Oshia, the only woman of the group, dressed in a long-tailed green tunic and a maroon beret, sucked her teeth with disdain. “It’s not like we’ve had very much success. We’ve been to three cities and now this town and have met a dozen Foxes barely. How much further north do we plan to travel?”
Sergio grunted. “Your optimism is just exhilarating, Oshia. A dozen is better than none. They’ll matter big time in the next battle. You must’ve forgotten how many we lost in the east.”
Oshia cast down her eyes in lament. The Fox at her left set a hand upon her shoulder. She’d lost a sister in battle and a father to the Plague. “How could I ever forget,” she whispered.
Sergio cleared his throat again, moving on. “We only have several more weeks before our rally in Visqont with the general. We’re only responsible for covering land of the Arkhades Kingdom, so I believe...” He pulled a piece of parchment from his back pocket and unfolded it, his eyes darting over it. It was a map of Memoria. “A city called, Rotharia, looks twenty leagues northeast of here, across the wetlands. It’ll be our last stop before heading to Visqont. And then, off to WestBaine from there.”
“I can’t believe the general ordered us to evacuate the Vanik Isles,” said a Fox named Holmes.
Sergio swept his ponytail from his shoulder. “I can’t believe it either,” he said to himself. In all his time serving, Sergio had never heard such words come from the general. “The Vanik Isles are finished,” said Sergio.
“The general wrestled with the decision. It’s better to fight another day and save other lands than dying for conquered ones. There are plenty of cities in WestBaine capable of challenging the horde. I assume we will reach out to them.
“But what of our creed? To fight even unto our death?” said a different man.
“We’ve done too much for Vail for this to be a matter of the creed, Fox—intellect maybe. Dying for the creed would be unwise. It would mean leaving behind those who remain. Sometimes you have to decide what’s good and what’s better.”
The chatter flourished. Sergio spoke of their next journey and his plan. “Since we’ve found none of our brethren here in Iristadt, our work here is more or less done. I give you all until noon to gather whatever provisions require. Enjoy yourselves. We leave for Rotharia, so prepare. Remember, we go no further than that.” He dismissed them and rubbed his neck in relief once they had gone. Masters stood at his side.
“Heard anything from Darwin?”
“Not since we parted ways in the Aglaecein,” said Sergio gravely.
“Lucreris Capital is the northernmost city of Memoria. He’ll be pressed for time in his return.”
Sergio looked across Iristadt, eyes falling on the red shingles of narrow triangular rooftops. “Winn’s gotta’ take care of himself. Getting to his family is what’s important to him now.”
“I know that,” said Masters matter-of-factly. “Think he’ll make it back? The general won’t wait long. You know that.”
“O’ course!” barked the halfling. They walked along the road, heading for the bar. Sergio looked into the distance. Darwin was his closest friend, closer even than his blood brothers. He had lost one dear comrade to Abyssians. The thought of losing another worried him. Will Darwin make it back in time? Sergio, the half-satyr, half-man, hoped so.
Through Nasracan Eyes
Bagaminos. It was a city of cerulean domes and palm trees. The exuberance of life was as natural as the air. The eastern city was another location in the kingdom of Arkhades, an instance of their coastal presence. It was in a perfect position, perfectly fortified, and a perfectly populated metropolis neighboring the capital. The noon sun beamed from the cloudless sky over the people, casting them once again into ordinary routine. It was business as usual, the merry city immersed in consolation and sanctuary. When an elderly man dropped a crate of belongings from his head and fell, an armored soldier came to his aid in the blink of an eye. In the shaded and secluded corners, intimate young couples, no older than teenagers, kissed and cuddled, soaking in their blooming romance. Merchants of the market effortlessly sold their wares, and their customers patronized them without complaint or remorse. Crime halted; perpetrators apprehended with fairness and mercy. Whoever the Lord of the land was, he had prevailed at his station. Bagaminos was one of a kind upon Memoria.
But the city had not known of the spying eyes watching it from nearby. It had not known what kind of menace was coming for it. Abyssians were but only a whisper, shadowy entities of eastern hearsay. Bagaminos knew little of the vast war of the world, and for good reason. Nothing had disturbed its security. Until now. There was heavy thrashing over the land that started at one pace and hastened into another. Somehow it went undetected, a mistake that would seal the city’s dark fate.
The nasracans had arrived, disembarking their boats upon the eastern shore of Memoria like rabid dogs. The very moment their claws sliced into the sand, they raced countless leagues west, never stopping, to destroy. There was no warning. Like swarming pestilence, they descended the hills of the Terabonna Wetlands and swooped down upon a fateful encounter: Bagaminos. It was the closest city. The city’s sentinels who deployed into the wetlands never saw home again.
By the time the Arkhadians realized their destruction was upon them, it was too late. A thousand Abyssians covered the inclining land, the Black Salt like streamers of searing heat climbing to the heavens in their wake. There were nasracans mostly, but scattered among them were also four robust rock-necreins. They were hulking ash giants with brutish, sinewy arms and broad shoulders. Eight citrine eyes lined their ribbed, sloping heads, and in their wide mouths curved stained teeth. Their purpose was to penetrate the city’s fortification. They accomplished it promptly, using their bodies as wrecking forces that decimated flesh and stone.
nasracans trickled over and through the wounded walls, into the city, shrieking as they hunted for all they could kill. Among them was one peculiar creature, a youngling of their kind. He was nothing more than two tussling souls trapped in an undead boy’s body as if it had been a hollow shell. He went through the gates, climbing from the massacre and into a tree. A single horn ridged his bald, gray head and curled outward at the nape of his neck. He was half naked, his upper body slender and frail, deceiving of his wickedness and nether-worldly strength. His lower legs were black and metallic, glistening like marble. Behind him was his arrow-headed tail that writhed as if with a mind of its own.
He was younger even than the undead boy of his host body. He was made in the eastern isles and had yet to see war. It exhilarated him. The thought of killing brought no less of such a thrill. But there was something else in him that scorched with a craving for life.
He looked forward—his apathetic demeanor unchanged—as his kin killed. The infrared world around him was bright and green and black. The green objects piqued his interest. They beckoned him, each with a shade or mixture of shades. The brighter ones were more invigorating for reasons that eluded him. He wanted to have them, to own them.
From the overhang of a rooftop screamed a man as he came falling three stories—an archer tackled by a nasracan. The nasracans looked peculiar through the youngling’s eyes. Their inwards were black and gray, a flicker of green light in their bowels. They differed from men, who were entirely green within and illuminated with life.
The youngling leaped down to the ground into a crouch and then hopped along to seize the dead archer. Instinct. The nasracan that had killed him was a creature with horns hooking from the back of its neck and curved along its jawline. It was muscular and bald like the youngling, though mercilessly savage and hardly timid.
When the youngling approached the dead human, the territorial nasracan snatched him and flung him into a building far from his meal. The youngling rebounded, scolding the larger nasracan with a shriek and a hiss. The nasracan responded with an overpowering roar that echoed down the road and silenced its envious foe. It then chomped into its kill, fangs squishing into the fallen arch
er’s flesh. Its black iridescent eyes flashed. The youngling saw green light leave the man’s body and slither into the Abyssian. The man was black now, worse than dead, and invisible to the youngling's eyes. The large nasracan moved on.
The people fled for their lives, shrieking in peril. But there was no use in it. Abyssians were designed to hunt them, everything about their atrocious forms made far more superior. The youngling stayed on his back, watching three soldiers fight a nasracan at a fork in the road to his left. Valiantly and skillfully the men fought, but this Abyssian differed from the others. Its horns were ground-length and twisted together into one.
It was less rabid as it maneuvered their skirmish, wielding more skill than its beastlier peers. A soldier swung his sword furiously, and it evaded, wrapping a long tail around his abdomen and flinging him into the distance. The second soldier attacked with a hard slash, but the Abyssian stopped it with its forearm, shattering the blade. The nasracan leaped onto the soldier’s shoulders and twisted his head in a circle. It didn’t bite the man nor take his green light. Why? The glaring and writhing youngling didn’t know. This Abyssian seemed unconcerned with him.
The third soldier’s skill was better than the rest. He slashed downward, missing as the nasracan leaned. The Abyssian retaliated with its claws like knives. The soldier parried and spun, and they leaped about wildly, exchanging hard blows, countering, and evading their rival. The soldier nearly severed the nasracan’s tail as it tried to stab him with it. The soldier crouched with his sword in both hands, his back elbow raised and blade parallel to the ground.
The nasracan charged him with a cunning attack that fooled the unsuspecting soldier. Its tail preceded it once more. The man hop-stepped into a swing, giving too much of himself to the lunging strike. In its gray hand, the nasracan gripped the soldier’s sword wrist. The merciless nasracan spread its claws and swung, slicing the soldier’s arm in half at the elbow. Petrified, the soldier staggered, unable to cry out his agony. The nasracan palmed his helmet, its menacing strength crumpling it as if the metal was soft. The dead soldier dropped to his knees with a crushed skull. This one, the nasracan drank. The youngling watched in wonder as it drank its reward. But what happened after would leave him even more mystified and curious. The nasracan staggered and fell with a shriek. Black lines like veins appeared beneath its skin along its arms, chest, and face. Its eyes blinked quickly with green flashes.
Suddenly, how spilling blood pooled the ground, the nasracan’s skin darkened. The color streamed its flesh until its pale upper-half was entirely black. Its twisted horns came undone, and it rose a new creature. On its inside, in its center, was a sphere of green light larger and brighter than any within a nasracan the youngling saw pass by. He’d witnessed the evolution of an Abyssian. It was the reason for coveting the green essence of the men. The youngling felt this truth within himself.
The nasracan—no, something else—grasped the soldier’s blade from his detached hand. It felt wrong to call the Abyssian by that name now—an insult warned the souls in him. A nasrogh, they told him. The nasrogh saw him lying in the debris, walking toward him. It looked at him as if ruminating the odds of something. “Come,” it spoke, its voice guttural and vigorous. Like a child following the heel of its parent, the youngling obeyed, coming to the man whose head was backward. “Drink,” the towering black Abyssian ordered. “Quickly before his soul flees.”
The soldier’s face beneath the helmet was pallid. Unintentionally, the youngling exposed the human's neck with a snatch almost tearing it in a clean line across the Adam’s apple. The green within him was fading. The youngling's insides percolated as if joyed. Slowly, lustfully, lovingly, the Abyssian youngling bit into the soft, savory flesh. The man’s waning spirit entered him—a third soul captive wrestled with the others. It was sweet and overly satisfying, yet it worsened his thirst. The youngling stood. He felt different, surer of himself, more aware of his surroundings. He wanted to thank the nasrogh, but he couldn’t. He knew no words; he didn’t know if he even had a voice.
“Come,” said the nasrogh again. And again, the youngling followed, into the massacre. Women and children had no chance. The nasracans dragged them from their homes like dolls and toyed with them both before and after plundering their souls. With magic, a nasracan grew its claws to the length of short swords and sliced another youthful victim limb from limb. A husband and wife ran clenching each other’s hands until a pack of seven nasracans snatched them apart.
The woman crashed down hard, claws stabbing into her back until she stopped moving. An inch before death freed her the Abyssian devoured her soul.
The man lay pinned, forced to watch his love’s eyes go blank as a nasracan bit him. Then four Abyssians yanked his arms and legs from their sockets in one unison motion. The nasracans fought with their claws and their straightened and hardened tails as if they were swords or spears. Stronger and older nasracans fought with the weapons of soldiers.
The youngling killed two of the four men he’d tasted along the way. Two more horns grew on his head on either side of the first one, curling back over his skull. He was even more different than he was a mile back, much stronger, and more determined to feed. It was at the top of the stairs, before a cylindrical building, that he and his nasrogh tutor parted ways. Their black eyes met with cordiality as if the monsters possessed such a trait. The youngling joined the others confidently. The nasrogh stalked away as if its evolved form had tasked it with a greater purpose. It killed particularly.
The rock-necreins folded into giant balls and rolled like boulders that forged vast lanes of honeycombed ruin. To Bagaminos, Abyssians were once but only a whisper—shadowy entities of eastern hearsay—shadowy entities that had seized it, erasing it forever from the world like a star flickering from existence. They continued to descend the hillcrest in droves with wavering tendrils of Black Salt like tongues licking the clouds. Like waves climbing one over the other, they flooded the city, leaving naught but destruction behind them. They left none alive, and nothing standing.
Irvina
THERE WERE NO Abyssians as I dashed south. Not yet at least. Lucreris was an old city that warmed me, but outside, I was very much insensitive, cold, and wary. Nova and my mother were the only things that mattered other than the Militia, the only things I had left. It had been too long since I’d seen them, and I had decided it would not be the last time. I realized they had been miserable during the previous three years, and I wished nothing more than to rescue them while I still had the chance. I raced across the desert with as light a load as I could prepare. It was an amber sea of mounting dunes spanning far and wide until their brilliant ripples etched an undulating horizon. The air was thinner, more pleasant going southward and cooler even with the white sun pulsating at its peak.
As a veteran desert traveler, I’d known Endless well. I exhaled with relief. My journey hadn’t lain westward where the center brewed with harsh sandstorms. Massive cliffs, outcroppings, gorges, and crags were distinct features built closer to the desert’s perimeter. They were features I could identify like the back of my hand and know in an instant where I was and how much ground I’d covered.
The southwest, though, was unfamiliar. It was the outskirts of Memoria where the sweltering hills of the Vozmon Plains remained beneath the westward stretch of the Tucson River. I never had a reason to venture there. The landscape was foreign, but I knew the way.
Lucreris shrank behind me. I walked along the crest of a dune conserving energy for escaping potential encounters. Hours into Endless I went.
My mother’s condition weighed on me. Every ticking second, she was closer to succumbing to the sickness that gripped her.
Determination was a cold liquid surging beneath my flesh, making my limbs tremor. I’ve got to be careful not to stay in Southwood too long. It was the first and last instance I would tell myself that. Worrying of time would obscure my focus. Patience was the key to success, a lesson long learned.
Night c
ame, and so had the dangerously comforting reticence of the desert. I set up camp in the open field, a decision I generally wouldn’t have made. I lay back on my bedroll atop a cover with my sword in hand, staring upward until the warm evening took me to slumber. A dream flashed before me.
The ring of crossing blades echoed in the fog, and I felt the swaying of a vessel....
“I’m leaving, Darwin... after this battle,” said Cassidy. “For good... with Harland and his men.”
The news was heart-wrenching. I sheathed my sword and crossed my arms. “You're not serious.”
Cassidy sheathed his blades and scratched his head. “I’ve been thinking... no, struggling... with the decision,” he corrected. “I’m not going to stay here and work without pay.”
I had known for a long while that something was eating away at my friend, but it was a shock to hear it was something such as this, so small a thing. Money...
“Shimmering coins? That what this is about?” I said in a raised voice.
“Don’t get high and mighty on me. You heard what White Foxx said at the rally. No one’s paying Foxes anymore. Times are hard. The rich have become the poor, and the poor have become the homeless—”
“All the more reason to help,” I interrupted. “Harland’s an opportunist. It’s always about the riches with him. The man has no honor.”
“You may be right. But where is there a place for honor and glory now? There are too many Abyssians on these isles,” Cassidy reminded me. There was a pause. “By our blades, we will die, Winn.”
It was a fact—a guarantee even. I looked at the polished wood of the ship deck.
“I only wish to die littered in luxury and my family to live in a house large as the estates of Crusadia. All these long years of fighting, and we haven’t had time to spend with the very thing we’ve been fighting for—family.”
Enigma: Awakening Page 5