by Steve Thomas
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Author's Note
Prologue: Crisaelva Falls
The Pact
Argentatus
Purged
The Curse of Sangrook Manor
The Heart of Habrien
Necropolis
The Last Sangrook
Epilogue: Whispers of the Flame
Afterward
More By Steve Thomas
THE SANGROOK SAGA
Steve Thomas
Copyright © 2018 Steve Thomas
All rights reserved.
Cover by John Comegno
Author's Note
The stories in “The Sangrook Saga” are not presented in chronological order. I took some inspiration for the style of storytelling from two of my favorite video games series: The Legend of Zelda, whose timeline is a puzzle with no solution, and Dark Souls, which tells a complex history through a series of vague clues, bits of lore, and environmental details. I personally enjoyed the challenge. Reflecting on the available clues and deducing how these smaller stories fit together was very gratifying to me. For The Sangrook Saga, I wanted tell a story in a similar fashion, mysterious and ambiguous but full of clues for the reader to piece together. I hope that you will find it fun as well.
Prologue: Crisaelva Falls
The Lord Crusader of the Convergence raised his shield as he approached the altar. His arms were weary from hours of fighting. His armor was dented and bloody, his shield was battered, and his sword was notched. But here was where the true fight began, here in the Sangrook chapel beneath the earth where chained prisoners writhed and human bones were arranged into runes adorning meticulously arranged sarcophagi.
Crisaelva Sangrook fixed her cold gaze upon him from behind an altar covered in relics and entrails. Raven black hair dangled over her shoulders, framing a bone-white wrinkled face. She was rumored to be immortal, an ancient necromancer who sucked the life out of her victims and added it to her own. But she was more than that. She was a warlord and a mass murderer who emptied one graveyard only to fill another. The Lord Crusader was here to stop her before she could burn one more city to the ground.
“Did you come to fight me?” the old woman asked with a wry smile.
“The Sangrooks are a blight on this world,” said the Lord Crusader. “In the name of the Converged God, I will extinguish you and your line.”
Crisaelva pulled a deep breath through her nose, sucking the heat out of the room. The Lord Crusader suppressed a shiver. He heard groans and whispers from all directions. He heard claws clacking against the stone pillars of the chapel and fists pounding against sarcophagus lids. Soon, he and the Sangrook matriarch wouldn’t be alone in this room. “Best do it quick,” said Crisaelva, folding her hands over her stomach.
The Lord Crusader felt his knees begin to tremble. He tried to boast, but his voice cracked as he spoke. “Your army is broken. Your ghouls and demons have been crushed. Your children are dead. Your grandchildren are dead. My Templars have taken Sangrook Manor. You are utterly alone and when I kill you, it will be the end of your blasphemous, accursed line.” He lifted his sword and aimed its tip at the necromancer’s heart.
“You underestimate our numbers,” she said, her voice deepening and reverberating as she spoke. “My sons left bastards in every city and my daughters have bedded kings. I own this world. You may take this body, but my family will rise again.”
“No,” said the Lord Crusader. “The demon dies with you.”
And so it was that the Lord Crusader battled and executed the fearsome Crisaelva Sangrook, liberating the world from the scourge of a ruthless and malignant clan of necromancers. The Convergence may have hoped this would lead to an era of peace, progress, and recovery, but the Sangrooks lived on.
The Pact
The Convergence realized all too late that the Sangrooks’ power thinned as the clan grew larger. Ironically, had they left us alone, our magic would have dwindled away and our empire would have collapsed on its own. The Purge only made its survivors stronger. I intend to survive.
- From Orkael Sangrook’s Journal
“This is a fine sword,” Orkael mused as he lifted it from the young Prince Colmire’s broken hand. The boy lay sprawled across the floorboards, his fine velvet shirt in tatters, his buckskin pants torn to reveal bruised skin. Orkael folded his arms and leaned against the wall, watching as Braxim delivered a kick to the boy’s side for good measure. “Good craftsmanship, excellent balance, and do I detect an infusion of some kind? It’s not every day someone comes at me with a magic blade.”
The defeated prince lifted a quivering head and spat blood and spite at Orkael, splattering his shoes. “You’ll never beat me, necromancer,” he said, his voice as weak as his body.
Orkael Sangrook tutted. “Oh, I think I already have.” He tossed the sword aside. “Braxim, would you find a place to display the Colmire family sword? I’m sure our guests would be most distraught to imagine that their family heirloom was poorly attended after their deaths.”
Braxim grunted and pushed off from the stone wall, stepping toward the sword. His brother had a penchant for the theatrical. He loved to play with his victims, to let their defeat linger. It was a bad habit. The boy would try another attack, and Orkael’s gloating would only serve as an opening. He glanced back at Princess Aghara Colmire, the young prince’s sister. The woman hung from the ceiling by chains and manacles, her toes just barely grazing the floor. Blood trickled down her bare chest, oozing from the runes and glyphs carved into her flesh, dripping from the tips of her breasts down the tattered blouse draped over her hips, staining her paisley skirts. Despite the kidnapping, despite the torture, and despite the blood rituals, she still held her head high and met his eyes with defiance. She was a noblewoman to the bitter end.
Or so she thought. There would be plenty of time to break Aghara. For a few moments longer, dealing with her brother was more urgent.
Orkael paced beside the young man, stopping now and then for a swift kick. “I bet you fancied yourself the heroic prince come to save his sister from the evil necromancer.” Kick. “You’d walk in here, and what? The Converged God would descend and imbue you with some…holy might and you’d cast me and my brother into the Unbound Realm?” Kick. Kick. “You thought you’d rescue your sister and take her back home, tell a few stories about your great deeds. Maybe your father would open some prized bottle of wine in your honor.” Kick. “Let me show you how this plays out.”
Orkael dropped to one knee. He grabbed the crumpled boy by the head and spun his broken body around. The prince was a groaning, quivering rag doll in Orkael’s grasp. The necromancer caught the boy in a headlock, squeezing his throat with a spiteful arm, and lifted his head, speaking directly into his ear. “Look at your sister. I want you to see. We were very nearly finished with her when you arrived. Would you care to watch the rest?” The young prince could only groan. His face was already turning from red to blue. “Braxim, why don’t you continue the ritual? He was kind enough to supply a blade, after all.”
Braxim nodded. Colmire’s eyes were already glazing over and his gaze was unsteady. He wouldn’t have to watch for long. Aghara, on the other hand, would be fully alert. Braxim snatched up the sword and returned to the chained princess. Still she struggled to put on a brave face, but the facade was cracked; her brown eyes were dripping with fear. She winced as the tip of the sword broke the skin beneath her collar-bone, but she did not scream.
Braxim heard a thump from behind. He spun to see that Orkael was staggering backward, and Prince Colmire had rolled onto his back. The boy had somehow rallied the strength to head-butt the necromancer and break his grip. Orkael appeared to be u
ninjured, but his demeanor grew tense and angry. “I would have let you two say your goodbyes,” he said, then stretched his hands in front of his chest. He turned his palms until they faced each other. A thin line of crimson energy arced between them, and Orkael slipped that magical garrote around Colmire’s throat.
With a swift jerk, Prince Colmire’s head dropped to the ground. His body soon followed.
Orkael grunted and kicked the head across the room. “He ruined it!”
“You take too much pleasure in torturing them,” said Braxim. “I’ve told you before how dangerous it is.”
“It’s not about killing them. I could have killed him ten different ways before he got through the door.” Aghara was sobbing now, her tears leaving streaks in the dried blood on her face. “I wanted him to die hopeless and terrified, so when I brought him back… It doesn’t matter now. Clean this up.” He straightened his collar and buttoned his sleeves, then skulked toward the door that led upstairs, waving dismissively at the girl. “I’ll finish with her later. No one else should be coming to interrupt today.”
The door slammed shut behind him, leaving Braxim alone with Aghara in the dungeon. The building was an old guardhouse in the middle of a forest, built in ancient times when some forgotten empire sprawled across the land. With the help of some spells to clear out the errant foliage and to convert some builders into thralls, Orkael had made the place habitable again. Braxim’s only contribution had been nailing down a few floorboards to seal away the dead thralls once the rest of the work was completed.
Braxim stood in what had once been a guard’s post. He envisioned a desk or a bookshelf in the corner where Aghara now hung. There was a fireplace to one side of that corner and the stairwell on the other. Perhaps the table in the center of the room was where the guards ate, drank, and gambled to while away their shifts.
The cells were down a hallway. Orkael had left them just as he’d found them; he liked the aesthetic of dripping mold and crawling roots. Anything to remind his prisoners of their hopeless situation. He tried not to think about the thralls locked away in that hall, slowly starving to death, only leaving their cells when Orkael needed a test subject, only eating when another prisoner died. They’d eat tonight at least. Braxim hoisted the late Prince Colmire’s decapitated body onto the table. Orkael wasn’t the only one who needed test subjects.
Braxim slid the Colmire sword under his belt and instead drew a small obsidian razor. This was his favored tool for magic, a black stone capable of biting into flesh with sharp, shallow, and most of all, precise cuts. He never liked to draw more blood than necessary and his left arm was already a web of scars. He balled his left fist and prepared to cut into his forearm.
“What are you going to do to him?” Aghara’s voice was soft, but still carried the authority of a princess.
Braxim sighed. He hated talking about the brutal work he did at his brother’s behest. It never seemed reasonable when he tried to say it out loud. “I can’t have the body laying around, and our prisoners need to eat. Do I need to go on?”
She held back a sob and tears welled in her green eyes. “No.” She sucked in a deep breath and raised her head as if she were haggling with a street merchant rather than hanging half-naked from the ceiling with a spell carved into her chest. “May I at least say goodbye to my brother? You owe me that much after all you’ve done.”
Braxim sheathed his razor, then retrieved the head. It was already pale and had picked up some dust rolling across the floor. Braxim held Prince Colmire by his brown hair and brought the lifeless eyes and dangling jaw to meet Aghara’s face.
“Alone,” she said.
Braxim couldn’t help but be swayed by her audacity, speaking as if she had any power left. “As you wish, milady.” He rested Aghara’s dead brother’s head at her feet and started up the stairs, chuckling at her spirit.
Upstairs, Orkael sat at a great oak table built to seat a dozen men. He was gaunt and pale from his frequent use of magic, and his eyes were bloodshot from forsaking sleep. He hunched over a half-eaten bowl of root and herb stew, wrapped in a blanket and calmly sipping tea. Orkael only ate the simplest of foods, claiming that anything else would distract him from his work. Braxim took a seat, but didn’t reach for the bread. He was expected to procure his own food. “Kind of the boy to come to us,” said Braxim, “but why kill him so soon?”
Orkael waved the question away. “He didn’t matter.”
“I thought the goal was to dominate everyone else who shared our blood, not just the women.”
“Different mothers. It was only the girl’s mother, the king’s first wife, who I could trace to a Sangrook.” He slurped down a last mouthful of tea and set the cup down. “You should soulbind with me.” His voice was cool and gruff now, lacking in the passionate bravado he had used while reveling in his defeat of Prince Colmire. “We can draw on each other’s strength to speed up our plan. Loan me some of your strength and I can help you reach new heights of magic.”
Braxim knew all too well who would benefit more from that arrangement. Soulbinding created a spiritual link between people, but it was never a partnership of equals. Orkael was wearing his body thin with reckless use of magic. He had drawn power from the Pact to handily defeat Prince Colmire, but once that power faded, he would be left weaker and more decrepit than before, as if he’d traded two years of his life to win the fight. With soulbinding, he could take strength from Braxim, and give Braxim the same ability — to run himself into an early grave doing his brother’s bidding. That was hardly a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Braxim shook his head. “No, I’m still not ready for that.”
Orkael scoffed, and a tick in his eyebrow further expressed his annoyance. “I have work to do. I need to finish with the girl and move on. We’ve attracted too much attention here. Don’t disturb us.” He stood, his chair creaking as it slid across the floor, then returned to the basement, leaving Braxim to entertain himself. He waited until he heard the first scream from the dungeon, then slipped outside.
He sloshed his way through the insect-ridden marsh, refusing to draw on the Pact to ease his passage through the dense mud. This place had been a village once, but as the story goes, it was flooded by an earthquake and abandoned. Braxim didn’t know whether to believe that rumor, but he did know that the only people who chose to live in the swamp were outlaws, exiles, and hermits.
After an hour of walking through the bog and over roughly hewn boardwalks, Braxim climbed the granite steps of a temple marked with four roses arranged in a diamond, the sigil of some long-dead god. Each rose was taller than a man and forged of copper now bright green with corrosion, bolted to the brick wall above a faded oaken double door. He shouldered his way through the stiff doors and ignored their grating, plaintive squeals. Inside, he stood in an antechamber floored with frayed carpets. Ivy crept in through the windows and the stench of animal urine hung in the air.
“You’ve been here a year, Almondo,” Braxim muttered to himself. “Clean the place up a bit.” He passed into the sanctuary. The open sky greeted him through a collapsed roof, and he tread lightly over the fallen rafters and chandeliers, over the puddles and saplings as he made his way to the doorway beyond. This brought him into a long and musty hallway leading to many rooms, only one of which had a door.
Braxim knocked. “Almondo, I need advice.”
He was met with silence, then slow, shuffling footsteps. The door creaked open to reveal a wrinkled man with white hair, garbed in a faded brown rough-spun tunic that hung to his knee. His only other article of clothing was a rope belt tied around his waist with a nail piercing each end, which marked him as a penitent pilgrim. Almondo was more than that, though. He had once been a priest of the Converged God, but was defrocked for attempting to soulbind animals. Or so Almondo said. Everyone in this swamp had a story. This far from Convergence territory, it wouldn’t be hard to pose as a priest just by wearing humble clothes and speaking in vaguely religious aphorisms. O
n the other hand, if a man spent a year of his life as a hermit in the ruins of a temple doling out spiritual advice to any wretch who came his way, who was to say he didn’t deserve to call himself one?
Almondo flashed a weary smile. “How can I help you, my son?” He waved Braxim through the door and into the only well-preserved room in this old church. It was Almondo’s study. A great wooden table sat at the center of the room, surrounded by chairs and coated in candle-wax. Almondo’s usual chair was at the far end, though the whole table was dotted with burning candles. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and what books and scrolls remained were only somewhat musty. Almondo’s bed was in the far corner, a humble straw pallet topped with a wool blanket.
Braxim took a seat. “It’s my brother. He has another prisoner. A noblewoman”
Almondo snatched a decanter and two cups from a cabinet. “The King of Windmire’s daughter? I’ve heard rumors that she went missing.” He poured himself a glass.
Braxim nodded. “And we killed her oldest brother.” The priest pushed a cup toward him, but Braxim waved it away. “You know I don’t drink.”
“You’re too afraid of the Pact,” Almondo said with a smile. “That’s not to say you should be careless with it, but a glass of weak wine now and then shouldn’t enable too many unholy atrocities.” A bit of regret flashed over his face. He took the cup back. “A poor joke. Forgive me. Exile makes a man go a bit cynical, especially after being cast out of the Convergence.”
Braxim shrugged it off. He had more important problems than a priest’s sense of humor. “You said you’d help me release my brother from the Pact. I can’t wait much longer. We’ll be moving on soon, before the king sends an army into this swamp. It won’t be long, now that we’ve relieved him of two children.”
“I’m still working on it. I’ve sent out a few locals in search of the books I need, but they won’t be back for months, if they find the books at all.”