Efrain was thoroughly exhausted, and more than a little perturbed. He realised that he’d come dangerously close to his own end up on that rooftop. While he had no flesh to pierce, bones could be smashed and to be exposed now at all times would be fatal. When he had thought there was little hope and was going to try a desperate last gout of flame, he’d seen Aya, a mere little girl, running across the roof ridge.
‘Turn back!’ he’d wanted to shout - there was nothing for her to do here. She’d only get herself killed, or worse, the notion only reinforced as a man was dragged down and mutilated. Then she’d flung an arm out at empty air and a shape crystallised in front of them.
A shower of yellow and blue sparks exploded into life and Efrain felt a wash of heat as magic surged around him. There had been no time for consideration or even a quick word before he harnessed it - the same molten magic he’d witnessed all those years ago in Neith. With the help of Innie, he’d turned it into a blaze that knocked many of the remaining creatures off the roof, their wings burning as they fell to crash upon the hill.
Yet the surge was short lived, and even as Efrain had managed that last trick he had felt it fading. The power was already fading so he tore off what he could to fill his own reserves. A final pair of fireballs knocked some distant flyers down into the forest. Then it was gone.
Efrain then turned, and found to his horror that Aya was smothered by a creature. Lillian was already there, throwing it against the wall and bursting it into a squall of gore. Efrain blinked. Had he known the paladin was that strong he’d… but no there was magic, undoubtedly. The last of the fire was dying down when one of the knights on the rooftop yelled out to them.
“Back down to the church! The roof is not safe!”
Lillian was already moving, tossing Aya to Niche as she retrieved her abandoned sword. Efrain gestured to Innie, and the two of them set off, followed by a defender, and Claralelle, who had slung the fallen man over her shoulder. The two came by the back of the group, Lillian guarding their rear as they retreated down the steps.
The door slammed behind them, and they emerged out into the cathedral, finding it already abuzz with activity. The wounded were ferried to sick beds, and Efrain was left alone near the altar. Aya lay, staring up at the ceiling lifelessly, as the paladins and the other children leaned over her. Efrain approached with a quick lope, and inspected the girl. Physically, she seemed fine, if half conscious. Magically, there was only an eddie and trickle coming from her.
“Shear bloody exhaustion,” said Innie, “she just channelled the powers of a wisp matriarch.”
Efrain was quick to confer with the assessment, and spoke up to the paladins.
“She’ll sleep it off,” he said, before turning on his heel and heading out to the front doors.
The fighting had turned from a slow drudgery of throwing back the creatures from the walls, into a chaotic brawl. It was those damn flying things that picked off defenders from the wall, or plunged into groups of men, sending them tumbling.
Efrain ran down the hill, joined by several men from the second barricade in front of the church at a soldiers command. Now that he was closer, he saw that the slimmer landwalkers had been joined by a bulkier, smashing type, that were laying into the makeshift barricade. Several sizable holes had been opened, through which clawed hands groped and were hewn at.
Still, the barricade was going to fall eventually, and there was still a good few hours before sunrise. Efrain purged the idea that they would simply continue after dawn. He instead focused on the length of the wall. Even getting close to it would be risky, as there were a decent amount of creatures that had made it over to charge at the soldiery.
More dangerous still was the flyers, one of which was brought down a few dozen paces from Efrain. As the villagers pinned it with crude wooden spears, soldiers came in with steel to messily finish the job. The arched entrance was the weakness Efrain concluded, and if it was breached they would be overwhelmed. Simply rebuilding and reinforcing the barricade was not viable, not now.
Something more drastic, something more immediate. Something he could manage with limited ability to magic. It had to be something within the environment itself, something like-
Efrain took off toward the wall. It was drastic, it would hopefully be immediate, and he might just have enough magic to prompt it. He came to the black stone, reaching a full twice his height and more. The fighting was thickest to the left of him, but that’s also where the opening was.
Efrain turned to men that had followed him with a ‘protect me as best you can’, and placed his hand on the stone. Immediate he felt that faint glimmer, that old magic from so very long ago, woven into the very rock. This wall had been shaped by magic, he was sure, laid and moulded, and what was once done could be done again. He was vaguely aware of Innie, she must’ve guessed what he was doing, pouring her reserve into him.
He reached out to the stones, trying to imagine those people around a bonfire with their shadowy faces. This time, instead of listening, he coaxed them, telling them to remember the old times, when they had been pliable, and worked into the shapes they were now. They barely answered, preferring to carry on in their way, set and still.
“C’mon,” he growled, “c’mon you fuckers. Move. Move. Move! That’s what you want.”
The heads began to turn, and magic began to flow, but it wasn’t quite enough. Efrain pushed again, letting his and Innie’s magic pour in. The figures began to move, slowly, too slowly, so Efrain gave one last push, and the entire wall rumbled before him. An urgent shout went up from the centre of the brawl and defenders began to leap off the wall as it shuddered and groaned. The voussoirs that held up the opening began to crack and shift. They must’ve been holding back the stone and its ‘desire, but as Efrain pushed his will upon the stone, one fell out, then another, then several.
That was enough - the blackstone began to bulge and flow, slamming together and crushing anything in between. The debris of the barricade exploded outward on both ends with a mighty crunch. The result after the dust had settled was an ugly, ballooning scar issuing from where the arch had once been.
Efrain leaned back, taking a moment's peace, which was none the sooner interrupted by a mishappend figure coming for him. The men brought it down and it was succinctly dispatched. The rest of the night went on like that, Efrain and Innie offering what little help they could with light and fire as the defenders slaughtered the now subdued onslaught.
By the time that light began to glow through the fog, Efrain was more tired than he’d been for a very, very long time. The garden and graveyard around the church was thoroughly trampled, littered with the bodies of monsters, but also with men. He didn’t bother to count as he staggered back to the church.
The rest of them were cleaning up what little enemies were left, which had slowed nearly to a trickle. Mercifully, it seemed that the monsters were at least slowed by dawn, their blows less forceful and their charges more halting. Efrain pushed back through the out barricade and into the first, finding the quiet discomforting. Innie elected to stay outside, not wanting to spend a second more in the smothering cold.
Damafelce was at a table with her captains, looking only slightly less exhausted than everyone else. She had remained behind the lines for the most part, but the blood upon her armour told him that she’d probably led a sortie at some point. She came over and rested a hand upon his shoulder, her fingers sinking into the thick fabric.
“Did you do that… to the wall?” she said, words thick in her mouth.
“It seemed like what would buy us time,” he said, nodding.
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“It did. You saved a good few lives,” she said, “but we lost even more than expected, due to those airborne wretches. And there’s no telling how many more of them there might be in the fog. We need to regroup in the church and prepare for a last stand till the next dawn.”
“I need to unlock that door in the basement, and destroy whatever is causing this damping,” he said, “or we might not last till next dawn.”
Now it was her turn to nod.
“Do what you think you must,” she said, turning back to the table and her plans.
Efrain approached the altar, where Aya lay under a blanket, with her head on Frare’s lap. Lillian stepped in front of him as he went to kneel, murder in her eyes.
“Leave, now,” she hissed.
Efrain could’ve been placatory, could’ve been conciliatory, or anything in between. He could’ve explained that he only wanted to monitor her well being. He could’ve said he felt a pang of guilt and wanted to make sure she was all right.
“Oh, stand aside you stupid little girl,” he sneered.
Lillian, by the way her eyes widened, hadn’t expected that. Before she could even begin to formulate a response, Aya’s eyes fluttered open, and she tried to raise herself. Both Sorore and Frare pushed her down, informing her that she needed rest. Lillian fell to her side, reaffirming the conclusion, and asking her if she was alright.
“The knife,” she murmured, “Sorore, I saw it. The tool, the knife.”
Efrain’s ears perked up and he moved forward.
“What knife?” he asked.
“The one used to shape the stone, I think. It was…” she began to motion in the air with her hands, trying to draw the shape.
“It was of average size, maybe slightly on the larger size. There was a central blade. Broad, thick. Like a chisel more than a blade. It stuck out a bit, then it curved…”
She cupped her hands to indicate how it did so.
“Like a small plough,” she said, “It was the tool that was used for the stone. I’m sure of it.”
“How do you know this?” Efrain said.
“The girl, the ghost, she showed me,” she said, as her eyes began to flutter, “I think- I think I- in the chamber. She saw the light close behind her. Someone must’ve shut her in.”
She pitched back into sleep as her lids slid shut, but it was enough.
Efrain sat back and thought - the ghost must’ve been Jove’s daughter. And she was showing Aya something, something they needed. Perhaps she’d not been as dead as he previously thought, or, at least, not in spirit. But that confirmed his suspicions - a tool, a magical tool used to shape the stone. But where was it now? If the priest had come out with it, and it wasn’t in the church, where could it have gone? Sorore had turned a pale shader as she nodded solemnly. She looked up at Efrain with a mixture of both wonder and no small amount of confusion.
“I imagined the same knife, when I thought about it,” she said, “a chisel-like blade, that furled in toward the hilt. Crystal, with gold inlays.”
Was it lost behind the door as the stone slammed shut? No, he had to force the stone to move, the knife must’ve been used to close it, but by who? Jove’s and Modred’s words came back to him about the priest ‘Blutarch’, how he was a deacon in truth, and how he had followed the priest down to the catacombs.
He must’ve closed the door behind them - the priest and the girl, since no one appeared to have seen them. But why, what had happened? Efrain stood, thumbing his mask, before turning to the crowd of people. He found Damafelce at her table and pulled her aside.
“I need all the villagers assembled, now,” he said, “someone must know what happened to the tool, and I’m going to drag it out of them whatever they say.”
Her lips were drawn tight, but she nodded, and sent someone to ring a brass plate. Within ten minutes or so, the group had largely assembled before the dais, some two hundred villagers or so. Efrain stepped down from the altar where he sat apart from the paladins and children, and raised his hands.
“Two months ago, something happened here,” he began, gesturing to the church, “and now I have a much clearer idea of what it was. A girl came in, Liara, daughter of Jove and Maisie, under the assumption she’d been possessed. The priest ordered that she be cleansed and took her down to the catacombs.”
He allowed the information to wash over the group before beginning again.
“Now, I do not know what happened down there, at least, not yet. What I do know is that a tool was used, something that might be very valuable to us. A strange sort of blade, chisel-like, that flared out from the base. Does anyone, anyone here at all, know anything about which I speak?”
There was some murmuring, some side to side glances, but nothing.
“Good people, if you have taken oaths to silence, you must now break them. This could spell the difference between living and dying, for me, for you, for your children.”
Still, no one came forward. Efrain was starting to think this had been a fool’s errand.
“Well then. Is there anything that changed in the church after that incident? Any difference in practice or doctrine?”
“We had to start wearing these,” piped up a young man, indicating the necklace that many of the villagers wore, “Blutarch said. Passed ‘em around, he did.”
“My good lad,” Efrain said, hardly daring to hope, “would you mind letting me examine that?”
The man handed it over hesitantly, and Efrain looked at the small piece of metal. It was pitted and warped, scored with what looked to be heat damage. It was black, darker than any forgery he’d ever seen, like it had been pulled from the stone itself. Yet, there was not that same hint of magic as the stone had, rather…
Efrain applied the slightest current of magic and found it passed between his fingers like there was nothing there, not even air. A material with negligible magical resistance - only a handful of things fit that list. Efrain cheated - simulating resistance by passing the slightest of flows in both directions, clashing in the middle of the material.
To his complete surprise, it melted in his hand, splattering on the ground like ink. The villagers gasped, and began to throw the pendant on the ground. There were mutterings of ‘cursed’, and quite a few choice words being directed at Blutarch. Apparently many of the villagers shared Jove’s reservations, albeit likely for different reasons.
“Stop,” Efrain said, slowly, “take them all off, pile them before me.”
The villagers largely obeyed though some having to be convinced by their fellows. Soon, a pile of shabby pendants laid on the church floor. Efrain raised a hand, and over the volume of the pile, he repeated the magical motion, two currents, clashing. They melted into a puddle of stygian goo, sitting between the gaps of the stones.
People were beginning to back away by that point, but Efrain was fascinated. No material he’d ever seen had been so sensitive to that simulated resistance. Out of curiosity, he tried to set a flow, and the metal followed, twisting this way and that. Even more shocking than its liquid state was its behaviour - one would have to establish a ‘flow’, a line of magic across an entire material for it to move but this… he could merely establish a flow for a leading point, and the entire material was dragged with it with astonishing ease.
Even as the other villagers gasped, shrieked, and gesticulated, Efrain laughed. Like a ribbon dancer, he drew the metal up and around, snaking through the air. It seemed to disregard gravity in favour of the magic, eventually settling into his palm. Efrain recalled the feeling of working on his crystals in his laboratory, of materials slotting into place in regular patterns.
He looked at his hand, and in it was a solid black cube, large, but surprisingly light. Efrain raised it upwards, examining its cold sheen. This was something unique, something made, not formed, and thoroughly alien to Efrain’s knowledge.
“Is it- have we been cursed?” said the young man who first came forward.
“Huh?” Efrain said, absentminded, “Oh, oh no. It’s magical, but not cursed. At least, I doubt it. You’ll be fine.”
The answer seemed less than reassuring for the villagers, but he had gotten what he wanted. Now his mind turned to the actual knife - like this it was useful, wondrous even, but it wouldn’t unlock the door. He needed to know the shape, and the only one that seemed to know it was Aya, or…
He turned to look at Sorore, who’d been watching the display, enchanted. She had seen it, hadn’t she, or at least ‘imagined’ it at some point. He walked over to the dias, and sat down, considering if there was another option. The last thing he really wanted to do right now was deal with her paladin minders.
But, still, he needed that shape and he wasn’t like to get it from anyone else. The knife had clearly been a closely guarded clerical secret, hidden even from Naia’s company. How much did the priest know of it, and what it could do, and what it was made of, for that matter? Excitement still reared up at the discovery of this bizarre material, but it was tempered with the growing dread at the pit of his stomach.
Efrain crossed his hand and thought harder through his exhaustion as the crowds dispersed and went back to repairing damage and healing the wounded. He caught glimpses of Claralelle, who had inadvertently taken over the medic station, sending Naia’s aides scurrying around on her orders. That made him smile inside, but it was somewhat dampened with the sheer amount of work she seemed to have.
Finally, his thoughts turned to what he would find beyond the door. The bodies of the priest and the girl, no doubt. Or maybe they would just be ash, with only the power of the wisp matriarch beyond the stone. That could be very bad. But the power of the wisp matriarch wouldn’t restrict magic, would it? There was something else, something that he was missing, which might be a deadly oversight.
But regardless, they were running out of time. Efrain had caught a glimpse of just how many of the monsters there were. Breaks in the fog had revealed hundreds more beyond the walls, and who knew how many more would be oncoming. Even if the defenders killed them all, soon there would be a mountain of bodies stacked against the wall. A perfect ramp for the rest to swarm over and tear them apart.
There was nothing for it, he thought, getting up from the step and turning toward the children. To his surprise, he found Sorore marching towards him, with Lillian at her heels, telling her to sit down. She stood in front of him, looking at him dead in the eye and began to speak. Casually, Efrain tossed the cube to her, which almost toppled her over.
“Come on,” he said, “I need you. You too paladin, watch and listen. You could learn something useful.”
The paladin blustered, protested, and watched as Sorore took off toward the front door. They followed her around the side of the church to a little recessed forge. It was covered by an awning, and was made of older stone than the rest of the building. It must’ve been part of the original castle, left for its functionality.
Currently, there were several men and women working, sharpening swords and rebinding spears. Sorore hardly seemed to notice as she marched on in and turned to face Efrain, holding the cube to her breast. The smiths looked up at them, confused, perhaps wondering if they needed to clear out.
“Go about your work,” Efrain said, waving at them, “feel free to listen in, if you want. It makes very little difference.”
“So, what are we going to do with this?” she said, looking at the cube.
Efrain took it back, and sat it next to a pit of hot coals, where several bent weapons were heating. Instead, he looked around as he mulled over the best way to approach this. He didn’t know the shape, but with her self-assured expression the girl knew, and she knew she knew it and that he didn’t. So, he would have to teach her to work with a material he had never known before.
“Well, my dear,” he said, looking her dead in the face, “you’re going to be forging a blade with it. And you’re going to be doing it with magic.”