Sunset of Lantonne

by Jim Galford

  Nenophar looked little better off than Ilarra, with every muscle in his body limp as he struggled for each shuddering breath. His eyes were ajar but unfocused. Every so often, his massive feet twitched spastically. The dragon shook his head, his disembodied voice replying distantly, I saved her, but it will take time.

  As Raeln stood in front of Nenophar’s nose, he struggled to decide what to do. The dragon had done something that might have made Ilarra’s situation worse, though he clearly had tried to help. Raeln wanted to strike at him, to vent some of the anger he felt after fighting all day against an enemy that could not be beaten.

  “Raeln!” Greth snapped, grabbing Raeln and spinning him around. “He’s doing everything he can. Count it as a blessing he’s even trying.”

  Raeln’s shoulders sagged as he tried to find the energy to argue, but he knew Greth was right and could not be mad at him. As he relaxed, he realized how bad Greth looked, his armor in shambles and exposed patches of fur more often than not stained with blood. He could see near-collapse in Greth’s eyes, but the man clung to his arm and waited for him to relax as well.

  An icy drop of water hit Raeln on the bridge of his long nose, and he looked up at the roiling black clouds overhead as rains began to fall all over the area. With a communal groan, the survivors headed back to their tents to hide from the weather.

  “We need to rest,” Greth reminded Raeln. “Everyone needs to rest while we can. Let her have time to recover and get some sleep.”

  “I can’t,” he admitted, shaking his head. “Not yet. Ilarra might be beyond my help, but these people are starving. Some of them have no idea how to live outside a city. I need to assess our resources and make sure everyone is taken care of before I can rest.”

  Greth touched Raeln’s cheek affectionately, frowning despite a reluctant understanding in his expression. “Someday, promise me you’ll learn how to live for yourself,” he said, brushing his claws through Raeln’s fur. “I adore that you care so much for others, but I want to see you have a chance to put all this behind you eventually.”

  “There will be time for that someday…not today.”

  “You’ll find the more you put off someday, the farther off it’ll be, especially now that you’re a normal, everyday wildling again, stupid,” chided Greth, smirking. “Twenty or thirty years is all you’ve got left. Don’t blow it all doting on the furless. They’ll still be here when both of us are long gone.”

  Clasping Greth’s hand to his face, Raeln whispered his thanks for caring, but then took a deep breath and pulled away. He could not let the people suffer any longer if it could be helped. “Go to bed before you fall over,” he told Greth, nodding toward the wooden building. “I promise I’ll join you in a little while. I need to know the camp is safe while I sleep, or I’ll never relax. Once I’m sure, I swear I’ll come back.”

  Grinning, Greth punched him in the stomach hard enough Raeln coughed and tried to catch his breath. “If I wake up before you come back, I’ll remind you who’s the alpha around here,” he warned as he backed away toward the building. Turning mid-step, Greth marched with a renewed appearance of energy.

  Raeln watched until he could no longer see Greth in the dark, though he could faintly make out his silhouette approaching the lodge building. Finally, he turned back to Ilarra, intending to watch her a little longer before going to check on the survivors from the city.

  In the moments Raeln had looked away, Ilarra’s health had improved dramatically. Whereas before charred flesh had been crumbling away from all of her wounds, now a thin stream of the dry soil was rising up and floating around her, slowly settling over the burns and filling them in. Seconds after the area was covered with the dark grey powder, it would smooth and fade in color until it matched the rest of her skin. Already, her arm had regrown to the elbow and her lost leg was entirely restored, her skin looking out of place in the chill rain.

  What made Raeln freeze was not so much Ilarra’s recovery, but that Nenophar lay sleeping with his nose at her side. Each time he breathed, Ilarra’s hair flopped about her calm and peaceful face.

  Raeln watched the two for several minutes, feeling like he no longer belonged at Ilarra’s side. It was a chilling sensation, though he could not feel any sadness in it. She had a new protector who could do far more than he ever could. With the powers Ilarra had gained from the Turessians, Nenophar was likely the only one who could understand and truly be her equal.

  Smiling somberly, Raeln headed for the main encampment to the south where hundreds of tents had been set up on hard-packed dirt unsuitable for farming. In those tents, he passed men, women, and children of all the races—including a single raven wildling, who watched him with ebon eyes as he moved on. All of the people were either settling in by themselves or with people that made them feel safer or more comfortable.

  More than once, he found couples huddling from the winds and rain that wore clothing marking them as having come from dramatically different stations in life. In one of the more notable tents, an elven woman in battered and stained finery he recognized as a courtier of the king’s court lay shivering in the arms of a large man in pauper’s rags, who watched her with genuine concern and tried to shield her from the cold.

  Raeln continued on past the majority of the tents, smiling despite himself at the way the people came together in crisis, their old rivalries lost for the moment. He knew they would return again in time, but the peace among the survivors helped keep him warm and push him onward when his aching legs and arms pleaded with him to take Greth’s offer and collapse somewhere out of the rain.

  Finally, he reached his destination: a large shed he had seen during his first visit nestled among the tents. He had recognized it as a storehouse and wanted to be sure whatever was still in it got distributed to the survivors before they moved out in the morning.

  Standing beside the shed with two other soldiers, Phillith leaned heavily on a makeshift cane to keep his weight off of a bloodied and swollen leg. At Raeln’s approach, he looked up, smiling weakly while the other men kept watch over the area, taking in everything.

  “You got here before me, I’m surprised,” Raeln told his old mentor. “Wasn’t even sure you lived through that fight.”

  Phillith limped over, wincing with each step, then glanced over his shoulder at the other soldiers. “We’re already getting the food out as fast as the volunteers can carry it. Making sure none walks off.” The old man spoke a little louder than necessary, but then dropped his voice to a near-whisper as he added, “Did your friend make it out with you?”

  Raeln nodded, and Phillith gave a thankful sigh.

  “We lost nearly everyone back there,” Phillith told him, shaking his head. “We’re all that’s left, Raeln. With my boys and girls, maybe a hundred…hundred twenty at most.”

  “The rest of the army will come back in a few days—”

  “There is no rest of the army,” replied Phillith sharply and checked to be sure the soldiers had not heard him. “They’re all dead. I saw some of the boys and girls I trained out in the undead forces. No one’s coming back, and what we have left here dies the moment the undead regroup.”

  Groaning, Raeln lowered his eyes as he thought of what to do next. His attention snapped to the wound on Phillith’s leg. Black festered boils marred the skin all around the bandages that had soaked with blood. “What’s wrong with your leg?”

  Frowning, Phillith eyed his leg and then glanced back at the soldiers again. “Wasn’t from the zombies,” the man admitted. “Ghouls came in early and tried to kill me and a few other officers. Got bit pretty bad. We think they were trying to disrupt leadership before the main force reached the gate.”

  “Ghouls are diseased,” Raeln thought aloud, remembering his lessons from childhood. “That has to be cut off before it spreads. Ghoul fever can’t be cured once it sets in—”

  “I’m not stupid, boy. One of our doctors already looked at it. We fought too long and the disease was already
in my blood by the time I got to him. Chopping off the leg would have only kept me out of the fight, not saved me. I’ve got a few days, but not much more than that.”

  Raeln opened his mouth to argue, to shout for a healer, but Phillith reached out and yanked a tuft of fur from his shoulder to snap his attention back.

  “Keep it quiet,” warned Phillith with the firm sense of command Raeln had always known him for. “There are no healers out here. I’ve checked. Not even someone trained enough to chop it off without making it worse, not that it would help. I’m dead, Raeln. This is why we dispatch healers to every little miserable village in the region. It gets easy to forget how simple it is to die for stupid reasons, but I’m happier with this than having the corpses of my own men tear me apart.”

  “We can try…” Raeln began, finding nothing to finish the thought with. “Maybe…”

  “Shut it, boy,” the old human countered. “I’ll keep everything moving along until you’ve taken them west. It’s the least I can do. Get some rest and stop looking like the world depends on you. Go spend some time getting your head right for what you’ll have to do once I’m gone to hold all these survivors together.”

  “I’ll lead them as best—”

  “The officers will take charge of my men, but you’ll have to keep the civilians moving. Leading is not your job, Raeln, and these people are not your responsibility. Fight to help them, but you only owe your life to Ilarra and your friend.”

  Raeln tried to argue, but each time he opened his mouth, Phillith grunted a sharp rebuke, until he gave up and clamped his jaw shut.

  “That’s better. Go tend to your family and those who would be family,” Phillith said with enough finality that Raeln nodded in agreement.

  “What will you do?” Raeln asked a moment later, avoiding Phillith’s eyes.

  “I won’t become a damned ghoul,” the man snapped, glowering. “That’s my problem, not yours. If I even answer that question, you’re the type to stay behind or try to talk me out of it. Keep your mouth shut and just walk away. I know you’ll do your best with these people, and that’s all I’d ever ask of you.”

  Standing helplessly, Raeln waited until Phillith turned his attention elsewhere before he turned to go. He wanted to fight, to beg the man to find some help somewhere, even if he knew there was none to be had. More than anything, he wanted to say good-bye, knowing Phillith was right in the severity of his wounds. Raeln could not do even that, as it would have made Phillith furious. Death always came sooner or later to soldiers, and Phillith had come to grips with that decades earlier.

  Raeln wandered away, not really sure where to go. He wanted to go to Greth, but he still worried that Ilarra might need him. He wanted to be useful to the survivors, make sure they knew he would protect them when they had to travel. There were so many places he could go, only a few of which he actually cared about.

  He stopped walking, looking between the central building where Greth waited for him and the clearing where Ilarra was recovering. It would be so easy to go back to Greth and sleep for days, but Raeln’s overinflated sense of duty would not allow him to do so. Instead, he forced himself back to the clearing, his bare feet dragging through the damp grass.

  Stopping before he was visible from the clearing, Raeln stood there for what felt like hours, though the lack of any real movement of the moon in the thick clouds told him it had likely been less than one hour, trying to decide what to do.

  The survivors, Raeln knew, could wait. They were so tired many of them would have gladly lain down in front of the enemy forces to die had Raeln not pushed them to run. Letting them go until morning would normally be out of the question so close to the city, but small groups of patrolling women and men were dimly visible in the rain at the edges of the camp, the moonlight occasionally showing their movement. Even an untrained child could scream long before zombies reached them with nearly a mile of open ground all around them to show the enemy’s location.

  Ilarra was safe, or as safe as she would ever be, sleeping beside her dragon. That thought made Raeln smile and nearly burst out laughing, the idea still difficult to grasp. For so many years, he had been referred to as her watchdog, making the idea of her new protector being a dragon all the more humorous for Raeln.

  That left Greth.

  Raeln wanted to go to him and collapse in his arms. He wanted nothing more than to sleep near someone who understood him and cared about him, bringing with it all the absurd sense of security others in the camp felt by finding another living person who wanted to be with them in the dark. It was anathema to his nature, though. Raeln had always been the one searching for others to protect, usually finding Ilarra. He could not quite bring himself to take comfort in someone else…not yet. Once they had gotten farther from the undead army and…

  A faint rumble shook the ground as a column of flame shot from the western side of Lantonne and lit the whole sky. Seconds later, he could hear what sounded like the giant blocks of stone from the city’s walls hitting the ground.

  The elementals. He had nearly forgotten about them, which was as absurd as Ilarra cuddling with a dragon. The creatures were nearly as large as a city, and certainly larger than the one he and Ilarra had grown up in. With them on the loose, he had all the more reason to want to be miles from Lantonne and never return.

  Greth could wait, he finally told himself, giving the cabin-like building a sad look. There was too much to do, too much to plan, and too much at stake for affection just yet. That could come later, once they were no longer within range of the elementals and had seen no more Turessians for at least a few days.

  Walking again, Raeln had no desire to seek out Ilarra or disturb her and Nenophar. They both needed rest from whatever they had been doing during the struggle to hold the undead at bay in the city. Instead, he wanted to find On’esquin and shake the orcish man until he explained all the nonsensical things he had mentioned in passing and everything that hinted at knowing far more about what was happening than Raeln did. That was a goal Raeln could use to keep himself awake.

  As he walked, Raeln touched the gashes under his tunic. They stung only when he thought about them, but he found most had broken open and were bleeding slowly. Phillith’s infection was a very real warning of the risks for Raeln as well, but he had to hope he could shrug off anything the filthy claws of the corpses might have put in those wounds. There was little else he could do besides ignore the pain until it went away or got bad enough he could not walk or fight.

  His footsteps leaving paw-shaped divots in the mud that filled quickly with water, Raeln made his way into the clearing, where Nenophar still lay near Ilarra. Both of them looked up as he came closer, shaking off a thin layer of icy water that had covered them.

  Raeln turned away from them when he spotted On’esquin sitting near the edge of the clearing on a large, flat-topped rock. Unlike the others, the orc allowed the freezing rain to settle on him. It ran in thin streams off of the hood he had pulled up and dripped from the cloth onto his tusks, which stuck up from his lower jaw. The man seemed immune to the cold in much the same was as Ilarra and Nenophar, and to a much lesser degree, Raeln and Greth.

  “You come with a purpose. That much I can see from far off,” On’esquin said when Raeln was almost to him, though he kept his eyes on the ground. “I appreciate your visit, even if you do not bring with you the same calm I heard earlier. For now, the dragon lends me the calm I require.”

  Raeln squatted in front of the armored man, trying to draw On’esquin’s eyes to his own without success. “Where did you come from, On’esquin? Your accent is not one I know, and you’re marked as a Turessian. I need to know what you’ve seen, so I can get these people to somewhere safe. You promised me answers.”

  On’esquin grinned in the twisted way orcs tended to, his tusks making his face look angry even with the smile. “If I am marked as a Turessian and I speak like a foreigner, then where would you think I came from, wildling?”

  “Sa
y it.”

  “I came from the land you call Turessi, though I left there…I left a long time ago,” he explained to Raeln, his black eyes darting up to the sky briefly. “Most recently, I came from Corraith to find someone in these lands. My lord told me of a prophecy—”

  “I don’t believe in prophecies.”

  Smiling again, On’esquin reached into a row of pouches along his belt slowly, clearly understanding Raeln would not tolerate any chance he was reaching for a weapon. From the dried leather bag, he produced a stack of parchments tightly wrapped in leather and fastened with a silver button that held a symbol similar to those tattooed on his face.

  “I met a man in the deserts,” he went on, holding the roll of papers in his hands, seemingly unbothered by the rain falling on it. “I waited a very, very, very long time for his arrival, but he fit the description of the one that would tell me of the war’s start. I had thought perhaps the prophecy was a lie, but when he found me, it changed everything.”

  “And what does this prophecy have to say for Lantonne?”

  “It says a great many things.” He waved the leather-bound bundle at Raeln. “Only a handful have begun to come true.

  “Raeln, you must understand this is not the vague guesswork of a street prophet. These are the dictated words of my lord and master, who was given a gift by the same dragon that now lays with your sister. For a time, my lord could see the pattern of fate, which he used to see what the greatest threat to his lands might be.

  “Turess, my master, believed the greatest threat might be traitors to his rule or division of the lands after his death. What he saw was something entirely different. Instead of civil war, he saw an army of the undead marching across every nation he had once ruled, claiming city after city until no living being remained.

  “I was tasked with preventing the worst of what could happen by filling a very specific role in the prophecy. My unique state allowed me to watch over those he thought would be the ones who would start this war. Unfortunately, those who first began the war against Turessi all those years ago were not the ones who would start all of this. I waited for hundreds of years for either the sign I had failed or one of those monsters to try to escape. None ever did, and their own creator left them to rot while he began the war in this region.”