Standing outside of the doors to the Great Hall of the Palace in the city of Ghlow, on the Southern Coast of the Country of Rhiada, Myrl looked at the monstrosity that was the Crown of State. It was a relic of an older age.
Like many of the trappings of his Station, it looked like a group of artists had argued over it’s construction, materials, and symbolic meaning for far too long before they decided to just add all of it together in one mass of gold and gems. It was ridiculous.
Myrl knew, mostly from study, that the Royal Crown was, just like the Scepter of Office which the guard to his left currently held, built over the reign of various monarchs in his line. What had once been a crown of iron and bronze had been added to, layer by layer, by a succession of people who had all fought losing battles with what Lord Ashe had once called “Imposter Syndrome.”
Each of those royal ancestors who had felt the need to add at least one more large red gem to the crown had wanted everyone around them to REALLY know that THIS PERSON REALLY IS THE MONARCH!
Myrl smiled at the image it conjured in his mind. He knew that for some it had been a reaction to trying to be as good, if not better, than their own parents. While others had been in the throes of trying to live up to the expectations they had placed upon themselves by supposing at the very outset that they weren’t as “good” as some other candidate.
That kind of attitude had led to large building projects, like dams and bridges in the kingdom by the more forward thinking members of his departed family. In the hands of the more neurotic members of his family, apparently it involved statuary, portraits, excesses of wardrobe, and making the Crown of State… bigger.
Having handed the much smaller crown he wore daily to Master Baison, he slowly raised it to his head, and with a sigh, put it on. It settled poorly on his unfortunate brow. Myrl remembered the headache it had given him the last time he wore the thing, at his coronation all those months ago, and did his best to smile.
He held out his right hand.
The guardsman to his right placed the Scepter of Office, which had originally been a mace wielded by a very distant ancestor who would probably now not recognise the shiny, heavy thing. As he settled his grip on the over-decorated, gold shrouded smashing device, he found an odd spot where the Ring on his right hand that allowed him to read the emotions of those around him slotted into the grip of the damned thing.
It created a frisson in the air around the Scepter’s head. Myrl could see the rings of … agitation in the atmosphere about the head. It both radiated from the head, and lapped at the edges of the ridged sphere that made up the top of the scepter as if water lapped at the edge of an object floating on its surface.
Glancing at those around him, none looked to have noticed this odd behavior in the cudgel-like object. Gripping the thing with his left hand, he moved his right hand slightly, and the air surrounding the scepter returned to its previous, unagitated, state.
He re-gripped the scepter in his right hand, now slightly higher along the line of its tapered shaft. There was no frisson, nor hardening of the air now around its bulbous and awkward head..
Looking closely, he could now see a trough in the handle where he had previously gripped the thing, holding it more like the mace it had once been rather than the Royal Scepter of State it had become. The channel, a semicircular groove, was lined with steel and it specifically looked as if it had been made for the ring on his hand to lock into and to hold the handle in a certain way. He moved his hand slowly back down toward the hollowed out space possibly made just for his ring.
And the air crackled lightly, a charge snapping and dancing from the ring to each knuckle closest, then on to each following joining of his hand.
…curious… He thought, and wondered why his father’s journals never mentioned this. …had he simply not known…?
Master Baison and two of Myrl’s guards, as well as the several scribes who had accompanied him to Court this evening, stepped through the large doors before them, as the guards closed the doors behind themselves with a practiced economy of motion, Myrl felt that he was almost assaulted by a cacophony of sound. The murmurings of the awaiting throng of courtiers, city and kingdom functionaries, and merchants of a certain level of wealth and interest had all gathered to hear what the kingdom, and its still new king, were intending to do about monsters killing masses of citizens.
Myrl knew what he, Lord Ashe, Master Elbana, and several other advisors had discussed, but the answers were just not satisfying. Not in the least.
And Myrl knew that if he didn’t like them, those who came here for the King’s reassurances, HIS reassurances, wouldn’t like them either. Not in the least.
Myrl felt as helpless and alone as he had ever felt in his life since his parents had been killed. Because he was the voice now that people would be listening to settle their worries, and put their fears to rest. And he knew he had nothing of value to offer.
His ring buzzed, sending jolts of anticipatory excitement up and down his arm, and even making the fine brown hairs on his arm prickle beneath the sleeve of the fine gray linen tunic he wore beneath the soft but scratchy layer of brightly dyed and stitched red wool.
There was fear, and anxiety knotted together in those feelings the ring now conveyed to him, and even some scattered smatterings of things like joy, and curiosity, because who doesn't like a show? But mostly the people waiting for him beyond these heavy oaken doors were wrapped in concern.
That made him feel a little better himself, as he knew what his own concerns were here, and planned to address them to this gathering.
As he listened, he could hear the preamble of Official Heraldic Assault that Baison had launched at the waiting crowd. He knew the two guards on the other side of the door were waiting for the right point in the Master Herald’s oratory to lean over, away from the spears they both held, and open the large doors, admitting Myrl into the Great Hall, to take his formal place in the huge, and frankly uncomfortable throne.
As he had been contemplating the growing headache the heavy crown was pushing through its own padding and into his skull, the doors gracefully moved open to admit Myrl, flanked and trailed by the four other guards who made up his entourage this evening.
The people of Ghlow… of Rhiada, who all gathered in the Great Hall, packing its walls East to West, and Northern doors to the edge of the raised platform on which the Royal Throne of Rhiada sat waiting for its King were a splendor to behold.
He saw a row of the priests and priestesses of the various orders all standing along the Eastern wall, sometimes called the Sun-Wall because of its banks of ornate windows set to catch the light of the rising of the Sun. Myrl nodded to the head priest, Arne Raoh, his short, stocky, heavily muscled pugilist’s physique at odds with his priestly raiment. Arne stood in grim-faced discussion with an older, tall, sharp edged woman in the flowing attire typical of a Priestess of the Moon God, Arluan.
They did not wear their highest fashions tonight as they had at his coronation. But, his people wore every color of the rainbow, and every color in between as they cheered when Myrl entered the room. There was an undulation that began at the front of the room, nearest Myrl, and worked its way ponderously to the very back of the room as each person bowed.
Standing in front of his ghastly, huge throne, Myrl looked out at his people. The People of Rhiada, and smiled at them all. They were here to hear their king. They were concerned about the lives of their fellow Rhiadians.
And their own lives. Myrl knew self interest was close to the hearts of many here tonight.
He sat on his throne, settling the Scepter of Office across his knees, and wished his crown wasn’t so heavy. It felt like it was beginning to cut into his brow.
He forced his Will through his Talent as he spoke, and in a clear voice that every person in the Great Hall could hear as though he stood right next to them, not the boisterous shouting that heralds generally engaged in to be heard, he addressed His People.
“Thank you all for coming this evening. Please, those of you in the rows, be seated. Take what ease you may.”
There was a muttering and shuffling as most tried to sit in the various benches in the hall that had been arranged by the palace staff earlier.
Off to his right, in the corner by the edge of the dias, a Court Minstrel strummed lightly on a long necked dulcimer, the kind often played by the herdsmen of the mountains to the Northwest. He had been one of the more noticeable minstrels at the palace since Myrl’s coronation, usually found wandering the various gardens playing his dulcimer, or playing a little set of buzzing, twanging pipes. Many people at the palace appreciated a minstrel who didn’t play the lute, the harp, or some variation of rauschpfeife, or even a recorder.
Unlike many of the other professional minstrels in the palace, this grizzled older man had thick fingers on wide, scarred hands that showed years of hard labor. Myrl had spoken briefly to the man once, he had been a quiet sort. His music was generally jaunty, and of the more popular vein played in taverns and at festivals. The occasional work-songs. Not the endless droning “poetry” set to light music that was the current fad.
Myrl knew the man could play those last two, he had seen it himself, but the minstrel preferred the more “homey” music of his dulcimer and …whatever the wind instrument was that sounded like angry bees being shaken in their hive that he wore around his neck in a wire rig so that he could play it and strum the strings of his dulcimer at the same time. The king wondered if the man was wearing his little brass cymbals tied to his ankles again, as he had seen the man do several times already.
Myrl knew the palace children loved his music, and saw many of them skipping along to his tunes as he played in the various courtyards.
…I wonder if he has offered to play his dulcimer with Donk… my big friend is a notorious singer, and should never be encouraged… but he does love to …uh… sing… Myrl smiled at the thought.
No sooner had he opened his mouth to address those gathered about His appointing an officer to track down the beasts who had attacked the men on the dock just this last evening, when a great clamoring rang through the hall. All were shocked into silence, many of the guards around the perimeter of the cavernous room now gripped their spears in two hands as they took a readied, bent-kneed stance, eyes darting about the chamber, looking for danger.
The very stone walls of the palace rumbled and groaned then in the early darkness of the evening, almost chiming as if they had been a giant stone bell, struck to note the turning of the hour.
Waves of pain and rage washed across Myrl where he now stood in front of his throne. The Herald, Baison, was wide eyed, and turning to gesture for calm to his gaggle of scribes, who had all suffered from overturned inkwells, and a scattering of quills from the lap-desks they had been using.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The screams came then.
Some were high pitched, and rising. Screams of terror and pain leading to bad ends.
Other screams were throat-tearing, voicebox shattering screams of primal anger. Rage.
And rolling up from the clamorous detonations that rocked the stone walls of the palace, there was intermittent laughter amongst the mixed terror and the rage of the screams.
Several of the guards in the hall all turned to the large Northern doors of the Hall as more sounds of crumbling and concussion moved through the walls of the hall in hard edged waves. Each person assembled flinching with each new cracking detonation of sound.
While Myrl thought the concussive sounds had picked up a rhythm, as though a mechanical device was being used, some great battering ram, he could also feel through the aether the Will and Talent of a mage.
The laughter didn’t match its rhythms to the many snarls and tortured screaming that rang through the palace, but they matched the impacts that made the great stone walls of the Rhiadan Palace tremble and shudder in pain.
Myrl’s head no longer ached with the weight of his crown, the pain vanishing instantaneously with other more pressing concerns. While he had been afraid the waves of shock and fear that rolled from his audience up to him where he had sat on his throne might have paralyzed him with their volume, when he had grasped the scepter, the jagged, tearing waves of fear had subsided.
From beside him, Myrl felt the tug of someone at his elbow. “Sire, you must leave!”
It was a guard, gently pulling him toward the doors he had entered not five minutes before.
... Mellet…? Mullet…? Mauler…? “You! YOU! Get these people out this door, down the West Corridor to the Sunset Courtyard.”
The man spun away from Myrl like a marionette and gestured with his spear for the guards at the doors to open them, while he shouted at several other guards who had been converging upon the throne to help him gather people and get them moving.
The doors that Myrl had entered through spat out another full squad of guards, marching in synchronized quickstep, and each one marking out a place to stand on the dias around Myrl. They didn’t know what the danger was, but they were surrounding their king to cover him from as many angles as they reasonably could.
He had been about to issue new raiders to those newest guards, when Master Elbana strode in from the corridor, her short sword in one hand, and the cudgel she usually hung on her belt in the other. “Sire, we are under siege. You need to get to the West Hall! Now!”
He turned to her, and the grim, steely set of her features told him he wasn’t going to win any arguments with his Master of Horse today. “I will go, YOU get these people out of here.” He pointed to the door through which she had just come.
Elbana looked like she wanted to gainsay his orders, but he stepped forward, and gestured to the Northern end of the Great Hall. “These aren’t from siege engines, Elbana. There is a mage, a strong one, outside of that set of doors. I’m not sure exactly where, but whoever they are, they are trained to bring down walls, and the noise they are making makes me feel like they can do it. Get. My. People. Out.”
“MYRL!” she practically yelled his name.
“No! I will go. You get these people out. That’s my order to you, Master Elbana. Here and now. Save as many as you can.”
She stared at him. Anger showing in her clenched jaw, and the tendons on her neck beginning to show. Without breaking eye contact with her King, she shouted to one of the guards. “Martlet! You and three others get the King to the West Hall, NOW!”
The man Myrl had ordered to begin the evacuation of people from the hall peeled away from what he was doing, and tagged two others as he walked by them, all three surrounding Myrl.
Suddenly, a great tearing sound ripped through the hall, and the high arched ceiling above the raised dias where Myrl and his party now all stood cracked. As Myrl’s eyes were drawn up to the heavens, several large cut stones released their grips upon one another and began to tumble gracefully and with deceptive slowness toward the ground.
Myrl raised his hands above his head, in a futile attempt to block several thousand pounds of quarried stone from crushing himself. The mace-like scepter, still gripped in his right hand hummed to life, and bellowed in outrage as the metal glowed with the fear of those people all around Myrl, channeled through the ring, and into the body of the now incandescent scepter.
The stones of the destroyed ceiling halted in place, mere paces above the heads of those guests and functionaries who stood to the right of the raised royal platform.
Myrl tried to use his Talent to Delve the Scepter, to see if he could grasp what the thing could do. But when he made the attempt, the crown suddenly tightened on his head with crippling pain.
Myrl screamed.
All eyes turned to their king, and he yelled to them. “Get these people to safety! NOW!”
Several guards had opened a matching set of doors on the left side of the stage, and had set to shuffling people, peers and merchants alike, through them. Now several guards moved at the King’s shouted command, and began moving people out into the corridor.
The chaos of people screaming was only made worse by the screams and laughter of whoever had been outside of the Great Hall trying to tear the walls down. And now the fright of those surrounding Myrl tripled, sending their terror through his ring, and up his arm, before it washed back down and through him to the scepter, and from that Artifact to the thousands of pounds of stone now hovering over his fleeing people.
This new wave of fear made the color of the light coming from the scepter shift and change, and the large rock bodies began to sizzle in the light along their bottom edges where they sat in the emitted aura coming from the king and his scepter.
As Myrl watched, the stone was slowly eaten by the light. The people who were being shuffled and shoved past him added new layers of horror and need to his hungry ring.
Every time Myrl tried to shift or move, he found it impossible, as if he were being held in place by a giant’s fist wrapped about his trembling form. Several times, guards tried to move him, but putting their hands on the king was as far as they got before they too were frozen in place.
One guard, Martlet, had decided to give up his attempts to move the king, and fell to the ground, his body limp, and his hands smoking as though burned. Within moments, the man was back up and on his feet, though he held his burnt hands before him, not daring to touch anything.
…he must be in agony… Myrl thought, his eyes tracking the man’s reddened and blistering hands from where he himself stood imobile.
When the boulders above him had been more than halfway eaten by whatever power pulsed and bled from the head of the scepter, Myrl saw that most of the people who had been in the hall were now gone. Some still stood in terror. Some tried to gather those lingering others.
Some few argued with the guards trying to usher them to safety. Because there will always be those horrible souls best described as self-centered idiots.
But mostly it was down to his guards, Elbana, and a few scattered bodies throughout the hall who had either been trampled in the panic, or had suffered from falling stonework that Myrl had not been able to catch.
…I don’t even know how I caught these… he thought. His body was loosening in the grip of whatever force had been holding it in place. As he watched, the remaining stonework slid down the side of the light that had held it aloft.
With a grunt he hadn’t known he had been holding, Myrl lifted the scepter as though completing the arc of a swing of his arm. And then he stumbled forward, only to be caught by Martlet.
“Your Majesty, please, we need to leave now!” Martlet was not quite yelling, and Myrl was not quite going to take offense at being not quite ordered about by one of his own guardsmen.
“Lead the way, Martlet. By all means.” Myrl reached up to wipe his brow, and reposition the crown for comfort. But whatever exertions he had done had seated the thing too firmly on his head for any easy movement, so he left it as he was guided through the doors he had entered through mere minutes before.
A heavy thump sounded behind the retreating party, and before they had gone wholly through the doors that led to more heavily fortified, more central parts of the palace, something had grabbed Martlet, and as the man was dragged backward into the Great Hall, Myrl found himself tugged along as well. His clothing was trapped in the edges of whatever great clawed thing had taken hold of Martlet.
As Martlet was spun away by a mighty heave of impossible arms, Myrls red overtunic ripped, and he was spun away towards the Eastern wall to land hard on a mix of materials; broken benches, and people who had not escaped the falling masonry.
Behind him, in the open space of the hall, Myrl could hear the muzzy sounds of combat. Random meaty smacking noises he had always associated with the rough butchery that happened on hunting trips, and the sporadic clanging of metal he always thought of as the sounds from the practice yards.
Rolling over, he now faced a year’s worth of nightmares, as several guards tried to hold off huge fleshy monstrosities. Two guards used their spears, and a third used the broken haft of another spear in one hand, and his short sword in his other. Some other guards had run at the two monstrous forms, only to be batted away.
Huge arcing swipes of the beasts’ long clawed arms sent one man flying back towards the northern doors as a geyser of blood and offal trailed behind.
There was a rumble, and a crash as more stonework fell from up above, the wind of it passing nearby peppering Myrl pebbles and small shards. Looking to his left, the doors had been blocked almost completely by rubble. Looking back to the center of the hall, two more men were down at the claws of the giant gore covered things.
One of the creatures turned to the young king, and opened its horrific muzzle to let loose a wrenching screech. Expecting some kind of roar, Myrl flinched at the gritty, high pitched wail of pain and rage the thing emitted.
…just like dueling… you and Ashe duel all the time… erect a defense, and probe for a weakness… then cut… he thought.
Centering himself took more time than he had anticipated, as his legs were unsteady, and his body felt too weak to stand.
Before he knew what was happening, the thing had leapt at him, throwing its contorted and twisted form through the air at Myrl. Its outstretched claws reached for him where he stood, and instinctually Myrl ducked down as he swung the scepter up at the broad, paw-like appendage closest to him.
There was a flash of blue light at the moment of contact with the talons of the beast, and the scepter let out its own ragged wail as the azure halo ate away at the arm and body of the beast.
Rolling on the floor away from the monster, Myrl heard as it slammed into the wall he had been standing by , almost leaning on, and he scrambled to his feet as fast as he was able, trying once again to find his center, and marshaling his Talent.
It was with a grand effort that Myrl was finally able to force his mind into some form of discipline and organize his thoughts enough to raise the “Wall Of Leaves” he had used the day before when defending himself from the Parthiqueen Ambasador.
Breathing hard from behind the safety of his warding spell, Myrl watched as the beast picked itself up from the cluttered floor. Now he coils see the thing for what it truly was; a man twisted and stretched into a monstrous mockery of both bear and wolf.
It stood well over eight feet in height, and before Myrl’s scepter had destroyed one of its shoulders, it would have been at least as wide as Myrl was tall. Its skin along the legs were torn open in several places to allow the enlarged muscles and oddly lengthened skeleton of the thing the freedom to move.
With a keening howl the monster slashed at the shield that Myrl had placed between himself and the beast. Its claws, long, jagged shards of bone, more like lengthened finger bones than real animal claws or talons, pierced the delicate leaves of the spell, but the surrounding flesh of the paw was peeled back by the force of the spell’s barrier.
The now one armed thing pulled its remaining arm, dripping with ichor and further distorted with the skin of its paws pushed back away from its claws, back from the ward and howled its rage and pain into the night air. In the distance, someone laughed. There were more screams in the distance.
The laugh came again.
It was a high, ululating warble that ripped up and down against Myrl’s ears, and made both beasts in the Great Hall turn to the direction from which it had come. Both beasts trilled a ragged call in response.
Across the room from where he now stood, the doors on the other side of the dais were flung open, and two full squads of soldiers charged through with calls of “RHIADA!”
Seeing his moment, Myrl stepped back towards that now opened door, his foot tangling in something easily broken and very noisy. He was still holding his spell in place though the one armed horror now watched the new threats as they entered. Carefully walking backwards, his right foot still tangled, Myrl made his way to the open doors, and the angry and blood splattered face of Master Elbana met him as he reached the opening.
Where he had been standing, the injured creature looked to its comrade, then back at the blood smeared shield that had somehow stopped his killing of the little man in the torn red tunic. It then looked back to where its partner was being pressed by spearmen. It pushed itself around the far edge of the spell, losing filets of its flesh as it did so, before it was able to lope awkwardly toward its harried twin, leaving a wet trail of many dark colors.
Standing in the now open doors, Myrl reached with his Talent, and pulled. Several downed soldiers that had been spread across the chamber now slid towards the opened door, and their waiting king. Both creatures stopped to watch the slides of the injured soldiers, and screeched in unholy harmony, before leaping toward where their prone victims skidded to safety in the outside corridor.
Myrl called to the guards who had entered, “Spears UP! Retreat to ME! TO ME! RHIADA!”