“This little thing?” Jordai pulled the greatsword from his back. He was but a ten-year-old boy, but the sword was built to his size to be a sword of mythic size and weight. It had a night black blade that seemed even brighter than the night air. Its crossbar held a granite inlay of a mountain range. It was a replica of the mighty relic his family had been welding for over two thousand years. It was the most impressive weapon a boy Jordai’s age had ever carried, and Aaron hated the boy a little more when looking at it. “This sword was made for me by my father when I was but six years old. Couldn’t move it back then. It was built for my size, but solid metal and I was weak. But every year as I grew, my father reforged the weapon. Every year, I got stronger. Every year, I got faster. Should we spar and see who can defeat who?” Jordai laughed, but Aaron stepped forward with a snarl.
“Any time you are ready to die, you can pull that sword on me and test me, Stonefist,” Aaron snapped.
Jordai stepped back wounded and shook his head. “I didn’t mean it like that, Aaron,” Jordai said. “I only meant to practice and grow mightier.”
Aaron turned to Peter, who stood over a growing fire, his arms crossed, watching the exchange between the two boys. Aaron spat on the ground and walked away. He dropped in the shadow of a hill’s edge and peered out of the black at Jordai. Jordai stared after him, then shook his head.
“I meant nothing by it. Please accept my apologies. On my honor, I meant no offense.”
“There is that word again,” his father whispered as he sat, pressing almost directly against Aaron. Aaron heard the words in his ear as if a living man was whispering them. “Honor. What a lovely sentiment. What a useless waste. You show me a man with honor, I will show you a slave to an unyielding master.”
“I want you to leave me, father. I do not need your advice or your judgments.”
“You need me more than you think you do, boy. Much more.” Aaron felt his father leave. He looked out at the fire and the rabbits Peter was butchering, and Aaron felt sick. He saw Peter laugh with Jordai and Aaron fought back tears. Never would he know friendship like that.
Aaron ate in the dark. He did not speak. He did not cry. And his father did not come back to whisper any more darkness to him. For that, at least, Aaron was grateful.
Dirt on the fire and they were gone again. When the darkness came, Peter kicked them a little faster. They entered the forest like an explosion without even the slightest of pauses. They found the trees to be warped and twisted, the roots thick and splayed in every conceivable direction. They moved into clearings filled with monuments of stone and wood. They jumped mounds of earth large enough to be signs of burial, and they never stopped or slowed. Peter seemed never to waver even for a moment as he ran, as if no doubt lived within him as to direction or distance.
They were moving into another monument-filled clearing when they saw an explosion of fire and Peter skidded to a knee. He dove behind a great stone driven into the ground that depicted a woman standing tall with a shield against her legs. Peter hid behind the shield as Jordai dropped behind an obelisk and Aaron pulled up behind a stone carving of a robed figure with a skull for a face. Peter pulled his dagger, and they all peeked out from behind their monuments. Aaron saw three great slabs of stone, each with a figure bound there. Surrounding the stones stood a group of women. They wore ratted clothing. Their bodies seemed wrong in ways that were hard to describe. One seemed to possess wide, trunk-like legs naked and bare, her feet flat and webbed. As she held her hands over her head, she warbled out a cry that made Aaron’s blood run cold. He noticed what he had at first thought were folds of some cloak were flesh pocketed over and over itself, giving the back flaps of skin. Her rotten hair looked as if it were alive and squirming on her head, and her head almost came to a point.
Another was narrow the way a spear can be narrow, only this body was as twisted as a coil. Its limbs were long and ended in ratted claws. Its hair was so thin as to only be wisps and knots. It stood facing him, and he could see in the fire that danced before it that its eyes had been gouged out. It had sewn twigs in its sockets and seemed to gaze around as if still possessing sight. It wore no clothing. Its skeletal body and tightly drawn skin hid no bone or crook in its hideous shape.
As they watched, a third broke from the trees. She was taller than any woman Aaron had ever seen before, her body voluptuous and swaying. Her breasts were large and full, her thighs wide and quivering. She wore perfect flowing blonde hair, long enough to drop to her knees, and in the growing fire, the wisps of hair floated on the heated air. She wore a strap of leather across her waist that carried a thin sheath of a knife she pulled and held up before her. She walked around the stone slabs, and Aaron only then saw figures bound there. They looked young and small, thin with blonde hair, another wearing light brown. The third looked to be a twisted rot of a girl whose face was covered in pustules. The woman with the dagger came before them all and sliced hair from their heads. She handed the knife to the thick woman, who held up her hand, and with a horrid scream of pain, sliced off three of her own fingers. Aaron pulled back in horror and looked over to Peter.
His king’s eyes would not pull away from the spectacle. Aaron hissed at him but could not pry his leader’s eyes away. Aaron looked back as the thin crooked woman took the knife. With a heavy slice, she cut the emaciated left breast from her body. She held it up as she frothed from the mouth and she waved it in the air above her head. She unleashed a horrid cry that could have contained words before tossing the flapping meat on the ground and stomping on it.
The knife was handed back as blood ran like a fount down the woman’s chest and hip. The voluptuous woman took the blade and sliced her forehead. One swift cut across the middle of her forehead. She slowly sliced a line of blood around her entire face, down her chin and back up.
Something gripped Aaron’s thigh as the ground around them began to stir. The hand pulled hard, and Aaron cried out in surprise as a head and shoulders broke free of the ground. Peter stood and looked at his feet as two clawing hands reached up, scratching away dirt. Aaron looked at Peter, who drew his sword slowly.
Jordai was up and shrugging the replica of his father’s sword from his back. With a savage stab, he dropped the blade into the skull of a woman climbing up from the ground below him. Aaron gripped the jaw of the man at his feet, and he stabbed his dagger into its throat. With a violent twist and a flick of the wrist, he severed the head and tossed it aside.
Aaron looked up at the women and their tables. The third woman was flaying her face from her head.
“Flank right,” Peter said. “You’re the hag with the blade.” Peter turned to Jordai. “You have the narrow one. I’ll take the thick. We have to stop this from happening.” The ground before them was filling with the dead, shrugging off dirt and stumbling forward.
Aaron ran right. He slashed as he needed to drop the dead at his side. He cut down rotting corpses and decaying flesh, but he strove always for the center of the clearing where the three women stood. Aaron came up behind his mark as Peter stabbed his blade straight through the skull of the thick woman with the flaps of flesh. The woman’s face exploded, and blood and bone sprayed forward. The woman Aaron moved up behind did not notice. She held her face up above her head, shaking it as she screamed the most horrifying scream Aaron had ever heard. He looked up, seeing fire through the bloody eyeholes, and he gagged in horror.
With a quick slice, he opened the woman’s back and she spun on him. She threw her face over her shoulder and gripped her blade, keening out words that seemed garbled and fierce, but Aaron did not want to wait to find out what her words summoned. He sliced her across the chest, then thrust into her abdomen. She slapped her hand forward, and her nails raked open his face. He sneered at her as he felt arms wrap around him from behind. Aaron looked down, seeing rotting hands around him. He sliced them off at the wrist with a twist of his dagger.
He leapt forward, slicing deep into the thigh, then the chest, of the f
layed woman before driving one perfect thrust into her eye.
Aaron heard his king scream out in battle and rage the war cry of the kings. “Redfist!” he shouted as the figures of dead men and women closed around him. Aaron stepped to the center of the clearing, a frothing wreck of a woman bound to the table.
“Cut me free, my sweet hero. Save me of this fate.” But Aaron could see the pleading eyes and the horrid teeth. From the clouded eyes, and the gleam of pure evil in them, this woman was a monster. With finality and verve, he sliced once across her throat, nearly cutting her head off before putting his back to the table and looking out at the coming horde before him.
He saw gaping holes where eyes had been, faces shredded by time and decay of the flesh. He saw worms and insects clawing the bodies, and he heard Jordai fire off his battle cry. “Redfist!” he screamed.
Aaron felt the need to fire his rage out into the air but could not bring himself to say the name. He roared in horror and wrath and began laying out destruction.
The fight did not last long. Peter had been trained by his father, one of the greatest warriors of their nation, Flak Redfist. Jordai had been trained by his father, one of the greatest men to ever touch a great sword. And Aaron fought with the hate that lived within him, a cloud of black hate so thick and so desperate that to deny it was to deny himself breath. He slashed and hacked at limbs. They kept coming. He chopped through necks. They kept coming. The mob of dead grew every few moments until finally Aaron heard from behind Peter yell out. “Heart!”
Aaron stabbed the creature in the heart, and it seized on itself. It dropped to the ground, thrashing and kicking. Attacking the heart did not seem to kill it, but it rendered it useless in a fight. Aaron began setting his attacks up with his sword and ending his opponent with a quick dagger thrust to the heart. Within a few moments, the battle died down to a few women’s screams, and Aaron looked back to see Peter gripping the head of one of the girls bound to the tables. Jordai held the other. Aaron glanced at the bleeding wreck before him, and he grunted. He went to join his king.
“What are you doing here? I told you to stay,” Peter said.
The young blonde girl held tight to him, weeping. “I came looking for you. I had to find you. You left us all, and I needed to see you again. Things are bad back home. We need you,” the girl said. Peter held her out at arm’s length and stared at her with concern and love.
“Fora, you can’t be here,” Peter said. “We need to take you home. You shouldn’t have come.”
Jordai held the other girl to his chest, smoothing her hair gently. He murmured to her, and Aaron looked at her eyes as she stared at him. She seemed to be thinking.
Peter looked around them at the horror of the twitching dead, and he shook his head.
“What was going on here?” he asked.
“They told us we were to be sacrificed for the might of the dead. They planned on waking the whole of the forest.” Fora cried, “Thank the gods you stopped them.”
“The gods?” Peter said. Fora touched his head and closed her eyes. She whispered to herself and shook her head.
“You’re right, Peter, the gods can’t help us here. We need the blessing of the Seven,” Fora said.
Jordai held the other by the sides of the face. He spoke very slowly to her with love and compassion, and Aaron looked at the twisted monster that lay the stone before him, and he spit.
Soon both girls turned to this one, and they looked up at Aaron. They stared at him.
They rushed to hug him. “You killed her, thank the Seven. She was one of them. She was a witch who had turned on them and was being punished for crimes against her sisters.”
Aaron slowly pushed them both away from him and he looked at the brunette. “Who are you? I have met Fora before but never you.”
Jordai wrapped an arm around her and pulled her tight. “This is the one I told you about, the girl with the wooden sword.”
Aaron vaguely remembered Jordai talking about a girl he had once seen who carried a wooden sword.
“What is her name?” Aaron asked.
“I am Cruckala,” the girl said. “You are Aaron the Marked.” She touched Aaron’s forehead, and he felt a slight tingle. He pulled back.
“Don’t touch me,” Aaron said.
Jordai frowned but said nothing.
“You have met Fora, but not me.”
“How do you know my name?” Aaron said.
“Fora told me about you. And the mountain speaks of the men that walk with the Redfist. I can see by the slaughter that those tales are true.”
“We need to get to a safe place. We are too exposed,” Jordai said.
Peter nodded and looked around them.
Fora smiled and tugged desperately on Peter’s arm. “I saw a place not far back. It is a building, old but still standing. We might be able to stay a night there.”
“Then we are taking you back to the Mountain. Darling, you can’t come with me. I must take this journey, and I need you with our people,” Peter said. “Earl must be sick with worry.” He threw an arm over her shoulder and Aaron heard her repeat as she smiled.
“Yes, Earl,” she said. “He would be worried, wouldn’t he?”
Aaron looked back at the woman whose head he had almost cut off, the vile beast that had been bound to the table, and he felt uneasy. He followed his king.
At a distance.
Cruckala stooped, and before she rejoined Jordai, she picked up the sacrificial knife the witches had used to mutilate themselves. She gripped the handle upside down and hid the blade on her forearm. Aaron thought it suspicious before he remembered this was the girl Jordai had seen years ago wielding a wooden sword, fearless and defiant. He shoved his fears away and walked with the rest of the Nation of Three.
They walked. No matter how Peter urged them to hurry, the two girls led the way at no more than a brisk walk.
“We cannot move quickly, dear one. We are weary from our trials. They hurt us so bad before they bound us to those tables. We can’t move very much faster than what we are doing now.”
“Let’s carry them,” Aaron said.
“No, you will tire yourselves, and what if we are attacked by more of those creatures? We must use caution,” Fora said to Peter. Aaron’s king looked into her eyes and Aaron saw it there. Doubt. Indecision. All the things he had never seen in Peter’s eyes before. Every instinct Peter had was telling him to run, to carry them to safety. But finally, the Redfist nodded and took Fora’s hand. Aaron watched the other two boys walk with their loves, and he kept a watch from behind. He caught a bit of movement from his right side, and he hissed and spun. He pulled his blade, and within a breath, Peter and Jordai had the girls behind them, weapons drawn.
“What is it, Aaron?” Peter asked.
“Thought I saw something.” Aaron glared into the forest around him, finding nothing. He could feel himself being watched, but that sensation had been with him for as long as they had been in this nation. The dead were watching it seemed from behind every boulder, from around every tree.
“Let me go forward and check it out,” Aaron said. “You stay here with the girls.”
“No,” Peter whispered. “We need to stick together. You could get overrun, and then we are split. No, we move with more caution. We move faster.”
Aaron did not put his sword and dagger away. Neither did either of the other brothers he traveled with. They moved faster, and Aaron watched in every direction. The trees opened to a wide field and beyond, in the wood above the slopes, rose a great and terrible building.
Large parts of the walls that surrounded it had collapsed from age. One of the great towers had dropped into the castle proper now, leaning at an angle crumbling and toppled before him. The roof had collapsed in many places, and the entire building looked to be a shell of itself.
“That can’t be it,” Jordai said.
“Yes, Stonefist, it is. It is falling and crumbling, but at least it has walls to put our backs t
o, and it is not exposed as we are now.”
Aaron heard nothing, but he spun anyway. There was something behind them, of that he had no doubt. “We are not alone here,” Aaron said.
“This way,” Cruckala said. “There is a tunnel.”
The group of them followed, and soon they came to a small tunnel dripping a mess into the forest. The ground around it was slimy and clinging. The tunnel looked more like a spout for waste and other filth. Its mouth covered over with vines and thorns, the way looked clogged, but Fora urged them on.
“Jordai,” Peter said.
Jordai sheathed his sword on his back and pulled his dagger. Fighting in those close of quarters would be impossible with such a great weapon. Jordai eased into the utter black, and Cruckala followed on her hands and feet, like a beast scurrying.
Aaron came last. He slipped his sword on his back and pulled a second dagger. He eased in backward, slowly following the group, his daggers ready, his eyes trained on the vines falling like rotted hair to cover the mouth of the tunnel.
“How do we know where this ends?” Jordai asked.
“It has to go as far as the castle,” Peter said. The ground was curved under them, and Aaron did not like how slick the ground under his feet was. When the tunnel’s mouth disappeared, Aaron kept his vision locked behind them all. Kept his eyes staring into the black, seeing nothing but what his imagination could conjure.
Soon the sound of dripping, then they opened into a small room with a hole in the ceiling. The hole was a chute that rose forty feet before ending at a grate. From the grate, Aaron could see a sliver of the red moon, and it looked like a bloody eyelid closing on them.
“Jordai,” Peter said.
Aaron saw a ladder set into the sides of the chute and Jordai leapt high enough to catch the lowest rung and pull himself up. Aaron stared into the black they had just come from, and he was sure he heard a sound, a subtle scrape. He paused, staring but the sensation did not stop. If anything, it intensified. He heard a great whine of rusted hinges and a slamming of iron on stone as the grate was thrown open.
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