Despite his friendly demeanor, his tone was urgent, and the triplets immediately began talking over themselves in their excitement.
"One at a time!" Sorn demanded. "And walk while you talk. We have to get to the council chamber and inform the King and his marshals."
"Marshals?"
"Think war leaders, Fitz."
The party quickly made its way back to the chamber and the anxious gazes of the king and his counselors. Sorn grumbled as his cousins spent more time arguing over who would speak to the king than actually discussing what they had seen, despite the urgent glares of Vrelin and Sorn both.
"Greetings, Your Majesty!" Fitz said just a tad smugly, having won the impromptu rock/paper/sword bout. "On behalf of my brothers, I am here to make a clear and concise report on what we saw!"
The king gave a solemn nod, bidding them to continue.
"Well, Your Majesty, all was quiet for several hours save for one slinky fellow trying to make his way past us to the warehouse. He was dressed as one of the pages we see about the castle, and the minute Hanz spoke to him, the guy yelled and ran. We grabbed him of course, and after a little… questioning, he admitted his intentions to give the men inside the warehouses a warning. He made us promise not to kill him, so of course we had to honor it," Fitz looked exasperated at this point. "But we still tied him up and stuffed him in an alley nearby." Several of the men raised eyebrows at Fitz's words, and Sorn just sighed.
"To the point, cousin," Sorn grumbled curtly.
"Well fine, then!" Fitz huffed, peeved by his cousin's interruption. "A couple of the king's men came by, but they darted away once they saw the building, so we thought they were probably scouts so we didn't kill them. Happy, Sorn? Anyway, less than a fifth of a glass ago, men started flooding out of the building from all the doors; swordsmen with shields, a few pikemen, and lots and lots of crossbowmen! They were yelling and roaring, but they seemed organized. The first thing they did was break into the neighboring houses and pour in." Fitz's voice lowered and his expression turned grave. "We heard, we heard screaming and we wanted to go in and help, but we remembered what you said about the crossbows, and we knew that we had to warn the king right away so we just came here." Fitz said the last with a forlorn sigh.
"It's all right, lad," the king soothed, sensing Fitz's distress. "You did the best you could, and you followed orders. No man can do better than that. Come, boys, we have no time to lose. Show us how the men are laid out."
Guiding Fitz by the shoulder to the war table, his brothers following, the cousins rapidly pointed out what they knew of the enemy deployment. Sorn, for his part, felt curiously detached from the abstract proceedings still occurring around him. Like one who kept touching an inflamed injury despite himself, his mind kept prodding him again and again with vivid images of the real life desperate struggles that must be occurring at that very moment in the city below.
So vividly he could picture the ugly countenances of the Empire soldiers, set in expressions of sneering contempt and rapine glee, as they prepared to destroy this city, utterly. It was as if he could hear the crash of doors being smashed in even now, and the fearful whimpers of the families trapped therein.
Though Sorn knew it was naught but a bleak muse, still he felt his gut twist in horrific sympathy as his mind's eye plagued him with the horrified screams ringing through the violated homes as the marauders brutally butchered fathers struggling desperately to protect their families. All too clearly he could see the soldiers with their vicious smiles as they proceeded to the horrified wife, hands raised like claws, savoring the women's screams as they raped them before their husband's dying eyes, children looking onward in mind-numbing horror. Those brutal acts of inhuman savagery being one of the last sights those children would ever see.
Sorn found himself sinking to his knees, holding his pounding head, filled with a curious roaring as his mind's eye relentlessly led him through the final agonized moments of those children's nightmarish lives.
"Sorn, are you all right?" Vrelin said with some concern, seeing the young man stumble to the ground. His entire body was shuddering, breath coming out in short, ragged gasps, his frame trembling with awful fury. Sorn turned his haunted, rage-filled face toward Vrelin, the captain blanched and looked away.
"They attack. Even as we speak they attack and butcher our children."
It seemed a tremendous effort for Sorn to focus even enough to speak. A painful crackling sound caused all to flinch as Sorn's hands, like claws, gouged the very marble floor he had fallen to.
"We have to strike now! We have to destroy them before, before they rape this city entire!" Sorn roared, and all looked alarmed at the young man's huddled form.
Fitz and his brothers looked at their cousin with grave concern. "Sorn, are you okay? We did what you wanted, right? You're not mad at us, right?"
Sorn found himself shaking, feeling as if he was desperately struggling to keep afloat before being drowned by the roaring crimson waves of his fury.
"They invade the nest, Fitz. They have broken through the walls… They invade our very nest!"
"Sorn!" Fitz cried, "Your eyes!" Sorn heard several gasps as his cousins simultaneously clamped fingers over noses as hard as they could.
"Fitz." Sorn gasped, shaking, if anything even worse than before. "You and your brothers, guard the castle. Use your true forms if you must, but let no enemy pass. Do not try to fight them in the lower city! The streets are too crowded for your true forms, and they might have siege crossbows in their layer. At the first sign of a siege crossbow, you back off. Above all else, above ALL else, you will obey my commands during this battle, is that understood?"
His last statement was no question but a command, and so intense was the harsh whisper of Sorn's voice that his cousins all but bared their necks to Sorn in acquiescence of his demand.
"Sure, Sorn," Fitz soothed, "we guard the castle. No enemy will come in, and we don't try to face any siege crossbows. No matter what, we listen to you. You have our word. It's okay, Sorn, it's okay…"
"No, it's not okay!" Sorn screamed as he struggled to hold back the roaring tides of his fury, a lone man struggling against a tempest pummeling through him. He seemed almost unaware of his surroundings, blind to the looks of alarm on everyone's faces, as Vrelin gently led his concerned looking king away from Sorn, and a grim-faced Eloquinon once again took the battle pose which he had displayed but minutes before. Indeed, Sorn seemed barely cognizant of the royal guard entire slowly interposing itself between himself and the King, their expressions fearful, their scents ones of growing alarm.
"Your Majesty," Sorn all but gasped. "My cousins will guard you and Elissa in the castle. They will be on the castle grounds. If the enemy manages to overrun the city, they will appear as… dragons and burn the enemy. It is only an illusion. So warn your men not to attack the dragon illusions. They are there to protect you."
The king all but shook off Captain Vrelin, though his face was grave and filled with concern. "Sorn, lad, are you all right? Let me send for the healers..."
Sorn's head snapped upright amidst a roomful of gasps. His face was flushed a deep shade of purple, and his body shook as if with palsy, or the verges of a berserker frenzy. Visor raised, he caught sight of his own reflection in one of the full-length silvered mirrors upon the far walls. The last shreds of his humanity seemed to be burning away in his shuddering fury. Worst of all by far were his irises, glowing like embers seething in the lowest depths of hell. He looked, at that moment, utterly fey. Alien. A terrible figure whose blazing eyes echoed an inner maelstrom of white-hot rage ready to consume all that it touched.
Sorn locked his furious gaze with the king. "Your Majesty, have your men follow me! I go to slay those who would burn your nest, I go for blood!"
Sorn roared, unable to contain himself any longer, swept along as he was by the tide of fury that crashed through him. Sorn felt himself catapulted from the room, dashing past a number of wide-eyed guardsmen who
looked terrified for some reason. The guardsmen, speechless, were too shocked to do anything but stumble out of the way as Sorn ran past them and out of the castle entire.
As if the steel that encased him weighed nothing, he charged down the hillside, walled off manors passing by in a blur, with a speed beyond any he had embraced, outside of his natural form.
27
Sorn felt as if he were literally flying across the land on wings not his own, only dimly aware that it was he who was running. He heard a roar and for one dizzying moment thought that one of his brethren had found him, calling out to him in his natural form, before realizing that the voice was his own. He was only dimly aware of the speed at which he traveled, his furious pace placing him neck and neck with the battalion of knights even now cantering towards the warehouses.
Sorn vaguely recalled words of consternation and the shaking of heads, for this very band of knights had decided of their own accord to lead the charge against whatever forces lay in wait at the warehouse, before Sorn had even had a chance to speak to his cousins. This was supposedly to give the king's garrisons and the city guardsmen the added moments needed to organize themselves against their foes, but in truth it was for their own glory they fought; young men who wanted to be heroes, if the murmured conversations Sorn had overheard earlier was anything to go by.
The armed and armored knights had only needed to mount their already prepared steeds before charging out the palace gates. Steeds that at that very moment Sorn was surpassing in speed to the gasps of the riders, both in surprise and in recognition. Sorn took instinctive comfort at the sense of fellow den mates charging in concert to fight off the invaders of their home.
"Come, my brothers!" Sorn roared. "We go to battle! We go for blood! For blood and Caverenoc!"
"For blood and Caverenoc!" the knights roared in unison, repeating the ancient battle cry of their city, and in that moment, they were brethren.
The minutes passed like seconds as they raced from the palace to the warehouses, and soon the screams of terror and pain assaulted Sorn's ears as he heard the cries below. They seared him with an agony like onto that of seeing a rogue male devour an infant wyrmling in his very nest.
Sorn felt their screams as if they were his own, and with each agonized cry and plea for mercy that his terribly acute hearing heard even through the din of his helmet, Sorn swore vengeance on behalf of these people, for their pain had become his own.
Sorn and knights ran in unison at their ground-eating trot as they made out the growing horde of men pouring into the street below. There were shieldmen by the hundreds flooding the streets, crossbowmen, swarming like wasps as they formed up behind them. Even then various marksmen were already aiming their weapons at the charging knights, both from the teeming horde of pillaging soldiers below and from the carefully placed crossbowmen at the window ledges of the buildings above.
"Knights of Caverenoc!" roared one among their number, a man in silvered field plate riding a princely pieballed stallion, “now we charge!”
Already half convinced that Sorn was a figure out of legend come to defend Caverenoc in her hour of need, the pulsating ball of green flame that streaked forth from his outstretched arm caused only a moment's surprise for the defenders of Caverenoc. The knight's horses, however, winnied and strove to shy away, almost breaking the charge, when Sorn's shrieking ball exploded into the ranks of the swarming enemy soldiers, erupting into an incandescent whirling maelstrom of flame. The knights did not see Sorn lurch, of course, busy as they were controlling their mounts and themselves as the wave of heat and light and the charnel reek of incinerated flesh washed over them even from a hundred yards away.
Yet lurch Sorn did, stunned by the searing agony of a backlash that ripped through him.
Completely caught off guard by the flow of energy that was the very essence of his enemy pouring into him like a vortex, he nearly stumbled to the ground. He couldn't understand why such was happening to him, he only knew that as his already over saturated mortal form attempted to absorb yet more power, it was causing those overburdened fibers of his being to scream in pain. His mind immediately skittered away from contemplating the true nature of what flooded into him, acknowledging it only to be a backlash from the spell, and Sorn grimly gathered himself to fire one last fireball before his band crashed into the enemy before them.
For though his towering rage was as far as it could possibly be from the focused serenity needed to access the arcane energies that were his heritage, it only made fire magics shine all the brighter in his mind's eye, invoking as it did the true essence of his people. And indeed, the fiery matrices glowed in his inner vision with an eerie green light, showing with a perfect crystalline clarity he had yet to achieve with any other spell, for all his years of practice.
Grimly Sorn focused, his own burning rage effortlessly saturating the crystalline matrix of the spell, and he released the pent up power within with a harsh draconic growl. A split second later a second green ball of pulsating flame roared forth from Sorn's finger toward the now disorganized flood of enemy troops, exploding into yet another terrible maelstrom of searing flame, leaving only cracked stones and burnt husks behind.
Now the enemy troops truly began to panic, for even those who had not been near either fireball's epicenter had become screaming in a harsh, gutteral tongue that Sorn understood with chilling clarity. Other soldiers that had not been flash fried by the terrible waves of heat that had washed over them were instead knocked to the ground by the charred bodies flung dozens of yards by the force of the superheated blasts.
At this point, Sorn stumbled and fell to the ground, head screaming with a throbbing pain as close to the sensation of burning as one of his kind could possibly know. The knights, mounts now well under control, charged past him with roars and cries of Caverenoc, ramming their lances deep into the now disorganized melee. At that moment the knights of Caverenoc shown forth in all their glory, tearing through the confused array of unprepared swordsmen and crossbowmen like a scythe through wheat.
Fortunately, Sorn's unexpected magics had broken the discipline that could have sent scores of crossbow bolts into the knights, bolts that would have no doubt sent a great number of them crashing to their doom thanks to the Empires sophisticated crossbows, were it not for Sorn's arcane reprieve. For even the rows of pikemen that were to have received the knights' charge had been almost completely obliterated by Sorn's fireballs.
In fact, Sorn's magics had aided the knights even more than they first realized, for the crossbowmen that had lined the nearby rooftops and upper windows had been forced to pull back from their carefully selected targets in an effort to escape the heat that had washed over the buildings from Sorn's fiery magics. At that very moment, numerous small fires were now ablaze on the wooden rooftops from those blasts of heat and flame, fires that served to hinder yet further the ability of those carefully selected crossbowmen to pick off the knights now crashing into the enemy troops below.
Sorn didn't even sense the transition from stumbled daze to all out charge as he hurled himself toward his enemy. It felt almost as if he were floating on wings of fury, so overwhelming was the maelstrom of hot rage pouring through him. Only peripherally did he note that his headache had passed to a slight tingle, all his attention focused on the whirling chaos of battle ahead as his right hand reached for the hilt of the great scimitar sheathed across his back, slamming his visor shut as he did so. He drew it with the same smooth precision with which he had practiced drawing the nodachi a hundred times before.
The impression of his stern-eyed grandfather looking on overlaid the furious battle Sorn found himself in even then as he crashed into the chaotic melee, his grandfather's sonorous voice reminding Sorn of his solemn duty, the solemn duty of all male dragons, to protect the nest at all costs.
Though his ears filled with the shouts and cries of the desperately fighting soldiers before him, it could neither drown out his grandfather's quiet words, nor bury the ago
nized screams of women and children Sorn's terribly acute hearing heard even in the midst of battle. Cries of pain which tore at Sorn, whipping his fury to a maelstrom of blood he did his utmost to echo upon the invaders before him. His sword arced through the air like liquid lightning, his aching hunger for vengeance appeased for but an instant, each time he felt the satisfying jar of his blade tearing through Empire armaments like cloth, biting savagely deep into the soldiers they covered.
Blood sprayed forth from dozens of such terrible blows, his opponents’ bodies sent spinning away as he whipped his blade in a savage dance of death, shattering raised bucklers before him with a single blow before decapitating the suddenly terrified looking swordsmen with a perfectly executed follow-up strike. His razor sharp scimitar flowed from blow to blow with a savagery void of finesse, yet possessed of a blinding speed and fury from which no swordsman could hope to stand against.
Even the infrequent blow that hit Sorn before his terrible blade tore through his opponent's defenses to grizzly effect did little more than scratch Sorn's thick plate armor. The grim even gleeful expressions of the enemy's crack troops were quickly turning to looks of open-mouthed horror as they realized that all their disciplined training would avail them little against this dark knight's savage onslaught. Even their legendary morale began to splinter as they witnessed swordsman after swordsman fall prey to Sorn's terrible blows.
Swordsmanship meant little, it seemed, when the most adroit parry could do nothing to stave off death, the black knight's whistling scimitar shattering through the blade as if it were glass before plunging deep into his opponent's neck, oftentimes cleaving the head off entire, sending it spinning through the air in a spray of crimson to land with a clank as it bounced on the cobblestones, still wearing its helmet. And so fast were the berserker's frenzied strikes that no sword could touch him, it seemed, before his opponent was sent flying away in a torrent of blood, inevitably dying moments later in wide-eyed shock, so savage were the blows that tore off heads, limbs, or cleaved bodies almost in twain.
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