144: Wrath

by Dallas E. Caldwell

  Sleep came to him bearing a grudge, and only his body was able to rest. His mind was pummeled by hazy images of lost friends and forgotten wars.

  ~ 1000 years ago ~

  The battle surged and swelled around him. Polas gripped his shimmering, white blade in both hands. The weapon was more than some ordinary sword. It was the Blade of Leindul, the Sword of the Nalunas, and it sang through the thick flesh and bone of undead soldiers like a hand parting a gentle stream of water. Polas steadied his horse and took a moment to survey the battlefield around him.

  The valley rang with the ring of steel on steel, the shouts of men, and the crash of wood on armored hide. The generals had led their armies down into the valley in a sweeping move to push back the advance of the undead. The steep sides to the east and west made it difficult for their enemies to bring in additional troops to flank, and the north end was too narrow to march a significant force through swiftly for a head-on attack.

  The soldiers that battled for Light and Hope were outnumbered, but not overwhelmed. They set aside their differences and fought together to throw off the cloud of fear that Exandercrast spewed out over the world.

  But the undead were relentless.

  Cairtols used their small size to scamper across the battlefield setting small fires in an effort to keep the creatures from rising again. As the battle labored on, it became a battle of wills. Fallen allies would be raised moments later to assault their former friends, and each would continue to fight as long as its head was still connected to its body.

  Narci no longer rode Kittah, but instead fought beside the great Erus tiger. Both tore and clawed at their enemies, sweeping through their ranks as a plague unleashed.

  A team of Yarsacs charged through the valley floor, trampled enemies with their powerful hooves, and sliced through the undead ranks with their well-honed blades.

  Ranar fought to stay atop his steed, firing bolt after bolt. Each volley answered with a sickening squelch as it found its target.

  The giant Taylith soldiers, who towered three times as tall as any Peltin man, hurtled stones at the dark legions with greater accuracy than could be asked of a Dairbun siege engine.

  A dark shadow briefly blocked Polas’s vision as an Ibor warrior swooped down in front of him. The creature was taller than even Narci and had skin like stone. Its face was gnarled and craggy, and its mouth was rimmed with sharp, angular teeth. Two thin and bony wings protruded from its shoulders. Twin horns curled back from the beast’s forehead, and its eyes were cold black.

  The Ibor swiped a clawed hand and tore out the throat of the general’s horse. Polas rolled as his mount fell. The Ibor was on him as soon as he had his footing, but Polas was ready. There was no substance in the world that could stop the Blade of Leindul when wielded by General Kas Dorian, not even the rocky hide of an Ibor. A quick cross-pattern removed the creature’s head and arms, and its thick frame fell to the ground with a whumpf and a scattering of rocks.

  Polas looked up as the sky darkened. Ibor descended from the mountains around them, their wide wings allowing them to glide on the hot air currents and drop down to ravage their prey.

  Panic tore through the army as people dived for cover or hid beneath wooden shields. Those that dropped to the ground were buried by the unremitting undead, and those who put their faith in wooden shields found them to be no match for the strength of the Ibors’ claws.

  A group of Faldred mages dropped their scrolls and headed for the cover of a nearby cave so that they could regroup.

  Polas whistled to Ranar.

  The Faldred general pulled a spindle-shafted bolt with a gleaming red tip from his pack and shot it straight up into the air. The bolt screamed as it climbed into the heavens. When it seemed the bolt would be lost to the clouds, it exploded in a shower of sparks and light.

  A second shadow fell across the battlefield. The Melaci Skywatch; Allies of Hope in this great war. Their appearance was answered with shouts and cheers from their friends on the ground.

  The Melaci resembled Peltin men, save for one great difference. Their backs bore proud and powerful seraph wings that gave them the enviable gift of flight. Each wore light chain armor and carried a glimmering Sky Shield strapped to their boots. With the sun at their back, they unleashed volley after volley of drill-tipped arrows.

  The barrage of projectiles burrowed through undead flesh and tore through tough Ibor wings. Not one arrow strayed off course or found an allied target. The elite archers of the Melaci Skywatch did not miss.

  Polas used the distraction to cleave through three Ibor warriors, dropping them all in halves on the rocky soil. He turned in time to see a large spear impale Ranar and pin him to the ground. The Faldred was still alive, but the spear’s deliverer was closing on him. Polas sprinted forward, crying out to grip the beast’s attention. The Ibor raised a clawed hand to end Ranar’s life, but his arm was caught and snapped backwards with at gut-wrenching crunch. The Ibor fell to the ground with Narci standing over him.

  The beast rose onto its elbows, ready to tear into the Eryntaph general, but Polas had reached his friends, and his blade made short work of the Ibor.

  Narci nodded to Polas and returned to the fury of the battle.

  Polas put one foot on Ranar’s breastplate and heaved the massive spear out of the Faldred’s chest. Ranar coughed up blood, and the wound gurgled in response.

  "Leave me, Polas. I’m faded," said Ranar.

  "Nonsense," Polas said, pulling the phial of blue liquid from his belt. He poured the magic ointment onto the wound and watched as the muscle and flesh knit itself back together. "Now, quit lying around and help us out." He nodded one last time and turned back to the carnage surrounding him.

  He truly believed that they could win the battle. All the years of fighting, all the lives spent, but they could win this battle and it would finally be over.

  Then the ground shuddered.

  For a moment, Polas feared the entire world would crumble from the quake. The battle stopped as every head turned toward the north, the direction of Firevers. Exandercrast was coming to join the battle at last. The Peltin general rushed forward over shaking rock and stone.

  At the end of the battlefield where the valley closed to a narrow pass, the earth broke. Exandercrast burst forth, and Polas’s heart lurched. It was one thing to wish the God of Fear destroyed; it was something much more formidable to face him in person. The horrific deity stood over seventy feet high, and his black wings blocked out the sky. His dark scales absorbed the sunlight and destroyed it. His serpentine neck ended in a long and horned head, its vicious maw rimmed in jagged teeth. A long, narrow tail snaked behind him and knocked boulders aside like mere pebbles. His clawed hands cleaved through the mountainsides as though they were soft soil and he the till. He was a Nalunis, a draconic immortal, and as the second and only living son of the Nalu, the First, he was the unrivaled ruler of mortals.

  Unrivaled in power, but not unopposed.

  Polas gritted his teeth. As the battlefield turned from bloody carnage to trampling, fleeing beings, – both allied and enemy – Polas charged. To his side, he saw Narci leaping from rock to ground to Ibor carcass, pressing forward, teeth bared. Ranar was nowhere to be seen, but that could not be helped. They were almost in range.

  Exandercrast raised his arms into the darkening sky. A shadowy ball of untold energy boiled between his hands. It danced between his palms. Black bolts like lightning licked at his clawed fingertips as the sphere expanded with the dark lord’s power.

  Polas heard Narci roar above the chaos and watched the Eryntaph double his speed, now leaping across the fleeing masses as though they were stepping-stones.

  They could not fail, not after fighting for so long. Polas pushed ahead, but he was just a man and the dark god was still half the valley away.

  Exandercrast slammed the giant orb into the ground beneath him.

  A wave of coruscating black energy swept out in all directions burning the tissue from
any being it touched. The wave incinerated flesh and left nothing in its wake but bone, blade, and empty armor. When it reached Polas, his eyes widened, and he clutched his daughter’s braid.

  Darkness took him.

  A rude awakening came in the late morning as Polas found himself being pushed over while greedy hands checked him for valuables.

  He rolled and kicked, striking one of the pilferers in the knee and knocking him to the ground. The second cried out in shock and tripped backwards over a fallen log.

  Polas rose and readied himself for an attack that never came.

  The two beings were young Peltin men about halfway through their teens. Their wagon stood several paces away on the road where a young woman tended to their horses. Both boys were scrawny and dressed in dirty peasant’s clothes.

  "Beggin’ your pardon sir," said the youth with the bruised knee. His hair was black and his face pocked. "We didn’t mean no harm. We thought you was dead."

  "What with the bandages and lying around this late in the day and all," added the second as he stood and dusted off his trousers. "We’ll just be on our way then."

  The two young men backed warily toward their wagon. The girl had already climbed into the driver’s seat and was ready to make a quick getaway. Her bright eyes flitted back and forth between her two companions and the open road in front of her.

  "Wait," Polas said.

  The two men froze.

  "When… what day is it? And to what city do you travel?" Polas asked.

  The dark-haired boy raised an eyebrow to his companion who shrugged in reply.

  "It’s the fourth vesahn day. We’re traveling to Odes’Kan, trying to make it by the maris day," he said.

  Polas took a few steps forward matched by a few steps backward from each of the young men. "Vesahn day?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "And what year and age?"

  The second young man looked puzzled.

  "Is this Maduria and the Rhamewash Forest?" Polas continued.

  The redheaded boy, again, was the one to answer him. "Yes, uh sir, this is Maduria and that indeed is the Rhamewash Forest. As to the year and age, it is the twenty-seventh year of the Orange Age. Are you well, sir?"

  Polas walked over to his horse and leaned his head on its snout. "Yes. I am well. Thank you for humoring a deranged old man."

  The duo left him then, rejoined their companion at the wagon, and returned to their journey at a quickened pace. The wagon wheels creaked along the worn ground, and the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves faded as they disappeared down the rolling road.

  Polas stood alone with his horse, listening to the sounds of the dark woods and staring off into the distance. Birds chirped and wind stirred branches. Somewhere deep within the forest, an elk called and clacked its antlers against a tree trunk, the sound bounding from tree to road to field beyond. Far away, he saw azure mountains breaking the horizon.

  He was right about Narci’s homeland then, and the call to seek his old friend for guidance hit him even harder. He shook the thought away and tried to focus on what he knew. The time he had known was the Age of the Alabaster Sky, and he had never known of an Orange Age or a vesahn day. But an age could change in a year as easily as a millennium. He was not yet convinced. Flarcant would show him. His farm and his family; they would know of them there. If he had his bearings right, the small city was merely four days’ ride away if the horse kept its lick. He could make it that far. He had made it through much worse in the past.

  Weakly, he climbed back on top of his horse and ignored the growling of his stomach. His hunger gnawed at his insides, pulling his chest toward his knees. Matthew had been right about the ointment, however. Even though it had begun to dry out, he still did not find himself thirsty. He had to remind himself to stop occasionally to allow the horse to drink, but otherwise kept a steady pace as he pursued what was left of his past.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Exandercrast once again found himself at war with his old foe, ennui. The feeling of complete empowerment overtook him once every hundred years or so, and he found it to be altogether boring. Not that he wished to relinquish his power; it was his by birthright and by conquest, after all. But a piece of his bleak soul wished there was something capable of challenging his might, of testing his limits, of giving him the slightest thrill. The current, monotonous age had even made his hold on the prison in the desert of Olagon seem stale and tedious. More than once, he considered releasing his magical seal on the place so that those within would finally be allowed to perish. It had been decades since he last set foot in the arcane prison, and he had long ago tired of tormenting the few pitiful beings left within.

  It was for this reason he spent most of his years in the form of a Peltin man. The bipedal shape was inherently weak, especially when compared to his draconic godhood, but it afforded him extra sensations lost on those Naluni too proud or too impotent to alter their shape. He savored the way adrenaline rushed through his veins as he murdered a family of Yarsac nomads. He relished in the damp heat of Dorokti blood as it ran across his fingers. And he reveled in the rush he felt from forcing a Coranthen woman to his bed. Though sometimes he enjoyed the challenge of coaxing them there even more.

  Some of the Naluni that served him liked nothing more than to attack a mortal village and raze it to the ground. Exandercrast himself had destroyed his fair share of cities in this manner, but he found the burst of terror it produced from his victims to be too short to truly sate his desires. That was why he preferred to play games with these pitiful mortals. Only recently had he devised a way to prolong the fear of destruction and utter loss in the soul of a mortal, and the soul itself was the key. For while the frail bodies they inhabited were born for destruction, the spirits within them were far more precious and enduring. He had extended life before; that was a simple thing and proved to be dull after only a few centuries. He had even frozen souls before, but in doing so had stripped them of their awareness. This new trick was something far grander.

  He strolled across the square, his sleek black hair trailing over his shoulders. He wore a dressing suit of pure white with a black poet’s shirt beneath. His Peltin form was a picture of the kind’s ideal: square jaw, clean, straight teeth, refined nose, and misty grey eyes. The campus around him lay in stark contrast to his perfection. An old barracks with a collapsed roof hunched at the far end of the square. A stable and two class buildings lay in ruin; scorch marks marring their foundations. Only the university center itself still stood unmarked by the destruction that had leveled buildings, walls, and towering gate around it. Wraiths, displaced souls that hardly resembled the bodies that once held them, flitted between shadows, hoping to escape the God of Fear’s notice.

  A wicked sneer cut across Exandercrast’s face.

  Five years ago, he had sent his Naluni to destroy Five Islands University, and he, in turn, had used a portion of his own power to keep the souls of those killed that day from moving on. These formless shades fed him constantly with the rawest fear imaginable. However, sometimes he desired something even sweeter.

  "Come out, lost ones, and I will free one of you from this fugue," Exandercrast announced to the still air.

  There was a gentle stirring and a sad glimmer of anticipation washed over him. He licked his lips. While eternal despair was enough to satisfy him, he much preferred the immense pain a soul felt when hope was ripped away and pure horror became the last beat of existence in a weary spirit.

  A wispy form emerged from behind a broken wall. Exandercrast spread his arms out wide and beckoned to the wraith. It was hard to tell, but it looked as though it had been a young Peltin girl, no more than twenty years aged, in its death.

  "Come," he said to her. "Take my hand. I will free you from this place, and you may finally pass on into the hereafter."

  The ethereal figure floated toward him, a billowy arm outstretched. Exandercrast felt a wave of panic swell around him from those left watching. Whether it was exuded for fea
r of the girl’s safety or that they might be left behind to their damnation, he was not sure. As the spirit’s hand touched his, he felt a chill run up his arm, and as he smiled, the wraith’s emotions soared even higher.

  Exandercrast lashed out with whip-like strands of dark energy. The arcing tendrils seized the spirit and tore it to shreds.

  The watching souls fled as far as they were able, and Exandercrast’s lungs swelled as he breathed in the raw dread of lost dreams. He shifted back to his true form, roared, and launched himself into the night sky. The splinters of the shattered soul wailed in agony behind him; a cry that would continue until the end of time.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Matthew the Blue sat, waiting. He hoped his faith was not in vain and Polas would show up soon. It had been five full days since the legendary warrior left the Cairtol’s home without food or water. He was not worried about Polas’s ability to fend for himself in the wilds of Maduria, but he did worry about the man’s spirit.

  Matthew had immediately fretted and considered riding after the ancient general, but wisdom had won out. He would never have been able to catch up with the general’s horse while riding his own trusty mule. So instead, he had prepared. He packed up rolls of dried meats, fruits, and nuts. He filled several skins with pure water from his well, and he readied his traveling gear: a small pack, oil, traveler’s mune, a bedroll, pen and ink, a coil of rope, a pouch of coins, and a few blank books.