by Rex Jameson
“Does master command me?” Ixfrit asked. “Let me prove myself to you! Let me punish these bad men!”
Ashton looked to Jayden and Cedric, but they paid no heed to Ashton, Clayton or Karl’s corpse. They watched the cavalry’s grisly work.
“Go!” Ashton said. “Make them stop slaughtering my people. Someone has to bring justice to the Mallories. Help us!”
A misshapen smile spread across his father’s face. “Ixfrit is here. Ixfrit serves his master. The bad men shall pay!”
Ixfrit roared fiercely like a lion and leapt past Ashton and Clayton. He raced past the elf and paladin.
“What the—” Cedric screamed as he watched the naked man run by him.
“No!” Jayden screamed.
The corpse seemed to bulge and grow to twice its size as it bounded toward the 100 foot tall walls. Its skin split, revealing fire and smoke underneath. His father’s face crackled and cleaved around the mouth and along the neck.
“What have you done?” Cedric exclaimed as he ran past Ashton, back toward the place where Ashton raised the creature into his father. Cedric put his fingers to his lips and let loose a shrill whistle. His white horse stomped out of the woods and the paladin leapt into the saddle in a single, fluid motion as the horse fell behind the still growing creature in his father’s corpse.
Ashton could hear the creature screaming as it came close to the King’s Guard.
“Ixfrit is here! Ixfrit will punish the bad men!”
A cadre of imposing knights broke from their ranks and charged at the approaching creature. It laughed as they collided, and its attack was fierce and wild. Its hands had become dark claws, and they sliced through metal like a knife through butter. Ixfrit bit into the visor of the lead charger, and then ran his fist through a line of three knights, shattering their lances with his shoulder and chest.
Ixfrit never slowed down as he ripped through the King’s men. A large man with a fur cloak and silver armor reared his horse and brought his sword down on Ixfrit’s face, but the skin simply peeled off, exposing the air to flame and smoke. The creature tore the man in two, flinging his upper half hundreds of feet into the air. The knights of Kingarth panicked and parted as the creature became more enflamed.
“Ixfrit is here!” it roared. “Ixfrit will punish the bad men!”
Cedric was the only knight to pursue the creature. He held his hammer high, and a white light grew around the shaft and pommel. Other knights fell in behind him.
The creature laughed as it hit the outer wall of Mallory Keep. Its massive fists cracked the stone and a molten mass, like metal melted in the smithy, poured out of the white stone. Within seconds, a twenty foot section of the impossibly thick wall was tumbling down behind the creature. It bounded through the rock and into the killing fields beyond. Arrows and tar rained down but with no effect.
The creature continued to tear into the walls, cracking and melting the stone in the inner bastion until this too began to crumble. Screams echoed across the field, and Ashton watched in horror and shock as a lone man tumbled from the top of the largest wall. His black-and-white robes billowed in the winds as he fell, slowly and inexorably to the packed ground below. The loud, crunchy thud of him impacting the earth turned Ashton’s stomach.
“Master!” Ixfrit screamed in triumph as he circled like a champion boxer next to the ruined inner corner of the bastion, where the man had fallen. “I have punished the bad men!”
The knights behind Cedric had faltered at the carnage. They had pulled reins and gawked, but Cedric had charged forward. He still raised his hammer high. He was upon Ixfrit before any fear could register on his fiery face.
“In the name of the Holy One,” Cedric proclaimed in a strong voice that carried unnaturally across the field. Cedric leapt from his horse and heaved his hammer in a great arc from behind him. “I smite thee back to the underworld!”
The light-infused hammer came down upon Ixfrit’s head, and like a hammer through glass, it shattered the creature into a thousand fiery fragments. They rained down for several minutes like ash from a campfire, eventually reaching Prince Jayden, Ashton and Clayton at the edge of the forest in small, glittery shards. The King’s Guard made room for the paladin as he retreated, with head low, past the broken outer wall.
“What just happened?” Ashton asked. He looked at the dark elf behind him, but Jayden just gawked at the crowd and the still crumbling sections of the high keep.
The knights encircled the dead, and the chatter of their discoveries reached Ashton as a confused cacophony. In the forests far to the west, the remnants of Ashton’s undead army watched on in disbelief and shock. A litter was quickly prepared from the remains of the bandit wagon caravan for a man at the center of the knight formation. They lifted it high above the crowd, but it contained only the bottom half of a silver-plated knight. A small group of mounted men charged into the eastern forest to retrieve the rest of him.
“Make way,” a captain yelled to the gathered men. “Make way for the body of Crown Prince Magnus!”
Ashton’s knees grew weak, and he collapsed to the ground. He watched the platform move to the edge of the forest where a group of knights dragged the armored torso of Prince Magnus toward the approaching litter.
Jayden snuck up beside Ashton, and he thought he was about to die. Clayton stumbled backward toward them, looking between Ashton and the broken wall. Jayden squatted to Ashton’s left instead of putting a knife between his shoulder blades.
“We should have stopped you,” Jayden said. “I told Cedric. I told him.”
Ashton could not speak. His shoulders slumped as he absorbed the shock of what he had done.
A few of the knights in the King’s Guard eyed the elf and the necromancer warily, but they all gave a wide berth to Cedric as he mounted his white horse and trotted through their scattered group. Some of them saluted the paladin. Others spit at him. He paid none of them any mind.
As Cedric came closer to Ashton, the knights looked at Prince Jayden. None said a word, but their eyes were daggers.
“They already mistrusted my kind,” Jayden said. “Now, they think I did this.”
“We should get out of here,” Cedric said.
“You don’t think we should turn him over?” Jayden asked.
“They hate what they don’t understand,” Cedric said.
“He killed the next in line to the Surdel throne,” Jayden said, smacking Ashton in the shoulder.
Ashton felt numb. He had no strength in his legs or arms until Clayton offered his hand. Ashton nodded and grabbed Clayton to pull himself up. Jayden rose from his squat beside him.
“A demon did this,” Cedric said, surveying the damage for himself, “and we may need this necromancer. The Age of Tranquility is over. The demon age is near. Humanity cannot hide from this any longer.”
Jayden shook his head and grumbled. He called over a horse, and Ashton gathered the reins to his own gelding.
“We need to go somewhere we’re out of the way,” Jayden said as he pulled along Cedric.
“I know just the place,” the paladin replied, spurring his horse to a trot and heading northeast.
Jayden followed closely, and Ashton carried up the rear. His head was down, deep within the darkness of his hood, but his eyes watched the litter that carried two halves of a man who had been ripped apart. The platform with the purple robe and white furs vanished into a crowd of polished armor and angry men.
As Ashton entered the forest, not too far behind Jayden, his eyes focused on the hooves of the horse in front of him. His mind wandered back to different nightmares, of hands grasping him from the underworld. He had thought nothing could have been worse than Riley’s revenge.
He was wrong. He was very wrong.
19
The Son Rises
Julian Mallory stared into his stylish black armoire. His father had told him to pack his belongings and be ready to flee to the caverns should the undead break into the Keep. Julian a
lready had one suitcase filled with leather travel clothes, soft and durable wool shirts, and changes of undergarments and socks.
Julian loved his father. He trusted his father’s instructions and knew that he must follow his father’s orders. But there was another part of him that glanced at the mounted white suit of armor in the corner of his bedroom and thought of disobeying Lord Janus one last time.
Outside, a ragtag army assailed his family’s home. Had they been orcs, his father might have sent Julian out to greet them with sword and steel at the head of the house knights. To die fighting for your house was a glorious death, one worthy of accolades.
But he did not want to meet these undead in battle because he was brave. He wanted to face the undead because he felt that his life ending now, at this moment, might be the only way to make his father proud of him and save his legacy. It was only a matter of time before Lord Janus found out about the relationship Julian had with his sister.
They had stopped being careful months ago. Julian worried that his sister had wanted for them to get caught—to put an end to their affair and declare it to their father. That’s why she must have been so brazen in the carriage. Why she had begun rubbing on him in the hallways more and drew him into her room, even when their father was home.
Julian would rather die than see the look on his father’s face when that realization happened. All it would have taken for Julian to leap from the ramparts that morning would have been that recognition—for Janus to have realized what was going on and voiced it. He would have taken the fall and been glad of it—to finally put an end to his own suffering.
Julian stopped pretending to follow his father’s orders and instead walked over to his white suit of armor with the black accents. Julian ran his fingers along the painted vambraces and the black pauldrons that fastened to the dark cape that hung behind it. The rest of the armor was pure white and fitted to his toned frame. His father had commissioned the suit when Julian was only seventeen. It had already seen use in three major skirmishes.
Julian ran his hand along a slight gash in the side of the metal breastplate, a reminder of an orcish war axe. He had split the orc’s head in two for the insult with his steel longsword. The other engagements he had participated in with this armor were routs. No other creature or man had assailed him save that orc.
He looked back at the suitcase in front of the bed and then leaned his head against the white helmet on the black wall mount.
“Better he didn’t know,” Julian whispered. “Let him see me ride into the horde. Let him know me only as a fearless, foolish son. Not as the thief of my sister’s chastity…”
The floor and walls shook and Julian crashed into his suit of armor. A great cacophony boomed behind him, and light filled the room. He turned, half expecting a giant or the hand of god himself to have broken his walls, ready to pluck him from his contemplation and cast him down to the underworld.
But when he pushed himself from his armor, there was no great palm waiting for him. No fingers clutched at his robe. He covered his eyes with his hand as he adjusted to the violent assault of daylight.
The armoire was gone, fallen into the gaping hole in the wall and floor. A man screamed and a large object flew by the floor-to-ceiling hole. Black-and-white with dark hair like his own. Brown eyes met Julian’s in that brief moment, and Julian knew it was his father.
“No!” Julian screamed as he grasped the crumbling stone wall and leaned out. “Someone help!”
He leaned out and held onto a terraced edge of the stone wall outside of his room.
“Help!” he pleaded to anyone who might be listening on the ground far below.
Sometimes, when people tell stories, they say that time slows down in an important moment. A few seconds stretch on and become minutes or hours. The witness has an eternity to record every detail of the moment—to make sure that the smallest minutia of facts, sounds and smells is kept for posterity. Julian wished he had felt that time dilation, but such was not the case in the death of his father. It happened too fast.
His father pawed upward, toward him. He screamed and then rolled in the wind so that Julian could not see his face. Julian heard the hard, wet thud of his father’s body hitting the stones and earth below. He saw the jet of blood and the gnarled mess of Lord Janus’s final resting place.
“No,” Julian said. “It was supposed to be me…”
He felt himself pulled toward his father, like a weak but persistent gravity tugged at his chest, beckoning him to follow his father’s plunge.
“Julian!” his sister shouted from behind him.
Julian inhaled sharply, and he realized that it was his first breath since he had seen his father’s eyes passing the huge hole in his wall and floor. Jayna hung precariously from the wall, reaching toward him.
“Jayna!” he cried as he fought off whatever force had beckoned him forward. He pointed downward. “Father…”
Jayna looked down and lost her sense of balance. Julian scurried across the overhang and pushed against her as he caught her, forcing her to topple inwards back into his quarters. She turned on her hands and knees, tears streaming down her face.
“Julian!” she said. “I thought you had… I…”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I only went out to get a better look.”
She crawled across the floor and grabbed his dark locks with both hands before kissing him strongly. “I cannot lose you…”
“But father…” he said. “Lord Mallory…”
She let go of his hair and carefully edged her way to the forty foot gap in Julian’s wall and demolished floor. He reached out with his hand, and braced against a strong section of stone with his other. She held it firmly and peered over the edge.
“Father’s dead,” she said simply. She turned toward Julian. “You are Lord Mallory now.”
“I—”
“You can make whatever rules you want,” Jayna said.
“Whatever rules I want?” Julian asked uneasily, completely oblivious to her meaning. He was still in shock. In his mind’s eye, he could still see his father’s blood stains on the walls and ground below.
Jayna pulled against his shoulder and herself to him. She felt so warm against his thin robe.
“His lands are now your lands,” she said. “His power is now your power. His castle is now your castle.”
She kissed him.
“Our father has just died,” Julian said.
“And we are finally free!” she replied.
She ran her fingers down his face, and he involuntarily closed his eyes and sighed as her fingertips brushed his lips.
“Master!” a strange voice yelled triumphantly from below. “I have punished the bad men!”
Jayna let go of Julian as he rushed to the edge. A strange man who seemed to emanate darkness and fire from large gashes and cracks in his skin was twirling in circles a few dozen feet below, his arms raised high above him. His fists appeared to melt as fiery tornados fought against the air near him.
A horse galloped toward the dark creature. The rider was painted black in his armor, and a small golden emblem of a star rising above a horizon jostled on his chest. The man was standing in his stirrups, a large war hammer raised high.
“In the name of the Holy One,” the knight on horseback shouted from fifty or sixty feet below. The rider bent his knees and vaulted himself forward as the horse wheeled to the side. The jettisoned man flew onward, the large, glowing hammer still in hand.
“I smite thee back to the underworld!” the knight yelled.
Julian watched as the dark figure with the tornados coming out of his body shattered into a thousand pieces and fire rolled out of him and over his father’s body and white and black cape. The shards whirled violently in the wind, some of them reaching up to the perch where Julian and Jayna watched in horror.
Through the cinders, Julian saw his father’s body catch fire and smolder.
The knight, undoubtedly a fabled paladin, spat
at the ground where the creature had disintegrated before kneeling before Janus’s body, crossing his chest with an extended hand, and offering a silent prayer. Julian immediately liked the black-clad man.
“I can fight bandits,” Julian said, “and I can fight orcs. But how am I supposed to fight fiery creatures that destroy stone walls with their bare hands?”
Jayna shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. She then pointed down at the dark knight. “How does he?”
A commotion broke the paladin from his prayer and Julian from his contemplation. A line of carnage ran through the assembled men that extended from the forest all the way to the wall. A knight, who Julian immediately recognized as Lord General Godfrey Ross, held the bottom half of a man. The captain wept, and wails were going up around the battle-hardened knights below.
“Put on your armor,” Jayna said in hushed tone. “Put on your armor and make yourself presentable. We must hurry to the battlefield. What we do next is important! How the men see you next is important!”
“I must go bury father,” Julian said, feeling suddenly weak with grief.
She pounded a fist against his chest, and he gave her a stern look as he rubbed his muscles.
“You are Lord Mallory now,” she reminded him. “Not him. You must exert yourself immediately, while the fires are hot and the men are looking for leaders. Do not let someone else fill this void.”
Julian nodded and grimaced as he scurried to his feet and removed his breastplate, cuisse, and greaves from the mount. Jayna grabbed a leather vest and pants from the suitcase that still sat on the floor in front of Julian’s bed and threw them to him. He stripped his robe and put the leather garments on before slipping into his lower armor and then motioning for her to help him with his breastplate.
“Make way,” General Ross yelled from the ground through Lord Mallory’s destroyed wall. “Make way for the body of Crown Prince Magnus!”
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