Perdition's Rest

by J. C. Placeres

  * * *

  Having physically shoved his way through the mass of Tormos at the western entrance to Deep Ridge, Gunvold descended the sprawling maze of passages and stair ways to the very bottom of the city where all the champions had their quarters. At the end of a short ordinary hall stood an unmarked and unadorned doorway just like every other door in Deep Ridge. In front of the door though stood three royal guards in their famous iron armor that covered nearly every inch of their body. Even the visors of their helmets were pulled down low to mask their faces. The silent visages of metallic wolves sneered across the hall at Gunvold, and the Behemoth stared right back. Wolves were the symbol of the Vold House and thus the royal guard that protected the royal families wore helmets shaped into the likeness of a snarling canine face.

  While the royal guard all wore heavy and decorated ornamental armor, Tormos soldiers including Gunvold wore drab reinforced leather armor so as to not hinder their movement. Gunvold wore even less reinforced leather than the average militiaman. While he wore long heavy pants; his leather shirt had no sleeves, his massive and imposing biceps exposed to the world. The royal guard was the only military unit in Juxon which dressed in heavy iron armor, something that did not impress Gunvold. A lesser individual might be intimidated, but to Gunvold these were fake soldiers. Most likely these men had never actually participated in any battle. They were more furniture and decor than warrior, having spent their entire lives in Juxon City safe in its protective walls. Although Gunvold was commander of the Tormos militias, the royal guard was the one fighting unit outside his jurisdiction, answering only to the royal families.

  Two guards flanked either side of the door with the third guard standing a few feet in front of the others directly obstructing the path of entry. Gunvold approached the soldiers and stopped mere inches away from the front guard blocking entry, he stared down at the metallic helmet, easily towering over the soldier. “Move,” uttered the Behemoth.

  The armored guard stood perfectly still, seemingly unmoved by Gunvold’s attempt at intimidation. Through his visor the guard spoke to the grand champion. “No one is to enter until Tulinda is ready to receive guests. You can wait out here until she gives the word if you wish champion.”

  Gunvold’s outward appearance remained expressionless, but inside a fiery ball of rage erupted inside him. Compounding the fact an insect had just refused his command was that the guard also referred to him only as champion, not grand champion. Calmly, belying the hatred that was now coursing through him, Gunvold responded to the guard. “I know you know who I am, but I will be generous and ignore your slight against my rank and position. I give you this one last chance to move, I do this gesture as a sign of respect for Thunvold and the royal families. Should you refuse to move, I will be forced to move your body for you.”

  The guard calmly responded to the Behemoth, although a slight quiver could be heard in his voice. “In the eyes of the United Tribes you are not my superior Gunvold. I do not take orders from you nor do my men. If you would like, go make yourself comfortable in your quarters and one of us will retrieve you when Tulinda is ready. Until that time, you will not be entering this room."

  * * *

  Tulinda sat at the head of the war table, a large piece of furniture which stretched nearly the entire distance of the room. In the middle of the table was a scale replica of the surrounding geographical landscape – Deep Ridge, Armistan and Aun’s Light. Tulinda knew the model served no real purpose other than to give a facade of legitimacy to the paranoid delusions of a mad man. Gunvold had the replica created to help him plan and plot how to properly fortify and defend Deep Ridge for when the Phlebos assault occurred, an assault which had not, and would not, ever occur. The runner who accompanied her stood in the back of the room, clearly uncomfortable in being alone with Tulinda. He shifted slightly and cleared his throat, a barely audible sound that echoed in the war room. Without looking behind she spoke to him soothingly. “Don’t worry Shuyvold, I know how to handle the Behemoth.”

  Tulinda’s attempt at calming the runner had little effect. During the two-day voyage south by horseback she had come to know Shuyvold. A very skittish runner, she found it humorous that he had the constitution to travel alone across the ragged expanses of Juxton. Then again, perhaps he was the type of man who found solace in solitude, in which case his discomfort while here at Deep Ridge would make sense. “Yes, milady,” was his only reply.

  Tulinda stared at the door leading to the room. She knew Gunvold was either on his way or already outside. The geomancer knew Gunvold better than any other Vesnian, or at least she used to. Not so long ago Tulinda and Gunvold had been husband and wife. The two of them were supposedly inseparable, however Tulinda could not remember any of it. Upon reincarnating prematurely six years prior, Gunvold quickly grew disinterested in her. He claimed that she had changed, that she was not the same person she was before the reincarnation. Tulinda of course knew nothing of what she was like beforehand other than what others had told her, and while personality shifts were not uncommon for a reincarnation, she did not believe her shift had been that drastic. She had to rely totally on what others told her she was like before, however most avoided the topic and refused to speak to her about her previous self. The only two people who had been open and honest with her were Duvold and Gunvold, and they gave opposing testimony. Duvold explained how before the reincarnation she had a shorter temper and was more prone to outbursts like Gunvold was, but not to his extreme. He said in general she had always been kind towards him and others during the interactions he had observed. Gunvold on the other hand stated she was previously a mirror image of him, believing the vast majority of Vesnians were below them and should be completely subjugated or eradicated. Tulinda found Gunvold’s view of the world reprehensible and refused to support his delusional viewpoint. She chose to model herself after the person Duvold had known, one of kindness, empathy and logic. A few months after she chose to reject the personality Gunvold wished her to mimic, he officially ended their marriage. As with everything Gunvold did, their relationship ended with vitriol and anger. He claimed that Tulinda had become soft and a mere shadow of the woman she once was. The only Gunvold which she could remember now was an egotistical monster who viewed everyone and everything, save perhaps Thunvold, as an irrelevant and expendable cog in his own world.

  The one thing everyone did confirm to her though was how close she and Gunvold had been. She poured through her records in hopes of finding any correspondence between the two of them but found nothing. No one, not even Duvold, knew why the two of them never wrote to each other. She had on more than one occasion tried to talk to Gunvold frankly and calmly about their previous relationship after the separation, but nothing of fruition ever came from the discussions. Their conversations would always end poorly. To this day, more out of curiosity than anything, Tulinda was still willing to speak to Gunvold, as she still sought a legitimate explanation as to their history. While everyone explained how the two of them had been madly in love, and while Tulinda longed for such closeness, she knew the two of them ever rekindling their romance was an impossibility. They were now vastly different people, but she held out hope that deep within the violent and abrasive Gunvold was a softer and more reasonable individual.

  Through talking and research she had found out that Gunvold, in all his incarnations, has always been a whirlwind of destruction. However, it seemed in recent times his paranoia and sociopathic tendencies had grown even more exaggerated. What compounded his behavior was that he was so incredibly close to Thunvold despite their differences in personality. Whereas Gunvold was violent and imbalanced, Thunvold was peaceful and calm. Somehow, the two opposite figures had developed a close friendship which lasted through reincarnations. Due to their closeness, Thunvold gave Gunvold free reign to do as he pleased.

  Tulinda came to believe that what may have exacerbated Gunvold's paranoia is that his position of grand champion had become somewhat of a hollow assignment. I
n the early days of the empire there were credible threats, initially and most famously the Dallion Rebellion. Not long after the rebellion was quashed though came the undead war under the leadership of Gunvold which lasted two hundred years. Juxon’s death had an unintended consequence that didn’t materialize until eons after his fall. Aside from his death imbuing the Vesnians with life, it also did something sinister; it imbued the long dead corpses of their human forerunners with undeath. Buried deep under the crust of the planet due to the great quake, it took the reanimated cadavers a long time to find their way to the surface. When alive the humans were wretched creatures, however in undeath their vileness was magnified. The undead were mindless husks who sought only the destruction of the favored children of the Three. When they first started appearing, the undead were able to overwhelm a few small encampments of Tormos through sheer numbers. When news hit Juxon City, Gunvold assembled the militias and began the undead war, a systematic purge of every undead human in Juxton. The undead were easily enough beaten in combat, but more kept pouring out of the subterranean caves beneath Juxton every day.

  The Tormos discovered that the majority of the undead poured forth from the cavernous depths deep within the Dallion Forest. Some scholars would later come to speculate that it was the discovery of the reanimated human corpses which drove the Dallions to madness. Gunvold came to realize that it was likely they would never be able to kill off every undead, so numerous were the humans when Juxon destroyed their race that it might take thousands of years to eradicate all the undead. Gunvold decided the only sound strategy was to seal off every opening to the cavernous depths, forever entombing the endless undead hordes beneath the crust of the planet. In 334 AJD Thunvold agreed and Gunvold, the United Tribe militias and a group of geomancers headed into the Dallion Forest and sealed shut every cave in the forest forever imprisoning the walking cadavers.

  The closure of the cavernous depths saw the end of the undead war and all conflicts in Juxton. For the subsequent seventeen hundred years peace ruled over Juxton and Gunvold had nothing to do but patrol around a quiet nation keeping watch for dangers that no longer existed. In more recent times Gunvold had become increasingly paranoid about the Phlebos and the threat he believed they posed. While he had always disliked their southern kin, he was becoming more vitriolic and aggressive in his comments. He foresaw a threat where none existed, believing that the Phlebos were plotting against the Tormos. He had even suggested a few times that potentially the Tormos should strike the Phlebos first. Despite Gunvold’s bellicose rhetoric that the Phlebos were snakes waiting in the grass, his hot head was the lone voice of insanity in a calm sea of reason. Now he was left to mull over strategies in his mind for a war which would never come.

  Tulinda had not initially noticed until now that a fine layer of dust was present on the war room table and she wondered whether it was due to lazy servants or simply the fact that the room was perpetually empty since there were no wars to be planned. She shifted in her seat, her light grey geomancer robes rustling as she moved, on the breast of the robes the symbol of the geomancers was emblazoned: a mountain with a dagger penetrating it. She turned to Shuyvold and smiled. “You may go fetch Gunvold now, I think he’s waited long enou-"

  An explosion ripped across the room, splinters of wood flying in every direction as the door barring entry was shattered. A body was thrown through the doorway and slammed onto the war table smashing the replica atop it into pieces and cracking the grand table down the middle. The body was that of the lead royal guard, he lay in the remnants of the destroyed table, his helmet missing. The guard coughed violently as blood bubbled to his lips and he slipped into unconsciousness.

  Gunvold strolled into the room casually, in the hall behind him lay the two other royal guards, both unconscious on the floor. A smirk came across Gunvold’s scarred face as he came to a stop at the opposite head of the shattered table across from Tulinda. “Your dogs kept barking Tulinda, so I had to silence them,” joked the Behemoth.

  “Are you mad?” Questioned Tulinda, her face an emotionless mask mastered through her years of study.

  Gunvold ignored the question and continued talking unabated. “I notice you are sitting in my chair Tulinda, if anyone other than you were doing that, I would have to show them what comes to those who disrespect me. Your dogs thought they had a long leash here, that they are somehow important because they bear the royal crest. It seems they were gravely mistaken, but they will be better for it I think. It’s good for plebeians like them to be knocked down a peg every so often.”

  “What about you Gunvold? Who will knock you down a peg from your lonely mountain top?” Asked Tulinda, her eyes glaring at the grand champion.

  “Why no one I suspect!” Gunvold began while slowly walking around the shattered table towards Tulinda. “You see I understand what Tormos society does not. Despite the reverence shown to the likes of you, Thunvold, myself and the rest of the elite, the Tormos as a whole believe everyone equal. In fact, the stark inequality that is present within Phlebos society is the only redeeming quality of that entire wretched nation. What you all refuse to recognize is that not all Vesnians were created equal. Why do our people think that equality should exist when clearly the Three favor some of us more than others? Why are you so adept at controlling the very ground we stand on? Why am I unequaled in combat? Why are the three dogs I just whipped lying on the floor spitting up blood while I stand here unharmed? Because Vesnians like you and I are the chosen ones; we are the favored of the Three! The sooner you and the rest of the chosen realize this fact, the sooner you can stop catering and pandering to the lower castes of our society and the better off everyone will be. What do the insects get by thinking they are our equals? False hope! How cruel is it that we hold them up as if they are something they will never be? How abominable is it that we let them live these lives of delusion? How wrong is it that we stymie our own potential in order to coddle those beneath us? By lowering ourselves to the lowest common denominator we are keeping the chosen few from being what the Three intended for us: absolute rulers of all Nualn. You cannot honestly think the Phlebos, in all their disgusting opulence and decadent pomp were ever meant to rule anything do you? They are weak, ineffective, and waste their time building pretty buildings and decorations to try and compensate for their shortcomings. The Phlebos were made to test us; they are the last thing standing before us and the destiny that our parents envisioned for us. The Northern Night, the Southern Sun and the White Watcher love all Vesnians, but they love some of us more than others. We can ensure the vision of the Three comes true, we can unite all Vesnians under our absolute rule.”

  Tulinda slowly moved her head following Gunvold as he trekked across the room, inching closer and closer to her. “You know Gunvold, seeing you stand before me, trying to prove as usual that you are somehow closer to the Three than the rest of us, it makes me wonder if perhaps you are right in a way. I think when we all crawled from the Patriarch’s body; you must have been the one who crawled out of his ass."

  Gunvold came to a stop a few feet from Tulinda. He stood straight and tall attempting to physically intimidate the much smaller female. Both knew it was a futile effort as Tulinda was one of a few people who would not be awed at all by Gunvold’s massive size and strength. Tulinda was also one of a few people who possessed the capability of defeating Gunvold in open combat if necessary. While the Behemoth feared no man or woman, if there was anyone who gave him slight pause it was Tulinda.

  “To answer the question you haven’t yet asked,” said Gunvold calmly and with a small smile on his face, “your dogs are not dead, although I imagine they won’t be playing fetch anytime soon.” Gunvold broke the penetrating gaze the two had been sharing and shifted his focus to Shuyvold who seemed to be trying his hardest to meld his body with the far corner. “Runner, what news have you brought me from the capital?”

  Even if Shuyvold had been able to speak, which he could not out of pure terror, nothing would
have come out. The already skittish runner had become catatonic due to the display put forth by the Behemoth.

  “Leave him out of this,” stated Tulinda. “The runner is here for formality reasons only. I was sent here specifically due to my ability to handle your unique reactions. That and the fact I would not wish upon any other sane person the torture that is trying to have a rational conversation with you.”

  Gunvold smirked and nodded in amusement at Tulinda's statement. “You always know just what to say to me Tulinda. It’s a shame you reincarnated without a spine. I would have enjoyed conquering Aunia with you by my side.”

  “It’s a shame that you refuse to acknowledge that you have become a monster Gunvold. I fervently pray to the Northern Night and the White Watcher that one day, realization of such may strike you,” said Tulinda with a weary look on her face.

  “Mark my words, this empire will be forged into something greater than what it is now,” replied Gunvold taking a step closer to Tulinda.

  “I tire of this vexing and irrelevant conversation Gunvold," began the geomancer, "therefore I will deliver the news bluntly: Thunvold passed three days ago. Considering the time that has lapsed he has most likely already reincarnated.”

  Gunvold nodded, outwardly he appeared no different, but inside his stomach tightened for some reason. “Hopefully he has returned, he is one of the few chosen who sees the truth,” said the grand champion faintly, the first quiet thing he had said in a long time. Raising his voice back to normal volume Gunvold continued. “That can’t be all you were sent here for though. What else is on your agenda?”

  “I often forget beneath your brutish nature is a clever mind,” Tulinda said. “I’m officially here on a diplomatic mission to inform the Phlebos of Thunvold’s passing. While we’ve been down here chatting, I’ve had runners sent across the bridge to arrange the meeting between myself and Corvul without you knowing. You will not be attending the meeting, only the runner and I will go. The last thing Thunvold would want upon reincarnating is to deal with an irate Mielor because you insulted Phlebos sovereignty yet again.”