Year 932,
Viryl could have complained endlessly about the Academy of the Spheres of Lazul. He could have complained about the big shots of the clergy, who with their arrogance and greed had made him lose every single crumb of his faith in the Zephyric religion. He could have complained about the other cadets, mostly scions of families powerful beyond imagination, otherwise ass-kissers, cutthroats and social climbers. He could have complained about the severity of the professors, and the harshness with which they judged him. He could even complain about how bitchy and cold all the girls in Classia were with him, given that in ten years there he had never gotten laid.
But one thing he must admit. Those scoundrels, in the education of their students, left nothing to chance. And thanks to that strict education, now, unlike his allies, he had a precise idea of what was to be done.
Unlike the Fekoro and the Ferenkelt, there were no bestiaries that could suggest a specific strategy to adopt when fighting a Fearkan. There were, however, general precautions that could be adapted depending on the occasion.
First rule, the most important: any Fearkan can be killed. A Fearkan is nothing more than an animal that a sorcerer's ritual has cloaked in arcane power, but even if its appearance changes its substance remains the same. It does not matter how big and monstrous it is.
A small but not insignificant corollary to this first rule is that between the animals are also included humans, even if this did not seem to be the case.
Second rule: the attacks of the Fearkan are not what they seem. The green fire that had incinerated Soverfott had demonstrated this, blazing even stronger once it had passed the shores of the lake. Arcane energy interacts with the physical world in a less predictable way than sympathions do. A less deterministic and more symbolic way. In any case, rather than trying to understand and get yourself killed, it is better to simply stay away.
Third rule: the Fearkan do not depend on the black priest who summoned them, but on the entity that granted them power. Therefore, eliminating the summoner is not enough to solve the problem and, indeed, if he sacrifices himself to the ancient god he worships, there is the risk that he will grant the monster even greater power.
Fourth rule: the arcane power of the Fearkan tends to run out on its own. It is during the ritual that it is infused and then it can only diminish, if a dark priest does not intervene to restore it. Therefore, in theory, to defeat a Fearkan it could be enough to isolate it and wait.
Fifth rule: exorcisms are useless. Or rather, they would be useful if they were performed by saints or charismatics. Sylyphyr is a very capricious god, when it comes to granting his grace. Of course, wicked, cruel men, victims of their own vices will never obtain a blessing from Sylyphyr. But it is not enough to be honest, devoted and upright men in his eyes. In short, praying would have been useless.
Viryl had observed the movements of the monster that towered over him, and had deduced that the animal that had generated it must have been the snake. He was led to believe this for two reasons. The first was that the movement of the tongue always indicated where it would move and who it would attack. The second was that Feneroth was supposed to be, according to what the last cultist had said, a god of the woods: a regal deer, not a disgusting grass snake.
If he could cut off the beast's tongue, they would win, Viryl was convinced of this.
And he took action.
He embraced the gun-spears and materialized two dazzling bullets in the drums. He quickly took aim and both barrels fired in unison. The night was lit up by two bright stars that arose around the tip of the monster's tongue that began to wriggle.
At the sound of the explosion, Radios, Elveria and Nomenas instinctively turned to Viryl. It was not difficult for him to imagine blank expressions and wide eyes behind their helmets. They would remain disoriented by the unknown nature of the abomination that had appeared before them for a long time.
«Watch how it’s done!» Viryl screamed at the top of his lungs, and took flight. Calling upon every particle of his Exoplion's sympathionic flow, he flew over the lake and created a giant, sharp stick of ice, over fifteen feet long. He fortified it with his hardening spell, and telekinetically dragged it skyward.
The Fearkan’s tongue was now only twitching in a few lingering spasms, a sign that the stun effect of the bullets was wearing off.
Viryl hovered twenty yards above the colubrid’s head, which arched its neck slightly and bared its forked tongue. Hearing the rustling sound and still dazzled, it was searching for him with its thermoreceptors. Once it had located him, the deer’s mouth would have spit flames again. But Viryl didn’t allow the monster to.
With a quick wave of his hand, Viryl hurled the titanic icicle at the bones of the snake’s skull, which shattered with a satisfying crack, like an egg being slammed into the ground. The ice spike stuck into the sand, dragging the monster’s impaled tongue with it, which stretched out of its jaw like a snail being pulled from its shell.
Viryl plunged on the hideous being, spears pointed down, and drove them into the back of the snake’s neck, which was about five feet in diameter. He summoned a cleavage spell into both weapons and slashed the colubrid’s cervix with the pulse.
The stag’s body immediately began to disintegrate like burned paper, and ashen confetti rose into the night sky. The skeletons that had been the Fearkan’s armor shrank back to their original size, as did the grass snake, which, though dead, continued to twitch and squirm.
*****
Viryl released his ethereal armor and took a few unsteady steps toward his companions, past the remains of his vanquished foe. His heroic deed had cost him most of the Fuligine Stone plating on his Exoplion. Perhaps he would have to go to the Order’s garrison in Corlona to have a new coating applied.
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«What the hell was that fiend?» Elveria croaked, still too shaken to retract her armor.
«A Fearkan. A problem that, if those foolish inquisitors had been competent in their profession, would not have weighed on our shoulders,» Viryl explained cryptically.
«He’s dead, and that’s enough for me. You know your stuff, Viryl of the White Gale,» Nomenas conceded, as he dematerialized his double-headed axe.
«Don’t rush, Nomenas. And you, my friend, why don’t you give us a slightly more elaborate answer?» Radios wasn’t asking, he was demanding.
Viryl snorted. Then he granted the request: «It's just that it's hard to explain, as well as believe. But you saw it with your own eyes, so I might as well try. Have you ever heard of the paladins of the Congregation of the Sacred Chrism? That tiny and mysterious Knightly Order of Avuèl, which sometimes participates in military parades, which no one has ever seen fight? Well, they take care of that. It happens very rarely, maybe less than once every three or four years, but when you hear of a Fekoro which exterminated a platoon of knights and which was then been suppressed by taking additional measures, it doesn't mean that they sent more knights and solved the problem as one would be led to think. It means that they sent the paladins of the Congregation. More specifically, it means that there was no Fekoro in the beginning, but that a sorcerer summoned a particularly powerful Fearkan who took down the inquisitors and the knights who were sent to contain the situation before the Paladins arrived. We could have been those knights. Luckily, at the academy they made me take a useless extracurricular exam on the Arcane Arts and, when I understood the situation, I knew more or less what to do. But don’t worry, these notions are useless. The chances that you will find yourself in a similar situation again in your life are practically zero.»
«I understood even less and I was already fine with the first answer,» Nomenas admitted candidly.
«Yes, but Soverfott… If only he had… I can’t believe it, I really can’t believe they sent us here if they…» Elveria tried to protest, struggling to find the words. Unlike the rest of the team, she was letting her emotions take over. The other knights couldn’t let her to. They would have all the time in the world to mourn Soverfott once their mission was completed.
«Soverfott was already done in the moment that beast laid eyes on him,» Radios declared, this time seeming satisfied with Viryl’s answer. Then, passing him, he approached the remains of the Fearkan and examined the two skeletons. A glint coming from the jaw of one of the two skulls immediately caught his attention.
Turning to Elveria, also with the purpose of bringing her back to reality, Radios asked: «Remind me a little, what did the dispatch say about the three inquisitors? If we found them dead, of course.»
«What…?» Elveria stammered, taken aback: «Let’s see… each of the three had special markings… one had a hump, a significant dorsal kyphosis. Another had two gold teeth, molars in the upper arch. The third couldn’t move his left shoulder, a bad glenohumeral arthritis. Why do you ask?»
«Because I think we found our men. This one has gold molars…» Radios paused to nudge the other skeleton’s left humerus with his foot, then continued: «This one has a joint smoother than an elephant’s tusk.»
« It could be that they sacrificed them during the Fearkan’s summoning ritual. The Ancient Gods are pleased by human blood spilled in their name, and perhaps that’s why the being we faced was so powerful,» Viryl speculated.
«It may be as you say, but now we have a problem. What happened to the third inquisitor?» Radios wondered, crossing his arms.
«We’ll know when we find him,» Nomenas replied with his silly face.
«Yeah, I think that was the point, Nomenas. It looks like we’ll have to search the woods anyway,» Elveria replied.
«That’s what we were here for anyway,» Nomenas concluded seraphically.
After observing the skeletons of the inquisitors, it was time to search the bodies of the cultists. They were four young people, two men and two women. The knights found nothing on them that could help them in their investigation: they were wearing simple linen tunics and cork sandals, all four were armed with common iron daggers.
*****
To explore the forest surrounding Lake Ophania, the four surviving knights decided that they would split up, each conducting their search in a different quadrant. Viryl was assigned the south-east one.
While waiting for dawn they ate a basic breakfast of biscuits and preserves, then they set off.
The first hour and a half of Viryl’s investigation was rather insignificant. He navigated through the brambles and blackthorns of the dense and immaculate sylvan scrub, and found nothing that made him suspect the work of a human hand. Then, unexpectedly, after passing a shrub that seemed to grow on the edge of the bed of a creek, he actually found himself on a path. He was fairly certain that it was not the dirt road that branched off from the paved road to Zelfiria to lead to the lake: that one emerged further north than the point at which he had entered the forest, but he had always and only headed south.
And yet this path had something familiar to Viryl. The gnarled branches of the blackthorns and wild olive trees intertwined above his head, concealing the sky. Pools of black mud on the path. Shivers ran down his spine, and he began to feel a cold sweat break out on him.
Viryl began to walk up the path toward the lake and, as he expected, after less than a mile he reached a clearing on which lay a series of abandoned huts built in a semicircle, forming a concealed square.
The air was still and there was no wind. The morning birds stopped singing, and an eerie silence weighed on Viryl like a boulder.
Viryl swallowed to ease his parched throat and then headed toward the row of shacks. Not that he retained an image of order and cleanliness of the place, but the neglect and abandonment had become even more marked since his first visit.
Reaching the esplanade where eleven years earlier he had seen ecstatic masked celebrants dancing around a bonfire, Viryl turned toward the ruined shacks to look for one that had the appearance of still being in use.
They all looked the same.
Not giving up, Viryl shouted, «Is anyone there?!» and then strained his ears. Perhaps the sect was holding the last of the inquisitors in chains in one of those huts, and he would respond to his cry with a cry for help.
There was a muffled sound, like ceramics smashing on the floor. If his ears hadn’t deceived him, it sounded to Viryl like it was coming from the second shack on the right.
He walked toward the entrance of the building and gingerly opened the door. As he slipped into the damp, smelly gloom of the hovel, a sharp, cold iron blade emerged from the blind spot behind the door he’d just opened and rested on the back of his neck.
Viryl instinctively leaped forward and spun around, his ethereal armor encasing him in preparation for the surprise attack.
The attacker was Darlah, who was gripping the hilt of a dagger so tightly in both hands that her knuckles were white. Her hair was disheveled and her lilac eyes were wide with a mixture of fear and desperation. She was wearing a simple, flowing linen tunic that hung softly and generously over her body, emphasizing her sinuous and slender lines.
It was clear to Viryl that he was in a sticky situation, to put it mildly. He hadn’t wanted to listen to his cousin’s wise words, and now here he was, facing this girl who had seemed anything but a maniac who was threatening to stick a blade in his abdomen. But damn, she was beautiful.
All Viryl could say was, «Please, Darlah, tell me it’s not what it seems.»