Legacy of the Blade: The Complete Trilogy

by Joseph J. Bailey

  I filled the void left by this passage with sadness and a soothing song.

  We passed other elementals, stalwart guardians of the land in silent vigil. Where once the el’amin had been stewards of lands rich in animus, their watch was now over landscapes as bleak as my spirit.

  “Do not succumb to the juel’dara’s taint, Noema’dar.

  “Our vigil is as much to prevent such a fall as it is to halt further incursion.”

  Lucius was right.

  I could not cede even this to the demons. We were here to help bring back what had been lost, not fall with it.

  I rested my hand atop Lucius, willing his strength and unyielding determination to fill me.

  Lucius had seen lifetimes of such sorry misery and still abided. I had merely been out within it for a few short weeks.

  I could not let my empathy lead me astray, but I could let it guide me toward the outcome we hoped to achieve.

  “My thanks, Lucius.”

  His quietude said none were needed.

  But I offered them nonetheless.

  “Tell me about Loer’allon, about what she did for you, and about how you used her to achieve your goals.”

  We were riding along the summit of a wind-swept peak, the two adjoining valleys equally desolate, filled with debris of past battles and lives lost, both in the recent and the distant past.

  None of the bodies visible were human.

  Demonic corpses, many resistant to rot and decay, in their many horrific visages, seemed to be caught in the earth, scratching and clawing for their freedom even as the ground slowly consumed their bodies.

  Elementals, those who had perished defending their lands, were largely indistinguishable from the native rock and stone except in cases where weathering had not yet hidden the cause of their demise.

  Saedeus laughed in reply to my question. “I do not think I used Loer’allon so much as she used me. She built me up over time, helped reforge me from next to nothing, and used my strength against the Chaos Gate.

  “While I certainly felt in control of my destiny, I think Lucius and Loer’allon played the largest parts in steering it.

  “But, despite all that, Loer’allon has magnified what we were each given to its best possible outcome. My ability as a djen’toth to drain others’ strength and knowledge and make it my own was used to undermine the very forces empowering and enlivening the Chaos Gate.

  “I was the perfect fit, once properly honed, for that quest.”

  Maeraeth added, “And my strength as a djen’lum, with my ability to shield essences using the djen’gar, coupled perfectly with Master Nomba's demonic aegis. Magnified and used in conjunction with other Angel Swords, these talents helped shield the Uërth and prevent further demonic invasion.”

  “Fueled by your personal sacrifice,” joked Saedeus.

  “I gave myself willingly.”

  “And you’re still here…after a fashion.”

  Saedeus’s teasing did little to rile Maeraeth. “About as much as you.”

  Saedeus continued as if Maeraeth had not spoken, ignoring his counter. “Loer’allon has used the strengths and abilities of her bearers both for their and her ends to best advantage. Until recently, however, those bearers before us were Empyrean Knights like Alric. Despite their intrinsic magical talents, they were not djen.”

  Maeraeth broke in, “Lucius, I think, has played a large role in finding those who would most benefit Loer’allon’s purposes…by which I mean the greater good.”

  “And how do you think she will use me?” I asked.

  Another voice spoke then, one older, calmer, and far wiser. It was the cool depths of humility, the burning brand of self-sacrifice, and the vast sweeps of wisdom. His voice seemed to come from an unimaginable distance, though his presence seemed as close as Maeraeth’s and Saedeus’s. “You will not be used, child.

  “The greater your vision, the greater your ability, the more Loer’allon will give.

  “And the more you will achieve.

  “Do not find fault. Find opportunity.”

  Saedeus practically leaped out of the sword in excitement. “Alric! You old stick in the slime! I thought you had hopped off to another Angel Sword or another plane entirely!

  “Where have you been?”

  An image of Alric’s radiant features, from shining, playful eyes to full silvery beard, formed in my mind. “I have been here…and elsewhere. Loer’allon is not the only Angel Sword.

  “Other brethren and quests need our service and support.”

  “You missed us, didn’t you?”

  Now it was Alric who smiled in my mind’s eye. “Not over much.”

  “You say you were in other Angel Swords, Alric?”

  “In part.”

  “Then the Angel Swords are linked and can be used in tandem?”

  Maeraeth answered for Alric, “That is what I did to shield the Uërth. Otherwise, there would have been no way I could have used my soul as the aegis to protect our world on my own.”

  Finishing the second thrust of my questioning, I asked, “And the abilities of those in the sword can be utilized as well?”

  Alric answered for Saedeus and Maeraeth, “Along with those of Loer’allon herself.”

  Not expecting an answer, I joked, “And how is it exactly that you ever lose?”

  Alric did not joke when he replied. “There are magics every bit as great as ours. And there are many with no qualms about using them.”

  Alric’s visage did not seem so kindly then.

  I would not have wanted to cross him on the battlefield.

  Great magics or not.

  A Look Back

  After we had flown over the rugged terrain for some minutes in silence, Alric finally asked, “Would you like to see?”

  Would I?

  See what?

  Inside Loer’allon?

  See the stories within her?

  Of course!

  “Yes. I would.”

  With this acceptance, my sense of the inner world within Loer’allon grew without bound as my own world fell away.

  “No!” I screamed as Master Nomba fell to the duaga, sacrificing himself to save me, to save our dream of an Uërth shielded from demons.

  Visions flashed before me: my life, seen in review, a kaleidoscopic symphony of imagery and sensation as Lucius guided me toward the culmination of my quest in Noema'jin.

  Despite my frailties and inability to control my magic, shielded erratically by my djen’gar, I strove onward with Lucius’ guidance, overcoming my inner demons with each unlikely triumph against the juel’dara.

  Communing with el’amin, learning to become one myself, I flew with dragons and elementals united to fight off the demons ravaging the heart of the el’amins’ home. Overcoming the pestilence and extradimensional foes in our path, while the battle with the juel’dara raged throughout Noema’jin, with Lucius at my side, I swooped down into Loer’allon’s Elysian halo at the heart of the tumult.

  Reaching for Loer’allon for the first and last time, expressing my earnest need to her as the demons pushed furiously to destroy the elementals’ home and crush its spirit, I gave my life and my magic to protect Noema’jin and stop further demons from breaking through from the Abyss, preventing another Chaos Gate, casting my essence across the world through the Angel Swords joined with Loer’allon.

  My purpose fulfilled, my soul burst into Light and I knew no more.

  For once, I ventured up the courage to face my fear and responded to the tumult shattering the evening’s stillness.

  I rushed out from my mushroom-shrouded hovel to find Alric, a mighty Empyrean Knight, dying in the rain. When I laid my hands upon this unexpected angelic visitation to see if I could help in some way, I took his soul into myself and found my destiny.

  More visions came to me then, pouring forth my life and adventures with Loer’allon and Lucius as we fought toward the Chaos Gate. Though I had at first merely intended to return Loer’allon t
o the Empyrean Knights, for I had not felt worthy of her touch or the destiny she presented, I could not resist the call to be more than I was and eventually face the Chaos Gate itself.

  As I rushed forward from Kerraboer, ready to meet my destiny, the Empyrean Mantle roared around me, heroes of the Light joined beneath its fold, a vast tide of Light pushing forward and then receding, leaving the broken detritus of the throngs of Darkness in its ebbing wake while I ran on to face the Chaos Gate.

  In the end, I leapt upward into the sky, the lifeblood of demons surging through my veins as I laid waste to my foes, Loer’allon blazing in my hand, untouchable and unassailable, every stroke of her blade opening further avenues to the power that fueled my assault, relentlessly cutting through the infernals spewing forth from the Chaos Gate.

  Each demon in my path was a steppingstone to the Gate.

  Finally, impossibly massive, darker than the lightless gulf between worlds, the Chaos Gate loomed before me. Unafraid, full of the insatiable hunger of a djen’toth, I drank deeply from the very soul of the Gate itself as each stroke of Loer’allon cut the Chaos Gate from Uërth’s moorings.

  When the Gate could take no more, no longer having the power to sustain its hold between dimensions as I spewed its leaking power back into the Abyss from whence it had come, the portal collapsed.

  For one fleeting instant, as the universe collapsed into Darkness around me, I was both within the Abyss and Loer’allon.

  Then the Chaos Gate closed, and Loer’allon fell to the earth.

  After a lifetime of training, I held the sword of my father in my hands.

  Loer’allon, Light’s edge, the Sword of Angels, Blade of Light and Truth, shone forth with a radiance clearer and more vibrant than the sun, filled with the light and hope granted on the universe’s first day.

  As she had served my father Laric before me, Loer’allon would be my companion and keeper for the rest of my days on Uërth, until such time as I perished or passed her on to a worthy successor.

  I was an Empyrean Guard, a Knight of the Undying Light, and I would fight Darkness until its end.

  The visions began to flow faster and faster, lives glimpsed in moments, from Alric to Laric and back, generations of men and women fighting demons, races joined together in common cause ranging from Alaurana Leyalia to angels themselves.

  Ages passed before my eyes, grains of sand in an hourglass, all her dauntless bearers striving with Loer’allon to defeat the spawn of Chaos wherever their evil might arise until the torrent of lives finally ended with Loer’allon’s birth in Light itself.

  When the visions finally ended, I did not know Light.

  Instead, I succumbed to darkness.

  Toward the Border

  “Are you well, Noema’dar?”

  Lucius.

  Lucius was calling to me from afar.

  Was this another life?

  Was I still within the sword?

  How many lives had I lived?

  How many times had I died?

  I was drained.

  This was just too much.

  From time immemorial, Loer’allon had been striving to rid the universe of hellspawn. My small mind could not hope to contain it all, to make sense of everything she had shown me.

  “Noema’dar, those were but past strands in life’s flow. You have your own to carve.

  “Use that which has worth and let the rest go.

  “It is not your burden to carry the past.

  “You must strive to make a new future.”

  Lucius was right.

  There were lessons and insights to be had in the past.

  Life was learning them.

  Less unsettled, but still exhausted, I surrendered to sleep once more.

  “How long have I been asleep?” I asked Lucius when I finally arose.

  His shrug indicated that such things were not important. “Your dreams could be counted in one cycle of the sun.”

  A day.

  I had been asleep a whole day.

  At least I felt better for the rest, although the weight of lifetimes still lay heavily upon me.

  I noted that the land’s music around me had grown even more disturbed in my absence as I picked myself up from where I lay atop Goer’naq’s cool back.

  The demonic thrust had been effective here, destroying much of what the elementals had sought so long to protect.

  The mountain we were flying over looked like something that had been corroded by acid and soaked in foul effluent.

  I shivered.

  This battle had been going on for far too long.

  As we flew, with growing unease I sensed the building cacophony of infernals, the extradimensional dissonance of Chaos incarnate. The sensation was mounting the farther northward we traveled, growing so loud as to overwhelm the inherent music of the land.

  There were demons ahead.

  When I could hold in my worry no longer, I finally asked, “Lucius, can we not go around the infernals?”

  Floating beside me above Goer’naq, Lucius replied, “We are.”

  That was exactly the answer I did not want to hear.

  My spirits sank. If the best we could do was face a demonic legion, I did not want to imagine the worst.

  “Will we be able to avoid them?”

  “We have been. The devourers of living essence are becoming more numerous as we near the edge of the lands of the el’amin.

  “Before the fall of the Chaos Gate, most juel’dara massed together in great legions to overthrow the Empyrean Knights as they spilled out of the Abyss. Then, after the Gate’s fall, many juel’dara united to destroy my kin and cast down Noema’jin. In time, unless they find another focus, the juel’dara should disperse, but that time has not yet come.”

  The first few valleys beyond Noema’jin, while bearing the scars of demonic incursion, had held some semblance of the form they had once been in, their integrity relatively intact. Northward, without the lands of the dragons adding additional protection as they did in the south, the thrust and continued wear of the demonic assault was much clearer, the damage far more severe.

  Now, beyond even these lands, on the outskirts of elemental territory, the land was decimated.

  No; decimation was too kind a description.

  Now that I had seen the beauty and wonder of the heart of the elementals’ homeland, and had passed through the unspoiled majesty of the lands of the dragons, the landscape here brought tears to my eyes.

  It was far worse than the barren lands I had traveled through to reach Noema’jin.

  And even worse than the desolate region around my home in Kun’Daer.

  Riddled with cancer and dying a slow death, the landscape had been terraformed by nightmares, warped by fell magics, and corrupted by base powers. Cracked, pitted, and denuded, the sides of mountains were mangled by demonic forces and had no resemblance left to natural terrain. Scorched in unclean fires, leaving fell chars that were every color but black, the landscape was polluted and despoiled by unholy arcana. The valley bottoms were filled with the worst detritus—demonic offal accumulating like soil eroded from the hillsides. What little greenery remained was sickly, mutated, and far from green, clinging feebly to the few surviving pockets of soil, earth that had been blasted far from its original location. The land itself glowed in profane light—infernal essence splattered across the environment.

  Worse than all that, the hillsides and valley troughs were filled with the fractured bodies of broken elementals.

  Their lives, and the music and beauty they had sustained, were gone forever.

  The scene almost robbed me of my voice.

  To aid us, to guard us, and to get us through, I sang songs to help shield us not only from potential demonic attack but also from infernal corruption.

  And to lift our spirits.

  Now, as we crossed through a valley that could have been conjured directly from the Abyss, if there were even physical analogues to landscapes there, a gathered host o
f demons neared. Their essences were even more vile than the lands we were now passing through, lands mutilated by past atrocities and battles with juel’dara.

  If we crossed the next ridge, Heaven only knew what I would see.

  I would not, however, want to visit such a vision upon Heaven.

  Or myself.

  Knights’ Fall

  Thunder rocked the horizon, the reverberations felt as much by my body as my ears.

  Although deeply overcast, there was neither rain nor a storm in sight.

  No lightning bolts flashed elusively within the clouds overhead.

  Gray and untroubled, the clouds rolled onward without a hint of significant internal turbulence.

  The thunder did not come from the sky. It came from far lower, somewhere ahead, past the next war-torn valley and beyond its jagged ridge.

  Nor was the thunder an actual sound, although its effects were much the same.

  The thunder was actually the repeated expression and release of power on an enormous scale, the booming I felt the shaking of reality’s fundament.

  And this thunder recurred over and over, for its source was not alone.

  Although there was no lightning, there was Light, unimaginably bright and glorious, as if all the world’s auroras had combined to form sublime manifestations of impossibly pure radiance.