Gifts of Vorallon: 02 - City of Thunder

by Thomas Cardin

  Lorace did not need to use his sight to see the south gate swinging open. The sudden cries of the men along the battlements were sufficient to show that the demon had done as he claimed.

  Instead of looking outwards, Lorace turned his sight inwards. As Sir Rindal had described shifting the tip of his sword to reach past flesh to cut through the threads holding an insubstantial spirit bound to a soul, so Lorace shifted his sight. Aizel commanded his muscles to immobility and tore through his thoughts as if they were his own, but he held no sway over what Lorace did now. He viewed his spirit and saw its shining extent as it stretched through his body and even beyond the bounds of his limbs, he focused his will and his spirit contracted and expanded at his command. He shifted his sight further still, to see how his spirit was bound to his soul and he saw the spirit of Lord Aizel as it stretched fine tendrils of its dark essence into his mind and body. The demon lord’s spirit, which had known life as the spirit of the wizard Losqua, overlay the entire horde with thousands of tendrils reaching down to control them all. Beneath them all was the spirit of Vorallon.

  Incalculably solid and massive, the great spirit shimmered beneath everything, the force upon which all other spirits stood. He broadened his sight to take in the entirety of the world spanning spirit. It shone silver and indigo, the colors of Vlaske K’Brak, but a black void intersected a distant portion like an ulcerous growth. The Devourer was attacking the spirit of Vorallon. The location of the blackness was where he understood Blackdrake to be. He could not spare the time to investigate it further for the talons of Aizel were tearing into his scalp.

  Looking further inward, to the center of Vorallon’s spirit he saw the core of godstone, the immovable center, which the gods themselves tapped to do the miraculous and impossible. Lorace braced his spirit against that immovable center and pushed. Focusing his will and his tranquility, his golden sparks swarmed, pushing back against the clinging, groping spirit of Aizel. He drove back each tendril and lifted the malevolent spirit off, freeing himself.

  “I accept your champion,” Lorace said as he reached into his satchel and took hold of his chain.

  Lord Aizel died before the man’s words had even registered on him. Just before this would-be ruler’s mind broke free of his grip, he saw everything the man had been hiding from him. He saw exactly how his entire empire was to die. He had only an instant to contemplate that doom before he vanished in unbearable agony from all existence.

  Hethal gripped her arm as the towering column of black flame erupted where the demon had stood. Immediately, each demon in the horde was in motion, many leaping toward the open gate and walls of Halversome.

  “The wards, Sir Rindal,” Hethal said urgently. “Channel the wards of the walls to Lorace as you did the wards of the ship. Iris, you must use your gift now, you must drive every demon you can into a furious rage against Lorace. Every one of them must attack him and only him.”

  “They will bury him in their numbers!” she exclaimed, unable to turn her eyes away.

  “Exactly!” Hethal said in breathless excitement. “Trust him, this is his plan.”

  “His plan,” Iris nodded. She reached out over the vast expanse of demons with every ounce of her strength. This man is all that stands between you and your greatest desires! She let their grisliest fantasies of violence wash over them and showed them the white robed man in their midst, the ultimate target of their twisted need. He will stop at nothing to imprison and contain you. Let loose your anger, let loose your hate. Crush him and be free!

  The demons charging the city halted and turned, howling in their unbridled rage for the tiniest spot of white buried deep within their black ranks.

  Sir Rindal intoned alien words deep in his throat, exactly as the Lady had taught him. Commanding the wards inlaid into every stone of the walls and battlements of Halversome. Even as the demons turned to focus their malevolence upon Lorace, thousands of piercing lines of blue energy burst forth from the city walls in a massive volley enveloping Lorace in their protective embrace.

  Oen rallied his priests where they stood on the south battlements, urging them to sustain the wards with every ounce of will. To each priest he had assigned a dozen guardsmen and Zuxran warriors to hold them up and share with them their strength. Finally, Oen turned Tornin, General Moyan, and Captain Falraan who stood with him.

  “You are with me,” Oen said as he planted both his hands on the stone of the battlement before him. “The power of these wards was never meant to be sustained like this, and I will have to call on your strength when mine wanes.”

  Sakke Vrang unleashed its full vengeance through him the instant the white circle on his hand closed on its dull silvery links. The demon lord’s essence passed directly through his body, no mere flash of memories filtered by the chain. Every bit of the hatred and foulness of Lord Aizel flowed into him from where the demon’s spidery-fingered hand had clutched his head. The golden sparks of his spirit struggled to purify it before it could flow past his tranquility and re-ignite the coals of rage buried deep within.

  To his inward peering sight he appeared to catch fire, so intense was the explosion of strength within his spirit as the purification happened within himself and not the chain.

  He grasped now what would have happened if he had chosen to embrace the anger that had arisen in his breast. The very darkness of the demon’s substance would have overwhelmed him as Adwa-Ki had forewarned. Only through his focused tranquility could the interaction of his spirit and the chain work flawlessly to convert the dark into light. Lorace would have stood upon the field as the nascent Lord of Vengeance, as his brothers and the Old Gods had foreseen him.

  Nothing remained of Aizel, not a scrap of his hueratta had escaped the conversion. The chain had pulled all of the corruption through his body, even the substance of the demon’s flesh.

  Lorace lifted the chain high over his head. Holding one end, he released its length to the winds at his command. He planted his feet, and began whirling Sakke Vrang in a great circle. The surrounding demons began vanishing into black flames as a bright blue nimbus of light covered him—the embrace of Halversome’s protective wards.

  He spun the chain faster and faster. The strain of it on his upraised arm was incredible, but just a small fraction of the strength flowing into him was enough to anchor himself against the pull. His grip on the end of the chain was an unbreakable thing though eventually he was bracing his entire body against the force of its pull as it whirled in a blur. He rooted himself to the immovable core of Vorallon again and swung the chain faster still. A continuous howl of thunder rattled his very bones.

  Beyond the immediate sweep of his chain, demons unleashed the varied foul energies of their gifts at him, but as with Scythe’s lightning bolt, the chain absorbed those forces as well, converting even that corruption into strength. They kept charging forward into the maelstrom of black flame enveloping the area. Smaller demons tried to go below the level of the chain, but simple shifts and dips of its arc with Lorace’s driving will intercepted them. The sparking glow of the chain was competing with the blue energy of the wards to brighten the cloudy morning into incandescence. Conversely, the sky began to darken with more heavy clouds sweeping in from the sea to collect overhead in brooding abundance.

  Lorace shifted his sight above the battlefield as the spirits of the demons spat forth a multitude of coalescing energies. Many forces were unleashed at him from fire to lighting and even thick waves of roiling darkness while others launched innumerable forms of deadly projectiles. The blurring disk of golden light that Sakke Vrang had become caught almost all attacks. The enveloping blue light of Halversome’s wards deflected anything the chain missed.

  Above all these forces of destruction another dark spirit rose, feeding surpassing amounts of raw energy to the attacks of the demons. The great pulsating form on the palanquin emitted raw spirit energy that the entire demon horde was tapping into to fuel their attacks. Lorace redoubled his efforts to intercept as
much as he could with Sakke Vrang, banishing the thought of what these empowered attacks would do if directed upon the walls of the precious city behind him.

  Each attack and each demon he absorbed and purified made him that much more formidable as more and more power flowed into him. The blurring golden disk of his spinning chain became a solid thing, its brightness intensifying into a circle of white fire. The sound of it rose in pitch until the very ground shook. The wards wavered in strength as the priests began exhausting their energies and pulling on the energy of the soldiers and guards supporting them.

  The demons continued to rush inwards on him in their vast numbers, driven by maddening rage, but it was taking too long. Before he could consume the horde, every man on the walls would collapse. Lorace reached further out with his burgeoning strength to encircle the entire horde with a massive wall of air and began contracting it, shoving every demon bodily toward him. The wind even pushed the behemoth monstrosity off its great iron palanquin to tumble defenselessly toward the thundering vortex of light and black flame in the center of the battlefield.

  The breathable air around him grew very thin, and a large column of downward twisting air was forming above the field of battle. He continued to collapse the wall of air nonetheless, but he spared some effort to pull air down from the sky to fill the void he was making. The air descended in a thick vortex of cloud and wind, its howl resonating with the screaming voice of the whirling chain.

  Faster and faster he shoved the demons inwards upon him, none escaped the Chain of Vengeance. They fell and tumbled into its brilliance in a solid wave. The forms of demons behind piled up into those in front as the crushing wall of air pushed them inwards. Finally, just a chaotic mass of black bodies flowed onto the blazing disk as the funnel of whirling cloud descending from the sky touched down on him. When the blue glow of the wards winked out, all that remained was the gigantic power feeding entity. It rolled helplessly into the tornado of wind and fire to vanish in a titanic pillar of black flame.

  Lorace released the wall of air with an explosive blast that nearly pulled the white robes from his body. The tornado whirled around him for a moment longer before he gentled its winds down, then he raised his arms and allowed the wind its head.

  It was over, the battlefield clear of everything but a few piles of timber where the Zuxran siege engines had stood and the heavy iron palanquin that lay atop the southern headland. Lorace coiled his chain into the satchel at his side. The cheers of the people upon the battlements brought a broad smile to his lips.

  With a final effortless gesture before turning back toward Halversome and his friends, Lorace called up the winds once more to lift the great palanquin far up into the sky and fling it out to the sea. It crashed down on the horizon with a great splash.

  Chapter 12

  DESTINY’S PRICE

  Twenty-Eighth day of the Moon of the Thief

  -in Halversome

  A line of settling dust extending outward from the open Pilgrim’s Gate was all that betrayed Tornin’s passage as the young knight appeared beside him. “Prince Wralka is going to be quite upset to have missed out on that,” Tornin said through a wide grin.

  Lorace looked up the length of the winding Silarne River with his sight to where the flotilla of dwarven river craft was proceeding along at their best pace. “I imagine he will for a time, but his people and those of Adwa-Ki are safe from the demons of Nefryt.”

  “I should think you have more than restored the balance with the end of all them all.”

  Lorace strode back toward the open gate. “I have not. The damage is still with us. Whatever is disrupting the grand cycle of souls in Nefryt is still unsolved. Worse still is the threat of the Devourer. I can see him attacking the spirit of Vorallon.”

  “What you just did was surely not for nothing, Lorace,” Tornin urged.

  “No, you are right, the defenders of the light have held the day,” Lorace said. “I have taken the strength of that entire horde into myself, converted its foulness into pure light within me. That is the gift Lord Lorn brought to me, the strength to do what must be done next.”

  “You go to face the Devourer now, do you not?”

  Lorace awakened his sight to look down upon Blackdrake Castle from far above, too far for his presence to be detected—he hoped. What he saw drew him to a halt, concern flashing in his distantly focused eyes.

  “No,” Lorace said looking back to Tornin. “We go to face the Devourer.”

  Lorace stopped while passing through the Pilgrim’s Gate. He lightly touched the lustrous gray stones of the wall, thanking the magic within them and the lineage of dwarven and elven artisans who had wrought them to perfection. Then he knelt to the smooth stone of the street and thanked the spirit of Vorallon himself. To the people who came up to surround him with their praise he returned it tenfold, ensuring them all that this victory was only possible because of their strength and purity.

  Each of his dear friends came to him once more and embraced him. All save Tornin were greatly exhausted from the energy and vitality they had put forth. “Tornin, share the strength of your blade with your friends,” Lorace bade him. “They are in sore need.”

  His defender drew and reversed his blade in a flash, offering the hilt to everyone to clasp and feel its restorative power. Tornin shared the vitality of his sword with the priests, flickering forth to meet them as they staggered down the steps from the walls, aided by their details of guards and Zuxran soldiers. Oen bade his priests return to the temple and rest, likewise Moyan and Falraan dismissed all but a thin watch of their men.

  Lorace made his way through the celebrating people, returning praises to each in turn, though his eyes remained focused in the distance. His companions followed him in silence through the city. Eventually, Lorace lead them to the Green Dragon Inn, where he gestured for them to sit around one of the long tables. More than a few of the Zuxran soldiers had billeted here, but they gave the distinguished group their privacy in the large hall.

  “Thank you all so much,” Lorace said as his eyes focused on them. “I could not tell you my plan before going out there. I could not even think it to myself. From the words of the fire demon we slew in the Keth and what I observed of the horde as they chased down Sir Rindal, I knew Lord Aizel held the demons within a mental dominance. My grave concern was that Lord Aizel could see into our minds and know any plan we had at a glance.”

  Lorace paused to gesture to Ehddan who poked his head into the common room to bring them food and drink.

  “I was correct in my assumption, for Lord Aizel did indeed control each of those demons,” he said, “and he could see into the depths of my thoughts. His gift was so powerful he took hold of me for a few moments as well. I had to get close to him and he had to reveal himself to me, there was no other way.”

  “It worked, Lorace,” Moyan said. “You won!”

  “Only barely,” Lorace said, lifting up the hair over his ear to display the half-healed wound where one of Aizel’s grasping fingers that had cut into his scalp.

  Oen gasped and began a healing prayer, but Lorace halted him.

  “Leave it for now,” he waving him off. “It is mostly healed already, and I must share what I now know with you before we commune with the gods again. I brought us here, away from the temple, to talk about what happened today, what could have happened today, and what we must do tomorrow.”

  Lorace took a deep breath. “What happened out there was only half of what the gods had planned to happen. I was very angry at what Lorn had done, you all saw that rage take hold of me, and I am so very sorry. But I fought it down, chose to discard it for tranquility, which opened up the depths of my spirit, allowing me to succeed in a way that if either the gods or Hethal foresaw it, they denied its possibility.”

  His companions shared a quick glance at Hethal who tipped his head in a slight nod.

  “I bade Hethal not to look forward in his vision, only to stay in the present for the same reason I d
id not share my plans for this battle with anyone, so that Aizel would not know what I would do by reading anyone’s thoughts. If he had known, or even suspected the extent of my ability, he would have struck me down the instant I was in range of his full power, worse, he would have used one of you to do so. As it was, he was prey to his own confidence, something I cannot let myself do, ever.”

  Ehddan brought forth a heavy pewter pitcher of rich dwarven ale and enough clay mugs for everyone while Lorace spoke, then bowed his way back to the kitchen.

  “The Lords Aran and Lorn told me that my destiny was tied to my decisions,” Lorace continued after taking an offered mug of ale from Oen. “The decision I made to discard anger and embrace tranquility today was far removed from what was expected.”

  He took a drink from his mug, enjoying the heady brew as its bittersweet flavor flowed over his tongue and down his dry throat.

  “Lord Aran rules Jaarda,” Lorace explained, “strengthening the pure spirits who pass there on their journey through the grand cycle of souls. Lorn guides the affairs of Vorallon, manipulating and teasing events into shaping the spirits of those who are reborn and live their lives here. There is no Lord over Nefryt to guide the work that must be done there to purify souls of those spirits who have been fouled and corrupted.”

  Lorace drew out Sakke Vrang and laid it upon the table with a light jingle of its dull silvery links. “This is the gods answer to what is failing there. This chain was forged for the new ruler of Nefryt. That was what the demon lord, Aizel, fought so strongly to prevent, for the new Lord of Vengeance would have to remove him from power first. There are three planes of existence: Vorallon, Jaarda, and Nefryt. There are three brothers destined to become three Lords. It has always been my destiny to rule over Nefryt, to restore the system of purification.”