Legacy of the Blade: The Complete Trilogy

by Joseph J. Bailey

  With a surety I had never known, I reached inside, drew upon the wellspring of power that yet surged within, and called upon fire.

  In retrospect, that probably was not my best idea.

  Almost bringing the whole house down on my head would be a close second.

  The world detonated in a wave of yellow-orange light and heat as I rocketed out into the night.

  There was my fireball.

  Luckily, I did not burn with it.

  The house, however, was another story.

  I skidded to a halt in the dirt, the trajectory and impact of my flight leaving a long furrow through the mud of the yard.

  When the magnitude of what I had just done sank in, I began to shake.

  Gathering myself as best I could, I checked that all was well.

  I seemed whole.

  The demon’s power was fading, used up in my exertions.

  Somewhat reassured, I fainted.

  The house burned on in my absence.

  The True Measure of a Knight

  There you have it.

  The true measure of a knight lies not in his ability to wield arms, remain stalwart in the face of danger, hold true to her convictions, better himself, or further the cause of her master or order.

  No, the true measure of a knight lies in his ability to faint.

  Consistently and often.

  I was a knight through and through.

  Or at least I could sleep through the night.

  Fully and deeply.

  Pretending to be one as I lost consciousness bravely in the face of danger.

  I shook my head groggily.

  I was not making sense.

  I was rambling.

  To myself.

  While lying in the muck with rain pouring down on me as the house sputtered, steamed, and smoked.

  I tried to sit up and failed.

  I felt like a dragon had just stepped on me and planted me about an arm’s length down into the earth.

  I envisaged an imprint of my body on the ground where the great beast’s scaled foot had smashed me into the dirt.

  Perhaps my outline would become fossilized and one day in the distant, demon-free future, people would come to gape in awe at the wonder of my mighty physique.

  Now I really was dreaming…or incoherent.

  Extracting myself slowly from the suction of the wet ground that held me locked in place, I finally managed to sit.

  The farmhouse was an unrecognizable collapsed black husk.

  My work here was done.

  Now I just needed some rest.

  I plopped back down into my hole with a squelch, closed my eyes, and went to sleep.

  And dreamed the dreams of knights.

  I blinked.

  My eyes refused to listen.

  They were caked shut with dried mud.

  So much for my noble dreams of knightly worthiness. I was more like a toad burrowing into the earth to hibernate until the proper season to emerge.

  I guessed my season had come.

  Demon season.

  I had just made my first harvest. I hoped this reaping was enough to tide me through winter. I did not want to make any more.

  “Well done, Saedeus!

  “The time has come, however, to move.

  “The death of a demon, your decisive expression of magic, and the attendant fire are sure to gather unwanted attention.”

  Groaning, I sat up again.

  I did not feel any better than last night. In fact, I felt worse. I felt like I was a piece of shattered porcelain that had not been put back together.

  All jagged edges and irregular angles.

  And I did not have any glue or magic available.

  Straining against the bonds of the earth, I managed to get out of my divot and orient myself on wobbly legs.

  Spinning slowly around, shading my eyes against the sun, I located south and east. Splitting the difference, I began my trudge through fields that were sown with woe.

  South and East

  As a lad, I had imagined venturing out into the wide world as a magnificent adventure, a noble pursuit that would lead to the realization of my dreams and the justification of my self-worth.

  Leaving a wake of glory in my footsteps, I would change the world for the better as I redeemed myself and the world with me.

  Sadly, this dream was far from the reality I faced.

  With the demon-infested farm just days behind me, I gradually began to see what the world had become—barren and impoverished with humanity fearfully huddled together in enclaves struggling to survive.

  There were no caravans or travelers on the road. I could not even make out the last time there had been tracks. Granted, I was still on the far outskirts of the realm, but Alric assured me that in days past many traders, trackers, and adventurers had plied these roads on journeys northward for fame and fortune.

  A murder of crows was my first sign that I was nearing civilization.

  Or what had at least once been a modicum of civility.

  On either side of the road, barren fields that had been lovingly tended were left to go wild. Copses of woodland blanketed rolling hills adjacent to those areas that had, until recently, been farmed.

  The occasional abandoned farmhouse marked each forlorn homestead.

  Thankfully, there were no demons to kill.

  At least not yet.

  Perhaps because the pickings were too slim.

  There were, however, signs of demonic incursion.

  Which only made the stark reality of my journey all the more apparent.

  I think most of the region’s inhabitants must have fled, fearing for their lives, when roving demons began traveling northward. Although fraught with peril, the residents’ journeys were probably intended to reach the relative safety and security of larger fortified districts.

  If any had attempted to find a safe haven in Balde, none had made it.

  The many motes of remembrance now bouncing around in my skull told me that more than a few had tried.

  For those denizens of this region who had chosen to remain with their land and homes, fate had been no less cruel. The bodies hanging from gallows, gorged, disfigured, and desecrated by demonic hands, scattered along the roadway or left by their shattered homes, told me that clearer than any remembrance or inference.

  I walked through lands of the dead.

  Whether the inhabitants knew it yet or not.

  Although I had considered myself unlucky my whole life, walking toward Kerraboer, I realized just how lucky I had been.

  I grew up with each step.

  Although my spirit fell.

  The crows marked the sacrilege that was the first village I happened upon on my journey southward.

  The souls dancing in my mind from this region, each a world of possibility I could look into and explore if I so chose, told me the village was called Skaerholme. Skaerholme had thrived in the times before the coming of demons, a bucolic hamlet located on fertile grounds in a region of lush rains and forests teeming with life.

  Then the demons came and with them desolation.

  That Skaerholme had survived as long as it had was something of a miracle. Many similar places had fallen long before.

  Sadness welled in my heart the closer I came to the circling black mass of birds.

  From afar, Skaerholme looked like a withered old crab coming to final rest on its back with its carapaced legs reaching skyward.

  On closer approach, the community did not look much better.

  The village was a huddle of small buildings girding the road on both sides. Stout mortared stone walls that apparently were not stout enough surrounded the town center. Mangled metal gates had been thrown violently to the side at the two entrances through the walls following the roadway. I could see one tortured gate lying in the grass to the side of the near wall while a second lay on the road itself on the village’s far side.

  Blood, dried almost black, was smeared all over t
he outer walls in an orgy of sadism. Body parts cloaked by shrouds of flies served as crenellations on the wall. Other parts were cast aside wantonly at the wall’s base.

  The crows, at least, held their silent respect for the dead, circling overhead.

  The demon or demons that had massacred the village, in contrast, were another tale entirely.

  To my inner sight, the village was worse than anything my normal eyes would reveal. I could feel the weight of the travesty that had been visited on this town to my very bones. Foul acts and far fouler magics corrupted the township in a profane pall.

  With the village less than a third of a league away, my feet refused to go any farther.

  “I cannot do this, Alric.”

  “I am not asking you to, Saedeus.”

  “What shall I do? Walk on by? Burn it to the ground? Run away screaming at the madness of it all?”

  “You must do what you feel is right.”

  “I can’t go in there.”

  “I have not asked you to go in.”

  Alric’s voice was heavy with concern when he added, “Going in would be unwise.”

  Alric was right.

  Now that I was casting my mind out, I sensed a presence in the village.

  One that begged me to turn around and flee.

  Faster than my legs would carry me.

  There was a dark gravity to the place, as though all the evil in the land gradually pooled within the village’s center, a sinkhole that evil could not resist, growing darker and darker through time.

  The thing at the heart of that darkness was the creature that had brought ruin upon this village.

  Was I in a position to do anything of true import?

  Could I possibly make a difference?

  Would I be able to stop this entity from unleashing similar horrors upon another town elsewhere?

  There was, I supposed, only one way to find out.

  “I do not think you are ready for this, Saedeus.”

  Normally reassuring, providing belief and motivation where I had none, Alric’s words of caution gave me serious pause.

  Unfortunately, I was never one for stopping once my mind was made up.

  Besides, I had hundreds of voices in my head cheering me on.

  I only hoped they would still be cheering when all this was done.

  To Not Dance with a Demon

  The thing that launched itself toward me was the stuff of fishermen’s nightmares.

  I literally had no choice but to engage the monstrosity.

  There was no way I was going to outrun it.

  Almost as soon as I finished taking in the sorry state of the village, within moments of deciding that I would act, the demon I sensed within leapt high over the town’s walls and landed on the road not fifty paces before me with a monumental thud and a billowing plume of dust.

  To say the horror was a cross between a gigantic praying mantis, an armored crustacean, and a multilimbed cephalopod would be a disgrace to any of those creatures separately or combined. A bilious haze of sickly, nacreous power fanned out about the creature, writhing wildly like another set of loathsome appendages.

  Unlike many demons whose spectral presence overpowered the entity’s corporeality, the sheer brutish enormity of the thing seemed to scar the very substance of the material plane with its rampant presence.

  It moved jaggedly, its scything tentacular arms and wickedly spiked forelimbs warping through space and time faster than the eye could follow, jerking from place to place without crossing the intervening distance.

  Eight eyes on stalklike appendages wavered in the air regarding me above a beaked visage polished to flesh-rending sharpness in the bowels of hell. Multiple rows of jagged mandibles gnashed against one another in anticipation of a ready meal.

  I wet myself.

  Call it my precombat lubrication.

  Or less friction to limit my own slower than hand or eyes movement.

  A soft moan escaped my lips before I could clamp my mouth shut.

  My manliness points were decreasing drastically with each passing moment.

  “Burn the essences you hold within, Saedeus!

  “Use them to match the beast’s strength and give them peace in their graves!”

  Alric’s words brought me back to my ignominy.

  “I’ll kill them forever!”

  “No, you will liberate their souls and give their deaths the meanings of which they were deprived!”

  The demon bunched its many scabrous legs and surged through the air toward me.

  Hundreds of voices begged me to use them, to free them from the torment of their last living moments, to give them the chance to redeem themselves by acting in a just cause.

  So I did.

  The lives of many became one as their combined power exploded through me.

  Time slowed as the demon’s supernatural movements resolved themselves within an actionable temporal frame.

  The infernal’s lightning ascent arced and slowed to a feathery fall.

  Whipping out Loer’allon, I waited calmly in the long moments of the demon’s descent.

  Leaping upward when the thing was no more than ten paces above me, I launched myself heavenward faster than the beast fell.

  My trajectory took me through the monster’s abdomen and out its other side.

  A cloud of ichor and entrails spewed out in a fountain of gore tracking my own ascent and gradual fall, the demon’s nebulous aura writhing frantically and stilling as it crashed thunderously to the earth.

  Their deed done, the many slain souls lending me their power left me as well.

  I crashed to the ground.

  Not at all gracefully.

  The pain of the bone-shattering impact was lessened by the inchoate rush of another tsunami of claimed souls in the departeds’ wake.

  With them came a demon unlike any other, a shocking mountain crashing down on me with the impact of a meteor and the surety of death.

  I burned the thing faster than last year’s kindling.

  Its flames healed the wounds of my mangled limbs, masking the pain of their refusing and recreation.

  Then I fainted.

  As was my style.

  When I woke, I smelled like death.

  Worse…

  I smelled like the denizens of the deepest unplumbed oceanic depths laid out in the sun for far too long mixed with the glorious smells of otherworldly excrement and unspeakable fluids.

  I vomited.

  Now I enjoyed the heady benefits of pre- and post-combat lubrication.

  I needed a bath.

  Badly.

  However—my stomach purged—I had a task to do before I took time to find water to cleanse myself.

  Standing with a bit of trepidation as I put weight back onto my formerly mangled legs, I tottered over to the giant demon’s corpse. With a sure stroke, I sliced Loer’allon’s storied blade through the armored plates between the creature’s ghastly head and its columnar neck, decapitating it. For the briefest of moments, a nimbus of light shining forth from Loer’allon separated the beast’s skull from its spine. Then the fearsome head fell to the ground with a mighty thunk.

  I got out of the way as the head fell to the ground.

  Trudging toward the village, I wandered around until I finally found a cart that suited my needs. Satisfied, I returned to get the demon’s head.

  What followed took more time, effort, and gore than I care to recount. But, in the end, I managed to plant the demon’s head squarely above one of the village gates.

  If I ever had a house worth calling home, I wanted one of these planted squarely above my mantle on the fireplace.

  My efforts might be just a small victory and an even smaller deterrent, but I was proud of my work.

  I can’t say the demon felt the same.

  But what did I care?

  At least I’d given it the best view in the village.

  That was far more consideration than it deserved.

>   Hopefully any of its kin heading northward could see the unholy visage just as easily as its dull eyes could see them.

  That is, imagining it could still see.

  And, if the demons couldn’t see, I would be glad to show its head to them.

  That settled, I found the village well and drew enough water to clean myself.

  Which almost made it go dry.

  Thankfully, the well was too small for the demon to fit inside or I am certain it would have claimed the shaft as its own.

  Then I would have had to walk farther for clean water.

  By the time I was done, I was too tired to walk.

  So I lay down on the dirt and went to sleep.

  What Now?

  I startled awake to a loud growl.

  Leaping to my feet, or, rather, stumbling to a predominantly standing position which was my uncoordinated attempt at an equivalent, I readied myself to face yet another implacable foe.

  Only when I had blinked the grogginess of sleep from my eyes and cleared the dream-addled fuzziness from my poor excuse for a brain did I realize that the sole battle before me was hunger, its war cry the gurgling of my stomach, and its outcome never in doubt. This was a war I would wage all my days, one I would never win, for I could only temporarily assuage my appetite but never defeat it.

  Unwilling to tap into my own stores unnecessarily, I decided to scour the village for foodstuffs that might still be palatable.

  With the memories of many of the village’s former inhabitants available for guidance, I was quickly able to gather enough food to last far longer than I had already been on the road, along with enough coin to supplant what I might need for far longer.

  My needs temporarily met, and the opportunity to ask available, I decided a little conversation was in order. “What exactly was that thing that tried to skewer me and turn me into Saedeus snacks?”