Crown of Steel (Chaos Awakens)

by Heath Pfaff

  It wasn't difficult to find what he was looking for. The spells related to the box were the oldest magic his mind possessed. He needed merely to look as far inward as he could, and there it was. Glyphs coursed through his mind, strange, alien symbols that were so different from most of the magical symbols he'd ever used that he could barely tell they were magic. The glyphs he was about to tap were far beyond the skill of any human mage. Xandrith would be relying entirely on instinct to do what he must do.

  "Here we go." He whispered quietly. He reached out for the sources of magic around him, making very sure to avoid grabbing Kassa. Usually when he grabbed for magic it was like filling a reservoir. He pulled until he felt himself filled up, but this time he knew he needed more than that. He grabbed for as much magic as he could take onto himself, and then he pulled even harder. Beyond him some of the Drayid begin to slump as they felt the drain of their life force, but Xan didn't have time to think on that. The power burned through him and he began to form it into the symbols that he knew must open the Great Vault. In his hands the box had gone cold. Holding it was like reaching into a frozen lake. Xan's fingers were stinging from the chill, but he couldn't let go.

  The flow of power through his body was becoming painful. The magic that coursed around him and through him felt like it was full of razors that ripped away at his flesh and tore its way through his veins. Part of his mind screamed at him to stop, but he knew he wasn't even close to finished. He hadn't even breached the lock yet. He tightened his numbing fingers on the box and pushed even harder. Around him even more of the Drayid begin to slump to the ground, some few of them laying still and motionless in death. Each life drained in its entirety was like a dagger being plunged into his back. Draining so much life from one person was a foul and dangerous practice. Rage began to rise up inside the assassin, dark and hungry. His troll ancestry was awake and responding to the death being dealt by the magic. Xandrith knew he couldn't afford to let that come to the surface.

  He pulled with all of his strength at the Drayid around him, forcing their power into himself. The flood of magic burned through him and surrounded him in an agony that washed away the rage of his troll blood for the time being. The symbols in his head began to spin faster and faster, the glyphs formed together into a massive display of complex magic that Xandrith couldn't begin to understand. From beneath his hands black smoke began to rise from the box, slowly at first, but then exploding outward as though under pressure. There was no smell to it, and it didn't seem to have any substance, but it flew from the box and began to fill the room in darkness. Xan couldn't see it, but the few Drayid that had remained standing were collapsing with their mouths agape as the same blackness began to pour from inside them to join the bleak haze in the room. He'd broken the first seal.

  The life force around him began to ebb but Xan knew he hadn't drawn in enough power to finish the task at hand. He reached even further and tore the remaining scraps of life from the Drayid around himself. His body was on fire. He felt as though his arms and legs would rip from their joints and his flesh would slip from his body, peeled off by the terrible rush of power running through his veins. There was nothing left for him to see. The room had gone entirely dark, filled up with the black issuing of the box, and yet to Xandrith a cacophony of color exploded across his vision as pieces of magic assembled into an order so confusing that the chaos of it all thrummed and tore at Xan's mind.

  "I'm going to die." He said, but his words were washed away in the turmoil. He tightened his grip on the box. The smooth driftwood structure was the only reality that he was sure of, and even that was being torn away from him. A sudden desire for one last moment of warmth filled the assassin. "Kassa." He called into the emptiness around him hoping that she might be somewhere where she could offer him comfort. The world began to shake beneath his feet and Xan's stomach dropped as though he was falling through the air. "This is my end." His body surged with wave of agony after wave of agony. A scream tore from his lips and he collapsed to his knees as his hands released the box. The magic swept him away like a storm at sea would swallow a small boat.

  The floor was an ornate pattern of mixed brown and black tiles layered in a very fine coating of ash-like dust. The cold issuing up from the ground cut directly through Xan's clothing and had settled well into his flesh by the time he began to push himself up from the ground. His body was stiff from the cold and his mind was hazy from the ordeal he'd just survived. He turned his head slowly about, though the act of doing so made his stomach clench in turmoil. He was at the end of a long corridor. Behind him was a pedestal with what appeared to be the Great Vault sitting atop it.

  The Vault sat still and blank, no glyphs upon its surface, and no indication that it had just been an instrument of unimaginable power. Xandrith knew immediately that he'd succeeded in doing what he'd intended. He'd passed through the vault to the other side and now it was waiting for him to make the trip back, at which point it would shut the gate between the two locations forever. He didn't need to see the magic around it to know. In fact, even trying to see the lines of magic caused his body to ache, his head to swim, and his stomach to churn violently. His magic was burned away, but it had worked.

  That meant that Xandrith was no longer standing on his own world. He was on Sentinel, the largest of the three moons that circled his home. He turned back to face the hall he'd discovered himself in. The ceiling was at least ten feet above his head, and eight or nine men could have walked abreast down the corridor with no problem. The walls were of a similar style to the floor, though the tiles were larger and some of them gave off a feint glow which provided the only light in the area. Xandrith stepped cautiously down the walkway towards the far end which was blocked by a set of double doors that filled the entire passage.

  The assassin wondered whether or not he should call out and make his presence known. The part of him that was accustomed to working in silence warned him against doing so, but the practical part of him knew it probably didn't matter. If he'd really stepped into the home of a creature akin to a god, what did it matter whether he approached quietly or not? It had probably noticed his arrival already. Xan doubted it had a lot of guests.

  Never the less instinct won out, and Xan proceeded quietly until he reached the massive double doors. The handle of the doorway was nearly at eye level, a fact which made the assassin feel as though he'd regressed back to his own childhood. He reached a hand forward and placed it against the surface of the door. His fingers were different. They'd gotten longer, narrower, and they ended in nails that were more akin to claws that human nails. The patterns of black on his flesh had deepened to be darker and larger, though his human flesh was still visible. His over use of magic had taken its toll on his humanity. He forced himself to ignore the changes and pushed on the great door before him. He expected it to be locked, or at least stuck, but the door swung inward effortlessly on its massive hinges with the barest of effort on his part. It didn't even make a sound as it rolled open to expose the fearsome giant hiding behind it.

  Xan sprang backwards like a cat who'd stepped in a puddle and brought himself into a defensive position with all the speed he could muster. The creature standing on the other side of the opening towered above him at the full height of the sixteen foot ceiling and nearly as wide as three strong men abreast. It had two separate sets of arms and carried a single long saber in each set. Its skin was a deep blue-gray wrapped tightly around bulging muscle. It had a strange and flat head with widely spaced eyes that gleamed red from behind some kind of metallic visor. Its jaw was split vertically and gaping open to show off razor sharp teeth lining both sides. Its legs bent backward at the knee and ended in dangerous looking black hooves. Xandrith's first instinct was to run as fast as possible back the way he'd come, but a small part of his brain still reasoning noticed that something was amiss.

  The monster wasn't moving. It wasn't just standing still, it was standing completely rigid with not so much as a single twitch of m
uscle moving anywhere along its considerable length. Xan took a few hesitant steps forward and he could see that its chest also wasn't rising and falling. The only indication the thing gave at all that it wasn't just some chillingly detailed statue was the red glow coming from the visor of its helm. Not to mention that the middle of a doorway was a bad place for a massive, threatening statue.

  "Hello?" Xandrith called up to it uncertainly. "I've come to see the one imprisoned here." The giant didn't respond, didn't move, and it didn't give any indication that it was actually alive. Xan waited for a time as the eerie silence of the place created a hollow of uncertainty inside of him. The words of the Drayid haunted him. "Beyond the dark is only silence and emptiness." So far those words were proving too true. With a deep steadying breath Xan decided it was time to move past the giant and explore further inside the prison.

  He proceeded cautiously around the great monster, giving it as wide a birth as the hallway and door would allow. Despite his perception that the thing was either dead or inert, Xan refused to take his eyes off of it as he circled past. A small part of his curiosity wanted him to touch the creature and see if it felt alive, but he had little trouble pushing that curiosity aside in light of the fact that it was better not to tempt fate any more than he already had. It would be detrimental to his day to wake up the horrific terror. It wasn't that Xan didn't think he could kill a sixteen foot tall and four armed beast, it was just that he wasn’t sure he could kill a sixteen foot tall and four armed beast and survive the fight. In the end it took him far longer to get around behind the creature than he would have liked. His own paranoia kept him moving quite slowly. Once he'd circled around behind it, he found himself faced with a further unsettling sight.

  The room beyond the giant looked like an entry hall. It was wide open with two sets of stairs ascending to a landing on a second floor. Between the two sets of stairs on the first floor was another large set of double doors with four more of the giant creatures standing guard along the corridor. They were just as unmoving as the first as they stood at rigid attention, their weapons away at their hips. Two stood to either side of the doorway, their red gazes illuminating the approach to the next set of doors. Xan cringed inwardly. To explore what that door hid, he'd have to walk right between those four silent watchmen. The idea of doing so didn't exactly fill the assassin with a sense of confidence. He looked at the two flights of stairs leading to the second floor, and then back at the door on the first level.

  Intuition told him he'd find what he was looking for behind the guarded door. A god would have guards, wouldn't it? It would be much easier to go up the flights of stairs and begin his search there, but Xandrith wasn't a fool, and he wasn't sure how much time he had to return to the Great Vault before it closed at his back. He had no desire to end up trapped within the Vault knowing that once it shut its doors this time, it would never be opened again.

  "Shit." He said the word aloud, forgetting just how quiet it was around him. His single word seemed to echo all around the empty hall. It seemed so loud that someone must come running to see who was standing in the entryway swearing into the silence. Of course, no one did. "Sorry." Xandrith added belatedly, the half hearted apology also taking its time to ring from the walls. He only hesitated a moment more before forcing his feet to take him forward. Every step he'd taken from his old life had led him to this point. He couldn't turn his back on it all and go back. He'd made his choice long ago, and this was just a continuation of the same choice. He was going through the doors on the first floor.

  He walked hesitantly between the towering guards, those red eyed statues seemed looked down upon him in silent judgment as he made his way toward the tall double doors. His head told him those guards might move to strike him down at any moment, but his instinct told him there was nothing alive to offer him any form of threat. His instincts were correct and he reached the door without incident. The material of the doors was difficult to determine. Xan's eyes told him that they were carved from some type of wood, but as his palm brushed over the door it seemed to him that it was made of some type of metal. He pushed forward and the door before him swung open as though it were a slight garden gate, though Xandrith knew that each of the doors must have weighed as much as a half dozen horses. The opening before him yawned open like the mouth of a great beast gaping wide to swallow up the tiny, insignificant assassin. Xandrith stepped through the opening with s sense of trepidation weighing down his feet.

  As he entered the new room light erupted all around him, a brilliant blue-white glow waking in the stones of the walkway and along the walls of this new chamber. The room was long and narrow with a gray carpet stretching along its center and running from the doorway up to what appeared to be a throne sitting atop a raised platform. More of the giant guards lined the walls, standing their silent vigil, but seemingly unaware that their inner sanctum had been pierced. They were really dreadful guards.

  The giants weren’t the only figures in the room, however. Other creatures, some masculine and some female, stood along the walls or gathered in the corners of the room. They too were frozen in place, some seemingly in the middle of tasks that they would never be able to finish. They looked much like the giants with four arms and red glowing eyes, but they were much closer to the height of a human. Each of the strange creatures had three eyes, two more widely spaced than a human’s and a third sitting between those two and just above the ridge of their nose. Xandrith had never seen or heard of any race that looked exactly like them, but the scene in the throne room made them seem somewhat less alien and strange. Had Xan walked into the room of any human noble he might have been faced with a similar scene. The giant guards would have been fae enforcers or orcs, but the setting was familiar enough. The stillness was what made it all seem horrific. What force could freeze their world in a single moment?

  The assassin didn’t waste any more time staring at his surroundings. He walked forward down the gray carpet toward the throne at the other end of the room with a sense of dread building at each step. Something was clearly amiss, and somehow he knew that he was just a few steps away from facing the source of his unease. It felt like it took forever, but he reached the steps. He stopped, only looking at the empty throne for a moment before his eyes caught on the sight that lay across the steps in front of him.

  The bones lay in a perfectly neat pile, clearly undisturbed for all the time that they’d been free of their skin. As such, the scene was only too easy to read for someone as trained in death as Xan was. He stood as still as the statuesque creatures around him and gazed at this death laid out before him. It had four arms like the statues, and three of them were sprawled out to its sides. The fourth arm lay across its collapsed chest bones with the pale fingers still wrapped around the hilt of a makeshift knife whose blade passed between the slots of the rib cage. The knife itself was made of bone that had obviously been shaped from one of the dead creature’s own legs. It was a surprisingly adept piece, even properly hilted and counterweighted. This creature, then, had removed its own left leg and spent a good number of weeks preparing the bone and then shaping and constructing the weapon for this singular purpose. Suicide.

  Xandrith knew he was looking at the body of the god-creature that had been sealed away inside the Great Vault, but he couldn’t wrap his mind around the reality of what he was seeing and what it meant for his cause. His last hope, the plan for which he’d struggled so much, was dead in this pile of bones at the foot of a throne across the very threshold of the vast stars. He was dead. Humanitiy’s hope, the one last entity that might have intervened on their behalf, had taken its own life and left them with nothing.

  A small part of Xandrith reasoned that he could still search the rest of the building, that maybe he was merely mistaken in his assumption that this pile of bones before him was all that was left of the reason he’d come here in the first place, but he knew that wasn’t true. This castle on the moon was full of nothing but death and the frozen magic that had on
ce served the dead. Apparently without their master, all the other creatures of that place had simply stopped and had been frozen in place for all time.

  “You damned son of a bitch!” Xandrith cursed and kicked the skeleton before him apart. The skull cascaded across the room to rock in place against the base of the throne. “You selfish piece of shit! Your plan to catch the other one didn’t work, so you just kill yourself?!” Rage hammered through Xan’s veins. “Who gave you permission to give up?! The rest of us don’t get to just quit when things go wrong! What would you have me do now? Am I supposed to go back home and tell everyone that sorry, there is no hope left? Is that what you want me to do?” Xandrith kicked the remaining bones apart to scatter in every direction. Only the bone knife remained, somehow unstirred by Xan’s rage. “I’m not going to do that! Do you hear me?! I am not going to give up. Some god you turned out to be.” Xan reached down and picked up the knife on impulse. He slid it into one of his empty knife sheaths. “If it can kill one of you, maybe it can kill another. You hear me?! I'm going to do what you couldn't do. I'm going to kill that fucker!”

  Xan turned his back on the god-thing and began to walk away. The ground beneath his feet began to shake. It was a subtle rumbling at first, so slight that he barely registered what was happening, but by the time he was halfway down the gray carpet of the throne room the vibration had become quite troubling. Xan picked up his pace, suddenly quite eager to be as far from the land of dead gods as possible. A heavy jolt passed through the ground, so vigorous it tossed Xan into the air. He landed on his feet but only barely. The tiled floor was beginning to buck with increasing violence.

  Between the assassin and the door one of the giant and silent guardians tumbled, crashing into the ground with a tremendous force. As it struck the floor it split apart and its massive body shattered as though made of glass. The red glow of its eyes flashed once and then was gone forever. As the vigorous shaking began to grow worse, more of the statue-like residents of the quiet halls began to shake and topple. A crack opened along one wall of the throne room and a violent, gasping wind began to rip its way towards the new opening, dragging small pieces of debris with it.