Voidhawk - Redemption

by Jason Halstead

  “What are you?” Rosh asked even as she was walking towards him, sword raised.

  “I’m a Fury!” She shouted at him. “My wrath is intolerable! You will die a million deaths for me!”

  Rosh blocked her sudden and furious blows. She was stronger, stronger even than the man that had done battle with him only minutes ago. He let her play on the offensive, slashing and cutting at him and venting her considerable rage. She seemed impervious to fatigue, so long and so viciously did she fight. Rosh began to grow tired of her assault and looked for his chances to fight back. He drove her sword out to the side with a parry and stepped in to smash his fist into her face.

  Volera grunted and stumbled back from him. She did not fall, but she did stop her attack. She stared at him, shock evident on her face. “What are you?” She hissed.

  “I’m Rosh,” he said, then walked towards her with his sword raised.

  She fell back, sword held up defensively. “Come then, Rosh, come and fight with me. I’ll savor your soul for years!”

  “You don’t shut your mouth it might take years to finish this,” he growled as he advanced.

  She smiled and stood her ground, licking her lips lasciviously at him. Rosh chuckled and stepped forward, putting all of his power into a swing he knew would blast through her parry. At the last moment she disappeared, vanishing into a puff of black smoke.

  “Damn it!” He growled, looking up and down the hallway for her.

  “Not so long,” he heard her hiss behind him.

  Rosh felt her sword enter into his back, grating off the bone of a rib and bursting through his chest to the right of his sternum. He growled, the sound coming out wetly, and grabbed the blade in his hand. Rosh spun around, ripping the sword from her powerful grip and causing it to saw against his flesh in the process. He endured the agony and turned to face her.

  “You are strong,” she said in admiration. “But in moments your strength will fail. You will stumble and fall, and before I let you die, you will beg me for release.”

  Rosh reached behind and pulled the blade out of his back. He shuddered at the pain it caused, but focused on blinking through the redness in his vision. Rosh held up her sword in one hand and his in the other. He smashed them together, shattering her blade and sending fragments flying down the hallway. She stared at him, eyes and lips wide open in shock. Her eyes narrowed angrily.

  “You have no idea what that will cost me in souls to mend, mortal!” She hissed at him.

  Rosh coughed, hacking up the blood that had filled his lungs. He bent low for a moment, retching out the fluid and leaving great splatters of it on the floor. Volera laughed at him mockingly. Her laughter cut short when Rosh straightened up and thrust his great sword into her belly. He pushed forward until the cross guard was snug against the demonic corset she wore.

  The fury was tall, but not tall enough for Rosh’s likes. He lifted her up by the sword in her belly until her face was inches from his. “That all you got?” He spat in her face, flecks of blood glistening on her crimson skin. He stared into her soulless black eyes and got the feeling that, for a moment, he was looking straight into raw fear.

  “How are you alive?” She gaped, staring at him.

  “Just lucky I guess,” he said, then he twisted and swung her until she flew off of his blade and crashed into the wall of the passage.

  Volera slammed into the wall with a sickening sound that was equal parts thud and crunch. She bounced off and lay on the ground, staring up at him blankly. Dark blood ran from her belly, letting off smoke as it dripped onto the stone floor. “You gonna stay down or get all smoky on me?” He growled at her, not convinced the fight was over.

  “I am defeated,” she whispered, as though that explained it all.

  “Next time pick your fight’s better,” Rosh growled at her, then turned and moved back to the open doors of the royal bedchambers.

  He saw the massacre within. The King and Queen were both dead, butchered by the otherworldly invaders that had long since disappeared. Rosh stared around looking for a target. With a final growl he turned and exited the room. The Prince, he might be in trouble too, though Rosh suspected he was dead by now as well.

  Rosh paused as he passed Volera. She was still laying there and still bleeding onto the floor. “You gonna die?” He grunted at her, kicking her thigh to get her attention.

  “Do you want me to die?” She asked, staring up at him.

  “No,” he said. “Then I got no proof I ain’t done all this.”

  She smiled slowly at him, then faded away to the smoky nothingness.

  Rosh stared at her and cursed loudly. He kicked the wall where she had been once, then again when it didn’t hurt enough to distract him from his anger. Finally, unable to take out his aggressions on the stone wall any further, he turned and stormed off to check the other rooms in the hallway.

  All of the bedrooms were empty. Only one showed signs of recent occupation, Prince Sinjin’s. The bed was unmade and the sheets thrown back. Rosh checked carefully around the room but found nothing. He hurried on, heading back to his room to grab his clothing and make his best speed out of the castle and away from the accursed kingdom altogether.

  A shout of alarm greeted him before he had even ducked into his room. Rosh swore loudly; up ahead guards and servants were rushing to investigate the noises they had heard. He stood his ground, sword held in hand and waited for them stand in front of him. Prince Sinjin and Phigellus, the wizard, came soon behind the guards. The guards were standing ready, crossbows and swords pointed at Rosh demanding his surrender.

  “What’s the meaning of this? This man was declared a hero of the Kingdom!” Prince Sinjin bellowed. “Is this cause for alarm, because he’s out of bed in the wee hours of the morning?”

  “You might want to take a look down the hall,” Rosh said before anyone could intervene.

  “Down the hall? What… what’s happened? What have you done?” The Prince asked.

  “I ain’t done nothing!” Rosh growled. “I tried to stop it. Some assassins attacked me and the King and Queen. I killed what I could, but some bat-winged bitch stopped me from saving them.”

  “Saving who… what are you saying?” Prince Sinjin demanded angrily.

  Rosh sighed and rolled his eyes. “Go look,” he said. “And tell these guys to put their damn weapons away. Ain’t like there’s enough of them to stop me anyways.”

  The Prince and Phigellus pushed past Rosh and moved down the hallway. There were startled gasps as they came to the final room and beheld the butchery of the King and the Queen. “You did this!” Prince Sinjin howled, coming out of the room and running towards Rosh. He held a silver dagger in his hand and seemed intent on using it.

  Rosh let him come at him, turning to face him and holding his sword out of the way. The Prince thrust the dagger at him, burying it in his side. Rosh grunted, then backhanded the prince and sent him sprawling to the floor. He pulled the dagger out and tossed it on the ground even as the guards anxiously pushed forward to contain him.

  The Prince mewled in pain and spat out two teeth into his palm, then held them up for everyone to see. “He struck me! Guards, throw him in irons! I’ll have you flayed alive you traitor!”

  “I ain’t no traitor,” Rosh growled. “And I ain’t taking this. I didn’t kill no one here, at least not no one that’s still here.”

  The blood decorating Rosh’s skin was damning evidence, if any, but now the guards noticed how the wound in his belly was healing before their very eyes. “What are you?” Prince Sinjin asked, pointing at the wound and staring. “A demon summoned by our enemies to kill our beloved leaders!”

  “I ain’t no demon!” Rosh roared in a bellow that did little to support his claim. “Whatever I fought, them was the demons!”

  “Hold,” Phigellus said as he stepped closer to Rosh. He studied the blood on him and the wounds, which were now mostly healed. “This blood is his own,” he spoke.

  “Demons ca
n heal themselves,” Sinjin spat out angrily.

  “They can, but you stabbed him with a silver dagger, why was there no burning of his flesh?” Phigellus asked. The magician turned to stare at Rosh for a long moment. “Who are you?” He asked.

  “Just a man that’s seen more than any man’s got a right to,” Rosh said. “I ain’t done no killing here and I won’t stand for anyone saying otherwise. You let that dandy try something and there’ll be more blood on the walls.”

  “That dandy will be sworn in as our new King shortly,” Phigellus reminded him.

  “Ain’t my King,” Rosh growled.

  “Be that as it may, he will rule this land and you will be subject to his laws while you are within it.”

  “Fine, I was just leaving,” Rosh said, turning back to his room.

  “Do you know what this is?” Phigellus asked.

  Rosh turned back to the wizard and saw that he held up a piece of the demon-bitch’s shattered sword. Rosh nodded. “That was the sword that bat-winged bitch stabbed me with.” He reached behind and pulled out the other shards he had tucked into his breeches from the first demon he had killed. He held them out to the wizard. “Same as these, I broke his sword on mine too.”

  “You broke a demon blade?” Phigellus asked. Sinjin scoffed in disbelief.

  Rosh shrugged. “Two of ‘em,” he said. He held up his sword and offered it to the wizard to examine. “This ain’t no regular sword.”

  Phigellus took it and stared at it. He muttered some arcane nonsense that made Rosh’s head swim trying to make sense of it. He stared and shook his head, then offered it back to him. “Indeed, that is no regular blade. I’ve never seen its like, but there’s nothing demonic about it.”

  “Depends on who you ask,” Rosh muttered under his breath.

  “What about the King and Queen?” Sinjin demanded.

  Rosh scowled. “I ran that bitch through and left her on the ground back there,” he said, pointing down the hallway. “She was bleeding and stinking up the hallway where her blood was eating into the floor.”

  Phigellus hurried back down and found the spot Rosh had spoken of. He used more of his magic to identify that something had indeed occurred there. “What was she, a bat winged woman?”

  “Said she was a Fury or something,” Rosh said, shrugging.

  “You did battle with a Fury? No man has ever survived such an encounter!” Sinjin laughed out loud at Rosh’s claim. “Legends tell of less than a handful of women who fought as demon slayers that could defeat one!”

  “I ain’t no regular man,” Rosh said. “She looked mighty fine, aside from the horns and wings, but that don’t make her my type.”

  Phigellus took a deep breath and put his hands to his temples as he tried to reason through the events. Finally he looked at Rosh with a calculating look in his eye. He nodded briefly, then turned back to the Prince. “Prince Sinjin, you must be devastated by this loss. Please, take some time to rest and recover. I will get to the bottom of this.”

  “And him?” Sinjin demanded, staring at Rosh.

  “Rosh, there are many things about you we do not know. I ask you to please aid us in solving this mystery. If you will not, it is a long fight between here and the gates of the Kingdom,” Phigellus asked.

  Rosh scowled but nodded.

  “Excellent, please come with me Rosh, I would ask you more questions.”

  Rosh glared at the Prince a moment longer, then turned away and followed the wizard down the hall. A handful of guards followed, uncertain of what they should be doing.

  “You defeated a Fury?” Phigellus asked again as they walked.

  “You hard of hearing?” Rosh asked.

  Phigellus chuckled. “Fair enough. Say no more until we reach my casting chambers.”

  Rosh remained silent, following the wizard’s instructions. The walk was short lived, only causing them to head up a different flight of stairs and down another passage. The doors into this room were more solidly built than the ones to the royal bedchamber. Runes and magical sigils were carved around it. Rosh scowled at the magic, then put it out of his mind as he followed the wizard in. The guards remained outside.

  “Did you kill her?” The wizard asked.

  Rosh shrugged. “It would have killed a man, but it might take a few hours.”

  Phigellus nodded. “Demons are not so fragile as we are,” he said. Then he looked at Rosh and chuckled. “Or at fragile as most of us are.”

  Rosh grinned.

  “Right, well, demons will recover from most any wounds. Did she actually tell you that you defeated her?”

  “Aye, she did. I asked her if she was dying,” Rosh said, remembering the scene.

  “And she said?” Prompted the magician.

  “She asked me if I wanted her to.”

  “Did you?”

  Rosh scowled. “I’m getting to it, just takes a bit to get it straight, you know? It was a busy time.” He paused and thought back, reconstructing the events as he remembered them. “I said… I said no, I needed proof I didn’t kill no one.”

  “And then?”

  “Then she disappeared in a puff of smoke, just like the other one I killed,” Rosh said.

  Phigellus clapped his hands together then turned to open up a tome on a lectern. “Excellent! Now we just need to figure out which one she was…”

  “Which one?” Rosh asked. “You mean there are more than one?”

  “There are many demons,” Phigellus said. “More than you or I could count. There are demons that have yet to be discovered, in fact. But there are only so many of each type. Of the furies there are only 13 at any given time.”

  “Why thirteen?”

  Phigellus shrugged. “They have their own rules and laws, I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of them. If you had destroyed her rather than defeated her, another would have been promoted to take her place.”

  “Another what?” Rosh asked.

  “A lesser demon, most likely a succubus.”

  “Suc-what?” Rosh asked.

  “They are beautiful women that seduce men to their dooms. To lay with them is said to be the ultimate in pleasure… and always fatal,” he added.

  Rosh’s eyes widened. “I might have known a few,” he quipped.

  Phigellus chuckled. “Aye lad, we’ve all had our share of wild nights.”

  Rosh smiled wistfully as the image of the blond haired Willa came back to his thoughts. Beautiful once she’d put some meat back on her bones and recovered from her imprisonment, she had been a wildcat in bed and he’d never met her like since.

  “Someone special?” The magician inquired.

  Rosh blushed, then shook his head. “History, we all got that too,” he grunted. “She’s dead now. Most everyone I know ends up that way if’n I stick around too long.”

  “Quite the legacy,” he observed as he flipped another page in his book. “I think this may be partially my fault. I’ve had a suspicion that someone has been using my casting chambers recently. I had no proof, everything was as I left it, but there just seemed to be something a bit off. The energies were touched, like a shirt left on a bed but moved a few inches from its original position.”

  Rosh grunted. He had no idea what the magician was about, but at least he wasn’t as long-winded as Xander had been. That man drove Rosh to the point of distraction when he got started on about something or other that nobody cared about. Sure, he’d saved their butts a few times but what Dexter had seen in the man was beyond Rosh.

  “Let’s try this one!” Phigellus cried out, turning another page and startling Rosh. “She’s a particularly nasty one, even among demons. Ancient and wicked, I’d even advise you to not look at her while I summon her.”

  Rosh grunted noncommittally.

  Phigellus chanted, casting powders and various substances about as he summoned the demon. In moments a black vortex of smoke appeared in the middle of the summoning circle. A few moments later it coalesced into a form Rosh had rec
ently become very familiar with. It was not his demon, he knew it at a glance. Her eyes and hair where perfectly white, giving her the look of the blind though she stared directly at them both. Rather than the black corset she wore a diaphanous white robe that left nothing to the imagination. Rosh grinned when he saw her, and even started forward when she crooked a finger at him and bent it suggestively.

  “Rosh!” Phigellus snapped at him, pulling him from the spell the demon had cast on him.

  “That ain’t her,” Rosh snapped.

  “My apologies, Triana, your services are not necessary. It is a small gift, but I offer you a month of service when my life is completed here.”

  She sneered at the wizard and disappeared in another flash of black smoke.

  “Feisty,” Rosh noted.

  “You have no idea,” Phigellus said, chuckling.

  “You know all these demons?”

  “I’ve needed to call on some from time to time,” Phigellus admitted. “Mostly for information, but sometimes for tasks they can perform. I serve the Kingdom and the needs justified the means.”

  “A month of service?” Rosh asked, scowling.

  “Aye, demons such as the furies deal in souls, life energy, and service. A month of licking her boots is no small fee, but it is something I can survive.”

  “Sounded like you’d already be dead.”

  Phigellus smiled. “Indeed, that was a stipulation. But had I not offered that she would have found a way to come back and shorten my life considerably. If she would have had her way, she might end up owning my soul.”

  Rosh grunted, awed by the power of these beings. He shook his head and looked away. “This really that important that you’ll risk that?”

  “Have you ever accepted that you can be a part of something greater than you, Rosh? Have you ever accepted fate and moved on in spite of it?”

  Rosh smiled. “Guess maybe it ain’t so hard to understand then.”

  “I guess not,” Phigellus agreed, smiling. He went back to flipping through the book then nodded. “Yes, this one. Volera. She’s one of the more martial furies. Most came from the ranks of the succubus, and their skills at seduction are second to none. Volera was once a different sort of demon, one who delighted in warfare.“