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Post by Timeon on Nov 14, 2020 1:38:17 GMT
Chapter 1Night peeled back from the Carrana mountains like a fevered dream. The emptiness of night began to fill and make way for morning light. The first thing to rise out of the darkness was a great mountain, a sentinel amongst many lesser ones envious of its majesty. The mount stood silhouetted by the rising sun, undisturbed. It stood clothed in fresh snow, every minute radiating more brightly, casting a gentle pink glow across ridges great and small, stretching farther than one could hope to see. As the sun rose yet higher, the sky turned from midnight blue to fresh peach. A valley ran beneath those peaks, once quiet and serene. The valley floor, however, was no longer the spectacle of peace and tranquillity it had been for living memory. A brisk mountain stream was coughing and sputtering blood, which pooled in the cracks and deep sides of the mountains. It was as if the mountains themselves were been injured. It was a new day, but it brought no new beginning. The world stood on the cusp of disaster. As Constantin Noval brought his horse to a stop, he allowed himself to digest the view. A carpet of unmoving silhouettes lay ahead, sprawled across the valley floor like so many insects, crushed by an uncaring god. Like toys, whose owner had grown tired of them, lying broken and abandoned. That was precisely it, he realised. Watching what the Spirits of Malvern were doing to his people - it was like watching a mad child peel the wings off a fly. There was no profound intelligence behind it, only an expression of control, power and malice that cared to don a human face. The crunching snow signalled to Constantin that he would not bear witness to this alone. His retinue drew in close atop their mountain steeds, flying the iguana banner of the Legion. Behind them trailed a diversity of Republican survivors of this long night. Many of them had been lucky enough to have been stationed in the Citadel when the attack began. Most of those who had been at the Vastness, on the other hand, were no longer around to speak of what had come to pass. "There, look below!" the thick accent of the mountains arising from the chest of one of Constantin's new companions. "By the Rear Wall!" Some of the "insects", it seemed, were twitching in the snow. Not all who had failed to escape, it seemed, had died. Rising from the snow as if returned from the grave, several figures shambled beneath the Rear Walls of the Vastness, through which Malvern had come charging forth. In the original folk tales of the Faloran people, wise men and women had warned of Daimons, trying to pierce the veil between sleeping and waking. They warned of the potency of bad dreams. Yet the nightmares had eventually triumphed, and had followed mankind into the waking world, wearing the guises of friends. The figures below began to congregate, and Constantin could now make out that they were wearing crimson Inquisitorial robes, fluttering madly in the wind. High Inquisitor Aurelio Manza emerged triumphant from their midst, striding towards the ridge upon which the Republian soldiers wearily stood. As the High Inquisitor drew nearer, however, Constantin had to steady his horse. Something was terribly wrong. From behind, an Inquisitor rode up beside Constantin, having caught up with the vanguard from the Vaiporo Citadel. The Inquisitor spat and cursed when he looked down at his brethren. "Mankind so defiled!" the Inquisitor cried, his face peeled back, as pale as the slain. "The High Inquisitor has succumbed! Aurelio Manza is Chimera!"
Constantin drew a pistol from his hip, frost-bitten arm pointed stiff outwards at the crimson silhouettes below, fanned out before them. If it were true, then the High Inquisitor had succumbed to the Daimons within his Binder tattoos; and had lost himself utterly. Yet, he was not alone. The other figures below drew nearer, revealing demonic features grafted to broken bodies. It was as if the Inquisition had transformed into wild animals in the postures of men, eyes feline, teeth hooked, horns proudly erupting from human skulls. What had once been High Inquisitor Aurelio Manza came to a halt beneath the ridge, razor-toothed smile opened wide to echo a beastly cry up at the Republicans beyond. Constantin fired his pistol, his frozen arm thundering with pain from the cold and the recoil.
Aurelio Manza flinched below, letting out another monstrous cry. Cloaks billowing in every direction amidst mad mountain winds, the Chimera which had once been the High Inquisitor threw itself on all fours, a mighty groan echoing across the mountain peaks. Then it galloped away, tailed by the other Chimera which had once been Inquisitors. The creatures fled out of range, then not long after, out of sight, swallowed by the snows and lingering shadows of dawn, into the valleys to of the north. What they left in their wake was tragedy and ruin; the aftermath of the battle of Carrana.
The Inquisitor by Constantin's side drew his crimson robes right around him, as he prayed to Nothing for deliverance. Catching himself, he looked across the battlefield once more, before noticing that Constantin Noval was staring at him. "We've no time to spare. One of the Great Spirits of Malvern made its last stand here this night. Through its death, it has thinned the fabric between the world of Spirit and that of Man in this place. For a time."
Few would know of what the Inquisitor spoke; but Constantin Noval had fought outside the walls of Falor, during the Eclipse. "The Spirits will seize the bodies of the slain." he stated, matter of fact, though bile rose in his throat.
"We must build a pyre." The Inquisitor nodded, then looked out across the plain, towards where Aurelio Manza and the other Chimera had vanished. "And the High Inquisitor is not here to guide us through this. I fear his hunger for the magic of a Great Spirit got the better of him. Yet it is him we have to thank, no doubt, for slaying it." Constantin Noval looked for familiar faces amongst the gathering Republican soldiers, and found several of his own soldiers catching up with the rest of them. It was difficult to believe, but merely one day ago, Constantin Noval had been an outlaw in these mountains, creeping under the watchful eyes of the garrison of the Vastness. Now the men of the Vastness were dead, and the Republicans called him friend and saviour. For rebel and outlaw though he was, against Malvern and Daimon, they were all brothers here, all differences set aside. The sight of the Chimera below had, in that instant, cemented that bond amongst the survivors; even between royalist outlaw and Inquisitor.
"Your name, pater?"
The Inquisitor grimaced at him, perhaps smiling. "Alvaro."
"Let's get to work, Father Alvaro. I suspect we do not have much time. And the road to the Capital is long, and Malvern has a head start. I suspect we might not reach Sabria in time." Republicans and Royalists alike gathered and made piles of the dead. Every once in a while, they would recognise a friend, hewn by sword, arrow and claw, and would set the Republican and Royalist bodies aside respectfully. The Malvernians they piled on top of one another, along with the ghastly forms of defeated Spirits. Yet in the end, Republican, Malvernian or Royalist, they all burned the same. When the wretched deed was done, Constantin gathered up his men at the mouth of the Long Valley. The highest-ranking Republican left alive, Muzio Doria of Vaiparo Citadel, did the same with his own command. The two men met as the sun crested from afternoon to begin its descent into evening. Pyres burned away the dead to the side of them, its warm glow welcome in the cruel cold. Muzio Doria was much like the rest of his Republican kin in the Carrana Mountains; an unlucky, dour faced runt whose superiors had taken a dislike to him, and had thus banished him to the least desirable posting in the Republic. He had gotten far more action than he had ever anticipated, or bargained for. "Well, I suppose I ought to thank you." Muzio Doria said beneath a heavy moustache, quite reluctantly. "But still, I ask a simple favour. Say nothing of how we stood together. The Inquisition in the Capital cares little for common ground. You royalists are no different to the Malvernians to them." "Stand with us." Constantin declared boldly, though none but Muzio Doria could hear him. "March with us to the Capital, to defend it against Malvern. Let us deal a finishing blow to Malvern and the Inquisition both." "Look around you, outlaw. If I had been a political animal, I wouldn't have ended up in these wretched mountains. No, I don't much care for your royalist pretender. He's not so different from a Malvernian to me. I care as much for him as I do for the blighted Inquisition!" Muzio Doria spat. "As much as I care for the capital and its debauchery. Damn them all. If any of my men wish to rally to your banner, I will not stop them. But leave us to our vigil, outlaw. The world has turned its back on us, it must expect us to do the same. I owe you a debt of gratitude, and that much I will not forget." Constantin Noval inclined his head, the spitting and crackling fire drawing his attention back to the valley around them. "Good fortune to you, commander." Muzio Dora took a light bow, and then strode off towards his waiting men. Though surely enough, he kept true to his word. By the time Constantin Noval was ready to start on the hard march down the Long Valley, in pursuit of Malvern, his ranks were already swelling with volunteers, as Doria had promised. Though many had fallen, many more had united against all hopes and against all odds, to thwart the Imperial incursion. Constantin Noval reunited with his honour guard, the Companions, with his friends and most trusted. They were joined by a man who proclaimed that he now led the volunteers who had defected from the Republic; none other than the Inquisitor, Father Alvaro himself. Together, they set riding forth, under the orange iguana banner of the Palaienid pretender, to rescue a Republic, that they might reforge a Kingdom.
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Post by ashenmoon on Nov 22, 2020 17:48:29 GMT
General Adelate Boriates was an adventurous man, a bold man. His career in the service to the empire and his own fame was illustrious, but not stellar. So it had been while he was a youth, bursting with vitality and the promise of his great House. So it had been as he passed through his middle years, watching with creeping dismay as his lessers surpassed him. It seemed that, no matter how driven, how dashing, how daring he became, that final recognition - a Triumph - would always elude him.
Then the imperial messenger had come to his estate, and brought the summons to war. He had kissed his uncaring wife farewell, had promised to return in splendour.
It was not until that last meeting with the Imperial family, that the cruel truth had been unveiled. He was brought along, but only under suspicion of treason. Not that as much had been said outright, but Adelate Boriates was a clever man, a curious man, and had been making his own inquiries into the attack against the palace. Still, it wasn't until the battle actually commenced, and Boriates found himself sidelined, again and again, by that crippled philanderer and his menagerie of mercenaries and madmen, that the full extent of his powerlessness sank in.
And so it was that, while Boriates and the other lapdogs stayed put in the shade of the walls of Sarsanon, Boriates unobtrusively slipped away and followed Nikaioforos and the Mark. For a moment, as he passed by a cluster of the Plutarian mercenary officers, his gaze met that of the Dreyal woman, who, he imagined, winked at him.
It was not spying, not really. Adelate Boriates was an honest and straightforward man, of that, there was no doubt. No, he was merely keeping himself appraised - prudence, that was all.
And so, prudently, he circled wide the Hunter's palanquin, and approached unseen from its back, straining to hear the muted conversation on the opposite side. He edged forward - glancing around to make sure nobody was paying him any attention, but the palanquin stood in a pool of stillness, while troops marched along the road below. Then he heard that familiar laughter:
“Of course. The Hunt awaits! - ah, it is good to hunt!”
Boriates felt his heart soar, his fist grasped his sword, and he had to fight the urge to call out - to cheer, to blow the trumpets, to charge! But Adelate Boriates was a man of discipline and willpower, and he kept his silence.
And the silence... stretched.
Usually, when the Hunter made some similar pronouncement, the air was at once filled with clamouring voices, of yaps and yells and confident excitement, with attendant Spirits cavorting and crying for action.
Now the youthful voice had been swallowed by the crisp morning air. The bustle and noise of an army on the move seemed distant, and the palanquin's tent-cloth beating in the wind seemed loud as as heartbeats after a duel.
Minutes must have passed, the silence terrifying, the tension unbearable, the questions intolerable. What were they doing - surely, he would have heard it, had they spoken out loud, or entered the palanquin? Had they walked away - was there no one left here, but himself?
Adelate Boriates was an impatient man, uncomfortable with the unexpected. He took a deep breath, straightened his back, and strolled around the side of the palanquin, doing his best to appear as if he belonged.
He almost stumbled, so strange was the scene before him.
The Hunter's lithe figure slumped dejectedly on the steps of the carriage. And off to the side, the cripple Nikaioforos and the Mark's hawk-head were bent deep over a camp-table strewn with maps and charts. They conversed in a low mutter, and the archon sat frozen, as if stunned, staring off into emptiness.
Marvelling at his own audacity, but unable to contain the sudden sense of urgency - and opportunity - Boriates hurried forward to kneel before the divine figure.
"My Lord Hunter, is all well?"
The Mark spun.
"Boriates. You were not summoned."
The Hunter favours the bold, Boriates prayed, then prayed that the prayer was accurate. He looked up, searching the Hunter's countenance for some sign. What he saw shocked him yet deeper - a face tired and drawn with sorrow, sorrow much too heavy for features so delicate to carry. Where had that happy, laughing, boisterous youth gone? Of course, it was irrational to think of the Hunter as young - surely, he had seen many hundreds of generations of Man pass by - and yet it was impossible not to think of him as a gallant youth, the promise of a glorious life yet budding...
"My Lord... how can your servant help?"
"By not interfering in private councils, general," the Mark clipped.
Boriates glanced towards the seraph, caught Nikaioforos' uncomfortable - embarrassed? - mien, took in the guardsmen and spirits who were watching from afar. He turned back to the Hunter, who had barely moved. Sightless eyes gazed far, far away. Boriates swallowed, throat dry. He wanted to shout out that something was wrong, couldn't they see? But they did see, and they had seen, and so things were doubly wrong.
Adelate Boriates was a practical man, a straightforward man. But even his irreligious heart was wrenched to its core by the look of utter despondency he beheld.
"My Lord, were you not going to hunt? To lead us on?"
"... to hunt..." the boy repeated, tonelessly.
"Yes!" Boriates encouraged, "to hunt!"
The Hunter looked up, agonizingly slowly, to meet Boriates' gaze. A flicker of life, of hope - for a moment.
"Father" - the Mark was suddenly standing right next to them - "as I explained, we will hunt. But carefully. When hunting a predator, one must not become the prey. We will need to think our next move through carefully."
And the hope faded.
Boriates could not bear to watch it.
"Nonsense!" he cried out. "We've succeeded spectacularly - and the road to Sabria, and the dark heart of this twisted country, is undefended! Give me the cavalry, and I'll be at their gates within the week and fulfil everything we set out to do... and that which so many have given their lives to."
"That's your plan?" called Boriates, cool and unaffected. "A mad dash, straight into enemy territory, betting everything on one roll of the dice? My, I wonder - that strategy sounds oddly familiar..."
"The Republic's crusade was doomed from the start - as has their nation been, right from the start. How could Man alone hope to stand against the tides of the world? But we - we are led by Lord Hunter, so how could we fail?"
"I would... hunt..." the Hunter whispered.
"Father, calm yourself. The plan we made with the Empress and the generals of Lunium and the west front is still unfolding. The war needs us to act our part, to distract the enemy-"
"To hunt!"
And the Hunter was himself again - once more recovered, once more full and fierce and sharp and sly. He flew to his feet, grasped Boriates by the arms and raised him up before him.
"My friend, my friend - you will hunt with me, yes?"
"Of - of course, my lo-"
The Hunter kissed Boriates, open-mouthed, soft lips passionate, lingering.
Breathless, laughing, the Hunter let go, and raised his horn to his soft lips, and blew a short, triumphant call. And this time, it was answered, a hundred-fold, by trumpets and bugles from the host, and the cheers and cries of Man and Spirit, all echoing in the mountain valley as Malvern, at last, answered the call.
~
They left the injured and the worn-out, the tribal mercenaries, the golem-master panting over the captured hoards of marble, and a few companies of Plutar soldiers capable of manning Soranon's cannon defences. By noon, the rest of the Malvernian host had left the mountains of Carrana, and were plunging into the heart of the Republic.
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Post by Timeon on Mar 26, 2021 23:28:18 GMT
The teeth of the Soranon split the horizon like lesser peaks of the Carrana Mountains. To Constantin Noval, those aged black walls seemed to defy the light of day. While the peach glow of noon warmed the hills and crags of Carrana, Soranon repelled that comfort. Like the Vanozza Fastness and Vaiporo before it, the Soranon had outlived the world within which it had once been built. It endured as yet another grim relic of a time when Malvern had ruled the world. In contrast, the town which had grown within its runed walls was a recent invention. In garrisoning the dead structures of ancient Malvern on its borders, the Republic enabled new slums to bloom like mushrooms on dead wood. The soldiers it had sent to patrol these far reaches needed servicing, and the hillfolk took advantage of what scraps of trade they could. Bored soldiers on frontier duty had brought life to places which had slept for a millennium, drawing the hillfolk from their villages and crags to the Soranon and beyond.
Bored soldiers, however, had offered little in the way of resistance to the resurrected hosts of Malvern ascendant. One might even say that the Dominion had allowed the Republic to grow complacent with its refusal to embrace gunpowder, while Malvern had no such qualms with mixing both high magic and gunpowder. As for the Soranon? Just as the forgotten symbols carved into the Vanozza Fastness had been used against its defenders, so too had the Soranon's walls greeted their former masters in triumph. As Constantin Noval stared across the valley at the Soranon's walls, he could occasionally catch a viridian spark of magic flare across its defences. Malvern had marched through the valley into the soft underbelly of the Republic, and had sealed the way shut behind them. They had left a garrison of their own behind, splayed out across the bastions built by their ancestors.
Constantin Noval and his pursuing legion learned a painful lesson not long after. It was not the Malvernian crossbowmen who caused the most harm to the attempts to retake the Soranon. Booming and crackling, fingers of lightning howled from the walls at the every command of the magus which Malvern had left behind. When Constantin Noval's forces began their retreat, the Soranon's gates opened, and a host of metal men fanned out in perfect unison, taking up position beneath the walls. Malvern's infamous golems; lifeless men, warded off any further attempts to draw near. The Republic and Royalist forces left their dead beneath the Soranon's walls as they fled to regroup in the hills.
Dismounting his horse with a view of the tortured battlefield below, Constantin Noval joined his aides and allies in planning their next move.
"We will have to go around it." Giacchino hissed through a gap in his teeth, pocketing his spyglass as he did so. "Whatever devilry they've awoken in the Soranon, it is beyond gunpowder to undo."
"A generation spent restoring bastions we would have been better off burying in the mud." Noval cursed, unable to break his gaze from the walls which defied him. "We should have known better. Looked more closely."
This sparked the ire of the plump Inquisitor beside them; Alvaro.
"The Fastness would have held, had they not brought the Hunter himself. We are dealing with an Archon, Noval." Alvaro massaged his jaw, eyes darting to and fro, calculating.
"With a God." Giacchino rasped.
"With a Daimon!" Alvaro snarled, a thread of spittle making its way to Noval's coat. The intricate tattoos snaking across Alvaro's skin flared. "And Daimons can be killed."
"Killed? Not so in Varantium, it would seem. Not even during an Eclipse, Inquisitor! Not even High Inquisitor Gori could do it!" Giacchino spread his arms wide, as if preaching, or perhaps welcoming a blow.
Before the Inquisitor could react, Constantin Noval grabbed his old friend by the arm and pulled him close. "Do not speak of the Eclipse, Giacchino." Noval hissed into his ear, hand trembling in its tight grip. He released the old man, whose face had was now cold and unreadable. "I know what it is we face. Better than you, and better than this Inquisitor."
The pounding of hooves cut short their disagreement. A company of horses crested the ridge, approaching from the road to the Vaiporo Citadel. At their head was Colonel Donato Khalez, who had been master of the Vanozza Fastness before its disintegration. Here comes a hard man, Noval thought, and steeled himself for an unpleasant conversation.
The Colonel dismounted, straight-backed and and graceful in his approach, even as his tattered uniform betrayed the blood and mud he had fought through to survive the night. "A waste of good lives. A damned waste." he gestured across the valley. "Is this what destiny awaits those who desert to the Royalist cause?"
"Women and children in Sabria are counting on us to move with haste." Noval stated, holding his ground. "We must go through the Soranon. We will require your cannons, Colonel."
Colonel Khalez guffawed. "We lost the Vanozza Fastness, and you would pound Soranon to sand as well?"
"What use are your walls, if they will only defend our enemies?"
The Colonel knuckled his moustache and looked past Noval's shoulder, where hundreds lay dead in the cold. "Be that as it may, you are asking us to start a siege. Malvern will torch the Republic long before we make it out of these mountains, unless we find another way."
Constantin Noval's gaze faltered. He felt their eyes upon him, weighing his every gesture, perhaps his every thought, betrayed upon his face for all to see. He wheeled to once again face the valley below, arms crossed behind his back. If there truly had been gods and not just daimons, as Falorans once believed, then he needed their blessing now.
It was not to be gods or daimons that delivered them, however.
-
The night was soiled by an inhuman screech, pulling Constantin Noval from his sleep. He grasped for his sword, blind in the dark, and found only air. When he finally found his blade, it was to the sound of another scream, dimpling his skin and thrashing his heart. Something caught his foot and he very nearly fell, but he emerged out of his tent and into the night. The camp was coming alive around him, panicked soldiers drawing rifles, knives and pikes and rushing to and fro. So, Malvern had sallied forth from the Soranon? Had the sentries-
But no, Constantin thought, this chaos was not coming from the camp. An explosion of viridian light shook the valley below. Another inhuman bellow echoed through the Carrana Mountains - not from his camp, but coming from the Soranon itself. Flashes of magic and the sound of shattering earth awoke the entirety of his Ember Legion and the Republican camp Khalez had erected beside them. Hundreds amassed on the crags and ridges to look down as the light of the stars had given way to the glow of magic in the distance.
It was not long before Inquisitor Alvaro found his way beside Noval, an excited, almost ecstatic look on his face. "Do you see it, commander?"
"Of course I see it, damn you!"
"No, fool!" Alvaro's eyes rolled back to reality. "I mean, do you see him?"
Shadows darker than the night, blacker than the Soranon, were dancing silhouetted against its walls. The light of the fires below cast grotesque shapes, revealing something which the naked eye could not see. Yet it was not the silhouettes of golems which Noval beheld, for it was their husks which the flames consumed.
"I see." Noval breathed.
The shrieking grew louder, more hungry. And then the gates of the Soranon shook against their hinges and were cast down.Noval could see the creatures clearly now, striding through the fires and over broken golems. Soon they were scaling the walls. The magics which had warded off Noval's men merely sputtered with futility against these new attackers. Amidst the noise of beasts, Noval could also hear the wailing of dying men. For the first time since the struggle with Malvern began, Noval felt pity for his foes.
"High Inquisitor Aurelio Manza." Alvaro was smiling even as he wept. "The Chimera now pursue the Archon. They hunt for the Hunter."
The Republican and Royalist forces could only stand in horrified silence, as within a single hour, the Soranon had fallen.
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Post by ashenmoon on Apr 4, 2021 22:08:14 GMT
The rolling hills beneath the Carrana mountains lay dry and dusty. The spring sky was high and frail, the smell of winter faint in the still air. In the light of the sun it was pleasantly warm; in the shadows - beneath jumbled rocks and withered weeds - patches of snow lingered.
Horns called from afar, then closer. Shouting followed, and a dark, rumbling thunder rose. Winter-dead leaves, tangled in thorns, shivered, and pebbles skittered down scree. Soon individual voices could be heard - cries hoarse with excitement, the noise swelling-
A lion burst through the dry brush. A male in the pride of his years, jaws slavering, mane flowing. Muscles rippled underneath a pelt wet with exertion, as it crested the steep banks of a snowmelt run and leapt into the air. For an instant it hovered, its long body forming a golden arc, a living bridge. Then it disappeared over the opposite bank.
Heartbeats later a group of riders appeared over the same bank. The war-horses, lathered and snorting underneath barding laden with heraldry, hesitated for a moment before the excited yells of the men urged them forward. They leapt, landing in the stream in explosions of spray. One of the men raised a horn to his lips and blew a short, shrill blast, before urging his mount after the lion.
Immediately he was answered by a hundred cries, and swiftly more hunters appeared. Most of them were laughing Men atop wildly galloping horses, but some had different mounts: great antelopes and wide-horned bulls there were, wild dogs and leopards the sizes of ponies. Still more creatures carried no riders at all - a pride of manticores flowed easily through the gaps of the throng, while a great simurgh spread its shimmering wings and let its dog-like body sail over the muddied streambed. Figures in the shapes of men there were, too, though all subtly different - some with horns, some with tails, and some shifting and changing even as one looked upon them. More and more appeared, all laughing and yelling, yipping and yapping, calling out jokes and challenges to one another. A whirlwind of colours and insignia, banners and flashing spears filled the air.
And then they were gone, leaving the soft clucking of meltwater seeking the sea.
~
General Adelate Boriates blinked.
The sun was low on the horizon, and his throat hoarse. He reined in his horse, feeling the soreness of his back after a long day on the road. Soon he was overtaken by the others - as if caught by a whirlwind assault on the senses. He smiled, vaguely, as noblemen and riders streamed past him on either side, slapping him on the shoulders, grinning and laughing. As they jostled and jockeyed away from him, the sun painted them silhouettes, and their shadows long.
"Ahh, to hunt again! Has it not been too long?"
Boriates looked down, and saw the Hunter standing next to him, awash in the setting light. Over the Archon's back was slung the body of an enormous lion, yet the boy-like Spirit seemed hardly to notice. Off to the side waited the Mark, silent and watching.
"My Lord... ah, yes. A fine catch, congratulations!"
The Hunter grinned.
"You've a strange modesty, General! I am, after all, only carrying this for you."
"For... oh, yes. Yes, of course."
"Is everything well, my friend?"
"Certainly, my Lord! Certainly. Merely a bit - overcome, that is all. I think we had best start look for a campsite."
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Post by Timeon on Apr 11, 2021 21:35:18 GMT
The thudding of soldier's boots on cobbles echoed through the Soranon. Constantin Noval, Donato Khalez and company walked over its ancient gates, which had been kicked down with little ceremony. The chimera must have ploughed straight through Soranon, as its main avenue appeared as if a fire had scorched its every stone. Buildings groaned, dust and brick trickling onto the road. Republican and Royalist soldiers peeled off, rifles and torches in hand, and it was not long before gunshots rang through the mountain pass.
Constantin rounded one corner to find a man holding shuddering hands to his face, blood leaking from gashes in his face, as if an animal had mauled him. He babbled incoherently. His armour betrayed the mark of Malvern.
"Do I end his suffering, sir?" one of Constantin's Companions asked, sword angled for the kill.
Constantin shook his head.
"The world of Spirit is an abyss, Acastus, not a paradise. Spare him a few more years, pained and blinded though they may be." As the babbling man staggered towards them, Constantin took his outstretched hand into his own. He embraced him, and held a suddenly sobbing man to his chest. He kissed the pathetic wretch on his brow and called back to the assembling soldiers behind him. "We are all brothers when faced with the atrocity of Spirits. Look at what horrors Spirits wreak upon us! What lies they weave to turn us against one another! See to this man's injuries!"
Constantin Noval let Acastus lead the Malvernian away, while the rest of the company continued into the panicked and now-burning Soranon. A flash of magic from a tower upon the battlements was beacon Constantin needed. When one of the riflemen beside him was smeared against the wall by a crackling ball directed from the tower, Constantin barked at his men to seek cover. Many of them would never have faced a magus in combat before. His Companions all had - but they were split up, leading his men through the alleys of the Soranon, extinguishing the Malvernian resistance before it could regroup.
His sword and breastplate bearing runes not unlike those upon the skin of the Inquisitors, Constantin Noval had killed Pacters and Binders before. He would not risk more lives against this magus. With pistol in one hand and his blade in the other, Constantin made for the base of the tower, lodged in the side of the northernmost battlements. Its door had been pulled off its hinges, like the gate to the Soranon itself. Had the chimera been here, too? As Constantin scaled the winding stairs of the tower, his question was soon answered.
A half-man lay before him, as contorted in death as it had been in its final days of life. The Malvernian magus above must have vanquished one of the chimera. This chimera - this half-man - lay with a fur-covered arm outstretched and grasping. A beast-like face and horned scalp hosted turquoise eyes with feline slits, now staring emptily, their malign intelligence gone. Scarlet fragments of inquisitorial robes clung to its ruined body, emphasizing that this monster was the ultimate mockery of the man he had once been.
Constantin Noval stepped over the body and arrived at the top of the tower. He peered into a plain, round room, lit only by the light of the moon. Sprawled on a chair beside the wall, the silhouette of a man flinched at his arrival. Hand tightening around his sword, Constantin strode into the room, and lifted his arm for a killing stroke.
"Constantin?" an unmistakable voice called to him. His breath caught in his chest, his slaying-arm trembling, Constantin found that the voice of his deceased wife had come from the silhouette upon the chair.
He had thought himself prepared for any witchcraft, any devilry, having faced the children of Radiance before the very walls of Falor. How dared they trouble him with the voice of his wife? His weakened arm lifted his blade high as he took another step towards the silhouette. The moonlight caught on its trembling head, revealing Marcila's face, unmistakably so. His dead wife was draped in this chair, in a lone tower of the Soranon.
His throat tight, his hand shaking, he found his fingers loosening on his sword-grip. The blade fell between his feet with a mighty clang. "Marcila?"
A gentle hand took his.
"Yes."
He found no lie in those loving eyes.
"Daimon."
Marcila kissed his fingers, soft lips brushing his fingers.
As their skin met, Constantin was no longer in the tower. He was in Sabria, beside his wife on the day that he was elevated to chief bodyguard of Avus Gula, recently ascendant First Citizen of the Republic. Thousands cheered in the streets below, as the First Citizen announced the Triumvirate. It had been a happy memory - once - but it would become a bitter one, once he learned of the Triumvirate's treachery. Soured thoughts broke the illusion. He found himself staring at Marcila again, but now unsure of himself. She recognised his confusion and rose to embrace him. His resistance melted as her arms folded around his neck, as she kissed him.
This time another memory, farther back. They were younger still, more naive in life and in love. Triumph, glory and pride were now replaced by the tenderness of spring. Not the spring of the Carrana mountains and the Soranon; this was true spring. The spring of countryside springs, waterwheels and family gatherings. They were celebrating a birthday, or a marriage? Memories flashed past, many he thought forgotten. Sights, smells and faces which Constantin thought never again to nurture in his heart bloomed anew in an instant. He was walking backwards, through the chapters of his life, and as he did so, the thoughts grew ever sweeter. Constantin Noval found himself weeping, for the loved ones returned to him, the great crushing weight of time lifting itself off of his shoulders, returning to him what it had so brutally, thoughtlessly stolen from him, without reason or care.
Constantin Noval understood well enough what was happening - a daimon trap, surely. Its song was tempting enough that with every second, he dared to allow himself to drink a little more deeply of it. Fragments of himself were pieced together again with every moment he fell deeper into this masterful spell. It was not a mere magical ambush, Constantin realised. This was a trade. What was being offered to him here was more splendid, more magnificent, than any daimonic illusion through which Radiance had ruled. It was Belief which defined daimons, but this was no mere belief. Constantin was recovering parts of his own soul. As he reached that conclusion, he felt the joy peel away from him. He reached for it in spite of himself.
"Marcia!" he croaked, suddenly finding himself back in the room of the tower.
Yet Marcila was gone. In the chair sat a wizened man, sporting a goatee, studying him with hawkish eyes.
"Commander Constantin Noval." the Malvernian mage concluded. "What you experienced was real. Marcila can be yours again. If you swear on her memory, her soul, to spare my life. I ask for nothing more."
"How dare you-" Constantin managed, fumbling for the sword at his feet, pressing it against the mage's throat. He managed to say nothing more.
"My name is Synesius, Golem-Master. If I die, precious knowledge will be lost. I do not want to be here. I just want to live. To pass on my knowledge. I want to talk to you. I offer Marcila as a gift. Please, spare my life. I am just an old man."
Constantin Noval felt the words tug at him, offer him a way out - a way back to Marcila. He knew them to be blasphemy, lies, for Marcila was dead. Yet if nothing else, Constantin felt soiled enough to want to know one thing - what had been done to him?
It was enough to make him lower his sword, and thus, he realised, to accept the bargain.
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Post by Timeon on Jun 28, 2021 18:45:52 GMT
Chapter 2
Tomas de Campo sat cross-legged in the gardens of his family estate. Across from him sat a grey horse, soaking in the gentle sun. All was silence, save for the trickling of fountains, the occasional chirp of sparrows, or the rustling of leaves in the wind. The horse regarded him with human wisdom, its voice occasionally humming in his head. Its name was Alabaster, and it was no horse at all, but his Family Spirit - the first Daimon he had ever Bound within freshly inked Inquisitorial tattoos. Yet somehow it was there before him, no judgement in its intelligent eyes. Then Pietro Gori's voice tore him from the estate, from Alabaster, from the spectacle of peace.
"Can you imagine a beast of prey that causes no injury to its victims?" Pietro Gori gently shook his fork in the air as he spoke, bloodied steak impaled upon it. He put the fork in his mouth and almost suckled on the meat before chewing gently. The High Inquisitor made a grandiose show of enjoying every moment. With his mouth still full, he pointed his fork at Tomas de Campo accusingly. "Pain is a gift. It is a warning that something is wrong. It teaches us to fear danger. False friends." The last words Gori said with an unfriendly smile.
Tomas de Campo broke Gori's stare, and looked about him. He was seated at a long table which stretched between them, decked with rich dishes, candles and pleasantries. To one side of the room hung tapestries depicting the moment of Shatterbridge, the founding of the Republic and other glorious scenes of recent generations. The most recent tapestry, its freshness visible from its quality, depicted the Triumvirate - Gori, Timbale and Avus Gula, hands outstretched, swords and scepters aloft. The windows, however, told no story at all. They gaped with blackness - was it night? Yet there was no moon.
Pietro Gori snapped his fingers. Tomas de Campo looked back at him, noticing now that Gori's neatly trimmed beard and moustache were disheveled, his skin pale and yellowed like parchment. His eyes betrayed none of the carefully manicured madness which proved so useful as an Inquisitor - only emptiness, like that of a soldier who never manages to leave a war behind.
"A mosquito is a fascinating creature, Tomas. It bites, but if it does its job well, it does not hurt. Its bite numbs. Its victim ignores it."
"Your Grace?" Tomas' throat was dry as he spoke. He reached for some wine, found its taste bitter.
"Can you imagine our tattoos, Tomas, if they did not hurt?"
Pietro Gori gestured out at the non-existent view. "There are all sorts of ways to feed. We worry too much about pain. We cringe from it, failing to heed its lessons."
Tomas de Campo cut into the steak on his plate, placed some in his mouth, found the meat to be tough. His jaw began its work with little joy.
Pietro Gori was looking positively unwell now. Tomas de Campo placed his fork down. The High Inquisitor stuck a finger in the air. "Tomas. Daimons bear false gifts. Our people do not comprehend the price, for like any parasite, it numbs the pain. Like worms which crawl through our stool, they tire, keep us forever hungry, wanting... weak. Hollow."
Looking down at his steak, Tomas de Campo found a white strand rearing above it, and then another. The steak began to writhe, to wriggle. Tomas de Campo raised his head, and found that Pietro Gori sat unmoving in his chair, stiff in death, eyes staring. His voice, however, continued to boom through the hall.
"The Daimons are digesting you, Tomas."
Tomas de Campo spat a mouthful of worms into his plate, tearing at his sleeves, his robes. His tattoos began to hum, searing his flesh. He wept with relief as agonizing, sobering pain rushed through his body.
Darkness enveloped him - but not that of night and neither of sleep. It was the waking world. The hall vanished, and he remembered where he was, where he had been. He was in a prison cell. He wept openly now, with relief, for he realised how close he must have come to succumbing to the Daimons imprisoned within him. Tomas de Campo, right hand of Pietro Gori, had marched back to Sabria from the Dominion with the broken remnants of the greatest army the Republic had ever assembled. The strike at Radiance had failed, and the Eclipse had passed. Pietro Gori was dead. On arrival, the First Citizen, Avus Gula, had sold him out during the unfolding power games. It was Aurelio Manza who had become High Inquisitor, and Tomas had been thrown in a cell instead, awaiting the day his failing health would break him, allowing the Daimons within him to turn him Chimera. Such an ignoble end would have turned Tomas into propaganda for Aurelio Manza, showcasing the weakness of Tomas' creed.
Abandoned in his own filth, the only light Tomas ever saw burning and blinding, light no offered hope. It was now merely a reminder of what had been lost. That was more painful than rotting away in the dark, Tomas mused, as his awareness solidified in his waking nightmare. The door only ever opened so that rough hands could place a bucket of dirty water at his feet, along with a wooden bowl of slop to eat. Left to excrement and despair, Tomas de Campo had only the Daimons trapped within his skin for company, and Alabaster was perhaps the only pleasant presence of the hundred Daimons damned to claw at the inside of his head.
This cycle had repeated itself innumerable times, and he could hardly remember many of the instances. It had become an eternal night, one with little rest. This blur was once again interrupted by his cell door screeching on its rusty hinges. In stepped a silhouette, and then, a shocking difference struck him, as the man grabbed his arm. The feel of another human could have bid him weep anew, but he was just as quick dragged to his feet, then hoisted over the man's shoulder.
"Your Grace." the man stated. The shock of the touch, and the way in which he was addressed, was too much for Tomas de Campo, who felt consciousness fade.
-
When Tomas de Campo awoke, the first thing he felt was pain, as his eyes struggled to function once again. All he beheld was a blur of colour, rich crimsons overwhelming all else. His breathing reminded him that he was still alive. He lifted trembling hands to his face, found that he was clean shaven. As his body adjusted, Tomas de Campo found that he was laying down in a grand bed, in a far grander chamber, decorated to the finest tastes of the Republican fashions. A window in the room betrayed a real view, affirming that this was no illusion. The city of Sabria sprawled out beneath him. Tomas de Campo drifted back to sleep several times, until he awoke to find a man seated beside him. It was, perhaps, the face he would have least liked to see after that of Aurelio Manza. It was the pudgy, bearded face of Avus Gula, First Citizen, sporting an all too familiar goatee.
"High Inquisitor." Avus Gula swallowed, peering down at Tomas de Campo with no limit to concern. "We have much to discuss."
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Post by ashenmoon on Jun 28, 2021 22:54:36 GMT
General Boriates set down the quill and flexed his cramping hand. With bleary eyes he surveyed the fruits of his labours:
The rest of the page remained blank, save a rapidly drying pool of ink where his hand had hovered, paralyzed. The rickety writing-desk was littered with expensive, crumpled-up paper notes of previous attempts. His head felt as if a band of steel was slowly being tightened around his temples, and the dread in the pit of his stomach made every effort to breathe a struggle.
He slumped back in the foldable camp chair. He closed his eyes to the dim, steady lights of the lanterns. He breathed in, tasted the musty smell of the tent mingled with leather and oils and dried, stamped grass. With a conscious effort he tried to relax. He focused on the tension in his shoulders and breathed into them, again and again, until the ache began to ease. Then on to his neck. His back. The twisted claw of his hand.
Slowly, slowly, the aching band around his head loosened.
A sudden, shattering crash. Startled cries outside the tent.
Boriates sprang to his feet, whirled and reached for the sword propped against his saddle-bags.
Drunken laughter and jeering, and the braying of playful animals, drowned out the earlier upset.
“Can’t hold his drink!” someone shouted.
He froze, hunched under the low ceiling.
“Open another one - more gently!” howled the, even when slurred, unmistakable voice of Justiniano Longo.
Boriates stared dumbly at the strings which loosely held the tent flap closed.
“Waste of a good wine-jar, that,” someone closer by laughed in a theatrical mutter.
With a shaking finger Boriates pulled the flap aside, made a gap wide enough to peer through.
Outside were his soldiers, sprawled on the ground under the open air. They lay on dirty blankets and slovenly bedding loosely arranged about several low-burning camp fires. A few attempts at tent-pitching were in evidence, but had - evidently - been abandoned before long. Many were snoring loudly, others sat - or lay, or lounged, or were heaped - close together, conversing conspiratorially, occasionally laughing uproariously. One group were gambling with dice; someone was playing a lute; two Spirits in shapes vaguely resembling a cross of a dog and a panther were chasing their own tails in twin mad tornados, while men sat by and idly commented. The air reeked with wine and smoke and piss. Further out, in the dark, shapes moved back and forth, coming and going. Strange sounds and grunts were ignored by one and all. If there were guards on duty, they challenged no one.
Longo and a group of Malachites were seated around the nearest fire. One man was sorting through a heap of broken pottery, occasionally holding up a shard with some lingering drops of wine with an exclamation of relish.
A slow, grinding groan pushed through Boriates’ lips.
He released the flap, shut out the sight, and collapsed on the bedroll. He held the sword - still in its scabbard - against him as a lover, and tried hard not to look towards the writing table. Bile rose in the back his throat.
What had happened?
They should have made the outskirts of Sabria several days ago. Indeed, apart from the occasional excursion, they had made good speed the first few days. Down from the snowy peaks of Carrana they had galloped, the proud and bold vanguard of the Empire. They had followed the dusty road as it stretched north through bare hills and empty country, a stony track sometimes hard to separate from wilderness. Soon enough little hamlets and cottages had appeared on the horizon, then they thundered through a cluster of buildings huddled around some well, then a trading-post straddling a crossroads. They did not even slow down, letting villagers leap out of their way, and leaving wide-eyed confusion in their wake.
By the end of the third day they were half-ways to Sabria, and were well into the fertile lowlands of central Falor. Rolling fields, lush olive groves, and prosperous towns - only occasionally marred by the black-sooted Industry of the northerners - had replaced the earlier barrenness. They had accepted the stupefied surrenders of several small towns and scattered two unsuspecting companies on the road, presumably reinforcements on their way to Carrana.
But then...
Boriates shook his head to try to clear it. Somehow, they had gotten off track. It had begun with circling Ortona, the capital of the region. Then, one of their hunts had somehow gotten them turned around. As far as he could tell from the maps, their erratic route since then had somehow managed to place them almost full to the west of Sabria, then circled back around, and now they were about a day to the east of the city. Far from pursuing any objectives of strategic importance, however, most of each day was spent hunting and raiding smaller towns for supplies - mostly wine.
Again and again, Boriates would find his company off course. Again and again, he consulted the best of his maps and reports and officers, determined the proper course of action, and set out to do it.
It was not that his orders were disobeyed - far from it, they were met with eagerness. At once, the company would set out, just as Boriates had intended.
But a few hours later, they would once more find themselves coursing through some grove, fast on the spoor of an eight-pointer stag.
Yesterday they had occupied the mansion of a nobleman in the morning and had had his staff butcher and cook most of his livestock. The whole day had been spent in games - the Hunter had arranged tournaments in wrestling, in racing, in spear-throwing. Idly, Boriates had been aware that this was not, strictly speaking, what had been the plan - but the men had enjoyed themselves so thoroughly, and the war… well, it wouldn’t go anywhere, would it? In the evening one of their scouting parties returned with a travelling band of performers - jesters, acrobats and musicians - and the pork, slowly cooked during the day, was so tender as to melt in the mouth. If there had not been reports of a major defensive force approaching - sent up from the west, from Lunium - they would probably have stayed another day.
He ran his fingers through sweaty hair.
“Why, why, why…” he moaned.
It was almost a relief when the screaming began.
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Post by Timeon on Jun 29, 2021 15:54:16 GMT
Tomas de Campo spread his arms wide as attendants bathed him with warm, wet cloths, scraping his skin clean, dabbing him with perfume. When they were done, they wrapped him in the crimson silks of a High Inquisitor. The ritual came to an end as they kissed his feet, and placed fine slippers upon his feet. Weakened as he was, he allowed them to carry him into the heart of the Collegium, and place him upon the Rector's seat. Once a university, the Collegium had long since become the Inquisition, its many entrances bricked up, until only a single and most splendid gate led into its interior. Tomas' return, aided by the rifle and pike of the First Citizen, had caused a quick shift in power within the Collegium. With Aurelio Manza far from the city, his closest confidants within Sabria were rounded up in chains.
"A delegation comes, Your Grace." one of the tattooed vicars of the Collegium mumbled, bowing and scraping.
Word of any shift of power in Sabria spread as quick as wind, and a new High Inquisitor could surely not have caused any greater disturbance in the power games of high society.
"Who do they represent?"
"We have reason to believe... the... the Senate, Your Grace." the vicar almost choked on his spit.
The Senate - now this was a most unexpected and surprising twist. In their ploy for power, Gula, Gori and Timbale had blown up the Senate, taking most of the Senators out with the building. They had assassinated the Consul, Harmon Dermeticus, to prevent any hope of there ever being peace with the Dominion, and proclaimed themselves Triumvirs. Pinning the murders and destruction on the Dominion, the Triumvirate had gone to war, and Eclipse had ensued. For any group of men claiming to represent the Senate to arise now revealed much of why First Citizen Gula had set him free. Was Gula using him as a shield? Tomas de Campo did not have long to wait.
A loud banging sounded through the chamber, as the brass knockers of the Rector's chamber were used in keeping with ceremonial custom.
"Be welcome in my hall." Tomas de Campo bid them enter.
The innermost doors of the Collegium creaked open, allowing an entourage the likes of which Tomas had not seen since before the rise of the Triumvirs to enter. The pampered men who strode in wore the lace and garb of true Senators, wide-brimmed hats upon their hats, moustaches waxed and curled. One among them carried the sceptre of Consul, cradled under his arm, somehow recovered from the vaults of the Triumvirate. His face was familiar, but Tomas could not quite place it.
"Esteemed brothers of the Senate. It brings me great pleasure to welcome you into the Collegium, as was the case in better days."
"Tomas de Campo." the would-be Consul stated through thin lips. "Is this a coup d'etat?"
Shadows stretched and twisted on the walls around them, as Inquisitors gathered to spectate in the balconies around them by torchlight. Would they fall upon the Senators without hesitation, if Tomas commanded it?
"I would ask the same, Senators." Tomas spread his arms wide. "But surely there has been enough violence between brothers and sisters, when Daimons still reign?"
"Where are the Inquisitorial Tribunes, de Campo?" another Senator chirped petulantly. Ah, Tomas de Campo recognised this one - Iacin del Sera, one of the most infamously corrupt Senators in the Republic.
"When I heard we would have company, I ordered they be set aflame. As we speak, they must be burning like candles." Tomas de Campo explained as a matter of fact. Candles - Gori had always enjoyed referring to his victims as candles. "Aurelio Manza and his creed have been declared heretics. I am sure, gentlemen, that men of politics recognise they have no role in deciding matters of the faith. And will not interfere."
"No." the would-be Consul intoned hesitantly. "But we do have business with the First Citizen, Avus Gula."
"As do I, I assure you." Tomas de Campo's breath grew pained, his body still weak. He grabbed his smelling salts and incense, and steadied himself. "What do you want with him? And your name, sir, if I dare?"
"Consul Dorman Heraklid." the foremost Senator's grip on his sceptre tightened. "The Republic is back, Inquisitor. We have Admiral Corso on our side! The Inquisition would do well to be on the right side of history, as democracy is restored, and the traitors brought to justice!"
Tomas de Campo massaged his temples. He beckoned to the vicar, and whispered curt instructions. The pale-faced man nodded all too eagerly, and shuffled off. Returning to address the Senators, Tomas de Campo sighed. "If I understand correctly, the Empire of Malvern is at our doorstep, Senators. You have seized control amidst a panic. But to what end? Do you plan to hold this city without the Inquisition?"
The Senators regarded him with wide-eyed disbelief. Tomas de Campo seized the moment, staggering to his feet. An accusing and withered finger pointed at Consul Heraklid.
"You wretched imbeciles! Even now, you play at politics, as the Capital - the Collegium itself - are prone to a deathblow that could undo everything our people have worked to build. What is your plan, Senators?"
"Hold the city." the Consul stepped up to his full height, like a twig stretched to breaking point. A bead of sweat ran down the man's face, the air in the Collegium growing ever hotter. The Tribunes are burning. "... until our forces in the West arrive..."
"This city is indefensible!" Tomas de Campo howled. "It's impossible. Are you all mad?"
"What other choice do we have, Inquisitor?" Iacin del Sera was beginning to break down, his poorly concealed anxieties bubbling to the surface. Consul Heraklid, the lesser son of greater scions, seemed more determined to try and live up to his legendary ancestors, however. Some distant great-grandchild of Veronica Heraklid, Dorman and his cousins might as well have been monarchists, for all the entitlement they bore for their name.
Dorman Heraklid shook his scepter in the air feebly. "We will not break. We fight till the last man."
"Women, children, too?" Tomas de Campo nearly laughed. "The city - and its merchants - have long outgrown these decrepit walls. You Senators splurged your wealth on building streets of marble, drinking fountains, statues of yourselves, not defenses."
"... no, no, no..."
The vicar returned, the First Citizen Avus Gula leashed behind him. The pudgy First Citizen struggled and pulled, to no avail.
"... we had a deal, a deal..."
The Senators gaped in disbelief, though their greedy hands already twitched impatiently to seize the First Citizen who had murdered their kin.
"No deal, Gula." Tomas de Campo sank back into his chair. "The First Citizen is yours, Senators. You shall have your Republic, your democracy, your Senate. But the command of the City during this crisis is mine."
By evening, Tomas de Campo had been hoisted to the High Inquisitor's balcony behind the Collegium, overlooking one of the greatest squares of the Republic. Consul Heraklid stood hesitantly at his side. De Campo's voice echoed to the city, and the thousands of faithful who had flocked to do penance at his call.
"My Children! My Beloved!" Tomas de Campo gestured with some theatricality, long practiced in the style of the Faloran demagogues of old.
On cue, Tomas beheld the carriage entering the square from the Collegium below, hoisting a cage within which sat the First Citizen. The city bells began to ring.
"Sons and daughters of the Republic, I make this prayer to all the powers of Mankind, full of the affection we all hold dear to this state and all its citizens, that you now look upon the accused and the damned with clear eyes and mind. This matter concerns concerns your faith and your very honor! By the laws and by my oath as High Inquisitor, I reveal to you the greatest of treacheries. I speak now of the corruption and iniquity of the men who have been the real cause of the Republic's long crisis. It was Avus Gula who contrived to deceive you so effectually when he murdered your Consul, Harmon Dermeticus! Many of our very best sold themselves to this prince, and never reported one word of truth to your assemblies. This warmonger, this murderer, has brought us all to the border of disaster, when all we have ever sought is peace! And yet this man, Avus Gula, has invited by his weakness, his treachery, the ire and wrath of Malvern and Dominion alike!"
The crowds were at first still, then hummed with grumbles of ever growing outrage.
"It was by Gula's order that your children attempted conquests, and died with futility before the walls of Falor! And what of Gula? He fled afterwards here to Sabria, to live then in peace. His assaults were equally directed against the dignity, the sovereignty, and the liberty of our whole nation. It is because of him, my kin, fellow citizens, that Sabria is now lost, without her finest alive to protect her! But take heed, take heed! To Sabria we bid farewell, but the Republic shall endure. We shall ascend, we shall triumph. The world will behold the Last Argument of Man!"
As the crowd surged to affirm his message, Tomas de Campo blew a kiss into the wind, and stepped back. He turned to Consul Heraklid.
"Bring me representatives from every guild, every echelon of society. I want to speak to the poor, to the merchants, the army, the navy. To the faithful and to the monarchists. We have a few days at best, Consul. And not an hour to spare."
There were others to speak to, also. Addressing his vicars, Tomas de Campo ordered the release of the Last Warden - Davaerid - Danton Redwind. The time when the Last Argument of Man would be made was at last approaching.
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Post by ashenmoon on Jul 2, 2021 21:47:28 GMT
Boriates rushed out, stumbling into Par Arash - his Momlan bodyguard-slave - and was immediately engulfed by a milling crowd of men, all as confused as he. Shoving men and Spirits aside, using his scabbarded scimitar as a lever - enthusiastically aided by Par Arash in the effort - the general made his way to where the throng was at its thickest.
They were at the edge of the encampment before Boriates burst through a final wall of packed soldiery. Flickering torches lit the scene - the Mark, skin and jewellery bright, crouched over the slumped shapes of men on the dirt - everywhere long, shifting shadows swallowed by the night - the beeches of the surrounding grove black cracks against the stars - the men lurid sketches of humanity.
Boriates approached the seraph.
“Dead,” the hawk-headed Spirit clipped without turning. He was laying the men to rest, crossing their arms over their chests, drawing their blankets over their faces.
Above them, the simurgh - Watchful was his name - briefly blotted out the sky, a colourful shimmer - dust whirled in his wake, and when Boriates opened his eyes once more the Spirit was disappeared without a trace.
“How? What happened?”
The Mark shook his head.
“Nothing good. I must speak to Father.”
“The Lord is resting-”
“I will speak to Father.”
The Mark marched past Boriates. The crowd parted quietly to let him pass. Par Arash disentangled from the crowd, circled Boriates to stand guard in the murky dark beyond the reach of the firelight.
Slowly, Boriates knelt down by one of the corpses, raised the corner of a blanket to see the face of his charge.
What he saw was sheer, blind fear.
Swallowing, Boriates let the blanket fall.
“Triple the guard! Officers, to my fire!”
~
The Mark disappeared into the Hunter’s expeditionary pavilion - a much reduced, albeit still luxurious, version of the acres-wide palace of cloth the Archon had required at the beginning of the campaign. Echelons of spirits and cultic devotees of their divine patron always circled his quarters, equal parts bodyguard, high priesthood, and travelling carnival.
Meanwhile, several scouting parties, bristling with martial and magical arms, were sent out to track the spoor of the attacker. Within minutes there came a horrendous scream out of the night, followed by a flurry of activity - growls, roars, thundering crashes and trees splintering. Eventually, the manticores came loping back into camp, carrying with them one of their number - Scent-of-earth-after-rain - moaning and delirious with pain. He died shortly after their return, prompting an immediate evacuation of a quarter of their camp, as priest-magi attended to the passing of his soul.
Soon enough, though, word spread from the manticores: now everywhere men were whispering “chimera”.
Boriates once more summoned the high officers of the vanguard - there was Issar Arezis, imperial food-taster, quartermaster and tribune; Justiniano Longo of the Malachites, who served as their guides in this land; the heir-apparents of House Isparos and Suhrea, vassals of House Douvanes; Chrysas Etapheron, army chief of House Arbanes and desperate to distance himself from his master's treachery; and prince Kayan of the Fuma nomads. All save Boriates himself, Longo and the young son of Suhrea were accompanied by pacted or House spirits.
“We must chase it down!” the princes Isparos and Suhrea echoed one another.
“We must wait for the Archon’s counsel!” tribune Issar admonished.
In some strange way the discussion continued well past this point, although that was the essence of the issue. Only after a long and useless debate did they determine to go see what took the Mark so long.
On the way they were joined by Triune Smaragi Lekapenos - the nephew of Porphyry, who had been slain in the mountains - and who had investigated the corpses. He judged the chimera to be highly dangerous, and best pursued under sunlight.
“Where might such an aberration have come from, if it be so powerful as you think?” chief Kayan mused.
The company grew, briefly, quiet, uncomfortable. Surely not…
They arrived at the Hunter’s pavilion, nestled beneath the boughs of a free-standing and ancient beech - white and gold-striped, with a great many green banners flapping jauntily in the still, stale air. There they were met by one of the Hunter’s close companions - Savanna he was called, a strange, androgynous creature that peered at them with cat-like eyes and a loose-held bronze war-sickle, but whether he were a Spirit or Man, Boriates had never been able to determine. In any case, Savanna told them the Archon was indisposed and could not be met with at this time.
So stymied, they settled down to wait. Occasionally, Boriates thought he could hear faint, wretched moaning and retching.
Tribune Issar led several nearby men in a series of votive offerings, mumbling hushed prayers as they poured libations onto the ground.
Almost an hour passed before anything happened.
Boriates was circling the perimeter of the camp - the guards were wide awake, and well on their way to sobering up - when the alarm was raised. The whole camp - some three hundred souls, except the Archon’s inner circle - rushed towards the scene. Once more, Par Arash cleared the way, although the men were more alert to the voice of command after the recent events.
A rider had arrived. The horse, wild-eyed and lathered, glistened in the light of many torches. The man sat slumped deep in the saddle, swaying to and fro, arms clasped tight about his belly.
“Who-” Boriates stopped.
“G-general…” wheezed Denios Troklos, Fist of the Voice, chief of the Abstinents, before he passed out.
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Post by Timeon on Jul 4, 2021 12:20:41 GMT
Though godless, the Republican and Monarchist forces marched away from the Soranon with gloomy superstition weighing every step. Constantin Noval could see it in every downcast face. The Soranon had fallen, but no thanks to cannon, musket or bayonet. Their way had been opened for them by Chimera, the head of their own irreligious faith twisted into a monster. The past nights had seen the border of the Republic trampled with horrifying ease, bastions older than many an Archon cast down within hours of one another. Constantin Noval brooded that perhaps, "godless" was the wrong word to describe these men. These weary soldiers believed in gods; they simply chose to defy them. Such words meant little to him, but would mean everything to Inquisitor Alvaro, riding silently to his left, expression lost beneath a low hanging hood. To Constantin's right, Colonel Donato Khalez interrupted the mood of the grim procession with an extravagantly feathered hat, and a defiant tilt to his head.
However brave a face the best of them put on, there was no concealing the unease which bubbled forth in the wake of Malvern, for their trail warned of things to come. Constantin had tracked many armies, but the Malvernian host left more than just imprints of human feet and horses' hooves in the mud. There were beastly feet, too, claw marks and indecipherable shapes stretching far beyond the road and into the hills on either side of them. What beasts did Malvern have in tow, which it had yet to reveal, Constantin wondered.
The road ahead twisted downhill, away from the mountains, onto the plains of Jovinium proper. Behind, Constantin's Ember Legion marched dourly beside Republican cannon and pike, the ranks dotted with ragtag assemblies of Inquisitors flocking to Alvaro's command. To one side, the Snowbiters could be spied, Giacchino's banner fluttering in the cold breeze of the Carrana. The mountain-men; the Stonefolk, had mostly returned to their homes between the crags, but some had chosen to follow regardless, proclaiming their loyalty to Armant Freic. Aleimon Palaienid, Constantin corrected himself. He prayed that their loyalty to his own Palaienid pretender would hold against the Malvernian brand of that eternal dynasty.
Every time that Constantin Noval found himself pulling ahead of the entourage, Colonel Donato Khalez would make a show of kicking his horse ahead to keep level with him, harrumphing and grumbling. He would not suffer Constantin the illusion that he was in charge. Khalez seemed to be making a show out of demonstrating that leadership of this contradictory host was shared. Had Constantin worshipped any god, he would have been praying that this coalition could hold long enough to reach Sabria. Inevitably, Khalez's horse whinnied in protest, the Colonel pulling in close beside Constantin once again.
"Do you really think your pretender is going to end our misery?" the Colonel barked, loud enough for Alvaro and the rest to hear. "Or that your men follow out of conviction?"
Constantin pondered a moment.
"Many, perhaps most, would gladly die for the rightful Palaienid." Though now, once again, Constantin paused. He looked over his shoulder at the weary thousands who followed on. "What I can tell you know for certain, brother Khalez, is that each has grown sick of the Inner Crusade, of the family members and friends lost to Inquisitorial fire. I'd wager the same for your men."
Colonel Khalez grinned, as if having caught Constantin in a trap.
"We march in the wake of Daimons, and this royalist points scorn at our own!"
"Malvern, Dominion, Inquisition." Constantin fired back with emphasis. "All I see in each is Daimon magic, shackles seen and unseen."
"Daimon magic!" Khalez guffawed. "The very basis of the legitimacy of the Palaienid since time immemorial. And he speaks of Emperors and Kings!"
Constantin shrugged off the attack, keeping his eyes to the gloomy horizon, cobblestones smacking under horses' hooves. "I was Bodyuard to Avus Gula. I witnessed the Republican dream betrayed. It was not the Palaienid who exiled you and your men to the mountains, Colonel Khalez. It was not the Palaienid who murdered the Senate, and our Consul. These men follow us to protect their homes. But not just from Malvern, but from anybody who would take those homes away from us."
Colonel Khalez fell silent. Constantin refused to look him in the eye.
"The sooner we convicts set aside our differences, Colonel Khalez, and focus on freedom, the sooner we might escape this nightmarish prison. Eyes ahead."
-
That night, they reached the first gutted village on the road to Sabria. They found very few dead. It appeared that Malvern had only cut down those who resisted, leaving no evidence of the rest of the folk behind. Some of the buildings had been knocked down, as if great shapes had crashed past them unheedingly. Colonel Khalez agreed that this was as good a place as any to make camp.
Campfires and tents soon dotted the side of the road, the few buildings left intact becoming quarters for the officers of the Ember Legion and Republicans alike. Making one last round atop his horse to ensure that all was well, Constantin noted his Companions peeling off their duties to ride beside him. They were his ever-vigilant bodyguard, come to ensure that all was well and debrief for the day. Acastus hailed him with the iguana banner of the Palaienid in hand.
"There is no doubt about it. The Malvernians left the road after sacking this village." Acastus reported, a disturbed look on the Varantian's face.
"In pursuit of what?" Constantin wondered aloud. "And where?"
Acastus hissed through clenched teeth. "In the Dominion we learned that Spirits are unpredictable. Who can predict the outcome of an Idea?"
Would this offer them the chance to overtake Malvern, and reach Sabria before their host? As they continued to ride through the camp, Constantin raised his sword in greeting to clansmen, who hummed mountain-hymns and hefted big metal pots over lively fires. Giacchino and his Snowbiters gambled with Khalez' cannoneers nearby. Pairs of Inquisitors passed mumbling and shifty-eyed through the wreck of buildings, sniffing out the unfathomable.
The Companions had earmarked a thatched hut on the outskirts of the village as their headquarters. Within it, one room had been set aside from Constantin. Striding into it, Constantin barked behind him.
"Make sure the prisoner and I are not disturbed." He hurried the door shut behind him.
Constantin exhaled abruptly. Synesius, the Golem-Master, was sitting cross-legged on a stool, a closed chest beside him on the floor. His eyes were shut, but the lids fluttered and twitched. As if on command, the lid of the chest swung open. A soft hand unfurled into the air from within the chest, and then another, reaching for the invisible. Marcila climbed out naked, the illusion that Constantin's wife was alive reignited.
This is the test, Constantin thought, the test of my soul, of the creed of the Inquisition, and that of the Dominion and Malvern alike. A perfect reflection of his wife, this Marcila tested the floorboards with one foot. Finding them sound, she stepped out of the chest, only to stumble. Constantin caught her, her skin human to the touch. He noted, however, that he could feel no breath on his face, even as her face was inches away from touching his. Though briefly, his lip trembled as her eyes met his, her expression unreadable. Constantin felt like a puppeteer, holding his puppet up by the strings.
"Thank you." Marcila said. She ran her fingertips across his forehead and cheek. "For saving me this time."
The words burned deeply, memories bubbling of Marcila sick, coughing, breathless, pleading - dying.
"Golem-Master!" Constantin extracted himself from Marcila's limbs, and shoved Synesius in his chair. "What have you done?"
Synesius flickered awake, beholding Constantin with a mixture of pity and disdain. "I have done nothing."
"You have deceived me, made me into an oath-breaker." Constantin's wavering hand went once again to his sword.
"I have done no such thing. I crafted something beautiful, which heals the sores and aches of our souls in a cruel world." Synesius smiled at Marcila, as would a father. "Am I to blame that you are a wounded man, commander? But aren't we all?"
Constantin looked back at the Daimon, found that Marcila looked afraid. "Constantin? Why have you grown so angry?"
"You aren't-"
Her arms folded around him in an embrace, as she buried her face into his shoulder.
Synesius turned his gaze away, closing his eyes once again. "Do what you will, commander. I merely wish to live, that I might continue my craft. I hide nothing. I make what meaning I can in a violent world."
"If you are a man of peace, why march with an army?"
"March?" Synesius chuckled. "My body is broken. Why was I carried to war? What choice does a humble scholar have, when so commanded by the mighty?"
Marcila's hand closed around his, her face pleading. The warmth of spring rushed through Constantin's veins. He felt the wetness of morning dew upon his skin, breathed country air.
"Come home." Marcila whined and pleaded. "Please, Constantin."
He pulled away suddenly, the bliss evaporating just as quickly.
Synesius pressed his attack.
"You accuse me of making war, but what of the men of your Republic, are they free to do as they will? I know that like you, they tire of this Inquisitorial Inner Crusade! And do you not also follow a Palaienid, commander, whose legitimacy rests upon a House Spirit?"
A smack. Synesius recoiled, tumbling from his chair. Marcila flinched.
"You dare compare us, Golem-Master?"
Synesius made no effort to lift himself from his misery. Constantin turned to leave, before Marcila's voice cut through him.
"I begged you, Constantin." Marcila was weeping! "Begged you for help you refused to provide."
He turned, confused, furious. Memories clawed at him, of his wife ill of the plague which had gripped their city. People lay frail upon the streets, crawling aimlessly. Many had turned to Daimons for relief, using magic to cure their ills. Out of duty, out of conviction, as commander of the First Citizen's own bodyguard - Constantin Noval had refused such help. He wished for Marcila's body, and his own body, racked by plague, to show the mastery of humanity over nature. To accept magic would have been to revert to servility to the gods. It would have been to admit the Republic had been wrong. He had survived. Marcila had not. A price had been unwillingly paid.
As Synesius pulled his broken body back upon his stool, Constantin grabbed him by his collar. "I spared your life, and you mock me!"
Synesius betrayed no emotion, perhaps resigned to his fate. "I have done nothing, commander. Daimons are but a reflection of mankind. Magic is neither good, nor evil. Evil rests in the hearts of man. Any wickedness in our condition is merely us looking into a mirror."
Constantin placed his face into his hands, gritting his teeth. His mouth tasted sour. The would-be Marcila bore a wounded look upon her face. Her injured expression begged incredulity. How could a Daimon mimicking his wife dare to take offense?
"Constantin." Marcila stated clearly. She placed her hand upon her chest. "I can forgive you."
Constantin Noval backed away.
"Monsters!"
His hand found the door, and he stumbled out. Acastus steadied him outside as Constantin heaved the door shut with his shoulder.
"Did the Golem-Master harm you, commander?" Seeing that all was well, Acastus nodded briskly. "If your interrogation is complete, I shall put this magus to the sword."
Constantin's breathing was ragged. He spoke with some effort.
"No! Not yet, Acastus."
"The Inquisitors are snooping, commander. They have caught his trail. We will not be able to hide him for long."
"Do whatever it takes, Acastus." Constantin massaged his temple. "I, I need more time."
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Post by Timeon on Jul 24, 2021 19:49:00 GMT
General Nikaioforos of House Argynyx groaned in anguish. The Princess Kassai wiped his fevered brow with a cold cloth. Reclined half-naked upon his pillows, the ever-dying, most illustrious general had not expected or welcomed company. Yet company had come uninvited nonetheless.
"This must stop." The Mark explained with crisp certainty. This pointless tarrying, raiding, endless distraction was costing them their victory.
Nikaioforos, of course, agreed. He had come on this campaign to be put out of his misery through glorious battle, not to be buried by embarrassed courtiers behind a hill. He was not the only one running out of time.
"What do you expect me to do about it? The Hunter is your father, not mine."
Sensing his anger, the Princess Kassai kissed his chest, his thighs...
The Mark, the son of a God, bore little regard for courtesy for men and women whose lives flickered like candles.
"Father does not listen. You know this." the hawk-headed Seraph cocked its head, an almost bird-like gesture. "But Boriates is flesh. Boriates is soft. Boriates may die."
Nikaioforos supported himself by elbow, even as Princess Kassai pulled his breeches free.
"So, not even a Seraph is free of treachery. Am I to be the more honourable between us two?"
The Mark stood silent.
The tent flap was pulled free once more. One of his bodyguards, Zoilos, staggered into the tent. One of King Hano's sons, the boy-soldier's face betrayed some new horror.
"Melusene, dead... the Malachite destroyed to a man." Zoilos clasped the Mark's arm, seeking comfort the Seraph was incapable of giving. Zoilos began to weep.
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Post by Timeon on Jul 25, 2021 16:02:55 GMT
Waking from grim dreams, Constantin Noval put himself to work. Echoes of Marcila's visage receded into his subconscious, as the waking world took rein. A new day brushed yesterday's phantoms just out of sight. As Monarchists and Republicans packed their tents and tools, falling into formation for the day's march, Constantin could feel that something had changed. Snowbiters mingled with Pikemen from the Vastness, Stonefolk with Vaiporo Riflemen. The men were even assisting each other to prepare for the road. The past nights in which the men had broken bread, cast dice and shared tales around campfires had united this ragtag assembly of convicts into a single unit. After all, they marched in defense of a common home. Riding between the men, consulting with his Companions, Constantin found that they had started to refer to themselves as "the Legion". As Constantin returned his horse to the front ranks, he found Colonel Khalez's sour gaze waiting for him. No bandying of words was needed. And so the Legion marched in the wake of Malvern, for the cause of freedom. Father Alvaro found his moment to fall in beside Constantin, but one hour into the march. The Inquisitor fidgeted, eyes darting from beneath a plain brown hood. "He came this way." Alvaro did not sound glad to speak it. "Who, pater?" "The High Inquisitor." Alvaro's nostril flared. "He hunts the Hunter." Constantin failed to resist an involuntary shudder. "Still, even now, you refer to him as your master?" Father Alvaro's jaw hung ever so slightly. His gaze went to the horizon. "I was never a particularly religious man, commander." Alvaro confessed. "The Doctrines were hastily written texts, inked by men and women who contradicted one another even as they fled across the Godsbridge." "Then why take up the cloth?" Constantin found himself earnestly curious as to the answer. He was not sure he had ever had a plain, honest conversation with an Inquisitor before. Now that Constantin had been permitted the chance, he found the mystique had peeled back. He was riding beside a portly, anxious man now, where once an Inquisitor had been. "The cloth." Alvaro chose his words carefully. "I believe in Mankind, as do all who fight for freedom. But what that means, I'm afraid few will ever agree. A Republican, a Monarchist and a Triumvir have much in common. But not enough." "What does Mankind mean to you, pater?" Constantin asked, following Alvaro's trail of thought. "What is an Idea without a Daimon to represent it?" The Inquisitor had a distant look to him now. "Nothing at all. Whatever we wish it to be. A convenient excuse, even. I joined the Inquisition because I could. Because it offered me a way out of living in filth and misery. I did it because it paid well." "Do you regret it, pater?" A dark smile twitched the corners of Alvaro's lips. "Being an Inquisitor is noisy business, commander. Daimons screaming for release beneath one's skin." then Alvaro paused. "Regret it? Yes, I think I do. I'd have rather taken a boat and sailed somewhere far away. Found myself some peace, far from this wretched war. But it is too late for that, now. A Binder can find no such rest. That is why I came to you, commander. I have a question for you." "I will answer if I can." "Your Pretender is a Binder, is he not? Your Aleimon Palaienid. You made a dire point, Noval, that Aurelio Manza is no longer master of these lands. He is lost. Would your Palaienid Pretender have space in his Empire for an Inquisition?" Constantin Noval choked back his instinctive refusal. What use would placing Armant Freic upon the throne as Aleimon be, if the Inner Crusade continued? "I- I must think on this." Constantin chewed through his words. "We will speak again." Sensing his hesitation, Alvaro cast aside his meekness, rising to his full height in his saddle. "Think well your answer." As Constantin rode back through the ranks of the Legion, his men hailed and cheered him. They saw him as a hero for what he had endured in Varantium. He certainly did not feel like one. Marcila's face passed through his mind, and Alvaro's request pulled like a hook in his chest. He pulled his sword free and urged his troops on, as if by so doing, he would remain one step ahead of his own Daimons. It started as a hum, and slowly grew into a song - one he had first heard on the shores of Lake Ostonus. There, he had torn up the First Citizen's orders before his men, and had led them to open rebellion. By night and candlelight, Hushed wives still sing, Of a dream of Empire, And of light it will bring,
Through Camperia and beyond the Tircon, To the walls of old Falor, Through village and city, by day and night, A wind comes calling, borne on its wings we hear,
"Have you seen the Emperor, by day or by night? Will still he sleep, beneath the mountain? O Palaienid! Forever shall we gaze, Towards Falor, golden Falor, until the end of days." Constantin Noval found his own voice rising to meet theirs, and understood at last that this war which consumed them all was a war for Meaning itself. Alvaro had challenged him with a question. What is an Idea without a Daimon to represent it? The answer, most certainly, should not lead to despair. If Mankind must make their own Meaning, free of Gods, then let them build a world of hope if naught else. So long as they resisted the Daimon, at least, Mankind would have the freedom of that choice.
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Post by ashenmoon on Aug 7, 2021 19:56:36 GMT
Troklos drifted to the ground, supported by grubbing hands. Boriates pushed his way to the man's unconscious, overpowering form - there was blood everywhere...
"Bring my personal healer!" he heard the detested voice cry out, waveringly, feebly, commandingly.
"Lord Nikaioforos - so, you are improved."
In the flickering torch-light, his co-general's grimace was lost in chiaroscuro, shapes, moving meaninglessly. Around them, soldiers whispered, beasts grunted, Spirits moaned. The night seemed - denser...
"Look here, old boy - it's no use, whatever this grudge it is you have against me. This isn't time. Why, just the other day-"
Adelate Boriates, scion of the Great House of Douvanes - commander of men, butcherer of Tharannon, confidante of the Empress - and the Hunter himself! - spat on the ground. He almost hit the healer scurrying to the ignored messenger's body. Par-Arash circled, warily, scimitar gleaming with unshed blood.
"Save it for your cronies in the Main, general. The Mark insisted you join his contingent, but don't imagine your influence over the vanguard extends beyond observation-"
"And observe I have! I say, this situation cannot go on - for all we know, we are surrounded! Don't think I am being... ungentlemanly, in my missives to Her Highness, but this laggardliness..."
A howl rose from the blackness beyond. Out there, somewhere, something - somethings - moved. Troklos' mount, a much-abused animal by the looks of it - lathered, shivering - whinnied pathethically, remonstrated uselessly.
"Someone, take care of this horse!" Boriates barked brusquely.
"Listen here, old boy - this really can't go on. Why, we are in dire straits here - and you're... I'm not sure you realize-"
The General directed a look of such intrepid loathing that, even in the dark, Nikaioforos was momentarily given pause. Sturdily, the cripple rallied:
"I don't know what you've got against me -"Boriates laughed, a bitter bark "- but there's lives at stake here!"
"You don't even remember her, do you?"
Troklos moaned, shifted under the ministries of the healer.
"Who, damn it?"
"My wife..."
"Your wife?" Nikaioforos laughed, rocking the wheelchair he was in. "By the Three, I've never... why, with Kolozotes'-"
"As you keep reminding us! Five summers since. In Rasseia. By the lakeside, on the promenade..."
Nikaioforos blanched.
"I..."
"Didn't even remember."
Boriates gestured, inchoately. Par-Arash interpreted him, correctly. The offending general was escorted away, through the bustling masses - "Get back to your posts, men!" - slowly, the crowd thinned. Boriates knelt down by Troklos' side.
Wheezingly, Troklos told him of the rear guard's actions - how the chimeras had come upon them in the night - how they had managed to escape - but the way the main army, sluggishly proceeding up the main route to Sabria was all but exposed, cut off, swollen slave legions unrulily swarming the landscape; how Troklos and his Lapsed had set out to warn Boriates and the vanguard - all means of magical communications scrambled in this god-forsaking land by deep-set Inquisitorial curses - and their desperate game of cat-and-mouse, out there, hiding from and hunting the chimeras, his nephew, Paulus, surviving the longest and why hadn't the Voice intervened, oh, Powers above!
The man fainted.
Boriates stood, erect. Now he knew his enemy - the twin names of the chimera that haunted them.
Before him, the dark resolved into blacker shapes - contorted silhouettes detaching themselves from a backdrop of noise - figures, resolving out of mist. The slave-priest's scimitar whirled, an arc of guarding light, as a powerful hand splayed across his chest and pushed the general back...
Beside him was Issar Arezis, the Tribunes' prayers a sibilant whisper:
"The Three save us!" gasped a multitude of voices.
A lightless light blanketed the world - every detail stood out in unbearable clarity - and eyes shied from the unnatural sight, the impossible resolution - and the monstrous, torturous forms arrayed just beyond the circle of real-light: chimeras, somehow suddenly audibly babbling, muttering, arguing, unholy cages radiating hate, pain, fear, confusion, in a weltering shockwave hurtling against them...
His knees buckled.
The Ancestors of the House of Arban coiled, roiled about him. Memories of the little village - the dusty tracks, the shepherds' flutes, the new well that had been dug by the smith after the old went dry - how the village had rejoiced! The dry season had been fierce that year -
- he gasped for breath, like a boy crushed by first love's shattering, recalling holy places, consecrated by the sacrifice of a child, a kiss, a broken oath - the secret passion of an ageing, ailing mage for an unthinking maid, a saint - made manifest... and made to war one another... and twisted, perverted; rape, murder, licentious ravages claiming, clamouring for attention- oh, it was all folly, all doomed, all the idiocy of a child - death, death was the only release from this circus of torturers and clowns-
And he could see, there - so sharp, as if he could reach out his hand and touch him - the lodestone of it all, a locus too terrible to look at straight-on... what had once been Charger, now perverted by the soul of that one...
A hundred, two hundred, voices rose from the camp, all as one - howling, writhing, not so much seeking an escape as lamenting the inescapable-
A thunderclap of blackness. Issar, on the ground beside him, gasped like a fish - and above them, the night sky shimmered, the air whirled. Watchfulness soared.
Triunes - Smaragi and his two confidantes - appeared above Boriates. One - a woman - he had never asked her name - stood stretched as if by a rack, shouting words the General's ears refused to hear - echoed by Smaragi and the other under their breaths, as the two men grabbed Boriates and Issar and began dragging them into the camp...
Past them whirled, weeping, the manticores - "Father!" they roared - launching into the night, disappearing from view - he would never again see them alive...
Boriates, mind returning, feebly, then insistently, shook off Smaragi, stood up on wavering legs. Around him, knights were whispering to their Spirits, beseeching blessings - geometries of light splashed upon them, they roared as muscles ripped, horns grew - and swords and spear-tips bristled, lines were formed. Somewhere, a horse was screaming its death-throes.
Par-Arash appeared, scimitar dripping blood that disappeared without a trace upon the blood-thirsty ground, the Momlan priest's skin seeming to drink the light; all of him a nothing, a negation-
The weight of the chimeras' suffering washed over him once more, but as pain sometimes suffocates, sometimes - it liberates...
"Get off me!" Boriates elbowed aside his bodyguard's attempts to force him back, found the forgotten sword by his side...
Rahea, she-bull of Douvanes, Spirit of my House: guard now over your son! Linger not over the flag-stones of the court of your mansion - let the stablehand and the milk-maid to their business... let your blessings travel, for a moment, across the the world - luck of my ancestors, stand by me!
"Charge!" he was shouting. "Death!" he was calling for, and the men around him answered - "Death!" - if their own, or the enemy's release was sought for, Boriates did not know, and did not ask, as he trotted forward, pulling soldiers with him, like leaves caught in a wayward current in a placid river. More men joined by his side, spears sinking, aiming into the dark - where the manticores and chimeras' struggles went unseen, not unheard - and Beasts of Spirits, hulking and slinking and leaping and drifting all about him, all responding to the same call - all one - now or never; do or die - it was all the same to him, but let the poor creatures out of it, their suffering was too much to bear...
They burst into the dark - the entire camp, he imagined, all exploding as one, an expanding ring of men, all a-flame with the Charge - he could barely see his hand before him; someone far behind carried torches - "Light, damn it!" he cried, and someone - not Issar, but a yellow-eyed man - touched him upon the shoulder, and the dark grew less oppressive... he looked around: they were in the woods - cypresses and oaks, limbs curving and twisting - and there, in front of them, a dark shadow - something that had once been man-like, scuttling spiderily - the men around him howled triumphantly, pounced forwards...
"Hold!" the General's voice pierced the din: and the men - unwillingly - willed themselves to obey. Somewhere, elsewhere, screams flitted out of the night: the blood-craze chilling. Suddenly they seemed very alone, the other voices out there in the dark - all very far away.
Boriates swallowed. What - what had happened, where had they gone? Casting about, he could see - maybe twenty men, none that he knew well: not even Par-Arash (the cur would pay dearly!) - and around them, the grove seeming to come to life...
"Back! Back to the camp!"
They had three torches between them - raising them high, the men - good men, only the best went into the vanguard, experienced knights and the sons of families too great to let down by cowardice or illoyalty - fell back, now cautiously, back towards the unseen camp - and when they came upon, behind them - on the path that they had come - the bodies of two men, blood glittering in the dark - they parted quietly and continued on their way; no one said a word...
The ground rose and fell, though the underbrush was nonexistent - it seemed they were walking in a park, ground soft with pines and mulch. Glimpses of the camp that they had abandoned appeared, disappeared, between the maddening array of the trees. The far-away (how had they gotten so far, so quickly?) camp seemed a beacon, the tents, tantalizing slices viewed through the ever-shifting lattice of branches and trunks, glowing in the dark.
Then an elbow jabbed into his side. Boriates sputtered, bent over - and raking claws raked empty air. Someone screamed. Something hot spattered his face. He looked up - everyone was shouting, running, now - torches fell to the ground, lending everything an up-side-down air - and a chimera was in their midst, a gray blur to the general's confused vision - a half-naked man, proportions twisted, fingers knife-like claws, clothes sailing in tatters behind knotted limbs - bodies crumpled, fires spread, everywhere chaos and disorder...
Then Par-Arash was there, blade cutting calligraphies into the air - the chimera howled, noises too guttural for a worldly throat to emit - men fell like trees, but more rallied - other parties emerging from the woods - now the beast was encircled, raging impotently as a ring of soldiers jabbed, stabbed at it - like a wild boar it charged one side, splintering spears like death-brittled saplings - a man's throat became a black gash, spurting blood - but others closed the ranks, pushed back - spears buried into the unholy flesh, struggling, heaving it back - and Par-Arash inscribed a half-circle like a moon aslant, and the beast's neck was parted, and the body slumped, and fell.
Already from afar they could see the camp was ravaged. As they once more entered its circle of light, they found the fires scattered, the tents - such as had been pitched - overthrown, and everywhere the bodies of men, and moaning cries.
They hurried through the deserted grounds towards the Archon's section of the camp. Rounding a pavilion belonging to one of the Kathodeen - the younger sister - it was on fire - they all but stumbled over another of the beasts, bent over - feeding upon - the bodies of two men...
Par-Arash flew upon it, a blur of motion - out of which an inhuman fist connected with his skull, a wet slap - the penitent priest wavered, floating almost, to the ground... Boriates led the charge, throat sore - he had been yelling almost continuously, but what! What senseless noise was this - he thought as the chimera's arm connected, like a piece of wood - he folded over, crumpled. More men appeared - there was Longo, and the Malachites - brave men, but who can truly trust a traitor? Of course their nation was accursed and it was the right thing to desert it, but one could never quite bring oneself to rely upon their sort: not willingly, in any case. Men died around him.
Longo grasped his wrist, hauled him to this feet.
"We've got this one - go on, protect Him!"
Cries rose in alarm, and bodies suddenly shifted, men whirled. Another black silhouette appeared, gyrating as a thing mechanical, sprouting smoke - but the men fell about it too sinously, like wheat before the scythe. The Malachites fell upon the demon - it seemed there rained blood -
And then the one, the lodestone, that one, appeared...
Not looking back, Boriates stumbled away - clutching his side, he must have broken a rib or two - supported by a few men from the woods. He recognized an adjutant of prince Isparos, one of the Kathodeen sisters, Smaragi (where were his two companions?) and a sergeant carrying Par-Arash as a man carries his wife over the threshold - the priest-slave diminutive in his arms. They hobbled forward, approaching the Archon's camp-within-the-camp - there was Savanna, sprawled on the ground... and around them, a heap of the mangled forms, the chimeras.
The Mark stepped out of the Archon's pavilion. Boriates' party parted about the seraph like the sea around the Bridge, and pantingly slumped against the tentcloth.
"So this is what you have led us to." The Mark did not ask.
"I..."
Everywhere he could see - between the trees and the tents - now appeared the dark shapes, the twisted limps, the growls...
Boriates struggled to his feet.
"To arms, men!"
The Mark raised his hand: Boriates paused. For a moment, he saw it - the sling in the Spirit's hands... and then it became a whirl; there was a snap, a crack, a flash of light: one of the chimeras fell to the ground. Then another - and then the rest rushed forward, a black wave.
Boriates and the others - too few, much too few! Where had they all gone? - raced to meet them. Ignoring the pangs in his side, Boriates charged one of them head-on, at the last moment falling to his side, sword outstretched - the blade scoring the fiend deep - as all around him, the battle was joined.
It would have been over in seconds, but...
Black-limbed, armoured in golden bracelets, the seraph moved - too swift for sight. He launched himself into the strife, wrestling one chimera to the ground, striking another so that it was propelled into the air like a leaf - like a leaf caught in the current the seraph created as he danced through the night, indolently, dealing out blows left and right, inviolable...
Then that one appeared, once more, inescapable - inevitable. The robes of the Inquisition flowed about it as if in water - tattered mockeries of what it once had been, the mockery of a mockery... the seraph, dancing through his opponents, directed a glancing blow against the one - and it rebounded, as if he had struck rock: Boriates heard the hollow sound.
The seraph's dance stumbled.
Within the blink of an eye, the seraph was surrounded. The general, and the other men, rushed to the seraph's aid - but the wall of swirling bodies was too thick, too thorny - Boriates barely avoided a swipe that would have rendered him in two. The Kathodeen spinning a green-shimmering light, entrapping one of their opponents - for a second only; and men fell upon it, stabbing fiercely - but the creature burst out of its bounds almost at once, ignoring its blows and lashing out on its own - and they fell, uselessly, while the seraph was being buried...
There came a great shout. Boriates turned in time to see the hulking form of Troklos - bandages banners behind him - leaping into the fray. Explosions burst about him, and the chimeras scattered with sudden fright. The Mark, shrugging aside his assailants, leapt into the air - Boriates caught a glimpse of his blood-streaked body - and continued on, into the dark: blotting the stars, the seraph disappeared...
And Troklos was alone.
Boriates - he was on the ground - crawled towards the pavilion, refusing to listen to the death-coughs from behind. He felt - the ground thundered - the remaining chimeras bounding after him - everyone was gone, all resistance was gone. They would fall upon him-
He looked up, saw the tent-flaps shift...
"Oh," said the Hunter.
Boriates closed his eyes and waited for death to come.
Sounds - struggles, feet scuffing the ground, grunts, wet splatterings, metal ringing...
He opened his eyes.
The Hunter stood - bathed in blood - and in his outreached arm he grasped, by the throat, that one. The creature hung limply, like a rabbit from the noose.
"Oh... so this is what it has come to. Do you recall... but no." The Hunter grew quiet, face downturned, reflective, for a minute. Then he looked up, smiling once again:
"Ah, but what times we had - what memories!" Gaily he laughed. "Such times... I do not believe we will see their like again."
Boriates felt his jaw open...
"My son / is dead / whyyy..."
About him, the words were echoed - a handful of other voices, most of them straining towards death - all different, all as one Voice.
The Hunter replied, indolently:
"It appears the boy was killed - what's it to you?"
"He was / mine... / do not-"
The Hunter grinned:
"I will whatever I please."
Lazily, he flicked the chimera aside.
It scuttled away, into the dark.
Boriates found he had breath to speak - his own words - that had been a Visitation!:
"That... that was Aurelio Manza... or what remained of him."
"It was my son, come to pay his respects."
"Respects?" Boriates spluttered. "We... there are so many dead!"
"Quite the tribute!" the Hunter laughed carelessly.
"But... the war..."
The Hunter waved dismissively.
"Oh, don't worry about all that. Now we can go to Sabria - we should be there by noon tomorrow. I hear the city is all but deserted - everyone has fled while we ravaged the countryside around them."
Boriates swallowed, sought his voice... The archon eyed him, suddenly, angrily - in the way of someone frustrated at explaining a school problem to a friend.
"They were only humans! Mere... weave. What is Man without Ideas? Lazy, dumb animals, and if not that - then making some horrid noise, wanting this or that... we can always find more where those came from. No, it is different for us who matter: you will see."
And he turned, and went inside the pavilion, and the cloth fluttered behind him, and grew still, and it was quiet.
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Post by Timeon on Aug 10, 2021 18:27:46 GMT
The Legion had come close to catching up with Malvern; the Empire's host having wheeled off course, and wasted days pillaging the countryside, for some design Constantin Noval could not fathom. Would it prove blessing, or curse? For the Legion could not move as fast as Malvern, dragging cannon behind. The Empire tarried, but even then, it moved with inhuman speed between one village and the next, leaving devastation in its wake. With each ruined home they found, the men and women of the Legion found their ideological differences whittled down. This conqueror had not come to govern, but to destroy. As Constantin crested a hillock, he looked down upon a new vista of devastation. This one, however, was no hamlet of the Republic. Killing fields stretched beneath him, like so many smashed anthills, crushed insects dotting the horizon. Earth lay cloven, trees toppled, as bodies lay twisted and torn in ridiculous shapes.
"Can it be?" Father Alvaro's eyes fluttered madly, raking in the sights.
Colonel Khalez rode up to join them and the rest of high command, his reaction matching the Inquisitor's.
"The reinforcements!" Khalez laughed. "Our men have arrived from the western front! Struck so hard, they've abandoned their dead!"
"Not so! This is not your doing!" Alvaro retorted, as if the claim had been a personal affront by some foreign ambassador. "It was ours! We did this!"
Alarmed shouts from below broke Constantin off from the argument. They all rode down to meet the scouts, who were dragging some misshapen form between them with ropes.
The shape they pulled behind them left a trail of dark blood behind it - and yet, it whimpered like an animal, spat, and moved. It was alive.
Father Alvaro dismounted his horse, mumbling and praying the tenets of humanity. He examined the beast, then howled. Constantin thought him dismayed, but when Alvaro turned, he saw ecstasy.
"He lives! The High Inquisitor lives!"
Quite suddenly, the form came to life, twisting, beating the ground, laughing, crying, screaming. The horses, quite naturally, panicked. One bolted in one direction, the other in the opposite. Pulled taut on two ropes, Aurelio Manza was lifted into the air. A cracking, popping, fleshy sound warned that something had reached breaking point. Constantin Noval's own horse reacted but a second later, his well-trained war steed reverting to its basest instinct. Constantin found his world turning, spinning. He hit the ground unceremoniously, agony shooting through his leg. The laughing, bellowing and shrieking bit into his ears, hammering his skull. Fumbling for his pistol at his belt, he rolled to the side, enough to get a vertical view of Aurelio Manza pulling at one of the ropes which bound him. The other had cut free. A nightmarish, made-up language issued from a beastly face, an animal skull whose visage burned to behold. Constantin was forced to look away, placing his face into the crook of his arm. He fired his pistol in the direction of Manza, but not even the gunpowder inches away from his face could block out the incessant celebration of the Chimera. Ears ringing like two gongs, Constantin opened a quivering eye. The High Inquisitor pulled the horse to the ground, rope in hand, and dragged it towards him. Among the evil words and holy nonsense, the High Chimera babbled familiar words... Constantin paused but a moment to make sense of them - to suddenly realise they were but a children's playful rhyme. Father Alvaro prayed beside him, somehow unharmed by the violence of it all.
At last he had it. What had once been Aurelio Manza clasped fingers like eels around the horse's neck. The horse's mouth was frothing, eyes cast backwards into oblivion. Constantin Noval took aim this time, and fired again, the pistol recoiling painfully. The bullet splattered into the Chimera's chest. Seconds later, it pulled the horse close, and its rhyme turned to song, not entirely unpleasant. Calm fell upon the killing field, as Aurelio Manza's childish rhyme reverberated into a quiet orchestra of lamenting voices, all emanating from the Chimera. The rhyme, Constantin remembered, concerned a horse. A dirge of the old nomadic folk from the plains, and their Daimon steeds. They had been some of the very first victims of the Inquisition in Jovinium. Aurelio Manza heaved and sobbed with a separate voice, amidst the uninterrupted song as the horse grew still.
Seconds later, the Inquisition descended beside Alvaro in a flash of light and swirling cloth. They surrounded the High Inquisitor, whether to shield him or put him down, Constantin did not know. The pain returned to him in all of its intensity, the shock sinking in beside it. He fell sideways onto his back, eyes gliding skywards. Someone called his name, and Acastus appeared above him, even as Constantin thought no more, consciousness slipping away, and Aurelio Manza's mourning lament fading with it.
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Post by Timeon on Aug 28, 2021 12:05:53 GMT
Chapter 3
A hunting horn droned across the plains. Startled birds took to the skies. Weary guardsmen turned with musket and pike in hand stared down across the city of Sabria. Like innermost districts shone with marble, but beyond its tired walls, slums twisted and grew outwards. Beyond Sabria's southernmost gate, an ancient Faloran road stretched out across the isthmus, past the great lakes which surrounded Sabria, before vanishing on the horizon. There, the purple evening sky met the earth, and it was from there that the Hunter's horn sounded once again. Like the shadow of a cloud cast upon the landscape, the armies of Malvern inched into view before Sabria.
Tomas de Campo extended a hand, and Consul Dorman Heraklid placed his spying glass in the High Inquisitor's grasp.
"We come to the threshold." Tomas de Campo stated, staring through the glass at the dim outlines of the hosts of Daimon and men. "It is our turn to man the walls of Old Falor."
Heraklid held a hand over his mouth, brows folded in poorly clenched horror.
"I was not born in this city, in spite of my name." Heraklid breathed. "But I cannot bear to see it in the hands of the Enemy. However briefly until the Western forces arrive to liberate it."
Tomas de Campo could not withhold a sneer.
"Sabria? Sabria is meaningless. Had your forebear's revolution succeeded, the Senate and Collegium would today be operating from Varantium, from Old Falor. Veronika Heraklid failed, and Shatterbridge was the result. What are we doing upon this island, if not running and hiding? And since the revolution failed, Consul, we are a government in exile. And our cause, our court, shall be held from whatever corner of the world the Daimon pushes us to. Don't mourn Sabria."
Dorman Heraklid stood aghast.
"You spite our founders? It was your Crusade that crumbled outside the walls of Old Falor! The Eclipse!"
Tomas de Campo waved him away, returned to stare through the looking glass. A slight smile graced the corner of his mouth.
"But the Inquisition will not fail again."
---
Beyond the isthmus, past even the Malvernian hosts and Hunter himself, Constantin Noval awoke in a litter. His wife presided over him as Constantin brushed his mental fog aside.
"Constantin." Marcila spoke softly. "Drink."
Constantin accepted the water which was offered, struggled to make out his surroundings. There was a terrible smell. It only struck him a moment later that his wife was dead.
"How did you-"
Marcila quieted him with a hard look.
"I told them I could help you." Marcila glanced over her shoulder. "What is his name - Acastus - very loyal. An intelligent and loyal soldier."
Constantin propped himself on one elbow, blinked through dazed vision at the image of his wife solidifying. Before, though she bore some of the same mannerisms, and same voice as his own Marcila, she could not help but appear to him as a mockery. Now, however, it was as if something had changed.
"Aurelio Manza..."
Marcila grew stiff, hostile.
"You speak of the Hungry One. Imprisoned, restrained." Marcila cocked her head. "A dog on a leash. Ready to be set loose. On a whim. He waits."
Constantin pushed the ladle of water aside which she once again offered him.
"I need Acastus, golem. Bring me Acastus."
"Golem?" it was Marcila's turn to recoil. She made as if to retort, but then her anger evaporated. She simply stood up and left.
Acastus took her place moments later, watching her pass with suspicion.
"You're awake, commander. She delivered on her promise."
"Be that as it may." Constantin groaned. "What is our situation?"
Acastus' mouth formed into a thin line before he answered.
"The Legion has fallen under Colonel Khalez' overall command as you've slumbered since yesterday's incident. The Inquisition has propped up his authority, of course. In the heart of their camp, we can hear screeches, laughter, but can see nothing. It is said they have put Aurelio Manza in a runed chest, even as they feign deference to him. They still refer to him as High Inquisitor."
"The war, man! What of the war!" Constantin shook his fist, voice cracking.
"We are half a day's march away from Sabria." Acastus confessed. "Malvern, I fear, has already arrived."
Acastus was holding something back, Constantin could tell.
"Out with it, man!"
"Our scouts report that Malvern has begun its attack, commander."
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