Chapter Twenty
The Break
Connie pulled back her hood and they drew one-another into a crushing hug.
Michael felt his throat closing with emotion but he quickly pulled free and demanded, “Where on Draendica did you go? Wait- fuck that, why on Enthall did you leave without saying one sane word?”
Her warm, brown eyes were swimming with mixed tears as she only half-listened to him, apparently too busy looking him up and down, searching for injuries and fretting. After a moment or more, it became clear she wasn’t actually unsure how to answer, but rather she didn’t want to.
“Mum?” he asked, though this time his heart began to shudder.
Connie looked up at him and her eyes were rolling with tears. “I only came to be sure you were safe, my dear.”
Michael frowned and blinked. “Sorry?”
“I can’t-” she stopped and wiped her new tears away. “I can’t stay.” She squeezed his arms and took a deep breath before speaking again, but this time not to her boy. “Take care of my son, Hillborn.”
The Fortmaster was just as pale as he’d been at the beginning of the conversation. He only barely looked up as he spoke, “Connie, is there nothing I can say to dissuade of these-”
She let go of Michael and levelled a hard finger at the man. “I won’t say it again.”
Amekot closed his mouth and nodded timidly. “Okay.”
Michael felt a deep rage beginning to kindle on his stomach. “Someone explain to me what’s going on.”
His mother took his hand and led him to a chair in front of Amekot’s desk, sitting him down in his angry breaths. “I’m going somewhere. Somewhere dangerous. And I have to go now. I might already be too late.”
Michael opened his mouth to reply when the entire office room flashed blood-red.
Everything suddenly was engulfed in warning-light, and a great, panicked tumble of bells chimed across the entire fortress like an out-of-time orchestra.
Oliver, who’d been standing respectfully off to the side, raced to the window. “What’s going on?” He looked to Amekot, expecting to find him terrified too, but the Fortmaster remained ghastly white with his eyes closed in dread.
Michael didn’t hear any of it. He could only hear the tone of her words, over and over again. They were iron-clad. He knew what he said next was in vain. “I’m coming with you.”
Connie smiled as the red-light began to flash. She gently touched his soft hair and said, “You have no idea how badly they will need you here.” Her tight smile began to shake a touch and tears played in her eyes.
“I don’t care.” He said, numb. All things felt far, far away. He could only see her.
She leant forward and kissed him hard on the head. “Michael Eddy Williams, you are many things. Uncaring will never be one of them.”
Another set of alarms began to toll in the distance and Amekot raised himself from his set, buttoning his cloak formally. “Archangel Jacobs, please go see to your Quick Response Team and inform Paladin Selene to execute Defence Protocols Seven and Five.”
“Sir?” Oliver asked, unsure whether to focus on Amekot or Michael.
Connie stood and turned and began making her way to the door and Michael only stared.
Michael was deep within the growing realisation of what was about to happen. A numbness had wrapped around him. He could scarcely feel the flood beneath him. He almost didn’t have the focus to even ask, “Why can’t I come? Why can’t you even tell me where you’re going?”
Connie stopped at the door and pulled up her hood as she looked at him again. She opened her mouth to speak while the red lights blared and the alarms stopped for a breath. “Because I know you, love. And I know giving you the barest idea would be the same as giving the whole answer. Because you’ve never left a riddle half-solved. Because it will be the death of you... and I won’t help that happen.”
Michael blinked and rose to his feet but the thoughts and words were a swirling hurricane behind his lips. He watched her leave and the door shut behind her. And she was gone.
Suddenly the world seemed so quiet.
Amekot was yelling something quite sharply at Oliver but the swordsman was only looking at the young man who’d just lost his mother.
Amekot huffed and muttered a handful of spell-words, causing his eyes to glow with an electric blue hue. When he spoke, the words rolled out like thunder and echoed about the entire fortress. “All personnel to battle stations. This is not a drill.”
His dismissed the magic and took off out the door, leaving the two boys alone.
Oliver gently took Michael’s arm to lead him but the archer crumbled into tears, like he’d been somewhere faraway and Oliver’s touch brought him back into the terrible reality.
Oliver wrapped the boy in a tight hug as he sobbed and murmured soothing words, though mostly he just held him. There was very little to say.
Another set of warning bells began to toll and the noise was almost an unbearable racket.
Michael managed to stand on his own two feet eventually. In a hollow voice, he uttered, “Let’s go,” and the words were tasteless in his mouth.
Oliver took his hand and led him out of the office and then through the great keep doors to find the entire stronghold of soldiers all flooding through the forum dressed in armour with their weapons close at hand.
The sky was overcast and grey and a weight seemed to hang in the clouds.
Oliver picked up his pace and took Michael toward the enormous fortress gate. They came up to the towering stones and stepped handily into a somewhat concealed stairway, leading into the innards of the enormous fortress walls.
Torchlight gently filled the passage. Michael felt himself focusing on the flicker of the flames and the way in which the light danced as Legacies passed by, cramming up and down the rising hallway. Light had always made him feel like he was safe, but in that moment, he could only seem to feel it that it would burn out, sooner or later.
A muscle flickered in his wrist.
They broke out onto the ramparts of the monolithic wall and he looked around to see the turret that sat on the joining of the walls, home to one of the fortress’ great ballistae. It was loaded with five-foot bolts and manned by thick-armed and grim-faced Legacies, all sitting on a swivel and activated by a single firing lever. All about them, soldiers pushed passed and strapped on armaments as they moved. Leant against the rounded walls of the turret were dozens of bows and quivers of arrows.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Oliver let go of Michael’s hand, shouting, “I’ll be right back!” as he ran toward a group of soldiers further along the wall.
Michael watched him go before he turned and looked out over the valley of Fort Guardian. It was the same as ever, green and rolling hills. Dew on the grass. He could see nothing in particular worth worrying about, but somewhere deep in his stomach sat a small pit of dread.
Oliver came stumbling back over, trying to pull on a cuirass that didn’t fit, fumbling with straps as a dozen soldiers followed him at a respectful distance. “Michael, I’ve got to lead a Q-R unit on the ground.” He reached out to the wall and found a lever which Michael had missed. He gave it a sharp pull and the heavy sound of grating stone could be heard over the edge of the battlements. Oliver gently guided him to the rampart and then swiftly stepped onto the wall, gesturing for his team to go ahead before himself.
Michael’s stomach twisted as he watched the ten soldiers climb over the defences one by one, descending onto a ladder of thin stone sheets spaced down the wall like ladder rungs.
“You’re going to stay here. Ilo’s going to look after you!”
The ballista-operator turned at the sound of his name and lifted his helmet visor. “Oh, hey Michael, didn’t see you there!” Ilo yelled over the racket of the bells tolling just above them.
Oliver stepped down onto the first rung and paused, casting another look at Michael. He mouthed It’s okay. Everything’s okay.
Michael nodded but mostly out of kindness. He felt like someone had stuck a hand of ice into his stomach, wrapped their fingers around his intestines and wouldn’t stop twisting.
Oliver vanished below the rampart-line and Ilo picked up a quiver of iron arrows, handing them to Michael. “You’ll want this set too.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
Ilo gestured lazily to the bell above him, swinging back and forward of its own accord. “That alarm is linked to the surrounding hillsides in case of a Nithe attack.”
Michael blinked. “What kind of knife could possibly-”
“Nithe. You know, Nithes? The big-ass worm things which would eat carriages in old Talisatian myths?”
Michael blushed with embarrassment and nodded, feeling some warmth come back into his fingers. “Scaly, right? With tusks and like one eye?”
“That’s the one. They dig through the soil and sometimes they try to nibble at our walls. This is probably just that...”
Michael blinked and shivered at the idea of such a creature when he realised a more terrifying question had just been silently posed.
At last, Amekot came up the steps behind them with Sidney and Jack in tow, though the Javen-warrior hung on the fringe quietly. Following that trio was an entourage of rubber-necking Legacies, all older and certainly not dressed for an altercation, as only Jack and Sidney were armoured of the lot.
Amekot looked out over the empty valley and raised a hand high.
The bells fell silent and became a small piece of the far more harrowing quiet, lingering in the air. The morning mist hovered above the moat’s sludge and the fog thinned along the grass beyond, bringing the visibility to a slow ease as it cleared on the rise.
Oliver and his team were perched precariously on the slim ring of land on the fort-side of the moat, no wider than five feet. They waited patiently as a long stone slab slid noiselessly out of the wall, bridging about half the gap.
Oliver held up his own fist, ordering them to stop as he watched the unnaturally silent hillside before them.
Michael was about to turn to Ilo and ask him what else it could possibly be when the noise came.
A noise like an avalanche of broken glass, ripping roots, and snapping steel all harmonising in one monstrous cacophony.
All across the fortress, Legacies slammed their hands across their ears, many even fell to the ground in pain while others roared against the murderous racket. One Legacy was too near the edge of the battlements as they cried out in pain and miss-stepped backward. They were weightless as they tumbled down, down, down into the foyer, hitting the ground with a sick, armoured thud.
Michael gritted his teeth so hard he worried they’d shatter inside his mouth. He managed to pull his gaze over the ramparts to find the cause of the horrific noise and his face became paler than ice.
The hillside facing the fortress was tearing itself asunder in a wide, fifty-foot fissure, as though the rolling meadow was growing an earthen maw to swallow all before it. The tear went beyond a simple surface-rip. It reached deep into the bowels of the valley until finally it opened into a deep, dark cavern, hidden by the thick sheet of shadow which lay about it. All around the mouth of the crevice, the grass wilted and died, the soil grew sour and the smell of rancid vegetation was thick in the air.
And then the noise it stopped. The mouth of the hillside froze open. The noise echoed for a moment, and a soft, cavern wind whistled in its place.
Beyond their groans, the entire valley was silent once more.
Amekot rose from his knees and his face was little more than crease-lines of dread and fear. He reached for a sword which he’d neglected to wear and cast his gaze back over the rampart into the crevice of darkness.
Jack looked sideways at the fortmaster and glared sharply.
The fortmaster cleared his voice, mumbled his spell-words and the man’s eyes glowed an electric blue. When he spoke, “Declare yourself and your intention,” it rolled across the valley like thunder, even though a quaver lay beneath it.
The word intention echoed across the empty knolls and no answer came.
Sidney, the tall warrioress, clad in lieutenant’s armour, glanced at Amekot, waiting for orders to disperse the Quick Response Units. After a long moment, she turned her gaze to Jack and he subtly gestured in Riniglacian sign-language, All hands - Hold fast.
She strode off as quiet as night to deliver the word.
Amekot had made no attempt to speak again.
“Hillborn...” Jack chided form beneath his scarred, steel wedge-helm.
Amekot swallowed and repeated, “Declare-”
“I heard you the first time, Manling,” a dark voice, crept out of the cavern mouth and swept across the fortress like a sharp gale force-wind. It was cold and empty, yet in all the nothingness, a malice resided at its edge. If Amekot’s arcane voice was thunderous, this creature had the tongue of a plague. “Intention, you say? I’ve been trying to decide what you mean.”
Michael searched the gloomy crevice but he could see no speaker.
“As for declaring myself... well, my name is Nikereus. I am the sovereign monarch of the Obthraie, and as for my intention, well... I don’t feel like giving away the fun, just yet.”
Amekot stood, noiseless and paralysed in fear.
The voice continued with an amused sigh, “So easily silenced are the voices of lesser men.”
Jack turned to look at Amekot and found the man frozen still. Jack scowled and pulled off his Javen-helm, revealing a face so covered in scars that there was hardly any room for untarnished skin. Even one of his eyes was so deeply gouged by a particularly long, three-stroke scar that the eye in question was as black and misshapen as coal. Michael felt a chill crawl down his back as he watch the eye still move while Jack looked out the valley.
Jack cast the speaking-magic upon himself and flatly stated, “Seal that tunnel and return to your homeland, Soiltorn. If you shall not leave, we will remove you!”
Nikereus’ voice was quiet for a moment before a deep, hungry laughter echoed out of the cavern again, rolling across the stronghold like a flash-frost.
Michael clutched his bow as it did so, feeling the hair stand on his neck and his stomach turn. He watched Ilo clutch the handles of his ballista tight.
“Remove me?” The voice chuckled again, before continuing. “I like you... but can’t help but I notice that a different voice addresses me now. Have I scared your first leader away?” In amidst the knife-scraping noise of the dark-speech, another strange sound was layered in behind it. A rhythmic shifting and cracking.
Amekot had cleared his throat but his face was still pale as the overcast sky. “Pardon my silence, I was merely contemplating how best to save my breath on some wandering vagabond Shanii with an entitlement complex.”
Jack squinted, trying to hear the secondary sound as did many of the other Legacies, unsure if they should focus on the words or the odd, shifting echoes.
Nikereus laughed again and the sound of it could have spoiled meat. “Entitlement would imply that I believe I deserve more than I’m owed...”
The odd noise became clearer and clearer as it approached the mouth of the dark cave mouth.
“Nothing could be further from the truth.” Nikereus smiled in their words. “Everything I have, I’ve taken. And I’ve taken it with pain.”
The sound finally rose louder than Nikereus’ words and the entire fortress and all its leaders fell silent as they realised what it had been.
Footfalls.
Thousands and thousands of footfalls.
Immediately every single ballista was swivelled around and taking aim, humming with an unsettling energy as an uncountable number of figures marched out from the crevice.