’s mind: a group of men, dressed in the same furs and bones she wore, huddled around a brazier, conjuring images from the flames. Sorcerers, she thought, recalling the Amber Brotherhood, back in the hills north of Altdorf.
He’s speaking the language of Ghur, she realised. It sounds like one of our rites.
Her thoughts evaporated as the giant dropped its victim and strode closer, narrowing its incandescent eyes.
The peasant flopped to the ground like a gutted fish, either dead or close to it, and the monster reached for Clara’s throat.
The old woman closed her eyes and prepared for death.
There was a snapping sound and Clara felt herself being lifted from the shattered stone.
She opened her eyes and saw that the giant had torn away her bonds and dragged her onto her feet. Seeing the creature’s face so close up was like seeing the world in the shards of a broken mirror. Its features were vaguely humanoid, but grotesquely oversized and brutally carved, like a crudely wrought totem, chiselled from a piece of green wood. The monster’s head was almost twice as large as Clara’s and its eyes were like emeralds, glittering in the dark. Clara suddenly found it hard to breathe. She caught the smell of raw meat on the monster’s breath and her legs collapsed beneath her.
The monster caught her easily in one hand and, with the other, snatched the stag’s head and held it up into the moonlight.
Clara dangled helplessly in the monster’s iron grip as it stared at the stag’s head. She realised that the thing was more than just a feral brute. There was a fierce intensity in its narrowed eyes and it studied the stag horns as though they were familiar.
The monster’s lips curled back from its teeth and it glared at Clara, as though accusing her of something.
‘I didn’t kill it,’ whispered Clara, knowing she was wasting her breath. How could she reason with such a thing?
The sound of hunting horns rang out and the monster looked over its shoulder, staring at the glittering host thundering down into the valley.
Clara gagged as the monster tightened its grip on her throat, then fell heavily to her knees as the monster dropped her, turned, and charged down the hillside after the other daemons, discarding the stag’s head as it vanished into the rain.
Clara watched the nightmarish shapes for a while as they thundered away from her. Then, as the noise and fury began to fade, she started to laugh. The peasants lay all around her, broken, bloody and dead; discarded like the remnants of a meal but, somehow, she was alive. How could that be? Why had they let her live?
It was only as her panic subsided that she noticed the terrible pain of her head wound.
Agony and confusion pooled in Clara’s mind as she dropped, senseless, into the mud.
Chapter Two
The god flew through a storm. It was fleet-limbed, weightless and snatching at the firmament. Its name was Kurnous and its fury was as bottomless as its hunger. Centuries passed, or perhaps seconds, as time and the cosmos fled before it, scrambling into burrows, cowering in dens and massing in great towers; screaming for mercy as Kurnous returned the world to a state of raw beauty. There was only hunter and hunted. There could be nothing else.
Then, something changed.
The god glimpsed a flash of silver – a blade emerging from a pool of pitch. Pain flashed in its chest, quickly followed by a dizzying rush of sensations: the breeze, whistling through the dark, and rain, needle-cold against its skin.
As the physical world began to bite, the Otherworld began to fade. Spirits and gods withdrew, taking decorous bows and giving their places to storm clouds and hunched, wind-lashed trees. The impact of hooves on turf shook through its legs and the god slipped into a dream. It dreamt that it was not a god at all, but a being of flesh and bone – a mortal sprinting through a tempest, with blood pulsing through its veins and air burning in its lungs.
The god dreamt that it was a simple king, called Orion.
The dream unnerved the god, but it charged on, down into a moonlit valley. Its subjects spiralled around it as it ran: faces and limbs, crumpled beneath divine hooves; the slow, the old and the weak, all crushed by their king. Kurnous’s heart drummed with the beat of their passing souls, bound to them by hunger and religion. Some of the spirits stayed with Kurnous, howling alongside the bodies of the living; waving spears of mist and blades of tempered moonlight. The god looked up and saw that the Otherworld was still there: a mantle of stars, overlaid with countless, bewildering constellations.
The air was filled with wonders, but as the god reached the valley floor it glimpsed something all too real. The landscape had been brutalised – defiled by the industry of mortals. They had built one of their vile halls: a squat, ugly fastness of chiselled stone and butchered trees. It guarded the end of the valley like a hulking boar, bristling with pennants and gilded with glittering casements. Kurnous’s pulse quickened, then, to the god’s delight, it realised its mortal subjects were already making for the stronghold, howling and screaming as they scrambled through the flood.
The god paused, grasping at the fragments of a dream and realised that the truth was this rainy hillside. The truth was this panting frame. He was Orion.
‘What’s happening to me?’ he whispered.
Lights flickered overhead, distracting him from his thoughts. At first, Orion paid them no heed, assuming that his friends, the spirits, were simply echoing his outrage with their incandescent flesh. Then he saw hunters falling. Not because of him, but because of arrows – arrows with steel heads that flashed through the lightning-charged air. Bloodstained nobles spun backwards across the grass, leaving a spray of rain behind them as they died.
Orion raised his horn and filled the valley with sound.
The hunters answered by racing even faster towards the structure, but the closer they got, the more of them that fell and the more Orion’s outrage grew.
Who would dare stand against the Wild Hunt?