Ren of Atikala: The Empire of Dust

by David Adams

  I caught Derodohr’s eye, and for the first time, I could see only confusion on his face. He didn’t know what to do.

  Neither did I.

  My body ached from my wound. But Magmellion had been able to stave away exhaustion…what other maladies could his strength prevent?

  “We must help her,” I said to Magmellion. “Release me. Let me fight. I can tip the scales and together, save us both.”

  He laughed into my head. You must be joking. I have you completely at my mercy, and at the mercy of my master.

  “If Contremulus wins, he might honour his deal,” I said, as the brawling dragons moved out of view. I couldn’t turn my head to look. “Or he might not. But if you let me go, keep me standing, and if Ophiliana wins, I have no need for you. I swear I’ll release you from your bonds.”

  And if she does not? Your suggestion hinges on many ifs.

  “Then I’ll die, and you’ll be free. Either way, you win.”

  I could sense him mulling over this. Roars and the snapping of jaws surrounded us, lending urgency to the decision.

  “Hurry up,” I hissed, feeling my blood drain away. “Or there won’t be a fight to intervene in!”

  Suddenly, I felt the armour shift, and its hold on me eased. My strength returned, and in earnest. The pain from my wound faded.

  Betray me and I will never, ever believe a word you say, said Magmellion into my head. I will bring the pain back and you will beg for death.

  That was fine. I would be doing that anyway. At least now I could tilt my head.

  Ophiliana had Contremulus pinned to the ground, tearing at his throat, but I could see that her advantage was tenuous at best. I ran to where Incinerator had fallen, snatching up the weapon, the blade still slick with my blood.

  I charged in, wings of flame bursting from my back, lifting me off the ground. I led with Incinerator’s tip, the weapon slicing through Contremulus’s wing and through the bone. He snapped at me with his jaws as I passed, but I flew up, above him.

  “Keep him pinned!” I shouted, risking a glance upward. The dragon hatchlings descended towards me, claws extended.

  She tried. Ophiliana slammed her claws into his wings, holding him against the snow-covered ground, jamming him down. The first of the undead hatchlings flew past, its sharp claws digging into my shoulder, sparking off my armour. Then another. I needed to attack, but Contremulus needed to be disabled. He needed to be immobile.

  Ophiliana dug her claws in, using her superior size to keep him pinned. I readied my blade for the strike; I would fly straight down and stab him as far as I could. Straight to the heart. No mistakes.

  Contremulus locked eyes on his mate, and there was a silent, almost imperceptible wave of magic. A battle of wills as Contremulus attempted to assert his dominance over his creation.

  She released him.

  Ophiliana’s gaze turned up at me, full of pity and apology. She spoke a word of magic, and a snake of ice leapt out from her tongue to me, snapping itself around my body. It latched hold of my breastplate, pulling me down to her waiting maw.

  My wings flapped frantically, but they were no match for her great strength. The dragon hatchlings bit and scratched, their small claws sneaking past the gaps in my plate, scraping along the chain, the tips nicking past my scales and opening small wounds on my flesh. Contremulus stood up, his wounds closing as I watched. His cold, emotionless face twisted slightly in a vicious, victorious sneer. He knew I could not fight both of them, especially not with his children fighting against me, too. Not even on my best day.

  You lose, said Magmellion in my head as Ophiliana’s spell pulled me closer and closer, and her teeth opened wide to swallow me whole.

  I heard spellcasting nearby. The ground beneath Contremulus reached up, stone fingers that grasped hold of his legs, feet, wings, solidifying themselves around his body. A spell of stone shaping. But who?

  Sirora threw down the spent scroll of stone shaping in her hands, her face as white as a ghost. “Kill him now!” she shouted.

  I couldn’t, not while Ophiliana still held my armour with her spell. I was still trapped. We were a hundred feet above the ground. It might as well be a hundred miles.

  “Let me out,” I said to Magmellion. “Let go of me.”

  But you’ll fall.

  “And then,” I said, “I’ll die. And you’ll be free.”

  Blessedly that seemed enough. My armour animated once more, moving itself away from me. The boots slipped off my feet. Shoulder plates fell away. The breastplate unlatched itself and broke in half, and I fell.

  Down, down, down. Blade leading the way.

  Pain returned. Deep and searing. Magmellion couldn’t shield me from its effects anymore; it was all I could do to keep my sword arm strong.

  Wind howled around my earholes. My blade’s edge gleamed in the dim light. Contremulus looked up at me, and I saw for the very first time something I had never, ever seen nor even expected to see.

  Fear.

  He exhaled, flame washing over me, but I didn’t feel anything more than the air. I followed the fire down, blinded by the white light, holding Incinerator out.

  I fell into Contremulus’s mouth, my blade stabbed into the back of his throat and into his brain.

  Contremulus’s body twitched and jerked, the inside of his maw aging around me. His scales shrank and withered, the skin beneath whitening and then turning to dust. The flesh of his muscles turned to blackened ash, revealing the ancient yellow bone of his skull beneath. This, too, turned to a fine black mist, forming a pile of glowing ashes on the ground, snow melting around them.

  His anger faded, quenched by the impossible heat of my blade. Of my last scrap of energy channelled into a single strike. The roaring ceased, and everything was quiet.

  His body aged, rotted and fell apart. And all the while, around me, he smiled the most genuine and happy smile I’d ever seen.

  I fell out of the ashes onto the snow, clutching my abdomen. I was covered in black ash, bleeding, and the wound was deep, but I felt something strange take over me. A warmth from within that was both pleasant and revitalizing.

  There was a glow, in the distance, a bright light that outshone the coming dawn.

  The fallen star was alive.

  It flew out of the hole above Atikala, standing upright and full of light. It lit up the whole mountainside, turning night into day. It drifted into the sky, and I felt myself being pulled off the ground. Floating on my back, a similar light shining from me. Drops of my blood fell onto the snow.

  “Apothesis,” said Ophiliana, her eyes wide. “Reina, Goddess of Flame and Healing…returning to us!” She looked at me with a sudden life to her voice. “Could it be?”

  I had no idea. I felt some a presence being torn out of me, like an unseen limb being removed.

  For the briefest moment, I saw thirteen faces in the sky, looking down at me, my own amongst them.

  But then it faded. Whatever magical event I’d started stopped as soon as it began. The vision disappeared. I fell to the ground, landing hard.

  Something broke as I hit. I felt, rather than heard, the wet snap of bone. Air was blasted from my lungs.

  The fallen star drifted into the sky until it got too high to see, and then it vanished.

  Pain. Laboured gasping for air that only came in tiny puffs. A creeping numbness spread over my legs, over my arms, one I’d felt before.

  I was dying.

  This time, though, it was different. In some indeterminate way I was different. Changed. I’d lost something irreplaceable.

  I felt very small.

  “Ren,” said Sirora, crouching beside me. “Can you move?”

  Wheezing gasps were all I could manage.

  Valen appeared at the edge of my vision. “She is badly hurt,” he said. “Can you do anything for her?”

  Sirora shook her head. “The wounds are mortal. If she does not bleed herself dry, shock and infection will do the rest.”

  �
�That’s okay, though,” said Valen, “isn’t it?” He sat down beside me, folding his legs. “Ren once told me that Contremulus ripped out her heart. How could this be worse? If she dies, will she not simply come back as before?”

  I tried. I tried to say things. Say that I was stronger than this, that I could pull through, but it was all I could do to get air through my throat.

  Ophiliana’s head drifted over them all, blue eyes shining as the dawn light struck them. “The light,” she said, “it left her body. The fallen star went back to the sky…Reina Fireheart’s divine essence is gone. To where, I cannot say, but…whatever power she had is no more.”

  “How could you know?” asked Sirora.

  Ophiliana said nothing, but she did not need to.

  I knew. I knew it in my broken bones. A primal truth that I had no evidence for, but I could feel on some level.

  There was no coming back from this.

  A strange peace came over me. Maybe it was my time. Tyermumtican was gone. The threat to Ssarsdale was ended. Tzala and Dorydd were somewhere far from here, away from all of this. Safe. Valen might have lost a hand, but he would do okay. I had no causes left to fight for.

  In pain, suffering, and at peace with it all, I waited for death to come.

  Ophiliana gathered her hatchlings. They were confused, lost without Contremulus to guide them, but she spoke kindly, and they, perhaps sensing some kindred with their undead mother, obeyed her. They took wing together as the dawn grew into day.

  Derodohr and his dwarven wizard opened a portal back to their homeland and departed without saying a word.

  Kresselack stared at me mournfully, and then, using a hammer and chisel, scraped off the metal markings I’d made on my armour. The metal liquefied and burned to ash. He disappeared, joining the rest of the army. If Magmellion had anything to say to me, he had no way of doing so. But at least he was free. His service was ended.

  Sirora rallied the surviving kobolds, their eyes burning from the light, and they marched underground. I had no illusions about what might happen next. Sirora would take command of the city, of that I had no doubts, but perhaps she deserved it. She had come through for me in the end and now every kobold in Ssarsdale was behind her without question.

  Everyone went except one.

  Valen.

  He stayed, even as the daylight burned his eyes, and the cold wind battered his body. He stayed with me, too afraid to finish me off, too attached to me to leave. He just watched as my breath slowed, the blood ebbed to a trickle, and the daylight began to melt the fallen snow.

  Hours passed. Then, finally, my body reached the foregone conclusion everyone else had seen, and the world went grey, fogged over, then faded away entirely. My eyes closed. The only thing I heard were Valen’s footsteps as he walked over the last of the snow, picked up Incinerator, and headed for the tunnel back to the underworld. To Ssarsdale.

  Everyone I knew left me for dead on the mountaintop, a bloodstained, broken body from which all semblance of life had fled.

  Hours passed.

  When I finally opened my eyes, it was night once more.

  The bleeding had stopped. Everything hurt, and the pain reassured me that this was no dream; no hallucination. I was alive.

  Somehow.

  If there was a divine hand in my survival, it came not from mystical energies that rejuvenated my body. It hurt too much for that. Instead, I had simply been so close to slipping from life to death that all the world had mistaken the former for the latter.

  I couldn’t stay there forever. I tried sitting up. I failed. I tried again. Failed.

  Finally I did it. Pushing myself up into a sitting position took time. I had broken ribs. My abdomen burned, but the wound did not seem fatal. I had lost a lot of blood. One of my legs was warped, wrenched, twisted. I pushed myself into a standing position, crying in pain from the effort. I tested my leg. It could take weight. I could walk. Barely.

  Ssarsdale only welcomed me because I had power. I reached inside, trying to find the flames. Trying to spellcast, to summon my wings of flame and soar once more.

  I found nothing. Only a cold, empty interior, devoid of magic.

  Not even a spark.

  I tried again, through teeth that chattered, the cold stinging my wounds. Nothing.

  Again. Nothing.

  Again. Nothing.

  A sorcerer with no magic was no better than a common worker, and that’s how I would be treated. If I went back to Ssarsdale, I would be mining in the tunnels or farming bugs until I died.

  Assuming they didn’t just kill me for being a cripple.

  So where?

  Northaven was gone, and even if there were survivors, and even if they rebuilt, there was nothing for me there but bad memories. Ophiliana was still out there, and although we had fought together, I sensed there was no friendship between us. She was still a lich. And I had killed her mate.

  There was no promise she would not try to finish what Contremulus had started.

  Irondarrow was closed to me too. Derodohr and his mistress would impale me on their doorway before I could say a word.

  Vaarden despised me, despised everyone really, and I wasn’t even sure where he was anymore.

  Ivywood was destroyed.

  Tyermumtican was dead. What he’d offered me, and what I’d agreed to, was meaningless now. There was no point in it.

  But a promise was a promise. With no other ideas, wounded, powerless, and alone, I headed south. I put one foot in front of the other, with no goal, no provisions, no armour, and no weapons.

  South as far as south went.

  EPILOGUE

  What I Have Done

  SO NOW THE WORLD KNOWS the truth. The truth as best I can tell it.

  It is easy to curry sympathy when I am the storyteller. All that is known of these events is recorded by me, since everyone else who has a voice to dissent is either uninterested in what others think of them or dead.

  I wish it were not so. I wish there was someone who could carefully explain to those I wronged that my intentions were noble; even if my actions were in error, they were committed with noble purpose.

  But there is none. So I offer this. To judge me you need to see the world through the eyes of those who are not me.

  Take, for example, the human villagers of Ivywood. Before their deaths they were almost entirely ignorant of the machinations, scheming, struggles and sacrifices happening far beneath their soil. All they know is a strange woman arrived at their village without introduction, left almost as rapidly, and a short while thereafter, a legion of kobold assassins struck out and massacred their town down to the last man, woman, and child.

  How would those from neighbouring Sharrowton see these events? Certainly as pure, unprompted aggression from monsters doing as they always do: raiding, attacking, murdering. In their eyes the villagers of Ivywood were innocent victims of random chance. They have pity, emphay, but not rage. Nobody is angry when a storm destroys a town.

  But I was no elemental force. No hurricane or tsunami. I made choices, I had options, and as much as I would like to dismiss all of it on an addiction I was powerless to prevent, I am accountable for everything I’ve done.

  To myself, if no one else.

  For many who suffer as I do, no matter our addictions, the truth is that we never really conquer our demons. We simply subdue them for long enough that we die before falling prey to their vices. This is a victory of a sort, but in my mind, it rings hollow.

  I am flawed. I am broken. I can never be good, as others are. I can never be just. I can never be one of the common people. Our brains are simply too different. I am an alien. An outsider, and I always will be. The truth dawned on me, as terrible and horrible as anything I’d ever known, made all the more terrifying because of the singular, wicked truth I knew it held.

  I am Ren of Atikala.

  And I am a monster.

  — Ren of Atikala

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