“Black Kettle,” the Casiq repeated, tilting his head and smiling grimly. The waving flames in the surrounding city cast moving shadow and light into his bulging eyes.
Aern, Fazel and March watched Tomo move in confusion, standing near one another, as ready as they could be.
Tomo began to sprint towards Kettle.
“Are you ready?!” She hollered at Kettle through her joy.
Black Kettle halted some hundred steps away from the Casiq, and nodded. He placed onf of his ironclad boots behind him, and held the halo aloft with two hands on the hilt before him.
As she ran, and whooped with feral delight, Tomo’s body began to come apart. She stretched forward, like a stream composed of tumbling shards of crystal, curling into a spiral that twisted its way to Black Kettle.
Kettle lifted the hilted black circle towards her coming, and in a quiet explosion of brilliant myriad light, the two joined.
The blazes in the city wavered, dimming the presence of this new fire. The crumbling ruins were static and silent, and the atmosphere became a vacuum.
The bright-faces dipped their faces and flinched back away from this overwhelming, ethereal display. The Althelib sheltered each other within their arms, their voices carrying no sound, as they huddled together in confusion.
Aern knelt down, covering his two guardsmen with his body, his back away from the growing pulsation of light.
The Casiq closed his eyes, and turned his face to the side. One of his old hands rose palm out, as if to push away the assailing brightness.
From her cage, Luinosa witnessed, unflinching. The explosion of light crackling on the other side of the square made her eyes water. But she did not close them.
The circle in Black Kettle’s grip became filled with the power of Tomokava. Her unfettered laughter ricocheted between the buildings across the square, as she wove her way through and around the halo. For a brief moment, she disappeared within it.
Black Kettle lifted the halo by the hilt, looking up at it over his head; a fixed expression of satisfaction on a face of tempered glass.
The halo erupted with a spinning, multicolored liquid flame. From its upper arch, rose an enormous sword-blade of fluid crystal. The brilliant hues the sword took shifted and rippled from the halo to its sharp tip.
From the sides of the halo, two brilliant, naked arms of light extended. Tomo’s arms. They curled forward before the empty circle of the halo, fingers waving. As they passed, a large eye appeared within the circle, the color of living amethyst.
One of Tomo’s arms pointed forward, and Black Kettle lowered his empty gaze to meet the Casiq’s. As Kettle brought the ignited weapon down to one side, Tomo’s arms retracted, and she squealed in anticipation from somewhere inside the sword.
“ROUND TWO!” Tomo called out into the square.
Her voice was everywhere.
In an instant, Black Kettle launched forward, leaving a trail of fragmented illumination from the thought-sword. The streak of shadow and light came upon the trio of guardsmen, then launched over their heads as they watched, dazed.
Black Kettle was nearly upon the Casiq.
The Casiq recoiled in horror, stumbling backwards and falling onto his back, as a dozen bright-faces lept forward mindlessly, to put themselves in between their master and the sudden coming of the black knight. They formed a wall of snatching limbs and gaping maws, and sent the harrowing beams of light from their lifeless eyes.
Kettle pierced forward into their beaming gazes like a black arrow.
Kettle brought his thought-sword down as he landed with a rattle of armor, splitting the first bright-face’s entire body starting from the top of its mask. The same glow that emanated from the sword shone from the hairline wound delivered to the monster. Before its body separated into its two halves, Kettle stepped back with a turn, and the light from the halo reached out in a gleaming semi-circle around him, leaving a horizontal incision on four more of the bright-faces.
As they came apart before Kettle, they choked on their chittering, and their masks became dull. The fragments of their false visages fell to the square’s ground, revealing the writhing darkness in the naked faces that were hidden underneath.
They were composed of an amalgamation of shadowy corpses, limbs, trunks, and twisted faces - all fused together into misshapen skulls. There were thousands of sharp, miniscule teeth, lining the dark portals of their mouths, crowded together unevenly. Their eyes were enormous, glowing orbs of rotted, translucent flesh.
Where the light of the thought-sword had separated their dark forms, the glow responded, then vanished like dying embers as they fell bisected. Their bodies began to disintegrate into the ground, leaving clumps of a steaming, tar-like substance.
Black Kettle turned toward Aern, Fazel and March, and pointed with his dark gauntlets toward the courthouse.
Tomo’s voice rang clear and sweet, like morning birds.
“You guys better run, and take care of your foxes.”
Kettle swung the thought-sword once, then again, in the direction of the courthouse. As he did, the bright-faces who stood in the way were battered to either side, thrown to the ground with their masks and bodies destroyed.
Fazel assisted March, who had nearly returned to his former vigor. Aern stopped and reached out to Kettle. He grabbed the knight by his dark armor, and looked into his glass eyes, which reflected the surrounding fires of the overcity.
“Luinosa,” he pleaded, and turned toward the west of the square.
“Don’t worry,” Tomo said, her voice emanating from the place where Kettle stood. “She’ll join you, and show you a secret way.”
Black Kettle trailed Aern towards the courthouse as he ran, as a small legion of bright-faces surrounded and crept behind him. They seemed eager to come upon the knight, but were cautious, as every swing he delivered turned one of their kind into a pile of dull mask fragments and tar.
Sam swung open one of the doors of the courthouse, and the three guardsmen dashed in, gasping for breath.
“Who is that?!” Sam asked them as they passed. The bright-faces that came upon the steps of the courthouse were being carved to pieces by Black Kettle. The dark hall of the lower courthouse was criss-crossed with the beams of light that emanated from the knight’s dancing thought-sword, and the eyes of the bright-faces.
Above them in the upper portion of the courthouse, the four guardsmen heard the wails of
the Althelib.
“Upstairs!” Aern directed his guardsmen.
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In the square, the Casiq stood watching helplessly as Black Kettle decimated the bright-faces by the twos and threes. Though he was aghast at the sudden twist in his fortune, he was awed by the power of Black Kettle, and the magnificent weapon that he wielded.
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As he lumbered backward, he nearly tripped over the ruin of broken bright-face masks. The Casiq looked about himself, and saw that the half that remained of the bright-faces in the overcity were making their way to the courthouse. He marked the Althelib, all gathered on the balcony, and that some of his bright-faces had found their way to the courthouse roof, ready to leap down onto them.
The Casiq snatched a piece of dull, broken mask from the ground, and held it aloft. It came alive with new light at his touch, and with a push of his fingers, he sent the fragment floating into the night air.
All around the Casiq’s feet, fragments of shattered mask began to take on the same ghostly illumination, trembling as they returned to life, and lifting off the ground. The Casiq flourished his old fingers above his face, and hundreds of those fragments began to float higher, towards the Casiq. Compelled by the Casiq’s power, they joined as they went, coming together piece by piece, around the first fragment.
The bright-faces who began to skulk towards the courthouse all whipped their necks around, and watched, as if called by a voice. Dozens of them turned away from the besieged courthouse, and made their way to a bright, cyclopean mask that formed high over the head of the Casiq. Their own masks fell away as they came forth, revealing their bulbous eyes and giant, disfigured faces. They chittered, and unleashed their siren calls, entranced by the giant mask that hovered ominously above.
The Casiq grinned wildly.
The wails from the courthouse rose as one bright-face, and then another, found its way to the balcony.
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Black Kettle made his way hastily towards the western limit of the city square, where he found Luinosa’s cage.
But she was gone.
“Oh, Sweets,” Tomo said. “Where did you go…”
Black Kettle waved his thought-sword across the span of the overcity and pointed.
In the distance, was the sprinting form of Luinosa, who was nearly at the steps of the courthouse. Kettle looked up, and saw the bright-faces that assailed the balcony.
“Let’s go.”
Black Kettle pitched forward, and flew like a jetstream of dark wind.
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The bright-faces locked their snapping jaws upon the guardsmen that pushed the huddled crowd of Althelib to one side of the balcony. A head was bitten clean off, another swallowed down to the shins, where they broke. The brave guardsman’s lower legs were tossed over the edge and down to the ground of the city as the monster shook its upturned face.
Madreena bounced with as much grace as she could muster, to the doors leading into the courthouse from the balcony. Two of them swung open suddenly, and she halted.
Aern and Sam appeared in the doorway.
“Aernest!” Madreena shrieked. “You’re alive!”
Aern waved her over, and called to the rest of the Althelib who were nearly toppling over the western edge of the balcony.
“Inside, and downstairs!” he bellowed.
The survivors of the undercity dashed into the courthouse, following the Captain’s directions. Two more bright-faces crashed onto the balcony, and were met with their screams. There were five now, gathered on the eastern end of the balcony, crawling forward to the crowd that struggled to funnel itself through its doors.
Between them, March appeared. In his remaining arm, he wielded his crackling baton, sending sparks into the faces of his foes.
They only flinched away before enclosing him again.
March fought on, undismayed.
Black Kettle came down upon the balcony from his great leap, in the midst of the bright-faces, with a resounding impact. His sword moved in brilliant arcs just before the beings noticed his presence. In those first moments, Kettle dispatched two of the monsters.
March doubled back, watching the knight’s violent movements within the group of confused beasts, who had suddenly turned their attention to Kettle.
Kettle’s fist shattered one of the bright-face’s facades with a stiff blow, just before the sword-hand flicked out behind him. The rear monster was run through, stopping dead in its tracks.
The monster facing Kettle stared mindlessly at him without its mask, a haunted chitter emitting from the darkness within its tooth-rimmed mouth. Kettle passed to one side of the unmasked creature, carving off its upper skull through the eyes, and continuing his movement to the bright-face that leapt at him from behind it. The glowing crescent of his sword-swing wrote deeply across the mask of the second, sending it toppling over to one side, with its lower jaw and fore-legs peeled from its body.
The balcony was now empty of bright-faces, and of the Althelib, save for March.
March’s eyes widened.
“What is that?” he pointed into the city.
Black Kettle turned towards the square, as a new source of strange light began to grow floating high over the ground. Beneath it, the tiny figure of the Casiq stood with one arm raised.
Around the Casiq, the remaining legion of bright-faces gathered, shrouded in darkness; the only light to be seen emanating from their giant, upturned eyes. They clambered over one another, forming piles of flailing limbs and saggy, rotting trunks.
The giant, glowing mask, lined with countless cracks and jagged edges where thousands of fragments came together, lowered into the collecting mass of shadow-flesh flesh. It roughly mimicked the facade of the bright-faces, but jutted forward with a beak-like protrusion. The holes for its eyes numbered not two, but three.
March and Kettle stepped forward, to the edge of the balcony.
A great force of wind blasted up from the square, where the darkened mass rose to meet the descending mask. Debri was tossed about in a circle from this cyclopean being, and March shielded his eyes from the stinging dust that whipped into his face.
Black Kettle dipped his sword down to the floor of the balcony, and the light that composed it stepped forth and into the incarnated form of Tomo. The transition was surreal, and March was again astonished.
“Listen Braver,” Tomo said, standing resolutely before him in her ivory armor. “Follow them down, and protect them. Sweets - I mean, Luinosa, will guide you all to our secret place.”
March nodded, eyes large, and spun towards the doors of the courthouse.
Tomo leapt onto the ornate, waist-high wall of the balcony, facing the square. Her ghostly waves of hair rose and whipped violently in the wind that came from the black mass that stood towering only some hundred or so steps from the courthouse.
Kettle stood beside her.
Tomo looked down at Kettle.
“Okay pumpkin. Let’s go.”
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Aern and Madreena nearly collided with Luinosa on the first floor of the courthouse building, as they descended its wide, curling stairs. The three of them embraced each other roughly, without words. They stared desperately, lovingly, at each other’s faces.
March came rushing down, passing the frenetic crowd of Althelib survivors that gathered in the chamber around the landing of the stairs. Some of the Althelib rushed towards the broken doors of the courthouse, to witness the tumult of shadow and wind that gathered at the center of the square.
“Luinosa,” March said through his heavy breaths. “Tomo said that you’d-”
“-lead you to safety.” She threw one long end of her scarf around her neck. “C’mon. Follow me.”
The Captain bellowed at his people.
“Althelib! If you don’t want to die, follow behind us!”
Accustomed now to the protocol, the group of less than one hundred gathered near Aern, who raised a hand to his niece.
“Show us the way, Lu.”
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Outside, the Casiq marveled at his new creation.
The hulking, tower-tall amalgamation of shadow-flesh writhed as its giant mask dug into the end of its long, twisting neck. The shriek that escaped its hinged beak tore through the overcity, sending both pieces of crumbling architecture and the surrounding flames airborne and crashing down around the perimeter of the square.
Its eight long, sinewy legs, thick as temple pillars, smashed the discarded masks with the gnarled knuckles at the end of them, as it pivoted in a half-circle to face the Casiq. The elongated, misshapen body of the shadow-flesh wyrm twisted severely, bringing its jagged, spiked tail around to curl about its master, who stood within the shelter of its body.
The Casiq leered at Tomo as she stood upon the balcony.
The survivors of the undercity broke through the ground floor doors of the courthouse, sprinting as they could to the west of the square, toward the ruined buildings. On the other side of that open run, some few other Althelib guardsmen beckoned and hollered, from a small alley hidden between piles of ancient scrap metal.
The Casiq marked them, and the monster that coiled around him unleashed a nightmarish whiney that issued from the countless wound-like mouths that opened along its body, and up the elongated neck.
Tomo watched the passage of the Althelib with a relieved smile. She stepped backward from the ledge, falling back into Kettle’s upturned halo.
Black Kettle leapt down into the square, and the iron of his armor shuddered as he touched down.
The shadow-wyrm issued a screech of pleasure.