The streets of Amistad were in chaos. It's citizens running amok in a all directions. The light of dawn had yet to touch the sky, well into the witching hour. People flew back and forth, shouting to find loved ones or neighbors in the madness. A woman cried out for her child, or her husband, none could say – and Tyr wasn't stopping. Marching straight through it all and shouldering people out of his way with Alex clutching to the back of his tunic. Okami was somewhere, but he could handle himself, his shifted shape did nothing to weaken him.
“Gregory! Gregory!” She cried. Tyr cursed his luck as Alex released him to make a beeline for the woman.
“Whats wrong!?”
“We're under attack! My husband went out some hours ago. Please, I'm with child!” The woman cried out. She was a portly halfling with kind eyes and a pair of overly thick lips. Pretty, even by human standards. Near a point of mental breakdown, jostled about by the sprinting mass of people until Tyr physically shielded them from the press. Even for him, it was easier said than done, getting slammed into repeatedly, elbowed, even stabbed in the kidneys by a man reaching with his free hand to pluck the amulet off Tyr's neck. He didn't even look, kicking back like a horse and breaking the would be rogue like a piece of driftwood.
“Under attack by who...?” Alex leaped into the air, balancing on a ball of air magic to get a better look at the streets around them. Everywhere was clamorous noise and frantic movement, but she could determine the presence of no enemy.
“Who cares!?” Tyr shouted. “We have to get back to the estate, if the entire association was alerted to a mass bounty--”
“How dare you!” Alex interrupted angrily, pointing her finger into his face. “What use are we if we cannot help these people. Flee if you must, but for all the words I thought I'd call you, coward would never have been among them! Wait... You're bleeding! What happened!?”
“Do you want to play nurse or help this woman?”
Softer hearts prevailed and he surrendered to her will. The estate was well protected both in terms of guards, the council mages that prowled the neighborhood, and Astal – a mage himself. That, and the plethora of defensive enchantments and mana towers practically littering the city.
Tyr summoned an enchanted spear from his dimensional ring and thrust it into her hands.
“I don't use a--”
“Shut up!” He growled. “The pointy end goes in the bad guys. Let's get this over with, and--”
“Urk... I...! URK!” Suddenly, the woman they had just been speaking to began to shudder violently. Cracking noises riddling her body, bending at an unnatural angle. Black blood flew in a projectile from her lips, nearly striking him in the face if he hadn't craned his neck aside at the last moment. Both Tyr and Alex stepped backwards in shock. He couldn't help but watch the aberrant spectacle before him with wide eyes, the flesh was bubbling beneath her skin. A grotesque noise, like the crackling of pine needles set to flame came from the woman's throat. Reaching a crescendo, she froze in place, her arms held aloft at an angle, fingers snapping into unnatural positions.
Her flesh melted away like candle wax, peeling her skin free of the flesh beneath until she was a screeching scarecrow of red flesh far taller and thinner than she had been. Black, murderous eyes, like those of a shark set into her face. But where there had been two, now there were four. A disgusting thing of flesh-less muscle and sinews visible to the eye, raking her claws hands over her warped form and sloughing away some of the flesh. Healing rapidly from the self inflicting wound, and throughout it all it just... Screamed. A banshee cry of pain, torment... Mourning...
Tyr didn't know what this thing was, where it had came from, or what it's purpose might be, but he felt nothing from it but that instinct again. It was unclean.
Alex stepped back in fear, while Tyr stepped forward and grasped the abomination by the skull. It tried to remove itself from his grip, cutting his forearms to ribbons until his sleeves were tattered red. With a squeeze both of the physical and spiritual, he slammed it against the wall and set it ablaze. The scarlet tongues of his flame reflected in his eyes, stomping it out to make sure it was truly dead.
“Why would you do that!?” Alex screamed nearly as loud as the creature had. “How could you do that? She was just a--”
“Not herself.” Tyr was composed, but confused. He could feel the anima running wild in the creature, turning the halfling into a misshapen horror of pure madness. And it had been so fast, he'd smelled nothing in her or on the air previously, and he was always looking. “Do you trust me?”
Alex looked like she might vomit, stab him, or spit in his face all at once – but she nodded. That's all she could do. There were many strange things in this world, but this... “Was it a monster?”
“If there ever was one.” Tyr's furrowed brow and piercing eyes glared down at the remains. There was something so familiar about it's taste, but he couldn't place why he felt that way. It wasn't a monster. This was something wrought by mana. Even if she was inclined to point fingers, his expression was indiscernible.
“Lets go!” He shouted, dragging her bodily through the streets. Tyr could feel her body quaking in his hands, and see the indecision and shame in her eyes. He couldn't blame her, this was sick. Pushing her into an alley – they came face to face with another of the creatures, whipping his sword free from his hip and carving it into chunks of meat that would spasm long after it came free from the body.
Even as its flesh separated under the razors edge of his bastard sword, he saw it reform itself and return to wailing, a limbless torso and head squirming on the ground. Only the fire could put it down with any sense of permanence. He burnt it until there was nothing left to heal.
“What the hell are these things!?” She cried, shaking like a reed in the wind. “Undead!?”
“No.” Tyr's characteristic calm was failing. But even in his current state of mind, he could tell. “They are very much alive.” Undead were constructs of mana, Tythas had taught him that much. Their anima, if they had any – was artificial, but these things were very real. He could hear them raving in the adjacent streets of the city, screeching and howling in agony or rage. Guided by some unknown hand. A thread of mana connection them to a place far afield. Beyond the crater, even. “I don't know what they are, I've never even heard of anything like this. But we have to go! Now!”
The streets of the city were packed with people. Squads of council mages and guards were visible, attempting to control the chaos, finding it impossible to identify threats in the mass of bodies. One moment, a group of citizens would be beating against the door of a shop demanding access, and in another one of them would erupt into a spray of blood like the woman had. Freeing themselves from their mortal shells as if their bodies had been some kind of chrysalis. Falling on their one-time companions with a manic abandon.
It wasn't long before normal people began to look about in fear, asking themselves the honest question. Tyr watched as a man was stabbed to death by his wife in the process of the change, but her knife wouldn't save her from what he'd become. Others simply killed their neighbors with whatever instrument they could get their hands on, change or not. There was no controlling this. Madness was everywhere. In the taverns, the houses, falling off the roofs with wet thumps. Tyr cradled Alex in his arms and jumped. He wasn't even halfway strong enough to make it so high, but she had the presence of mind to do the rest with wind magic. Giving them a better point of view and a relatively safer position from which to get their bearings.
The streets of Amistad were painted with blood. Even before the wrath of the council, there were too many of these things. In their position on the rooftop, Tyr could see hundreds of them. Maybe thousands, increasing in number until the common guard were overwhelmed and it was every man, woman, and child for themselves. He looked on as a hastily constructed barricade on the service district thoroughfare was buried beneath a tide of howling cadavers. Like watching a sandcastle disappear beneath the waves on the beach, back when he and Tiber used to go looking for crabs by the docks. One moment there'd be something real there, and the next there was nothing. Only corpses and more blood.
Tyr leaped back down, seeing a fear stricken figure on the ground. A child. He could turn his back on a grown woman, but not a kid. Children were blameless, bright like Iscari. He didn't know why, but he felt a compulsion so strong to protect that light within them that set every nerve in his mind aflame at the idea that one would hurt a youngling. Something heroic, those few strings of his heart yet to be withered forcing him to action. They really were everywhere, worse on the ground level. Swarming up the walls of various buildings in an attempt to get to those who'd had a similar idea to elevate themselves.
“You're safe.” Tyr said softly, an odd amount of care in his voice considering his personality. “I'll protect you.”
A satisfying clang and the comfortable feeling of safety came at the activation of his mothers armor, hoisting the child in one hand while swinging as fast as he could with the other. His sword became a hammer, and a hammer would do grisly work. Skulls crunched and bodies collapsed under the force, only to rise again anew, whole and untouched no matter how hard he struck them. Blade. Blunt instrument... It didn't matter. They needed magic, and in so great a number his flames wouldn't cut it.
Tyr begged and pleaded the earth to aid him in a way that it never had. Leaving it to faith and stomping at the ground. He asked, and it came, shattering the flagstone and shooting a sheet of them upward in a wall of hard granite. A burning sensation just behind his eyes, its price was pain and it was a bargain he could make, well used to it. Alex returned to his side, recovering from her shock to leap atop the wall and wash the street in a sea of wind magic.
Everywhere was lightning, the flashes visible against the smoke now rising in the air. She stood there triumphant, smelling of burnt flesh and ozone, raising her hand in an attempt to cast the most powerful spell she knew.
“Sky tyrant's fist!” She cried, clawing her hand into the sky and bringing it back down. The cost of the spell was atrocious, wilting her skin and causing her to sag, but it was enough. A price of her own, the spell manifested in the air, dropping a tightly wound three meter ball of foe-seeking lightning into the streets and ensure that they could advance no further for the time being. The force of the summoned serpents pitted the stone and roasted the monstrous creatures from the inside out. Falling backwards from the wall, she croaked in a bid for help, feeling herself sink into the steady arm waiting below.
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“Big brother!” The child cried. “I don't... I don't...”
“What wrong?” He asked, laying Alex to the ground gently and allowing his spira to circulate through the boys body. The child bent low, dropping to all fours and vomiting blood onto the stone of the street.
“No!” Tyr cried. He felt it. A mass of magic inside the boy. Some kind of amalgam of anima and light mana building up inside of him. “No! Please!” He wielded his spira like a scalpel. Pushing back against the mass until his own strength betrayed him. It was so... So heavy. His vision dimmed at the expense and he begun to panic. Okami did his best to hold the strange things at bay, arriving just in time to add his strength to Tyr's. But even the great wolf was not without limits. “Please!” Tyr howled now. To the heavens, to the hells, to all who could hear him. “Help me! Thanatos! Jurak! Astarte! Bumi! Freyja! Nyx! Veles!”
Every god or divine entity or messiah he could think of spilled from his lips as he worked. This was his first real opportunity to do something that mattered, something that could show the others that he wasn't a monster. They saw him, he knew they did. They had to, regardless of their claims otherwise, and they ignored him.
I'll do it myself. Tyr breathed deep. Damned if he'd allow a child no older than four years of age perish under such a hellish fate. I'll do it myself! I'm going to do this, I can do this! I am a spellbreaker!
“Please! Please let me do this, I need to do this!” He begged, screaming until his lungs gave out. Begging the earth, the mountains, the sea, the sky, the flame. There were old legends about how the elements had once been worshiped above the gods. So he called on them, and unlike the other gods they answered back. Filling him with energy until he felt ready to pop. A pain unlike anything he'd ever felt as his mana core swelled and his body bent under the force of it all. He was so close to something, it was in him and all he had to do was make this his reality.
I can do this! I am not worthless, I am a spellbreaker. This is my only talent. Repeated in his mind, these words intermixed with pleas to anyone or anything that would reach out. Even Orpheus, if he had that sword he could do it... She would know how to fix this...
But Tyr was a primus! The chosen of the gods, since birth he'd been told this thing. Pious or not, he was still a child to them. Even Thanatos had said something similar. He was primus, and he would not fail!
His scalpel of world energy became a hammer. Weaved together with the sacred flame of such intensity that it scalded every inch of him both within and without. So bright that his eyes lit up like lanterns, the ground shaking and the overwhelming purity of flame crashed into everything around him. Burning the abominations nearest him attempting to clamber over the wall and sending all others fleeing into the dark. He hammered. Struck. Tried to force himself it, but... But he was weak. All of the effort in the world could not resolve the defective product that he was.
All he could do was stare. There was cruelty, something Tyr was capable of. And then there was this. Not because he'd asked, or begged, prostrating himself before something as he never had before. But because it was a child. Someone pure and untainted, and nothing had come to save him from this fate.
Big brother. Tyr stared. Every change wracking the tiny body felt like a chisel carving away all the effort to become warm like his friend. It twisted, and so did he. Every moment his face grew hardened. Ever spasm of the thing as it tired to gain some modicum of control over its new form, he grit his teeth harder. He could taste the blood, his pulverized tongue, but even the pain wasn't a friend to him today.
He stared on as the boy became a thing, and the thing became a raving horror. Stared some more, clutching it's delicate torso while the elements fled him, feeling it begin to claw impotently against his armor.
“I am sorry.” He croaked, even now... Even staring at the obvious. It still didn't look like a monster to him. Some of that light remained, and he wilted before the sight of it. “I really am.”
His hands crackled with imminent combusting, vaporizing the creature and the skin of his hands along with it.
“One day.” He whispered hoarsely. Tyr had not know this boy, he had no attachments to this stranger, but he doubted he'd ever felt a loss so keen. In so many more ways than the life. If the boy had been cut down, the prince could've accepted that. He'd have tried, but lived with the failure. But this... There was something so foul in it.
They said the heavens lay in the sky so that's where he looked. Toward their floating palaces and gardens. Hoping they could hear him now, though it didn't matter. They would. It was only a matter of time.
“One day, I'm going to climb up there and I'm going to take from you. At first you will expect me to supplicate, worship you as men do, but I won't. And then, like so many others – you will beg me to stop. I will deny you.”
All that came in answer was the booming of thunder, wailing, and the dry groans of Alex as he lifted her. Eyes full of moisture. They would hear him, one day. And they would feel. If the gods would deny their 'chosen', their 'son', he would find another way.
–
“What the... Vestia forgive me!” Brenn screamed, nearly tripping backward until a man at his rear steadied him. “What the fuck are those!”
Never in all his years and all his lessons as a neophyte had he ever seen or heard of something as terrible as the shambling horrors assaulting the gate. Undead were the worst, most foul enemy of humanity, but somehow – something had surmounted that level of instinctual fear. Something straight out of his nightmares. Skinless, warped creatures of inconsistent appearance. Two mouthed, six eyed, three ropy tentacles where the arms should be, there was no consistency to their form. Behaving like the undead but only groaning in pleasure at the touch of light magic. Stronger than the men or women they had been, some fel construct. Like the rapture or sin made real, hellish abominations sent here to punish man.
He arrayed himself with the others, matching his tower shield with the roundshields of the Oresundians defending their estate. The wards caught most of them, but the press of bodies was so thick that they couldn't handle them all.
“Frostborn!” Astal, not missing a beat, howled like a wolf in the twilight. Carrying the Ebonfist clan banner, the steel standard of the wolf hung high about his men. As it always had, and always would be. Until the lands of men were lost in the fog, and even then it would remain. Hoisted above the remains of his kin who'd given far more than they'd got.
“Who!?” They responded, stomping their boots with the finality of a thunderclap.
“Frostborn!” He replied.
They covered themselves with their shields, thrusting and cleaving into the creatures with abandon. Steadfast. Free of fear. Dauntless. Few would find fault in the warriors of Oresund, for if the Harani called themselves steel – then they were the finest mithril ever forged!
“Frostborn!”
“Who!?”
“Frostborn!”
Those warriors beaten and tempered on stormy seas and the frigid climes of their homeland. Men who'd grown strong hunting the smilodon of the ash fields, stalking the razors way and swimming the icy waters of the mallard. To die as legends was their greatest wish and to any men who beheld these magnificent bastards, none could say they hadn't been living up to that title. Reaving, slaying, challenging. Fear of death was for the southron, frostborn knew no fear of the dark. The first to leap into it with spittle and blood spraying their mouths, a song on their lips.
“Jarvuld! You fat bastard! Jandvik, you lout! Are these enemies enough to bring us down? Is this darkness enough to obscure the dawn glinting off my perfectly shaven asscheeks!? Let them know your name!”
“Ebonfist!” They slammed their feet down again, harder this time. Giving Brenn the perspective needed to notice that Astal was... Somehow, he was weaving a spell.
“Frostborn! For Ragnar! For the land of ash and ice, favored by all the gods, witness us!”
“Witness us!”
Micah was amazed, the wall of men so little compared to the vast horde of creatures assaulting them, standing firm against the press. Hard eyes and passionate hearts, their oiled weapons set the creatures aflame with every swing of them. Brenn had joined them, crying just as loudly as the barbarian northmen and finding a stout shield-brother in them – and they in turn in the boy. Every warrior seemed to be intent on screaming the loudest, whether these things were capable of knowing fear or not.
But Micah was frozen, worthless in the rear. Stricken by the fear gnawing at his insides. Those maws and claws, formless things to set his wildest fears in moving color. He had no answers for them. But the Oresundians did. Their answer was steel, oil, and torches tacked on to more screaming.
Fifty versus hundreds, and they were winning. For now. But Tythas who remained behind him was sure that moment wouldn't last long. These men would tire eventually, falling beneath ever expanding crescent of burnt corpses gathering in the entry to the courtyard. Every call of 'frostborn!' became quieter. Ever 'who!?' dimmer. After minutes, their human bodies would tire, their lungs no longer capable of exclamation. After that, their arms would fail. One hesitation and the abomination would be on them, one hole in the shield wall and it no longer held advantage.
Sigi caught those who skirted the defensive line. Reaping a fearsome tally with her jorunn and howling to those gods she held dear. To Vortigern and Veles. Their names hot on her lips as she bolstered her frame with transmutation magic and splattering the enemies across the cobblestones with every swing of her weapon. Ensuring that no man was her equal let alone superior. Finally, she spat, shouldering her way through the press and replacing her jorunn with a hatchet, taking a shield from one of the reserves. Spraying blood and viscera as she bolstered them with all of her ability. No hesitation, only action.
“We have to do something!” Tythas cried, plying his memories for an answer, but none came and neither did a response from the others in the rear. Micah remained silent. He'd never seen anything like this. There were monsters, and then there were monsters – those that kept men up at night. These howling things...
Tythas dipped into his reserve. Spraying thousands of tiny bones onto the paved causeway leading toward the estate proper. Nothing given, nothing earned. “Arise! The son of Amateus calls upon you! Arise!”
A whirling mass of mana, a black tornado that stole his hard earned youth and hunched him. Flowing into the remains and animating them. A ridiculous thing, enough to give Micah relief from the gnawing fear, replaced with awe. A thousand chickens twice that charged forth, adding their own calamitous bawks to the noise around them. Dancing on the strings Tythas had given them. He was weak with the effort, collapsing into a pile of skin and bones, the rest was up to them.
An army of damned poultry, enough to beggar the eyes. Dark anima, forbidden magic, so thick that the backwash alone wilted at the flesh of the skinless horrors arraying themselves against the estate. Abominations bawled and called out in rage and denial, immediately stooping to relieve the front line in their manic attempts to target the chickens first. As if to say there was no master of flesh and bone superior to their own.
Chicken versus abomination, and the Oresundians celebrated their arrival. Finding a second wind in their new allies and calling out to them with maddened glee.
“The great cock is upon us!” Astal called, painted red and bearded axe held skyward. “Gullinkambi sees us! Gullinkambi knows us! The red day is upon us, my brothers! Reap! Reave! Kill!”
“Kill for the primus!” They responded in unison. “Blood for the primus!”
Even the servant staff assisted. As best they could. A handful among them mages, they sat stop the balustrades, raining death on the enemy. Every one of them seemed forged of iron. But Micah... The weak link. To feel so worthless. So powerless. He hated it.
Hated himself even more when the 'talent-less' primus that was Tyr descended on the courtyard in a ball of vivid flames and howling rage. All red and twice as insane as their abominable enemy.