“Just Pierait here, sir; all I did was help him figure out how to cross the Wall,” Lyria admitted humbly.
The dwarf waved it off.
“Well and the same, miss, or have you never heard that there’s a strong woman behind every man who succeeds?” the dwarf corrected, much to Lyria’s surprise. That was the closest thing to a compliment she had ever heard from the man.
Lyria and Pierait said their good-byes to the dwarf and crossed the river, edging back along the mountains. Lyria gripped Pierait’s arm as she had looked east and he shot her a concerned look. She pointed.
“The Terra Massif is shorter as well. The town of Windbreak is gone,” Lyria said with awe.
“I suppose I am the one responsible,” Pierait asked unhappily.
“I would not be so sad; it was a slave city, a place of moral corruption and depravity,” Lyria assured him.
After a week, they were starting to see Myceum in the distance and Pierait had taken out a jeweled spyglass the king had given him and put it up to his eye to look into the distance. Lyria worried as the shock showed in his face.
“They’ve begun without us, Lyria; I have no doubt that the army I see belongs to my friends and they are not doing well…”
Chapter 15: Devastation
Once it had been time to separate and for Rienna to lead her troops at the front, they had made it a lot further than they thought before the unicorns were too weary. It had been past the point of no return before the army silently admitted the march was taking its toll on their energy and strength and they would not reach Myceum at full strength by any means.
Rienna focused on their fast charge; the army already seemed happier when they realized they no longer needed to keep their tight formation but as the gates loomed in the distance, Rienna did not feel invigorated in the least. Something just wasn’t right here; there were no armies waiting, although Myceum’s scouts must have had time to announce the threat and assemble troops to guard the city. There was not a single solder waiting to stop them. Rienna’s steps slowed and she told the army to be wary. As they neared the stone arch, doors open as if welcoming them, Rienna’s urge was to turn tail and run and it was not a good feeling.
Still they entered the arch and were agape as they saw nothing but farmers and merchants, playing children and pregnant women. The people they saw were normal, but it made her feel even more ill; not a one of them seemed confused or frightened or concerned by an army pouring in through the gates. Rienna was not so stupid as to think they would just march in and slay the madmen so easily and her head was buzzing with warning, sure that there was a trap here, but baffled that she wasn’t seeing it.
A child’s ball rolled into her ankle and she instinctively bent to pick it up. Before she stood, her eyes had met those of a child coming to retrieve it and she saw an unnatural flash of red and malice in those inhuman eyes and before her eyes, something ripped through the child’s shoulder and she barely had time to summon her bubble of protection as the great armored razor thin blade lashed out in an attempt to divide her in half at the waist. She watched for a split second in horror as the child’s skin sloughed away in great globs and a twisted machine all spinning blades and deadly arms tried for her again. She had turned to scream at her troops and watched the scene unfold in a kind of wretched horror.
The bellies of pregnant women were spitting out gobs of gore and deadly robotic spidery creatures that set about tearing her soldiers to pieces, their screams high-pitched and almost inhuman as they were not just killed but ripped to pieces as they lived. Limbs flew and blood quickly painted the streets with soldiers that had been too shocked to draw their swords. The madman had implanted his machines in the bodies of humans, innocents, to lay his trap. The entire city itself was not people at all; Viper had used every subject of his city to hide his army.
Rienna felt sick and woozy but she drew her sword and dropped her shields and in a scream of fury, she slashed and used her magic to dismantle the atrocities and attempt to save whomever she could. Blood turned her vision red and she felt like a berserker, a creature of battle fury, uncontrollable and tireless. She could no longer keep track of whether her friends came to her aid or what sword or flash of light was friend or foe; her fury targeted the blades, the things that moved unnaturally and she cut them down. Healing was useless here; the things were precise and moved and tore and targeted with death in mind.
Melchior had been stunned from his vantage point, seeing the army ahead seemingly burst into bloody chunks from an eerie quiet only moments before and when he sent in the magicians, he watched as their army began to lose their resolve in the face of such brutality. The machines bursting forth from the remnants of human bodies that housed them were terrifying things that resembled grotesque landscapers meant to grind, pull and shred humans rather than manicuring lawns. He had panicked for Rienna but found her covered in blood and flowing in a danse macabre like an angel of death.
Finn and Verity had swooped from above, but Melchior had shouted at them to take to the ground; the damned machines could mow down with firepower what little took to the sky and even the exhausted unicorns were battling from the ground. He saw the others among them had abandoned their ordered march; Krose, Dinsch, and Ashe sped by to join the massacre. Despite all of their efforts, their army was decreasing rapidly and it was a sickening sight, seeing cold killing machines burst from bodies that fell in graceless chunks to turn the bodies of their soldiers into the same meat trails on the crimson streets.
Rienna lost track of everything, her mind not quite able to line up what had gone wrong and in the end, she decided to shut it out. Maybe it would bite her later, but right now she was purely warrior and nothing else, if she hoped to make it out in one piece.
Even when her body grew tired and sore and ached with dull and sharp pains, she kept on but she would watch carts and even doorways contort into more deadly machines and there seemed to be two more for every one she had slain. She could not say how long she kept at it, but she did not stop. At some point, she realized she was now close to the palace, that her fury had taken her further into the city and the machines seemed scarcer now.
She spun about back and forth and looked at the carnage, the dripping, bloody horror of a huge kingdom covered in gore and she had only just realized when there were no more machines left to attack, that the sun had left the sky and the sky itself was overcast and thick with clouds a grey so dark they were nearly black and rain began to pour. The thick chunks of flesh and bone that had once been living now seemed to reanimate as water drew them along the streets and forced the splatters and gore from the walls and pots and buildings to become a sick red-black river in the streets. Nothing moved around her that seemed to still be alive. Rienna was not yet able to feel; she wondered about her friends, but saw nothing as she watched, so she turned around numbly and climbed the steps toward the palace, wondering if she would have the strength to face Viper even if he was still here. The blood covering her, so little of it actually hers, was thinning but not washing away entirely even in the torrential downpour.
Somewhere in the distance she heard someone ordering those that hadn’t fled in terror or died to sweep the town; there might still be more of the cleverly hidden machines.
Rienna heard a heavy wobbly sound beside her and turned to see Dinsch, his white fur still pink with blood like her own skin and a tightly-bound cloth tied around his head over his right eye and a great trail of blood coming from it.
“I didn’t lose the eye, but it’s going to be one hell of a scar,” Dinsch admitted, walking beside her as she fell into step. Rienna did not speak; she couldn’t find her voice or her thoughts as they climbed the steps together. At the top of the steps, Finn (holding Verity) flew in for a landing and they ran down to fall into step behind her. Her friends appearing was both reassuring and weakening her, her stomach turning and flopping and she stopped to empty her stomach, straightening up to walk again. All she could think now was wheth
er Krose, Melchior and Ashe had made it. Krose ran out from the palace and stopped Rienna long enough to embrace her tightly and fell into step beside her as they walked again. Rienna’s heart felt heavy, needing so badly for the brothers to be somewhere around here. When she entered the palace, Melchior stood in the hall, next to a dying woman on the floor, panting as her blood and life drained away. She was covered in her own blood but she saw enough skin to guess that the tattooed woman had to be Chevalle.
Rienna quickened her steps, her sword thrust towards Chevalle, but Melchior came towards her and grabbed her wrist, twisting it quickly so that she dropped it in pain. He knew that attempting to reason with her would have been met with anger so he had to disarm her. Rienna shot him a dangerous, desperate look and he pulled her into his arms and kissed her head.
“Not yet, Rienna. She is already dying. She will tell us what she knows,” Melchior told her quietly then released her. She bent to retrieve her sword and sheathed it, watching the woman panting thickly.
“I did this willingly,” Chevalle admitted, her voice thick and sultry with impending death and defiance. “I would have done anything for Viper; he understood me better than anyone. I don’t even regret what I did to you, Melchior; I don’t regret what we did to the kingdom. Not long before you came, he stabbed me and left me here to die. Cradled me as if he forgot he had done it himself. He is long gone and his plans are clear. I would have destroyed the world with him, but he did not trust me after all. You will not stop him; if you chase him, you are doomed, if you do not, you are still doomed. The old gods keep stirring as their world and the souls in it are unbalanced— “
A bullet shattered the side of Chevalle’s head and the group spun to see Pierait holding a smoking gun with an armored girl beside him, the gun yet another parting gift of King Oryn.
“There is nothing more she could have said to help and there was a bomb in her head set to go off when she expired,” Lyria spoke up softly as Pierait tucked the gun back under his cloak where he had hidden it.
Tears leapt to Rienna’s eyes as she ran over and wrapped her arms around Pierait so tightly that he choked and laughed in the same breaths. She loosened her embrace only slightly as she looked at the girl he was with.
“How would you know?” Rienna asked her without suspicion. “My name is Lyria and I have the touch, an old gift and there were still machines about that were human enough to project their thoughts. One knew this lady’s secrets, a former general turned abomination. I have never seen anything this… this…”
“Evil,” Rienna finished and released Pierait to step back and look at him.
“You found your soul after all,” Rienna stated, seeing the change in his eyes. If he hadn’t had the pale blue hair and golden eyes, she hardly would have recognized him.
“More than that, I’m afraid; more than I had ever bargained for,” Pierait confessed. Rienna stepped away again, her eyes searching frantically around the room as her emotions started to flood back in.
“Ashe… tell me someone has seen him…” Rienna demanded desperately and it was Pierait that had come forward to touch her arm.
“We saw him chasing after that man, the one called Viper,” Pierait told her. “He is well for now, but for how long, no one can say.”
Rienna crumpled to the floor, her eyes filling with hate as she looked at the corpse of Chevalle, the fatal wound in her head still oozing. She wanted Ashe to hold her now and she was enraged that he had left her so foolishly. The horror of what she had seen threatened to fill her head but she shut it out and looked at her friends now, glad that they were still alive. She saw Krose, his concern for Dinsch prevalent now, she saw Finn and Verity embracing and Pierait and Lyria had gone to the doors of the palace to look out on the carnage still pooling in the rain. She saw the uncovered mechanical hand of Melchior suddenly and it had occurred to her that all was not lost yet. They had lost their army but they had not yet lost each other and Ashe was still out there alive, she had to believe that.
She took the hand he offered her now and let him pull her to her feet. She looked into his eyes and for an instant, she saw the serious unsmiling boy she had once known him to be and something about the things she was noticing built up her resolve. She knew what this whole awful scene was about and Viper had underestimated them. He had not quite known that their dark pasts did not cripple them, that this was not the last straw at all, and they were not giving up here.
Rienna turned as she heard Pierait’s steps hurrying towards them now.
“We need to leave now; the troops from the Walk are in the distance and headed this way. No doubt Viper thinks they will wipe out whatever survived this,” Pierait told them. Rienna was awed by this new man with a familiar face and words she never thought to hear him say but nodded.
In the open doorway, she saw Lyria back away hesitantly as the unicorns (and it looked like all 50 of them) had landed outside. Rienna stepped forward, renewed by this new sign of hope and smiled.
“These are our friends, Pierait, Lyria; unicorns from another realm,” Rienna told them.
“There is no time to waste, Rienna; your friends must mount and we must go,” the large female unicorn told her.
They did not waste time and were mounted and taking to the sky in short order, heading south over another ocean, towards another land.
She watched the horrors as they unfolded and She had been amazed that the survivors did not crumble. She was sure it would have turned out worse, sure that their resolve would crumble as the madman had thought as well. She was suddenly proud of the old gods’ children, those tiny humans with fledging knowledge of the elementals’ powers they had been given. Yet as they flew, She felt momentary panic as the earth shook lightly again as one of the old gods stirred in their sleep again. The blood of innocents, the evil machines, the end of the Soulless and the Wellspring, the end of the Lost and the Wraiths and the Furies. The gods were growing restless and they knew their creations were falling apart and a time would come where they would need to intercede.
Her eyes drifted to the continent that rested in the sky, a huge untouched land always hidden from humans by large white clouds. A land that the old gods had once materialized on and called Elcarim, a land as large as Wheryf where the Felisfolk had made their home. It was there that Viper had unknowingly carried the man named Ashe. Ashe had let go as soon as there had been a safe place to drop although safe was not exactly correct. This was a place much like Calderon, a place where the life had grown wild and evolved and changed so differently from the land below. Luckily for Ashe, a lot of the dangers slept.
She had watched the old gods make Elcarim out of sheer ennui, a place to watch their creations unfold. She had watched them make Calderon and some other hidden pockets of wonders to test what they wanted in this world. She did not know why they made her either; like many of the things they made in pockets, She had no purpose. Even the manmade ones like the Folk had a place, but She did not. The old gods had not even bothered to name her. She was like an abandoned child, waiting for her parents to notice her, realize how wonderful She was, but even as they had hidden away from the elementals, they had not even bothered to say anything. Secretly, She even wished that they would never wake and She would find her own way into existence.
She had once thought that maybe she was a reject, a thing that had been made to test the old souls with their powers, but She did not really have powers, unless the watching, the knowing, the seeing was a power. Unless the fact that She had not been driven mad by a long existence were some kind of power. She did not know, but it seemed as far as knowing went, She knew more than most. Still, the future was closed to her.
She knew Viper’s game, She knew what he was up to and the old gods would have no choice but to wake. The world would end and there was nothing She could do but watch. Even if her unfathomably long existence only amounted to a single second of true life, of touch, She would live it to the fullest. She would never give up hope.
> When Ashe awoke, he was dripping wet and disoriented, having aimed for a watery pool and passing out on landing. He guessed he had been lucky enough to just float to the edge, but it made him frown. He was several feet away from the edge, so unless the pool receded like its own little ocean, something would have had to drag him out. No drag marks to be seen… The place he had landed looked more like a watercolor painting or a place you went to after you died if you had lived a good life. Seeing as how he had enough presence of mind to know he had been no saint, he discounted any thoughts of being dead. He cleared his mind and had remembered how he got here; he had thought Viper’s escape pod would rise up into the sky forever, a feeling he had once had before meeting Zephyra. A grin crept across his face remembering that encounter now. She had scared him senseless at first, but had been so accommodating in the end.
He knew he shouldn’t have given into the impulse to chase after Viper; one look in that man’s eyes and the disgusting creations he had hacked through to get to the palace had made perfect sense. His eyes were the Pandora’s box of insanity and not a shred of hope; his only saving grace was the fact that he could be killed, which was hope enough for the world he wished to decimate. All the same, he knew if Rienna had survived, she would be panicking, maybe even wading through human remains to see if he was among them. He hoped he was wrong, both about the possibility she was dead and her mucking through the gore to confirm whether he was among it. He shivered, imagining her lifting and wiping at severed limbs to see if they bore his tattoos.
This was a place that looked untouched and uninhabited by anything civilized or organized. Plants grew huge and barely disturbed and he was almost afraid to move, remembering Melchior’s recollection of fast, human-dissolving plants. Anger and determination drove him more than fear though and he studied the landscape, remembering that before he dropped off, he had seen a strange yellowish ridge that Viper had passed over.
The Truth about Heroes: Complete Trilogy (Heroes Trilogy) Page 51