by Sean Rodden
The Mighty One turned his attention to the granitic tor where-upon stood the great grey giant called Kor ben Dor. Drogul felt an invisible heat lick his awareness, scorching his consciousness, and within him rose a perilous rumbling. The power in the Prince of the Bloodspawn was palpable even at that considerable distance. Palpable and prodigious. The Halflord was no mere monster fashioned of foul arts and unnatural corruption. This…this Kor ben Dor was something else. Something entirely different. Something… other.
Of course, he would have to be, wouldn’t he?
And Drogul knew that he was to meet the Prince of the Bloodspawn upon the steam-shrouded stone field of battle at Doomfall. The morrow, perhaps. Or the day after that. Soon enough, certainly. And there, on that killing ground, the Halflord’s considerable might would not matter. Not matter at all. For Drogul was the mightiest of all warriors upon that Second Earth. None could withstand him. None. So insisted those who knew such things.
“Urth ru fuckin’ glir! Gimme something to kill, brother!”
The Lord of Doomfall turned away from Kor ben Dor and the disorganized disaster that was the Blood King’s army. He clapped his zealous Captain on the shoulder with force enough to break the back of a horse.
And he said only –
“Soon.”
A cloud army clad in arcus armour marched in from the east, rumbling across the killing fields of heaven, taking and trampling the shining sun standard of the morning. And the rival host in bright blue battledress fled before it, retreating westward, seeking sanctuary behind the soaring stone shields of the Haunted Mountains. A cold grey darkness swooped down upon the shattered tor where the Prince of the Bloodspawn yet sat in silence astride his sinister steed; dusk descendent despite the day being but half done.
“Come.”
The pair of Black Shields approached their Prince, one to a side. Followed his gaze to the colourless haze heaving and churning before the great crevasse they had come to conquer. They then looked upon their lord, waited for him to speak.
In time –
“The day is lost. But lives have been spared. In such failure, we triumph.” The Halflord glanced to the overcast sky, then lowered his handsome head, saw unfleshed fingers of fog feeling their way furtively across the cool skin of the earth, tickling the foot of the tor. As above, so below. “War is strange, Shields.”
Neither warrior said a word.
Kor ben Dor returned his gaze to the guttering gloom of Doomfall. His white eyes glowed.
“No one died this day. Tomorrow, there will be slaughter.”
Gren del Mor heard resolve, fixed purpose, the unreserved rejection of defeat in the Prince’s velvet voice. Ev lin Dar heard only sorrow.
“Take the ’Spawn. Restore order. Return to camp.”
“Yes, Prince Kor,” the Black Shields confirmed in unison.
“And send Sil kin Hesh to me.”
Gren del Mor and Ev lin Dar traded curious looks across the rump of the Halflord’s render.
“As you wish, Prince Kor,” the former responded, then moved away.
The latter lingered. Heartbeats passed. Hoof falls faded.
“What is it, Shield?”
The Halflord’s question sounded unusually harsh in Ev lin Dar’s ears, sere and stark with irritation, impatience. But there, underlying that strange severity, stripped and laid bare before the discerning eye of the Black Shield’s innate intuition, a true and tangible sadness.
Nevertheless, wherever such empathy might lead, facility for expression does not necessarily follow.
“I… ahh… I… Prince Kor… I… are you – ”
The Prince of the Bloodspawn closed his eyes.
“Go.”
And with a terrible tightness in her throat, she went.
4
ULVIATHON
“The problem with facing your demons is that your demons are also facing you – and they don’t like what they see either.”
Anonymous student, School of Philosophy, Ithramis
He flexed his fingers against a prickling in their tips. Quivering waves of horripilation pebbled his skin for the tiny talons of ice slowly scoring his spine. His heart thudded, hammered against his breastbone; he heard the adamant drumming of blood in his ears; a strange warmth buzzed in the flesh of his face as his features flushed dark. Within him, his soul screamed.
Yllufarr, Prince of the Undying, felt unnervingly mortal.
The Sun Lord dimmed the light shining from his eyes, embraced the eternal midnight which reigned within the blackened dome of bone that was Maol an Maalach, and floated back and away from the edge of the pool. His tread was so soft, so very light, that the shattered osseous matter collected upon the shore did not protest his passing, did not betray his presence there; the heaped banks of the broken dead neither shifted nor settled beneath the feathery falls of his feet as he slipped soundlessly away and aside. He was as a wraith in the dark, an existential extension of night, an apparition without form, without substance – save the steel of the knives gripped in his tingling hands.
Nevertheless –
I know thou art hither.
The vociferation was soundless and subtle, ethereal, a whisper at the edge of Yllufarr’s consciousness. Yet it was also an assault. The words tore at the tunnels within the Sun Lord’s ears, clawing inward like a screech. Something caustic and acrid singed the insides of his nostrils, searing his sinuses, and a vicious bitterness burned his tongue. His eyes wept acidic tears.
The Athain Prince summoned forth staves of Light from the core of his being, and with these he pushed the corrosive power of the voice away. He then laid the shafts of Light before him, a few vertical, the remainder horizontal, forming an invisible grid of athamancy, a shield of arcane geometries curved about his form and strapped to his mind. Wiping his eyes with his sleeve, Yllufarr fluttered further from the source of the psychic attack.
The cyclopean gaze of the demon did not move to track him. A great crimson slit in the black air, a lateral knife-wound in the gangrenous flesh of midnight, the fiend’s solitary eye remained still, outwardly unfocused, seemingly unseeing. For a time, only a low thrumming within the demon’s monstrous maw, the rhythmic gular pumping of its pharynx, betrayed the beast lived at all. And then a single long shuddering huff of torpid breath. Languidly, almost lazily, and with an audible click, a translucent nictitating membrane washed over the gory red gash in the black.
Yes. I know thou art hither. But I know not wherefore thou hast come.
From behind his athamantic guard, the Sun Lord of the Neverborn extended his awareness throughout the turgid darkness of Maol an Maalach.
The Dam of the Damned was a hollow dome, an imperfect semi-sphere rising hundreds of feet to its apex, its single continuous curved wall wrought entirely of tightly thatched skeletal remains. The inner surface had been polished black by time and moisture and mineralization, the morbid tapestry seeming to glow with a light – or an unlight – of its own, as though a marrow of dark energy yet flowed within the fossilized bones. The floor was also composed of the detritus of the dead – flat bones and long bones, irregular bones and short bones, sesamoids and skulls – though these were neither petrified nor woven together, but bleached a sullied yellow and piled loosely, haphazardly, at such an angle that half the heap formed the sloped bank upon which the Athain Prince crouched, and half was submerged in the dark frigid water.
Wherein lay Ulviathon.
Dost thou covet death so desperately?
Yllufarr clenched his teeth. He had been careless. He had emerged from that icy black water mere hand breadths away from the monstrous demon’s bent knee. He could not be certain, but he suspected that he had actually used one the beast’s great claws to hoist himself ashore. And once there he had allowed some brittle bones to crunch quietly underfoot. Yes, he had been careless. Rash and reckless. And rather fortunate.
The Sun Lord flitted further away, naught but the shadow of a black-winged butterfly.
>
If thou hast come to die, wherefore dost thou hideth so?
Yllufarr frowned away the lingering hum in his head, peering through the Dam’s darkness to the place where unholy Ulviathon lounged, cold and coiled, its gargantuan form partially submerged in the stagnant standing water of drowned Coldmire. The Athain Prince slowed his heart, made shallow his breath. The grips of his knives were cold in his clasp, like shards of ice in frozen fists. Nearly two thousand years had passed – had come and gone and been lost to the mists of mythos and the dusts of history – since the terror and tragedy of the Angar ban Gan Gebbernindh. Two thousand years. Come. Some seven hundred thousand days. Gone. And nothing had changed.
Ulviathon was eternal.
As was the pain the Sun Lord suffered.
Shall I shower thee with sweet words, thou hider in the dark?
Yllufarr’s eyes burned. His ears hurt. Yet he still sent forth subtle fingers of his sentience, phantasmal tendrils probing black air and blacker water, seeking, sensing.
A broad shield of heavily scaled bone protected the beast’s hideous head, six long curved horns splaying from the rear rim of the plate like a row of crude yet lethal spears. Behind this formidable frill a single row of steely spikes ran the length of the spine and laterally compressed tail; tough leathery membranes connected each wicked barb to the next, creating a continuous crest that was significantly higher between the foreshoulders and humped hindquarters. Patches of matted fur and blotches of closely-set saurian scales armoured the fiend’s muscled flanks; all four iron-sinewed limbs were armed with webbed claws the size and shape of scimitars; the tapered tail terminated in bristling ball of bone, a massive morningstar of hardened horn made to pulverize flesh and shatter stone.
Shall I sing to thee, cowerer? A song! A song! Wouldst thou have me serenade thy slovenly and sorry soul?
Yllufarr squeezed his eyes shut, pressed forearms to his ears. Summoned forth further staves of Light. Thrust prodigious power into the grid of athamancy arcing protectively about him. Deflected aside the psionic assault.
A song for thee, groveler, sung for thy shame!
Blood welled at the corners of the Prince’s scrunched eyes. Blood and tears.
A song! A song for thy sorrow, thou craver of death! Thou weeper in the night! Thou nameless crawler over bones!
Nameless?
Oh, how a single word can alter all.
The Sun Lord’s eyes snapped open. Nameless. Those pale, pale pools narrowed. The fiend does not know me. His grip upon his knives loosened.
Thou lowly creeper in shadows!
The Athain Prince turned to face the osteal wall of Maol an Maalach, trusting in the imperceptible shield of eldritch power to fend his back. Nameless. Without so much as a whisper of cloth, the pair of blades vanished into his vestment. The advantage is mine. The severe line of his lips tautened in a saturnine smile.
Thou wallower in sorrow!
Reaching up, Yllufarr’s right hand grasped a knobby protuberance of bone on the wall before him; his left foot found purchase on a jutting femur.
Thou flounderer in ignominy!
And as silent as a shadow, the Prince of the Neverborn began to climb.
A phantom fog, damp and bitter, slithered up from the surface of the still dark water. Despite the impermeability of his boots and his intrinsic resistance to the discomforts of demanding treks, Eldurion’s feet were wretchedly cold. Wet worms of mist wriggled through the gaps between the raft’s loosely lashed logs, chewing past the Fian’s inverted otterskin soles even as voracious bh’ritsi might penetrate dead skin. Pricks of piercing pain tingled in his toes. Evidently, the fog in that forsaken crook of Coldmire had teeth. Sighing forth acerbic steam, the aged warrior pulled the cowl of his cloak closer about his face and willed away the urge to stamp his smitten feet. He would not have the Darad mark his frailty.
He needed not have worried himself so –
Rundul of Axar stared sullenly at the wastes of water surrounding the ramshackle raft. His beard jerked erratically as he muttered expletives and growled creative obscenities beneath its bristling mass. With some effort, the Darad shrugged off the impulse to scramble atop his enormous pack once again. Instead, he planted his stout legs as firmly as was possible upon the sphagnum-slicked deck, and gripped his war-axe with such violence that he seemed to be on the very verge of attacking the lake. Which, at present, seemed like a perfectly viable alternative to the interminable waiting, waiting, waiting. By sheer force of will, Rundul tore his tortured eyes from the tarn, clenched his jaw, and clamped his teeth upon his tongue – lest the silver-haired Fian discern his distress.
And so the Captain of the Wandering Guard and the Eldest of the Fiannar suffered in shared and stubborn silence, a fractured fraternity of endurance – together yet apart, alone.
The Lord of the Shaddathair ignored them both.
Utterly.
At the prow of the raft, the long lean figure of Sammayal stood like a diamond-dappled obelisk of obsidian, tall and black and studded with stars. His form was more substantial than it had been, more tangible, swollen solid with power. About him eddied echoes of song, the ghosts of sweet yet sorrowful voices lowered in lament, in sad refrain, mere shades of sound flitting through an afterworld of melancholic memory. But Sammayal’s own lips were still, unmoving, pressed pale in concentration, and upon them the Song of the Shaddathair was but the apparition of an aria gone unsung.
“Death himself would seem perfectly riotous beside that one,” Eldurion muttered into the silence in the Darad’s own tongue. The oiled iron of the grave Fian’s voice, even at a murmur, was well suited to the rasping, guttural rumblings of urthspuk.
Rundul looked upon his companion, relieved to have something on which to focus his attention other than water, water, water. Open curiosity, that fortuitous distraction, glistened in the Darad’s hard ebony eyes.
“You are a man of surprises, Fian.”
“Only to those who underestimate me.”
Rundul tugged at his beard. “You sure know how to hold a grudge,” he grumbled. “Even the Wild One might learn a thing from you.”
Eldurion’s eyes glittered in the hollow of his hood. “He might.”
“You’ve been heard, Fian.” The hulking Darad stared up at the grim grey warrior. “And now I would hear how you came to know the sacred speech of Mother Earth.”
Eldurion shrugged.
“I know but a little of the language of the Stone Lords, Captain,” he replied in heavily accented but flawless urthspuk. “My brother, of course, knew more.”
“Yes. The Lord Amarien was ever a great friend to the Daradur, and especially to Drogul. Still, our language is a thing we hold close and guarded.” Rundul’s brows bunched ponderously. “But I suppose it’s possible that your brother learned the urthspuk from the Mighty One himself.”
Eldurion was silent for a moment. His shoulders seemed to sag. He had not intended to mention his brother. He braced himself against a railing rush of pain, of guilt, shame. Pain and guilt and shame that the passing of a century had not dulled, had not softened. Some losses can never be overcome, some failures never forgiven.
“We were taught your tongue by the one who now calls himself Teji Nashi.”
“Ah,” grunted the Darad. “Him. For a man of many secrets he sure doesn’t keep those of others well.”
“He is with the Southmen now.”
Rundul nodded. “So I was told.”
“I would know the Diceman’s purpose, if you were so informed.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You are not curious?”
The Darad shrugged, shook his head. “I have little use for sorcery, Fian, and even less for sorcerers.”
Eldurion pointed to the black back of the Lord of the Unforgiven. “It is that one’s sorcery that allows this monstrosity of stonewood to float.”
Rundul glowered down at his feet. Coils of freezing fog curled about his boots.
“You just had
to remind me, didn’t you?”
The grey Fian’s face was a rigid mask. “Remind you of what, exactly, my stalwart friend?”
The Captain of the Wandering Guard sputtered something which the mysterious little Diceman had never taught the younger brother of Amarien.
Eldurion sighed, and somewhere in that sound was the sly shine of a smile. “You will have your tunnels of stone soon enough, Captain.”
An appreciative grunt. “One can only hope.”
The Eldest of the Fiannar directed the twin points of glittering light in his cowl toward the macabre mound of Maol an Maalach.
“Some can do more than simply hope.”
Rundul almost winced – almost, but not quite, for he was a Darad, and the Daradur did not wince – as his gaze followed the Fian’s, sweeping across the dreaded dead waters of Coldmire to the Dam of the Damned.
“You believe the Ath will prevail, then?”
“I believe he must.”
“Not quite the same thing.”
Eldurion chased away a grimace of pain as he felt icy slivers of misery slide under his toenails.
“It will suffice.”
“Ah.” Rundul made a dismissive sound. “Faith.”
“No, not faith, Stone Lord. Trust.”
“There’s a difference?”
“There is.”
The Darad nodded dubiously. “Trust it is, then.”
“You yourself said that Prince Yllufarr would return to us,” Eldurion reminded the Captain of the mara Waratur. “Can it be that you have come to doubt your own word?”
“A worthy blow, Fian,” Rundul chortled. “Expertly dealt.”
Eldurion inclined his hooded head. The impression of a smile emanated from the cave of his cowl.
Rundul generously permitted his comrade a moment of satisfaction. Then, with an indicative nod and a measure of pleasure of his own –
“You might as well save yourself some needless suffering, my – how did you put it? – stalwart friend. You can go ahead and stomp some life into your frozen feet now.”
Eldurion started, the sparks in his cowl flaring with surprise.