Legacy of the Blade: The Complete Trilogy

by Joseph J. Bailey

  My arms and legs pistoning back and forth, up and down, each stride shone with a luster brighter than the galaxy’s heart viewed in a clear nighttime sky.

  I was the subtle arcana of the land, the vast energies of the sky, the ineffable moment of creation.

  I was Light.

  Gawking, coming back to myself, I almost stumbled.

  Only I would almost face-plant when experiencing the divine.

  I was also translucent!

  I could see through my arms to the distant mountainous horizon.

  I could see the bare earth rushing past through my legs.

  Was I invisible?

  “What’s happening, Alric?

  “Am I a ghost?”

  “You are more real than you have ever been, Saedeus.”

  “And by real you mean unreal?

  “I can see through my Abyssal body, Alric!”

  I waved my arm around frantically, trying to impress upon him the force of my argument through sheer manic motion.

  He was not impressed.

  “You are now truly within the aegis’s mantle, Saedeus.

  “Blades cannot touch you.

  “Magic passes through you.

  “Objects provide no obstacle or hindrance.

  “You are the divine will made real.

  “You are the actor and arbiter of divine justice.”

  “And I’m a ghost!”

  Alric chuckled. “If you say so.”

  “So I say!”

  Not taking Alric’s word—for who was less trustworthy than an Empyrean Knight sworn to uphold the highest ideals of Heaven and Earth?—I charged a suitably impressive boulder at full sprint.

  The ground passed beneath me in an indistinguishable blur. My footprints left no trace as my strides devoured the distance between the rock and myself. With each step the rock loomed larger and larger, growing more impressive until finally its wind-smoothed surface was close enough to touch.

  Without stopping, I ran right through.

  A brief moment of darkness, one still lit by the luminous forces of Creation, was all I felt of the fortress-sized boulder that was now slowly disappearing in my wake.

  I was a ghost!

  Still looking over my shoulder, savoring my victory, I came back to myself, the rush of my blood, the beat of my heart, my awareness resettling neatly within my body once more, donning a welcome blanket only briefly left behind.

  Turning my head to face forward, a smile still on my face, I ran into that boulder’s much larger, and far less forgiving, cousin.

  I bounced off the rock’s face with all the energy of a ball rocketing off a bat.

  Too surprised to bother catching myself or adjusting my fall, I flew backward through the air until I finally skidded to a halt some distance from the unyielding stone megalith.

  “You truly are a treasure trove of equanimity and grace under pressure.”

  Leave it to Alric to spoil my fun.

  “Would you like me to show you how to adjust your armor so that it absorbs the energy of impacts?”

  I ignored him.

  At least this time I didn’t faint.

  When I finally stood, refusing to dust myself off out of pride, knowing deep down that the armor’s lambent surface would be unmarred even by my folly, Lucius was kind enough to introduce me to his cousin.

  His name was Raynard.

  I was not glad to meet him.

  Heaven’s Edge

  A loud percussion, the sound of distant thunder, brought me back to the exigencies of the moment.

  Another rumble followed and another.

  The reports echoed across the plains, surging and overlapping like the irregular advance of breakers at high tide.

  Orienting myself, I sprinted toward the sound.

  Smoke rose on the horizon.

  Irregular plumes spiraled upward, the billowing pillars weaving and shifting in the wind.

  Concussive blast after concussive blast followed.

  At least now I knew why the Infernal Plains were so empty of infernals.

  They had all gathered ahead.

  Black, writhing masses carpeted the earth—maggots gorging on a bloated corpse. Winged atrocities dove from above, a venue of hellish vultures squabbling over carrion.

  Where had they all come from?

  The Ways were sealed…at least the ones I knew through Alric. Without the Ways, only a demon lord had the power to teleport so many of its brethren en masse.

  I hoped against hope that a Duaga had not decided to call these plains home.

  Judging by the necrotic waves of power crashing against the shimmering arcane shields thrown up ahead, I would not be so lucky.

  The battle was too far…perhaps ten leagues or more away.

  I would not reach it in time to aid whoever or whatever was fighting back so valiantly against the demonic tide.

  Sadly, a small part of me did not want to get there.

  I knew the fate of those who failed all too well.

  “Shift, Saedeus!”

  “Shift?”

  “Shift! Bridge the distance between us with Light!”

  A remembrance came unbidden, like the recollection of a memory long forgotten…or hidden.

  Letting go, I flowed into Light and was gone.

  Nightmarish forms burst into being around me, the agonizing embodiments of atrocity. Oozing vile fluids, covered in gore and slime, scaled, chitinous, and scabrous, gibbering, howling, and moaning in dirges that mauled the soul in ranges beyond hearing, demons tore across each other in a mad frenzy to reach the huddled figures wreathed in eldritch wards blasting coruscating destruction from behind their sorcerous barrier.

  Incorporeal, a body of Light in motion, I scythed through the demons, Loer’allon glowing with all the glory of the sun on the first day’s dawn.

  Lucius wove a cloud of pestilent destruction, bursting through demonic forms faster than the unaided eye could register, his lethal path traceable by slowly settling gouts of unnamable fluids.

  Her blade an untrackable blur, Loer’allon cut and smote, clouding the air with gore and ichor, the weather of destruction in a rain of death.

  Fell energies came for me, grasping and clawing for purchase, but I was not there.

  I was an apparition of death, Chaos’s final companion.

  I became the center of the demons’ universe and its end.

  Tentacular horrors, horned abominations, and winged banes all tried themselves against me and fell.

  None stood before me.

  In retrospect, it was the one flying, the one who never stood before me, that was the one I should have been standing before.

  A blast of force powerful enough to smash through my etheric form drove me into the ground.

  My awareness wavered and blackened, the dark tremors of unconsciousness, of oblivion, creeping in from the periphery of my vision.

  Refusing to yield, refusing to pass out and away as I had so many times before, I did what I had yet to do.

  I drew in the energies of the dead and dying demons scattered in droves all around me.

  Their power became mine.

  I launched myself upward in a maelstrom of force, Light and Darkness wreathing me in an unholy alliance of annihilation.

  I exploded through the Duaga’s vacuous heart with an eruption of unholy energies.

  The Duaga never knew what hit it.

  To Not Be

  Too much.

  The lives of demons spread before me in an endless panorama of nihilitude, entire eternities of pain.

  The universe itself, Uërth beneath me, cried out against the travesty that was the demonic infestation inside me.

  The demons within howled and raged against the agony that consumed them, the need that filled them—the desire to consume the Light that tormented them, the necessity to destroy the source of the suffering and make Its power their own.

  Only through Light’s destruction could they live and their torture en
d.

  I was at the center of an eternal storm.

  And it was ripping me apart.

  Faint words reached me, the echo of forgotten memories. “You must not lose yourself, Saedeus.”

  A whisper. “This is a fight you cannot win.”

  Fainter. “Do not fight the demonic forces within…”

  Almost inaudible. “Let them go.”

  With a terrible sense of dislocation, as if the whole universe itself—my universe—was tearing apart, the agony unbearable, the effort excruciating, I did.

  Pandemonium reigned beneath me, an unhallowed sea of atramentous forces crashing in hungry tidal waves of annihilation.

  This was my psyche.

  This infernal tsunami was what I had brought inside my soul.

  The flickering light of my mind had nearly been consumed by the Duaga and the ravenous droves of its minions raging through the confines of my self, the depthless Abyss reaching up to claim me in everlasting subjugation.

  My mind a burning spark, a seething ember of the brightest sun, I cast myself into the deepest, most impenetrable tars of the demonic infestation.

  The universe detonated in Light and I was gone.

  Eyes Open

  I opened my eyes savagely, returning to life, to myself, with an undeniable certainty of purpose and an unflappable desire to live.

  Lying supine on the unyielding earth, I stared upward into an unclouded blue sky.

  The universe stared back impassively.

  The violent, eternal struggle within, the unending prison of demonic perception, the overwhelming feelings of hunger and desire, the experiences of unholy dimensions, of infernal mêlées, mastery and subjugation, of fell lore best forgotten, of the war against Light itself, went entirely unnoticed.

  I was a minor cause with little effect.

  One more agent of disorder in a greater universe that did not care if mine ended.

  “We are glad that you made it back, Saedeus.”

  Snap out of it!

  Alric’s words reaffirmed my place, provided a way back to myself, my sense of self, that I had lost under the struggles within.

  “How long have I been out?”

  I could barely form the words even in my own mind.

  “A few days.”

  Days!

  I closed my eyes wearily.

  The struggle within had been lifetimes!

  I had lived and relived demonic lives on this plane and others.

  I had participated in horrific rites and visited travesties upon unsuspecting worlds.

  I had consumed.

  I had destroyed.

  I had tried to unmake the universe in my own image.

  I had almost not come back.

  Flies buzzed around me eagerly, refusing to touch the demonic corpses I sensed nearby.

  “I don’t suppose our friends, the people we tried to save, hung around?”

  “They left rather quickly.”

  After all this time alone, the first people I had happened upon had left before I could even venture a greeting.

  What did I really expect?

  A thanks?

  A hearty welcome to travel in their merry band?

  Why would they bother to stay?

  Tarrying was just another risk.

  Why wait for more demons to come?

  I did not blame them for leaving.

  I would have done the same.

  I opened my eyes again.

  The universe regarded me somewhat more favorably.

  Or was that just me?

  All Not So Good Things Must Come to an End

  I tried to sit up.

  I failed.

  I must have burned off too much of myself, of my reserves, when I destroyed the mob of demons I had brought within.

  Gritting my teeth, I tried again.

  A waft of warm, soothing energy suffused me, easing my pain and enlivening me.

  Loer’allon.

  Or something different?

  I managed to sit up.

  A giant rock loomed in front of me obscuring at least a quarter of the horizon.

  Raynard?

  When I patted my chest to make certain he was in his preferred pocket, Lucius informed me that Raynard had been kind enough to guard me while I was incapacitated.

  His presence had discouraged any other demons from investigating the disturbance.

  I offered my sincerest thanks.

  Raynard remained unmoved.

  I could, however, see the intense elemental energies burning within his core.

  At least they moved.

  And none too happily.

  I would not want to be the next demon that chanced upon this field of contention.

  I stood slowly, placing a steadying hand on Raynard’s cool surface.

  I suppose things could be worse than having a greater elemental as a guardian.

  Giving Raynard one last appreciative pat, I surveyed the destruction.

  I had, I decided, done a rather fine job.

  The plains were seared and blackened in an area larger than many villages, and unidentifiable fragments of demonic entities were strewn as far as the eye could see.

  This was clearly a mess I had no intention or desire to clean up.

  Much like my shack.

  A small region in the center of the battleground remained untouched by the violence.

  This must have been where the band of travelers had made their stand against the demons.

  As I looked on, an apparition appeared in the air before me.

  The man bowed.

  He was broad-shouldered and armored in arcane plate. He held a visored helm in his right arm. His armor was etched in shimmering runes I could not identify that wavered and shifted of their own accord beneath his strong hands. He held himself with pride and ready confidence. In a single glance, I could tell he was formidable indeed.

  Although his dark-skinned face was worn and wrinkled by exposure to the sun, I could see that brightness yet danced in his steel gray eyes, his spirit unbroken by a troubled world.

  “Friend.

  “I am O’nila Lagund of the Scarlet Company.

  “Know that your arrival saved us.

  “We welcome your valiant deeds on our behalf and offer our sincerest gratitude in return.

  “Our debt cannot be repaid.

  “Though but a small token, our priest has placed a boon upon you to aid in your recovery.

  “Should you have need, we have left a bag with some supplies in the clearing.

  “We had hoped to be with you upon your wakening but cannot tarry longer, for our need is pressing and time is short.

  “If we meet again, we will show you the true thanks you deserve.

  “We are honored to have made your acquaintance, albeit briefly, and to have met one who would willingly dance with a Lord of Chaos.

  “Fare thee well, Knight of the Undying Light.”

  That was, I decided, rather a nice gesture.

  I wondered what they had left me.

  I prayed for cookies.

  And milk.

  Disappointment

  There were no cookies.

  I cannot say why this troubled me so much—my feelings were a well of disappointment that seemed to have no bottom.

  Really, who would leave a pack of goods for someone without cookies?

  Was not good, by its very definition, cookie?

  If I were to leave a pack for someone with all the true necessities for survival, cookies would certainly be present.

  Really, I countered, who packed cookies and carried them across an arid wasteland in anticipation of their eventual enjoyment before they went stale, or worse, were stolen by demons?

  Well, I continued, anyone with the capacity to hold off a small army of demons with arcane Craft could surely summon food.

  And, that being the case, what better food was there to summon, and then give as a gesture of goodwill, than cookies?

&nb
sp; Ergo, granted the fact that no other food source than cookies need be summoned, why would the Scarlet Company not choose to share their horde, especially with one who, by his own admission, had saved their lives?

  Some mysteries will never be solved.

  If I ever met the Scarlet Company again, if that was truly their name and not a clever ploy to keep me away from their gustatorial delights, I would ask them to share their cookies.

  Lucius snorted.

  Apparently he had no real appreciation for cookies.

  Unless he had eaten them in my absence!

  Mystery solved!

  Now I just needed to find the crumbs to provide the necessary evidence to prove my case!

  Sadly, even the crumbs were gone.

  I was, however, left with a bag filled with some of the most mouth-watering victuals I ever had the good fortune to devour.

  Even if there were no cookies.

  The Company was also kind enough to leave me a large pouch of the realm’s own coin.

  This would, without a doubt, allow me to buy quite the dragon’s horde of cookies.

  Or cakes.

  The Scarlet Company must have thought me rather in need of assistance to need so much coin.

  Which I was.

  I suppose I cut a rather sad, undapper figure in the bedraggled, castoff clothing I was now wearing after the demonic possession.

  Which was also true.

  I did, however, think the wandering vagrant look suited me.

  But my taste was rather unique, after all.

  Which explained the cookies.

  Relieving at least part of my need, I did find a nice pair of boots and a change of clothing in the bag which fit me perfectly.

  For that I was thankful.

  The bag also had the curious property of being much larger than the space it occupied…perhaps for optimal cookie storage.

  I made a mental note of that oddity.

  Next time a Lord of Chaos attacked, I might be better off hiding in the bag.

  With my cookies.

  Hills and Dells

  As I sprinted across the Wastes, Doeren Muer grew larger and larger with each unhindered stride.