by CJ Perry
The flames warmed the air around her and the toes of her boots. The thought of death had not scared her since the day her Mother told her of the calf growing in her womb. In her mind, no fate could compare - until now.
Her boots charred and her toes blistered. Ayla bit her split lip, imprisoning a mounting cry in her soul. The flames licked her shin, singing hair. The hem of her tunic smoldered.
The maddening need to flail or run overwhelmed her. The pressure to scream built like a steaming kettle in her throat. Ayla fought the bindings at her ankles, rending skin. The kettle inside boiled and scared noises escaped her throat. The wind shifted, bringing a half-second respite for her toes, but it stoked the slower burning wood like a bellows.
Ayla gasped for a breath and inhaled hot smoke. She coughed against the rope, chafing her neck, throat raw from the heat. Her eyes bulged and watered, as each wracking cough led to another sharp inhale of acrid smoke.
Fire climbed the pile of wood on all sides. The rising heat distorted the world around her in undulating waves. The curtain of haze and flames drew closer on all sides. Every breath burned. Her tunic caught and her legs blistered. Ayla tried to recite the prayer. She lifted her chin to keep her face out of the rising flames.
“Ayla?” Deetra said, and shook Ayla’s leg.
Ayla blinked and gasped for breath. The world returned, the fires of the funeral blazing, drowning out the stars with light and smoke. She glared at Deetra. James stood at her side, a goblet of wine in his hand. Deetra held a bottle in one and lifted a goblet up to Ayla with the other. Ayla smacked it out of her hand and the goblet tumbled into the grass.
“What happened to ‘be right back’?” she snapped.
Deetra cringed. “I… I was only gone a few minutes. James had-”
“Take me home, now,” she said, and then turned her anger on James. “And you keep your gossiping mouth shut. Do you understand me?”
James blanched and nodded. “Yes, Empress, I'm sorry. I only asked him to try and absolve him. I had no idea it might be true.”
“What?” Ayla asked. Her temper threatened to burn out of control. “What’s true?”
James stuttered and stammered.
“Speak!”
Deetra stepped in front of him, a scowl etched into her features. “Your son has feelings for the Guardian. That’s what.”
Ayla balled her fists. “Both of you, get on your horses. We’re going to straighten this out, right now.”
Chapter Nine
Visions of Traitors and Lies
Justin picked up the last crate in Freedom Hall, sweat dripping from his brow. He managed to stop by his room and add the latest bit of information to the Identify spell. Even with the aid of some cantrips to gather the dirt and hay and take care of the spills, it had taken him the entire day to clean up the mess. It might have taken less time if he did not spend half of it making trips up to his room to check on the Identify, and daydreaming about red curls and long eyelashes framing delicate green eyes.
Have you come to free me? she had asked him. He wanted to. She deserved to stand trial and lose her life for her crimes, but not her soul. Punishments when set on the scales of Justice must be weighed equal to the crime. Eternity in the Abyss for a follower of the Light did not balance the scale, it obliterated the very foundation the scale was built upon.
He carried the last crate into the east tower and opened the door leading outside. The sun had set and many of the merchants had sealed up their tents and locked their carts. Most of them slept in the courtyard to guard their wares, even though the Red Knights permitted no one else to enter. The merchants themselves were a thieving bunch.
A young man - a merchant’s son with bowl-cropped black hair - ran up, grabbed the crate by the lip, and dragged it away. Justin had paid him a gold piece to dispose of the garbage, and one more to keep quiet about it. It would have taken Justin another whole day just to haul the trash to the pit. He thanked the boy, let him know he did not need him for another trip, and turned back to the Hall.
Justin had gotten an overview of the planes during his studies. The cruelty of the demons that punished the Goddess’ enemies went beyond the simplicity of torture. Their plots and torments could span mortal generations and exceeded any imaginings of pain. Some men deserved such things; Tor was one. His minotaurs had enslaved millions of lives and raped thousands of women for over two hundred years. The suffering Tor wrought upon the world could only be measured with concepts like eternity.
He pushed open the door to Freedom Hall and inspected his work. The oil lamp chandelier cast a wavering shadow of the storm dragon skeleton on the tables and floor. The new dragon-inclusive heraldry hung above the main table, the old tapestry folded on his mother’s chair. There was no more hay on the floor and the dishes were all in the kitchen getting washed. He was finished.
Justin stretched his back and let out a long breath. He had not checked on the Identify in several hours, and he had yet to memorize his spells. Since he first started his apprenticeship, this was the longest he had ever gone without studying. If Master Rashidi knew, he would have Justin copying scrolls until his hands cramped into knots.
He climbed the candlelit stairs to his room, taking them two at a time. He spoke the command word for the spell-lock on his door. The sigil appeared and Justin turned it with his hand until it unlocked with a clunk and flash of blue light. The door swung open.
On his desk, the sword hovered above its mounts, white sand beneath it swirling in place. Justin’s heart leaped. The spell had finished; the sword Identified. Justin walked straight over to it. He considered resting first, or finally memorizing his spells, but decided against both. He had waited a day and a half for this Identify and what the spell revealed may well dictate which spells he needed to memorize.
His stomach churned with anticipation as he pressed his palm to the white sand below the hovering sword. The sand vanished in a puff of dust that ruffled the papers on the corner of his desk. The dust swirled into a pair of tendrils that drifted up toward his nose. He closed his eyes, and breathed them in. The world tilted to the side but he pressed his hand to the desk, grounding himself against the vertigo. He took a deep breath and let the vision come.
A single golden light above illuminated the circular room, its glare obscuring the view of the ceiling. Antique armors, swords, braziers and ancient artworks adorned the white marble walls. In the center, steps of concentric circles led up to a round, elevated platform. At the top stood an altar of alabaster etched in gold. An old longsword with a nicked blade and worn, leather-wrapped handle lay atop it. Amongst all the other beautiful weapons that decorated the room, its plainness stood out in stark contrast.
The High Priest ran his finger along the length the blood groove. “Your father, Dylan, served faithfully in the north for thirty years - until the day the Dark Queen’s Harbinger arrived. She baited him into a secret Temple of Darkness below the city, and there his faith faltered.”
Celia recoiled. “What?”
Justin’s mother had told him the story. She’d had no idea the kind of enemy the man she had invited into her Goddess’ Temple would become.
The High Priest continued as if Celia said nothing, the power of his voice amplified by the domed sanctum.
“He escaped with his life, captured the Harbinger, and put her to the flame to atone. A Dark Knight emerged from the temple as the Harbinger burned. Your father battled him, but without the Light of Our Lord, he failed. The Dark Knight killed him with his own sword. The Harbinger rose from the ashes, destroyed Tor, and broke the seal - bringing about the Dark Queen’s return.”
Justin folded his arms and shook his head. The story was close, but a twisted truth at best. The Red Knight the High Priest referred to had been Deetra, and she did not become a knight until after she killed Dylan. Celia’s father died at the hands of a slave girl. And Tor had sacrificed women to sire his army of half-beasts and enslaved the Empire. It was that curse, the ‘sea
l’ Justin’s mother - ‘the Harbinger’ - had broken.
Celia reached for the blade but it would not come up from the altar. She pulled, but the blade may as well have been welded to the stone.
“Why can’t I lift it?”
The High Priest ran his hand along the blade and then patted the hilt. “The Father of Light took mercy on Dylan and rescued his soul from the Abyss. To lift his blade, you must be a servant of the Light, and have no enmity with his soul.”
“His soul is… in the sword?”
The High Priest nodded, his hand on the hilt. “This marks the beginning of a time of tribulations. But, I believe you have a chance to stop it through your father’s redemption.”
Celia stared at the sword, shaking her head. Her voice trembled. “I believed a fantasy. I lived every day training and waiting, believing he died in a heroic battle with the Harbinger of the Dark Queen. But I lived a lie. My father died in disgrace.”
The High Priest rested one hand on the blade and the other on Celia’s shoulder. He turned her to face the altar. Celia met his eyes as he spoke.
“Perhaps he was never meant to slay the Harbinger. Perhaps his fate was always this sword, so that his daughter might one day lift it from that altar to avenge him.”
The artificial sun above made the strands of silver in the High Priest’s hair sparkle. Celia looked back down at the sword. A lock of red curls escaped the bun on the back of her head and dangled over the altar; a streak of flame on a backdrop of white.
“What are you asking me to do?” she asked.
“To finish what your father started.”
Celia shook her head. “How? It’s been twenty years. The Dark Temples are probably rebuilt. I would need an army just to get to her.”
“Not with this, you won’t. And there will be no army. The King does not believe in the prophecy.”
“What prophecy?”
“Our Lord sent me a prophetic vision the day you put this sword in my hands.” The High Priest closed his eyes. “An army of knights in red armor attack our gates. People scream and lightning strikes them down in the streets. When I look up to the sky, I see dragons weaving in and out of black clouds like serpents forming the symbol of the Goddess of Darkness.”
The High Priest opened his eyes, glassy with restrained tears. “The Harbinger has returned the Dark Queen to the world. If she is allowed to resurrect the dragons, the Age of Light will end forever. Forgive your father, Celia. He never left you. He’s been waiting for you, right here.”
Celia nodded and laid her hands upon the sword, tears in her eyes. One fell from her cheek and landed on the blade. The sword shone a brilliant white, overpowering the light orb above. Both she and the High Priest averted their eyes but Justin watched on, his eyes unaffected by the vision. When the sword’s light faded, the blade had turned from dull gray to bright silver and the nick in the blade vanished. Celia picked it up from the altar.
“I will finish what you started.”
The vision faded and Justin opened his eyes, keeping his hand below the sword. The sword still hovered. The Identify had more to show him. Justin shook his head. He had grown accustomed to visions and Master Rashidi trained him how to interpret them. Some were literal, like an Identify, but most were not. The High Priest should have known the difference.
The dragon Justin had constructed in Freedom Hall would serve as a monument honoring the addition of the Goddess of Storms’ dragon heraldry to the five stars of the Empire’s banner. The dragons the High Priest witnessed in his vision of war had been symbolic. The man was either a fool, a liar, or both. The next vision teased at the edge of his senses and Justin closed his eyes.
The sound of a rushing river through the storm drain beside him drowned out the bustle of the city. Justin stood on a side street in Hornstall within view of a doused pyre. A trail of human bodies led to the top of the burned stack of wood. A stake, ropes still clinging to it, lay askew across the pile. The doors to the Hornstall Chapel were gone, leaving the obsidian altar inside in plain view.
It was his mother’s pyre, eighteen years ago. A minotaur lay face down in the cobblestone road at his feet, its massive bull-head twisted at an unnatural angle. A woman in a headscarf stepped over it as she walked past him, headed for the pyre. Justin followed her as she made her way around the edge of the pile of wood until she came to a gray-haired man lying dead beside it.
She covered her mouth to stifle a cry and knelt beside him. Stroking his hair, she looked up the main road to the arena, then back toward the main gate. People moved about the city picking up fallen comrades in wheelbarrows and repairing damage from the storm. No one paid her any mind.
The woman picked up the sword from the ground next to the man’s body. She held it close as she stood and walked back the way she came. Back up the side street between the smithy and the tailor shop, a little girl waited. She stood where Justin had been just a moment before, just out of sight of the man’s body. Her red curls still dripped from the rain.
Celia. The gray-haired man was Dylan. Which meant the woman with the sword was his wife. Celia’s mother herded her away with one hand, sword still clutched to her breast in the other, but Celia noticed the sword. Realization set in on her soft features. She reached out, trapped by her mother’s arm, and screamed.
“Daddy!”
Her pain reached through the air, gripping Justin’s heart like a mailed fist. The anguish in her voice choked him.
Dylan stirred and lifted his head, but his body did not move. A visage of him lifted from within the shell of his form. He stood and looked down at his lifeless body, then turned to Justin.
“This was the moment my daughter’s story began.”
Justin’s heart skipped a beat and he opened his eyes. His room in the keep returned and the sudden flip in realities brought back the vertigo. He kept his hand on the desk. If he removed it, the Identify ended. The vision still teased at his senses - the humidity and scent of rain lingered on his skin.
The items Justin had Identified Drokin numbered in the hundreds, and the visions had ranged from cloudy and distant dreams to vivid nightmares. But all Identify visions were just impressions of the past. None had ever engaged him in conversation. It was impossible.
Dylan’s voice came from the sword. “Yours began the moment you saw her…”
Justin closed his eyes and shook his head. The room flipped once, end over end, and vanished. The dripping wet Hornstall of old returned.
Celia still reached out, her mouth open mid-scream. The water between the stones of the road no longer trickled. Dylan stood before him on the cobblestone street. He wore a breastplate with an etched insignia in the center, a silhouette of two tall towers beside a main gate. He had interrupted the spell, or paused it somehow. Justin folded his arms.
“I didn’t spend a day and a half on this spell, and suffer the things I have, to seek counsel from a traitor. Why have you interrupted my spell?”
“I have no enmity with you, but that can change. Let us show one another respect. We are both servants of the Light.”
First Celia, and now Dylan said the same thing. If Justin served the Light, then it was without his knowledge or consent.
“What makes you think I’m a servant of the Light?”
“The Light within you resists your mother’s and the Night Goddess’ will. It is why you saved my daughter in the great hall. And as your opposition to the Dark Queen grows, so will the Light within you.”
“I can maintain a balance.”
“You did not choose the red robes because of a belief in balance. You chose red because you did not want to betray your family. You deny the Light for their sake. My daughter saw it, your family sees it, and I can see it too.” Dylan put a hand on Justin’s shoulder. “The only one that does not, it seems, is you.”
Justin pulled away from him. The swirls and eddies of smoke from the extinguished pyre hung motionless in the still air. Minotaur and human bodies littered the ro
ad and the grass between the shops. The rain had washed away the blood, but not the scent of pitch and smoke. Justin breathed it in, lest he forget that Dylan was the man who burned his mother in this very spot. Had it not been for Deetra’s sacrifice, his mother would have died with Justin still in her womb that day.
“I’ve grown up with priests my whole life," Justin said. "Your insight and metaphors don’t impress me. I can love my family and disagree with them. I can despise the Light but understand the need for it. If you’re going to ask something of me get on with it, or release my spell.”
Dylan looked up at Justin, then to Celia who remained suspended in her moment of tragedy. “You don’t despise the Light. You looked into the Light for only a moment when you saw my daughter for the first time. Her Light is what you loved. What I ask of you, Justin of Hornstall, is this - if you care anything for my daughter then save her from this place.”
The altar sat in the chapel in front of rows of pews. The child-priests who died in the war would sit in them in a few short weeks from the time depicted by the vision and take the Dark Communion. Fifteen of them would die in the name of the Dark Queen. Celia had said that Justin sensed the evil of the Night Goddess. If evil had infected Hornstall, that chapel is where it began.
“Perhaps her Light is what I love, but I love my family too. You’re asking me to betray them.”
“They despise you. But a man in the dark will cling to those who despise him because he is lost.”
His whole life people had tried to convert him in one direction and now it came from the other. Justin shook his head to clear it. This was not the time for ‘spiritual unrest,’ as Victor would call it.
“You want me to save Celia, then you need to answer my questions. Tell me what the sword is, and what it can do.”
“It is a Holy Avenger of the Light. In the hands of a true believer, it is an open door, a gate toElysium. Through it shines the Light of our Lord, able to cut through any darkness. Creatures born of Darkness flee before it and those who worship the Dark Queen invoke its wrath.”