Reliquary of the Faithless: Bastards of the Gods Dark Fantasy (Enthraller Book 3)

by T. A. Miles

He let the consideration go, directing his own collection of Vadryn downward without word or action. It felt as if they had merged with his intuition, even above being connected to his thoughts. They seemed to know what he felt and what he intended, or what he would come to feeling or intending, based upon what they already knew of him. It was odd to consider that Serawe had stowed herself away with him, but since she’d been depleted…her overgrown layers of power scoured away, she felt far less intense. Her defiance remained—she had already tried testing him—and he had no doubt that on her own she could grow to dangerous immensity once again, but through Song, he could keep her reined in. For now, at least. He was uncertain what that would mean for his duties as a priest. He supposed he would eventually have to finish what he started.

  The arms of Serawe tightened around his shoulders, reminding him of her pleas when he believed he was surrendering her to the ocean. Shortly thereafter, he was brought to the ground. He slipped from the hold of the Vadryn, dropping into a light run until he had proper purchase and balance. He drew to a halt outside of what may have been the Morennish encampment, but it was mysteriously devoid of life.

  The Vadryn with him began to drift curiously, in search of bodies to feed from, and Korsten called them back firmly. They returned to him without protest or hesitation.

  Walking across the trampled grass among some few tents, collections of arms, and mounted torches, Korsten found what he thought he might; the bodies of the soldiers meant to lay siege to the city. It was becoming clear that conquering Edrinor was not the goal. The Morennish people only thought that was the goal.

  A thundering sound from above, drew Korsten’s attention to the city on the hill. Emissions of light that spoke of Barriers beings laid into let him know where to go.

  Merran’s Reach brought him to the central courtyard of the Capital City’s lower palace. He instantly heard the sounds of assault. Soon afterward, he was approached by a man he didn’t recognize, but by dress and bearing might have been the steward. His tunic of color and emblem to match the banners hung throughout the yard, came with a cloak that was fastened with what Merran knew to be the seal of office. There were four men immediately in his company, all of them armed, one of them a priest.

  Ceth had arrived ahead of him.

  “Merran,” he said. “It’s the same demon. It’s desperate to get inside, though it’s not shown any demonstrations to match what was displayed before Vassenleigh. I intend to try augmentation of a Release.”

  “What will that do?” the steward asked, greeting Merran with a nod in the process.

  Merran ignored etiquette, however marginal. He said, “It will potentially break apart the beast, so that it may be better dealt with.”

  “Yes,” Ceth said. “For now, we must keep the soldiers away from it. It’s already gorged itself. It will only grow larger if we continued to give it access to blood.”

  Merran scarcely listened, knowing that the information was not for him. When Ceth had finished, he asked, “Where’s Korsten?”

  “I haven’t seen him,” Ceth answered.

  The steward watched the Superior—freed from the Vassenleigh Citadel by the circumstances—turn to leave the yard. The man then looked at Merran, as if there might be more to say, but since there wasn’t, Merran stepped around him and walked after Ceth.

  The yard led out onto a wall, overlooking the city’s base, and the overfed demon lashing at the Barriers that had been in place as long as those at Vassenleigh with multiple arms and tendrils. Each impact sent a wave through the permanent spell. The beast may have been weakened, but it would break the Barriers, if allowed to continue unchallenged.

  Arrows sent down onto the demon had no effect. It barely dignified them.

  The signature of a Reach spell below saw two more priests onto the scene.

  “Why is it here?” Merran asked.

  “To claim something that belongs to the Rottherlen family.”

  The answer came from Eisleth. Looking back at his mentor, Merran saw that Jeselle had also come.

  Just behind him, the steward appeared undecided with how to respond to the Superiors. He had dealt primarily with Priest-Adepts, and knew the Superiors only by the names penned upon any of their correspondence. And there was one whose letters he had become the most familiar with whom he would not meet.

  “I’m going to look for Korsten,” Merran decided, choosing to ignore the comment about what the beast had come for. It would likely forget about it for at least a time if Korsten found it first.

  Eisleth halted him with his words. “It’s important that you come with us.”

  A Reach brought Korsten near to the top of the hill, and the base of the city where the latter half of disaster was set down a century ago. One hundred years ago, Vassenleigh’s Barriers had been compromised…a Rottherlen infected, Korsten yet believed…and that individual brought back to this city. The demon who had ruined blood that inspired a country murdered a household. Plague was blamed, to avoid all faith falling among Edrinor’s people.

  The thought, formed in depression, aroused an aggression from elsewhere. Before Korsten even crested the lip of the city’s rise, the heavy footfall of the demon thundered in his direction. Its form was twice as tall as Korsten, made broader with an excess of demons still clinging to it. They were the smaller beings from Zerxa’s tomb, their drifting shape snakelike. Korsten believed their formation was based somehow in community over territory. Like Serawe’s horde, they seemed to have an instinct to join with each other, to work together to accomplish. Their sense of individuality was reliant upon, not a host…but a master.

  Korsten watched the beast coming at him. He breathed heavily as his heart developed an urge to abandon him. He had not come here to fight Renmyr. He was finished trying to fight him. The only method that had ever calmed this beast was love.

  “I have loved you,” Korsten said quietly. “Haven’t I?”

  It was never the man. It had been the demon from the start.

  The demon slowed its thunderous steps, looking upon the priest before it with a predatory grin upon inhuman features that were recognized as easily as if they had been upon Renmyr Camirey’s face. It began to stalk him, just as Renmyr had always stalked him during an argument. It was always over control. Was that what it had been with Ashwin also? Ashwin could be neither contained nor controlled. His spirit had always been free and unable to be taken, so the demon set out to crush it.

  “You haven’t crushed anything,” Korsten told the beast, which was routing slightly to the side of a direct path to him. “Nothing except my trust in you.”

  “Your trust had to be stolen, through lies.”

  “I trusted you!” Korsten shouted, easily seeing the face of the man, though in spirit it had always been the demon. “I trusted you before I knew what you were! I would have trusted you to my death!”

  “Lies!” the demon bellowed, extensions of its being flaring outward from its body, giving it the illusion of wings. It began to stalk in the opposite direction, making a heavy path toward the other side of Korsten. “How quickly did you take the word of Ashwin against me?”

  “I returned to you, even after Ashwin told me the full truth of what you are.” Korsten kept his gaze with the beast, though it was painful to do so. His body literally ached with anticipation of a worse confrontation. It was only that he reminded himself that emotional confrontations were worse recovering from which enabled him to persist, knowing that the demon would carry on with whatever scared him the most, because he had always controlled with fear.

  Renmyr lunged forward, shouting in such a way that he might as well have followed through with a charge. Korsten was nearly pushed backward by the force of his outburst.

  “You let him take you!” the beast accused. “You let him hide you from me!”

  Tears welled in Korsten’s eyes helplessly. “I hid myself from you!” A sob escaped with the words, nothing that he’d believed Renmyr would be able to drag from him ag
ain, except that Renmyr had held on to a part of his life. He was a bastard to claim that he hadn’t. “I hid myself from you if only to make myself stronger, so that I could help you!”

  The demon began to flex and ebb closer, as if he would carry on arguing.

  Korsten didn’t let him. “You rejected me afterward! You rejected my help, and that was all I wanted was to help you! For such a long time…Ren…. all I…”

  Serawe and the others stirred suddenly within him. They surged forward with defiance, and that was all that was required for Renmyr to finally come at him full. The demon’s arm whipped beyond a natural reach, swiping at Korsten, yet managing only to rake across the air, as Serawe manifested, hooking her arms beneath him and lifting him back. The extension of her and the others formed what was nearly wings again, and held him above where Renmyr stood in rage.

  “Release me,” Korsten commanded Serawe. The lesser Vadryn recoiled at once, but Serawe tried to hold, and it was with her that he fell.

  He hit the ground on only one leg and tumbled sideways, rolling over several times down the steep road leading up to the stronghold. Korsten came to a halt on his stomach, with Serawe attempting to extract her being from him.

  There was not enough of her to pull away, and if she did, he would have to extinguish her before she could be given the opportunity to return to her old ways, and form.

  “Stop!” Korsten shouted at her.

  The embodiment of defiance, and determined to rise against Renmyr, she continued to drag her essence onto the ground beside him.

  Renmyr leaped down to meet them, claws bearing down on the struggling form of Serawe. A part of her immaterial form was cut away. The rest of her retreated to avoid further damage and once fully pulled back, Korsten pinned her with his Will immediately. The severed energy, drifted toward the mass that was Renmyr, but was quickly eradicated with Fire, which Korsten immediately sat up to cast.

  Korsten would not allow two such beasts to merge. Serawe would be sorted another way.

  How, scarcely seemed a relevant problem when Renmyr took hold of Korsten by the throat. And now they were back to where they’d left off…with violence.

  The demon pulled him from the ground and looked upon him with eyes that Korsten realized had long been looking at him through the silver eyes of Renmyr Camirey. Those colorless orbs had been behind all the gazes and the glares.

  Korsten was dropped suddenly. He managed to land on one knee.

  “I will not share you,” Renmyr told him.

  Korsten rose slowly to a stand, looking up at the beast, at his lover. His dark skin was comprised of blood and souls. A wide mantle of horns protruded from his skull. His face was barely human in any regard, but there was still a beauty about him. He was a being spawned of misery and pride, and fear. In the way of things, so had Korsten been. If he were to believe the ghost of his mother, his soul was cast first in love, that which transpired between Zerxa and Sethaniel and which led her to flee her home. But his existence as a priest had been born of tragedy. Through all of it, he had maintained a love that should not have been tainted. It did not have to be. But it was, owed to the nature of both of them.

  “I’m not asking you to share me, heart’s dearest,” Korsten finally said.

  And then he gave his focus to the extended aspects of the demon, and pushed forward Allurance, which carried forth Song, until the Siren spell was in motion. A light began to form over his skin while the spell reached out to what were rightly his, left to him by blood…the blood of his mother. For the sake of the blood of Adrea, and of Ecland…of Ashwin, and of anyone whose deaths could be in some way owed to the demon before him, he continued to work the spell. All the symbols of Emergence recurred upon his body, while the Vadryn held previously enthrall by Renmyr began to slip away from him.

  Renmyr moved back, and then tried to lash out at Korsten, but wound up without enough reach. Korsten continued to unravel him, to strip away not only the Vadryn created by his mother, but also those that had been created by others of the Wyrr, those which comprised the demon’s original mass.

  Korsten became unaware of precisely what he was seeing, or if he was seeing much at all in the array of darkness and light that stormed in front of him, cycling with a force that threatened to pull Korsten physically from where he stood. In his mind, he uncovered two small, shapeless forms huddling together…two souls that had committed themselves to selfishness and to betrayal in order to strengthen themselves, and to take what they were not entitled to. No one was entitled to love; it was its own entity, not to be taken or forced. While one of the pair of souls may have scarcely known better, the other had been given love in the form of acceptance and trust…from Ashwin, and refused to share it. Demartas was his name once. He had resorted to murder, and to conspiracy with an ill-formed darkness.

  For several moments, all the pieces of what had been the greater beast spun before Korsten, nearly blinding his perception of the rest of the world around him. He felt for an instant, that he could take all of it into himself.

  And then he thought with alarming clarity of Ashwin. His hands went through the motions of a spell, and without conscious realization of what he was casting, all the separated parts of the demon were committed to that spell.

  Korsten stood suddenly in the stillness of night, yet where he had been, but the demon and all of its component demons were gone.

  The demon had abandoned its efforts at the Barriers. Eisleth was aware of that without anyone having rushed into the main palace to announce it. He continued with his student and his fellow Superiors regardless. The demon was not the last of their concern, but only a part of a greater one. Knowing now that the Wyrr and the Vadryn were related, it was clear that there was a larger design behind the war than the Vadryn. The Vadryn had been tools without knowing it. And the Morennish people had become tools of the Vadryn. The chain of control led to a source as ancient as Eisleth and his twin. Sources that were born before men, whose incorporation into the corporeal plane was perhaps among the more foolish endeavors of the Greater World. It was time to properly align another of those sources. Ashwin had been right.

  With that thought, Jeselle said, “I’m against this.”

  “Still?” Eisleth said in return, though he was not surprised by her stubbornness.

  “You and Ashwin should not have kept this from me.”

  She referred to the fragment of the Source already in Merran’s hand. The piece that Eisleth had long ago embedded there in order to induce Emergence…in a Rottherlen. It was the only recourse left to them after the Vadryn had begun their slaughter by hunting down and murdering every member of the bloodline they came across, as ordered originally by the Wyrr. The Wyrr, who wanted nothing to do with the survival of men, especially in an awakened state where the Spectrum was concerned. It was now, after all the pieces had been put together, when Eisleth began to realize that Xelonwyr was more afraid of men than they of him. It was his fear that would make him a tremendous danger.

  He looked over his shoulder at Merran, whose spirit seemed only half present, while he continued to fight the urge to defy them and look for Korsten. Korsten would prevail. He had a way at prevailing. Merran did as well, but he also had a way at very nearly dying in the presence of many of the world’s more ancient beings.

  The main palace’s central hall had a lock of its own that had to be opened. Eisleth, Jeselle, and Ceth saw to three of the lock’s components. The fourth…Ashwin’s…would have to be bypassed.

  Eisleth looked once again to Merran, who appeared disinterested. “Hold your hand to the door,” he said to his student…whose role he determined could stay as such. King or not, Merran was a priest, and he had been brought up in magic by his superiors. Eisleth doubted that Merran had any desire to set aside what he’d known for three centuries.

  Merran seemed to confirm that when he raised his hand toward the door. It wasn’t until Eisleth looked beyond him and saw that Korsten had caught up with them that he
realized what had actually motivated him. Korsten seemed to want to ask questions, but Eisleth indicated with a shake of his head that now was not the time.

  The seal recognized the spiritual presence of Merran, though it seemed to take longer to activate the unlocking than it should have. The door opened onto the centermost room of the palace, a room dimly lit by the element floating above the room, over a basin of fire. The flames from the large lamp coiled around this piece of the Source, just as the water had contoured around the portion at the citadel. This was the less protected piece, if only because of the lack of presence of the number of priests at Vassenleigh. It did exist at the very center of Edrinor, however, the last place reached via the channels war forced open on all sides.

  The Source had been moved in sections. The first Ceth and Jeselle had transferred. The second, Ashwin and Eisleth were to have moved, but the portion they had moved was not the full remains. A small section had been left behind, just as a smaller portion had been implanted within Merran.

  Eisleth entered the room with Merran and the others following. “That,” he said to Merran, is yours.

  “Gods,” Korsten murmured from the doorway, looking drained, but uninjured. He seemed to know what he was looking at in the Source, and given that he had been well-educated, he might have. His interest appeared less aroused than it might have been normally, but there was still room through his exhaustion for wonder.

  Eisleth knew that Ashwin’s student had finally defeated his most personal demon. The others could be dealt with over time, before they grew to levels that would pose a threat to him or anyone else. And through that process of dealing with them, Eisleth planned to learn about Song, and how exactly it came to birth itself within their system.

  Merran stood beneath the Source, giving it a look as if it meant to attack him. By now, his presence should have claimed it. It occurred to Eisleth while he observed his student that the reason why it had not was the white moth currently hovering at his shoulder, dampening the signature of his soul.