Year 222. Amphe, Capital of Dioúksis Polydius Audax - Khirn
ADIL ERE
Punch. Elbow. Headbutt. Grapple. Throw. All of it worked, yet none of it lasted. The Belanorian kept rising, her face marked by half a dozen cuts and just as many welts and bruises. It was the only part of her that he could strike consistently, the rest of her body protected by her armor, just as his was. Yet, he felt more of her strikes. His breathing was haggard, lungs bearing a sharp pain with each inhalation. His vision was doubled at times, usually after his face bore the brunt of her attacks—the woman bounding at him with an offensive charging position on both flanks, fists raised and body weaving side to side.
Adil Ere was confused.
After nearly ten minutes of struggling to survive this woman’s onslaught, which involved leading her away from the courtyard and into the streets where hundreds of the citizenry screamed in fear at the unexpected bout breaking into their hindered attempt at evacuation to safety, the Ghost Tracker began to wonder why this woman—who was without any scrap of doubt to be the Great Blade herself—fought with an axe at all. Yvon ne’Banuus was a skilled pugilist, and the hefty weapon surely only slowed down her ability to kill, regardless of how easily she wielded it.
Perhaps she would be better suited with knucklers, spiked or blunt.
Adil Ere tossed aside this contemplation as a knee raced for his gut. He pushed it aside with both hands, curving his body to the opposite side and leaping back with a frantic haste. The woman was fast, faster than any foe he had faced, and he had personally sparred with the Runearch during this conquest of Aslofidor. Fear was his friend now in this brawl, anxiety for his continued health its own companion. He quickly began to understand how the Maprapeyni had fallen to this Belanorian.
The Great Blade was as inhuman as the Drayheller.
“Are you going to keep dancing, or are you going to fight?” she questioned, stepping towards him with a hard testing jab. He blocked it with his forearm, the reverberation of the strike still leaving him sore even through his vambrace.
“You are as the legends say, Yvon ne’Banuus,” he conceded, letting his thoughts verbalize in the brief moment. “I must admit that you are far more skilled than I in this form of combat.”
“Don’t excuse yourself from fighting, Druyan,” she spat. Around them, guards had begun to replace the citizens of Amphe. Yet, they did not interfere. This was not their fight. “You’re still alive, which is saying something. So fucking fight.”
She refused to let him respond with words, charging him with a takedown attempt he barely scrambled. He pushed her to the ground onto her front, pushing off by her back and backing away in a near-crawl. Yvon snarled and lunged at him from a supine position, the mere sight of which sent the Ghost Tracker’s heart racing at such a speed he was sure it would burst. The guards shouted in surprise, then began chanting her name as she trailed after the Druyan, gleeful that it was their enemy whose body was shaken to its core.
“Fight!” the Great Blade demanded, throwing a short-ranged elbow for his chin. Adil Ere ducked, responding with an uppercut that cracked her jaw, snapping her head back. For a singular instant, the Great Blade was rocked and sent reeling—perhaps even unconscious if the power that returned his Maprapeyni to him was so kind as to grant that. Whatever hope could have spawned from such a hit vanished as Yvon ne’Banuus, faltering back, planted her feet and reached for his neck with both hands. Fingers curled around his throat, choking the air from his lungs. His legs left the ground, the Great Blade lifting him with the same ease she had hefted her axe.
Adil Ere thrashed his hands against hers, trying to slip his fingers between her palm and his flesh. Her hold was steel, and his vision that was doubled only occasionally now growing dim and hazy. Tsamu meghua...rihyo he te chaghogha! he choked out in desperation. He expected nothing to work. This, at least, did.
The woman was thrown back from a shunt of wind blasting her in the chest, her nails digging through his skin as her hold was loosened and dragged away. Adil Ere fell to his knees, hacking and choking, clutching the bleeding marks. He felt the guards begin to descend upon him just as the nausea did.
“Tsamu meghua rihyo he te chaghogha!” he repeated, blowing away the dozen armored men and women who crept upon him. He managed a surprised laugh before the vomit erupted from his throat, bending him over at the gut as its contents were spewed onto the street. Too much Script had been incanted. Too much-
“Not like that, you don’t!” Yvon ne’Banuus yelled as she sprinted at Adil Ere, tackling him to his back and snapping his knees to an angle that should not have been.
Adil Ere screamed before his screams were silenced by an elbow to the face, cracking his nose.
“Fight me!” Yvon roared.
“Tsamu meghua rihyo he te chaghogha!” he snorted through blood and broken teeth. Yvon ne’Banuus flew up and back, out of sight; he had no idea where she went. “Tsiri te ghayuta mu yeyria.” His knees were mended, but his body was spent.
“Chinhita Hinhaa!” a voice familiar to him called out from his deafening, ringing ears. The swish and clang of thrown daggers and then swords against swords resurged him, drawing forth a growl of adrenaline from his chest as he sat up. His regiment, or part of it, engaged the guards—hundreds against hundreds. Blood splashed his face and into his mouth, a tasting of iron.
Hands gripped his shoulders, lifting him to his feet. Two men of his regiment: Bene Var and Cama Gon. “Are you alright, Hinhaa?” Bene Var asked.
“Just barely,” he admitted through the blood, pointing to the Great Blade, who appeared through the growing tumult, the head of one of his mean clutched in her hand. “She proves dangerous to the plan.”
“Is that-” Cama Gon began to ask.
Adil Ere began to pull them away, further towards areas where his warriors held control. Blood sloshed under his feet as the streets began to flood. “Yes, and I highly recommend we kill her if possible. Or leave to fight her another day.”
As Yvon ne’Banuus began using the head in her hand as a weapon, then her fists, and then the limbs of those she slaughtered, it was decided amongst the Ghost Tracker’s regiment that retreating was the better part of valor this day.
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Year 222. Amphe, Capital of Dioúksis Polydius Audax - Khirn
RUNEARCH
The Runearch pulled the face off the last of the men, preventing him from wrenching the massive, iron-wrought wheel that would open the gates already being battered upon by the rams. He tossed the ruined slab of flesh aside, spitting on the corpse as it fell, and turned his gaze to Yola Tal. She was a statue of pure crimson, not an ounce of her bearing any color that wasn’t a shade of red. Her spear was embedded in the mouth of what appeared to be the tumathios of the gatehouse.
“How are you feeling, Yola?” he asked her.
She freed the spear and stabbed it through the head of the last warriors in the construct. “Never better, tohyi,” she cackled.
He began to wrench the wheel, using all of his strength, both first-born and revived, to move what was clearly designed to be used by four people at once. The unmistakable sound of clanking gears and chains thundered through the house. Outside, the war only worsened. The battlements had formed waterfalls of blood. Hills of bodies lined the quarter-mile stretch. Soon, the city would be nothing but an ocean of death. Pointless.
More swarmed into the house, similar in image to Yola Tal, yet bearing the standards of the Dioúksis. The Demon rushed them with her spear before a fraction of recognition could pass between them at the violence within the place. They fell within seconds. Pointless.
“Open the gates, tohyi!” Yola Tal yelled as more of the Dioúksis’s men rushed into the gatehouse. They met the same end, but for each felled, two more replaced them.
The Runearch’s arms felt as if they would burst as he pushed and pulled the wheel down and down, the roars of his army growing louder with each inch the gate was opened. He peered out the window next to the wheel and marveled at the destruction of the fields outside the city. Where his men were not, siege weapons stood with endless payloads of fire. Where siege weapons were not, bounties of arrows from the defenders stood as markers of what happened here. And where those were not, countless dead Druyans and Aslofidorians lay forever.
Finally, the wheel would turn no more. The gate was opened, his men charging into the city in organized rows of shields and spears, cavalry charging down the center. In less than two hours, his army had breached the unbreachable city. Pointless.
“Lock the wheel, and let’s move on, tohyi!” Yola Tal roared as she faced down three warriors at once. She dropped her guard in a slip on the gore. They responded by lunging toward her, swords bearing down in piercing formation.
The Runearch extended his hand. The world knelt.
Skin inverted, muscles burst, eyes melted into soup, brains boiled into chowder—organs into stew. Three, six, nine, twelve, fifty, one hundred warriors screamed the first utterance of a scream before they fell.
Yola Tal threw her head back and roared in triumph at the display of power. Her gaze tore itself to Erik Apa. “Ran ha ya yit retskechu!” she laughed, running up to the man and throwing her arms around him in a comrade’s embrace.
Dazed by his own might, Erik Apa shook his head back to awareness and patted the Demon’s back. “Let’s move on, Yola. We have a lot to do.”
“How do you think Adil fares?” she asked, breaking away from him.
“The Ghost Tracker knows only success in my experience. He is fine,” the Runearch answered, ushering the Demon to follow him. Into the fray, they charged again, Erik Apa taking the lead in the new swarm that exited the towers. He held the Spear of Blackstone into the air as they bounded toward the city side of the quarter-mile stretch. “With me!”
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Year 222. Amphe, Capital of Dioúksis Polydius Audax - Khirn
ADIL ERE
“Mi tepia!” Cama Gon shouted before the carriage thrown by the Great Blade crashed into the building he attempted to climb. His body was obliterated instantly, as were the bodies of whoever had been hiding inside.
“What the fuck do we do?” Bene Var asked, trying to soothe his lungs as he and the Ghost Tracker stood furthest from the carnage.
“We keep moving!” Adil Ere heaved, breathless and bleeding, his stomach churning empty bile. “We don’t stop moving until we lose this ghatmi.”
“Hinhaa, look at this place! There’s farmland inside this city, we trailed her through the alleys, which are practical labyrinths, and she is still on our asses. How are we supposed to lose her?”
Adil Ere grabbed the man by the collar of his armor. “We don’t stop moving. Do you understand me?”
Bene Var would have answered had Yvon ne’Banuus—inhuman as they come—not shot into the air from beyond their sight, latched her fingers into his mouth, and ripped the top of his head off his body. Adil Ere pushed the dead man away and immediately set upon the landing Great Blade, tackling her on the rooftop of the audaciously tall building. Was it a trade spire? A home for some noble? A tavern? What purpose could the people of Aslofidor need for these buildings to be so egregiously large?
By luck alone, the Ghost Tracker had caught the Great Blade with his attack, bringing her to her back and leaving them both sliding down the incline of shingles. He tried to latch onto something, but his fingers were too crooked and swollen. Yvon ne’Banuus met similar success.
Both tumbled off the edge.
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Year 222. Amphe, Capital of Dioúksis Polydius Audax - Khirn
RUNEARCH
Amphe was a maze of stone, metal, and violence, never-ending in its attempt to lead him off the path he needed to follow toward victory. For every street he took, every district he conquered, every flag he planted, he found himself turned around and facing down walls of shields and legions of Audax’s men. He roared into battle each time, charging with spear and valor until his visage was that of the Demon’s. Yola Tal rushed alongside him, joining him in his spear lines and laughing with sick glee for every kill added to their tally.
“Would that the rest of the war had been like this!” she cried out, rending apart the body of a man nary a year older than thirty. “Think of all that we could have done!”
Akma Yal, leading his regiment with the fury of a berserker given brief moments of clarity, marched with them, his weapon that of the halberd and shield. “We would have only won this land for that wretched Vasileús. Now, we fight for ourselves and a much more glorious purpose.”
“The power behind the Runearch,” Yola Tal nodded. “May it remain favoring us till all of Khirn is within our grasp.”
“It is not just Khirn we fight for, Yola,” Erik Apa corrected, stepping beside her. “We fight for Aqella and the world beyond that of these measly lands we have been told of all our lives. The world is much greater than just these two continents.”
“How long will it take us to accomplish such a lofty goal, tohyi?” Akma Yal inquired, nonchalantly blocking a stray arrow from a rooftop archer. “Decades? Centuries? You might have those, but do we? Healed by your new powers?”
Erik Apa deflected the blow of a throw spear. His line advanced down the street. “Millennia, Akma. It will take us untold years to accomplish the goals of that which returned me to you all.” He turned to face his blood brother. “You will stand beside me through it. Every battle. Every war. Every conquest. You will be there.”
Akma Yal grinned. “This gladdens me, tohyi. I long to see what lands exist beyond the reaches of the inhumans in Aqella.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“As do I, my brother. So it shall be.”
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A conquest of hours slowed to a stalemate of days, weeks, then—finally—months. While great coverage of the city had been achieved on that opening day, it was impossible to hold that momentum forever, even with the Runearch’s new might. In addition to his learning of his limitations to it, which was not limited to just physical weakness akin to that of over-incanting the Script and bouts of extended unconsciousness, Audax’s army had been bolstered by the frantic non-combatants taking up arms to defend their home. Hundreds of thousands of Aslofidorians and Druyans built up walls of scrap, rubble, and siege emplacements akin to those built during the long-ago battle of Gortinda, the first significant instance of insanity in this entire decade of carnage.
Erik Apa, supported by his spear, stood with his council in the Sílion tavern, once a staple of good food and better liquors if the Aslofidorian Aposto Spinelis was accurate in his history lesson. Now, it served him and his people as the headquarters for war.
“We stand at the brink of victory with the royal quarter of Paliok just ahead of our main encampment here, yet we are held back by millions of raving lunatics in the Néa and Zo districts on either flank,” Akma Yal noted, tapping his dagger against the city map sprawled on the temporary war table. “We move up to take Paliok, they attack our rear, and we are undone.”
Ulek Aks pushed away from the table, sighing in exasperation. “A vexation I feel we made this very army feel at numerous turns. Had Adil Ere succeeded, we would not be dealing with such delays.”
“Adil Ere has not been seen since we broke into this city. It is possible he has not yet failed,” Erki Ney said, gazing toward Zeyn Gol. “Has any progress been made in locating him?”
Zeyn Gol shook his head, and his voice was like ice. “None. We’ve recovered almost all of his regiment. They’ve all accomplished whatever mission the man put them on, but where the Ghost Tracker is himself, they cannot say. Not because they’ve been forced into silence, they simply do not know.”
Erki Ney hummed and looked at the map. “Even the Ghost can become lost in this blasted place. I do not believe him fallen or having failed, but delayed? Yes.”
“By months?” Ulek Aks questioned, crossing his arms.
“As we have. We are in no better shape, and we have Maprapeyni.”
“Yes, but we are an army facing an army, trudging through buildings and conquering entire districts with multiple objectives at a time. The Ghost was set to kill the Dioúksis and bring Maprapeyni his head. That was his goal. Nothing has occurred yet.”
“That does not mean he has failed.”
“Then what has become of him? Where is he if not fallen?”
“He-”
Erik Apa stamped the haft of his spear into the ground, silencing the room with a crack of noise. “Enough,” he said in a voice far softer than the act. “We have questioned the whereabouts and success of the Ghost for months now to no end, and I am tired of it. We keep fighting. That is the end of it. Akma Yal, what do you propose we do to avoid having our flanks destroyed by those in Néa and Zo?”
After reading it for some minutes, the Runearch’s blood brother cleared his throat and tapped four districts on the map. “Sinoik. Oziás. Mahale. Vrástama. We have yet to take those, but they are lightly protected according to our scouts—a few thousand at most. Most of the city has either fled underground or moved into Paliok, Néa, and Zo in their panic from seeing you lead us again, swelling them to be swamps of meat. Unmoveable but defended unlike any other. We send two cohorts to take them while leaving the bulk of our army here to hold back and distract Audax’s primary forces. From there, those cohorts can move into the smaller areas of Míra and Polemíta, here and here.”
“Thus allowing them to flank Néa and Zo,” Erki Ney realized, leaning onto the table. “Allowing us to attack them from the front.”
“If they realize they are beaten and clear themselves of their panic, those in Néa and Zo will surrender, leaving us free to move from multiple sides into Paliok and lay siege to the Dioúksis’s last defenses.”
“Would that the Belanorians had reached this place in time,” Yola Tal said from the tavern’s bar, leaning her back against the counter. “They would have held this place together, maybe kept us at the walls for the months we’ve been inside the city.”
“The Belanorians are too busy dealing with Druya attacking their borders,” Erik Apa stated, moving to the table to examine the map. “They have no time to help this place. No time to save Audax again.”
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Year 222. Amphe, Capital of Dioúksis Polydius Audax - Khirn
YVON ne’BANUUS
The man had been her prisoner for months now, and his resolve was impressively strong with the context of his actions in mind. Through blade, chain, fire, nail, and mystharin , he refused to bend, his lips remaining fixed shut and his tongue remaining unwagging. At times, she considered giving up, slitting his throat, and being done with it. But then, that would only serve to ruin things for those who sent her here.
Their visages were still fresh in her mind, even now in the years following Acocaea—in the years following that Brass Tower. Towering things even as they lay in the fields of red grass, slowly waking from a slumber across a span of time she could scarcely fathom the first stretch of. Mammoth creatures of stars, their insides dripping unlight onto the fields as she walked past them, confused and dazed. When she reached the center of this congregation, they all spoke to her at once, filling her mind with voices of agony and soothing balm. Yvon never could recall when she had first seen them, only that she remembered seeing them after killing the Runemaster.
Now, she saw them again as she wiped down the ornate, unnaturally sharp edge of Dioúksis Polydius Audax’s dagger, single red eye glaring at the man himself as he weakly struggled in his bindings. Polydius made a face, but Yvon could scarcely make it out. She began to step forward. The room was dark but not entirely without light. She made sure that a single lantern hung by the door to cast a dim yellow light through the space, granting her enough visibility to see the silhouette of its occupant. She moved slowly towards this silhouette, listening as water gradually dripped from the ceiling and walls, damp with leakage from the earth’s moisture. Momentary pangs of water on rock or forming puddles. Drip. Drip. Drip. They were the only sounds Polydius would hear until Yvon graced him with her presence and questions.
“I must say, I wasn’t expecting you to last this long, yet here you remain. Most impressive, I must say,” Yvon commented with a sneer.
“Pl-ple-pleas...” the fool began to beg, his voice hoarse and croaking like a toad. Sounds emanated from his barely visible shape—creaks and groans of wood accompanied by the light snapping of withered leaves.
Dioúksis Polydius was strung on the wall, blood and waste coating his body as thickly as the nature that bound him to the old stone. Weeds and twigs were threaded through his body discordantly, writhing under his sickly flesh and creating new wounds every hour, filling the others with dark green leaves that healed as much as they hurt. Oak roots wrapped around his limbs to splay him flat against the surface; his feet, in particular, were snapped at such impossible angles that even if he were to break free of his entrapment, he would never walk again. His face was the only part of him left uninfested by the mystharin .
"Pl-pl-please?" Yvon mocked with a domineering voice sick with malignancy. She cocked his head to the side lightly. “Please, what, my friend?”
“Yv-Yvon...” he rasped, senses returning to him as he fully awoke from his poor sleep. “I beg of you...release me from this. I don’t know what it is you want.”
“Tsě wǐr gugi,” the Great Blade sighed, tossing the dagger onto the splintered wooden table of this cellar she had occupied for the duration of the siege. “How many times are you going to lie to me, Dioúksis? You do know what it is I want. I want the Drūyy Grūnazʻ Fō.”
“I don’t know what that is, Yvon!” the Dioúksis choked, blood and drool dribbling down and off his chin, staining the vines and leaves that tied him to the wall.
Yvon stopped just under the hanging man, gazing up into his gaunt, sunken face. His scraggly, once-rotund face was pallid with tinges of yellow and green, and his eyes were dazed and red. A putrid stench erupted from the fool’s body, and an even worse smell came from his mouth as he breathed through cracked lips and gums missing half their teeth. “Dioúksis,” Yvon said, braving the horrific aroma. “If you tell me where the Drūyy is, I can make this disappear.”
“P-p-please. Ple... please...” Polydius whimpered with a drool of bile-laced blood falling from his lips. “I don’t know.”
Yvon sighed and felt a familiar sense of scorn rise in her chest as she examined the pitiful display of the once robust Polydius Audax. A man who was once fat with pride and faith, living in the graces of his Vasileús, developing his lands for the spoils of evolution and the betterment of the kingdom. Many saw Polydius Audax as the future, the one man who could take the throne as a named successor rather than by the bloodline ages old. But Yvon ne’Banuus had learned the truth. The same truth that broke open the lies of the Vasileús and his family and all the other rotten souls that sought to undo the world for the gain of another.
Dioúksis Audax was nothing more than an opportunistic harlequin swayed by the words of the greatest madman of all. He would not lead the way in the kingdom’s evolution. He would devolve it into something lesser. He would devolve it into stagnation and the refusal to see the destruction wrought in the wake of his accomplishments. Now Polydius Audax was a gremlin in a cellar, buried beneath the vault of relics more worthy than he could ever be.
Yvon could not stop herself from saying these words to Polydius. “You are a fool to have done what you did, Polydius. Just as the Vasileús was. Just as the Vasiles was. Do you understand that now? A fool. The product of cursed fate.”
Another whimper, one of genuine fear. “I did what I did for the benefit of our world. All I did was-”
“No, you did not. But I can’t expect you to understand. Fools can understand nothing beyond their own logic for their actions and even less if their logic is not theirs, no matter how base or depraved. You have not the wisdom or the wits to see why it brought you here. I await the day you can at least admit that. Perhaps then, I will let you die. Until that day, all I can hope is that you retained enough of your shattered fucking mind to tell me where the Drūyy Grūnazʻ Fō is. Because, like an Elven Pirate, you hoard treasure of the ancients of Khirn from the time of the Golden Lords and beyond. Such was the blessing of Amphe, granted to the Duchy in place of the Vasile. And you all never knew why, each explanation for why being driven into excuse after excuse. But we’re not here for that history lesson. No. So tell me, Dioúksis Audax: where is the fucking Drūyy?”
Polydius screeched like an animal, thrashing in his bindings. Yvon swung an open palm for her captive, slapping him across his face so loud that the sound of it resounded down the hall outside the door. The Dioúksis did not stop screeching, merely growing louder. The Great Blade slapped him again and again and again until her hand was stinging with pain and wet with blood, tears, and other fluids. Polydius had fallen silent.
"You are a charlatan, Audax. A false leader that damned your people. You-” Yvon’s words caught her throat as she realized Polydius’s shallow breaths had stopped entirely.
She snarled and clenched her hand tightly. “Adil!” she roared.
The door to the cellar opened, and the Ghost Tracker entered with frantic haste. Blood dripped from his hands, and the knives clutched in them. “Yes, Yvon?” he asked in a withered, revenant voice.
“Heal him,” she grunted, flicking her wrist at the dead or dying Dioúksis. “Fully.”
Adil Ere nodded and threw his knives onto the table. From receeded, pale lips, he incanted the Script of Druya and touched the bound Polydius Audax. A red-black glow came first from his palm, growing by the second as tiny blue dots floated from within the Dioúksis’s bindings and body and joined it. Each blue dot was overtaken by the shades of red and black, some becoming physical and further staining the Ghost Tracker’s hand like infected blood droplets. Then, when the glow had become so radiant that the Ghost’s entire hand and forearm were engulfed in the light, he opened his fist and said: “Yihkeaa rum pi mota tsa chu.”
The red-black light shot from his palm and entered the body of Polydius Audax and the bindings that held him. Wood and vine tightened as the former Dioúksis’s body convulsed in place, violently snapping the oldest of the branches and leaves that covered him. His jaw snapped and distended to grotesque lengths, a wet gurgling noise draining from his esophagus as the depths of his mouth was filled with the red-black light. The light spilled forth from those depths to cover his face like tentacles, suctioning his flesh. Yvon remained fixed in the room’s shadows with a revolted expression, watching as Polydius returned to his old self. Younger. Fatter. Goateed. Alive.
Polydius screamed and flailed his head as his life was restored to him. “No...no!” he gasped, eyes cementing with utter hatred and despair on his captor. “Why? Why!?”
“You still have things to tell me, Audax.”
“You will suffer when my men discover what you have done to me!”
Yvon laughed, and even the thing that wore Adil Ere’s skin chuckled at the threat. “They are too busy dealing with the Runearch,” Yvon explained. “Your manor has stood empty for months, and they have yet to notice, such is their fear of the man who was dead and is now alive again, controlling powers that break their spirits.”
He began to weep. “Then let me die! I don’t know what you’re looking for!”
“I do not believe you, Audax!” Yvon bellowed, emerging from the shadows and taking Adil’s place. “All but three of the Grudrūyy have been accounted for by those who sent me here, one of which was last seen on Khirn, the other in Aqella, the third in the world beyond the one we have been taught of. Of all places in Khirn, Amphe is the only place it could be.”
“Why have you not looked in the vaults then yourself?” Audax roared.
Yvon snorted. “You present yourself as humble with a small manor, guarded only by a few stationed elites only to mask the true depths of your greed with the miles of wealth you have buried underneath the streets of this city. I do not have the time to search the expanse of gold and silver you hide away.”
“Only the time to torture me for information I do not have. To wage your war against the Druyans to sate your bloodlust. How many have you killed between the days you put the blade to me? How many more have you made like that boy there?”
“Adil Ere is unique. One of a kind. Blessed by death, with which I am most intimately familiar. Everyone else dies, Audax. You will die, too, but not until you inform me where the Drūyy is. It took months for you to die. And I had Adil bring you back just like that-” she snaps her fingers for emphasis. “And I will do it repeatedly, even as Erik Apa and the Aslofi’dorians take the city.”
“Even if I did know of it, why would I tell you? I have already lost everything, and if what you have told me for months is true, I have been misled and corrupted by something beyond me...so why should I care to tell you now?”
Her voice finally softened from its malignant intent. “Because I will let you die and repent to the only powers that will hear you now. And that is all you have left, Audax, that and the promise of vengeance on the thing that led you here. That is done with you, tossed you aside to me to face this punishment for your foolishness.”
The Dioúksis was silent.
“Consider your options, Audax. We both know that a weapon like that would not escape your notice, even led by the thing that has abandoned you. But you would never let it be used, would you? You couldn’t let it be used. Erik Apa would be in too much danger too soon. Before the appointed time. Before the last of the allotted deaths had been gathered.”
Silence.
“The thing moves to strike, Audax. It moves to bring about its defenses, the defenses you helped make possible so that it can accomplish its mad dreams. I move to help stop it however I can.”
“I could tell you...but you would just kill me.”
“You know it is what you deserve. That is the only penance, one paid for by the Vasileús and Erik Apa’s mother.”
Silence, and then a soft sob. “The Star Bastion...”
Yvon leaned close. “What?”
“After word of the Vasileús’s death broke with the Runemaster’s return...I had it moved to the Star Bastion. I do not know why. Perhaps I felt as though the Nujant Chhank would have a better grasp of it than I would. Perhaps it is, as you said...penance. Some blind, hidden attempt at penance without that thing in my ears. You will find it there.”
Yvon smiled and turned to face the thing wearing Adil Ere’s skin. “Pack up. I will send word to the Prime. Implore him to start preparing the legions to march.”
“What do you intend them to do?” the Dioúksis asked, tugging against his bindings. “They will not leave Belanore. Not when Druya sieges their borders.”
“God is dead, Audax. All of Bela’nore knows this and turns to the Prime in this hour of need. And the Prime turns to me, for I am the one that experienced the most in Acocaea. I say the Star Bastion and Bela’nore will move.”
“Belanore cannot hope to fight all of Erik Apa’s army. It would be a massacre.”
“Those without faith have only the zealous fury to regain it. Bela’nore’s legions will fight until the last man.”
With that, Yvon turned to leave, joining the thing wearing Adil Ere’s skin by the door. “W-wait! Wait! You said you would grant me death!” the Dioúksis called out.
“I did,” Yvon said, grabbing her pack from the Ghost’s hands. “But I did not say it would be quick. I will let you die, and I will let you stay dead. Face your penance, Dioúksis Audax. And pray that some divinity hears you in your demise.”
As Polydius Audax, Dioúksis of Amphe, cried out in anguish as the lantern was snuffed with a wave of Yvon’s hand, the thing wearing Adil Ere’s skin closed the door, leaving him in the darkness where he would starve and decay over the course of seven months, his suffering extended by the power of the mystharin infused bindings. His corpse would forever remain undiscovered by the Druyans, who would—by that first month’s end—conquer all of Amphe following the tactics developed by Akma Yal. In the immediate aftermath of this successful siege, the army stationed at Amphe would rest and recuperate, claiming into their ranks those that surrendered and swore genuine oaths of loyalty to the Runearch. Those who did not were executed or enslaved. Over the course of six months, to the day that Polydius Audax died, the army would soon be bolstered by the arriving armies from Veoris, Druyan, and the now strangely emptied Belanore. By the time the army reached such size, they had already begun marching towards their next goal, at which the legions of Belanore had already arrived, met at the gates by the Nujant Chhank and two familiar faces.