And march they did.
Ever, were they on the march.
The march to Old Ottawa.
Passage through this ashen wasteland was slow and quiet. The lack of life and overabundance of choking ash suffocated all commotion, leaving behind only the gently scrunching footfalls of their paces through its many drifts, and the subtle rasping of their tight-held breaths.
Or, at least, Alyss’s breaths. And Taiven’s.
Glare no longer needed to breathe.
Even now Alyss found it difficult, referring mentally to the High Inquisitor by his given name. Even now, she felt…ill-at-ease, around the man. She couldn’t help it. Glare’s infamy preceded him. It always had, since the delve’s very beginning. In many ways, he was what she so desperately wished to be.
And yet, though his demeanor was noble, and his combat proficiency enviable enough, Glare’s accolades left a sour taste in her mouth.
Much as she might endeavor to forget, the comely Immortal mage still served as a constant, grim reminder of the arranged marriage lain in waiting for her upon her return home, of the similarly bellicose Horseman for whom she was destined to bear children. The mere thought made her shudder.
Alyss much preferred the company of Taiven.
But her discomfort towards Glare was unfair, and she knew it. And as time passed, and the march continued, she saw it dwindle more and more, until it was but a whisper in the back of her mind. Until the very memory of home was but a whisper, in the back of her mind.
And the slow, tedious, silent march continued.
Being Marble stage Blessed, or greater, the three of them made good time. But their prodigious pace was rewarded by precious little change in environment, save for the occasional rumbling rainstorm dispensed from on high, the infrequent downpours of stinging, glowing, yellow-green liquid that forced Alyss to take shelter underneath a canopy of shades. Every now and again, ashen forest was replaced by barren, desolate plains, only to make its inevitable, subsequent reappearance.
Forest and plains, forest and plains. Ash, and acid rain.
It made for a rather monotonous slog. A boring, mindless march across an endless, arid, infertile wasteland.
And yet, Alyss found she didn’t mind it.
The first floor had been a stinking, sweltering, hell. She well remembered the gut-wrenching smell, scarcely stifled by swaddling her mouth and nose in fabrics. She well remembered the suffocating humidity that ensured she was drenched with vile fluid every second of every day, her clothes plastered to her skin, her head swimming in the heat.
The second floor had been an exercise in slavery and insanity. She’d been forced to kowtow to that madman, to placate Vox’s eclectic, unstable temper. Every moment that passed by could have all too easily been her last. Every time she lay herself down to rest brought only nightmares, abominable visions of what the dark lords of the Devoted might do to her when she was brought before them in memetic chains.
And so, by comparison, this tedious march through barren wasteland was…
Strangely pleasant, actually.
It was a laughable notion. The three of them were lost within the World Titan, deeper than they’d ever been before. Inevitably, they’d face down enemies more monstrous and powerful than they’d ever seen before.
All their plans and theories, all their knowledge of their current misfortunes, all their hopes of escape, were based solely upon the words and ramblings of an ancient, suicidally-depressed android that could have had any number of reasons to lie.
And to crown it all, to serve as the grim punchline of a grueling joke, they were delving into the third floor of an exotic Dungeon, where Knossos’s normal niceties, what few there were, squarely did not apply. There would be no fairness here. They would need a true miracle to escape.
Yet Alyss found she didn’t mind that.
And neither, apparently, did her two companions.
Perhaps it was all they’d suffered through together, all they’d struggled, all they’d already sacrificed. Perhaps, as she’d said before, it was the comparison to prior floors, past miseries. Perhaps it was something else entirely.
But as they trudged along the old road, as they traversed the cracked and pitted asphalt, surrounded on all sides by waste and death, she found it a surprisingly companionable atmosphere.
None of them grew fatigued, really, not in conditions so mundane as this. When any amongst them called for rest, or respite, to eat, or to sleep, they simply…did so. There was no argument. There was no debate. Theirs was not a light friendship, born of shared pastimes. It was a deep and fundamental bond, a grisly brotherhood, a grim fellowship forged in the fires that only suffering could bellow.
They no longer concerned themselves with time.
Why should they have? They didn’t care about completing the Agoge, not anymore. That, too, felt pithy in comparison to what they’d faced, to what they’d yet to face. And besides, this deep in the World Titan, on an exotic floor? For all they knew, mere seconds could be passing on the outside.
So they marched.
They marched, and they made idle conversation.
Taiven started it, of course. Of course he did. The young swordsman had already risked so much, put far too much faith in them, and still he offered more.
If Alyss was the leader, and Glare the soldier, then Taiven must have been their party’s heart.
He was, as it turned out, not an Aristocrat. Alyss wasn’t surprised to learn that. The swordsman had introduced himself as a Tharros, and she didn’t know any families by that name. She had, though, been surprised to discover him Forsaken. Shocked, even. He certainly didn’t act it.
Forsaken were all of a type.
Bitter. Angry. Vengeful.
Furious with the world.
Strong enough to taste divinity, yet too impure for the Aristocracy’s good taste, there was nowhere for them to quite fit in. Alyss knew the feeling all too well, shared it, even. Forsaken made up the vast majority of all enslaved Blessed in the Cells, a fate she, herself, had only just avoided, saved by the unique potency of her foul Blessing.
To hear this was a trait that she and the young swordsman shared brought about a strange giddiness to her gut, accompanied by a queasiness that she couldn’t quite understand.
The particulars of Taiven’s heritage were similar to hers, too; a mundane mother and a Blessed father. He didn’t talk much about the latter, but didn’t avoid the subject, either. He spoke of the man with a considerable distaste, but no overwhelming enmity. Apparently, he just…didn’t really know his father. Didn’t even remember his face.
Lucky you, she’d thought, sourly.
But Taiven didn’t seem all too bothered by that fact, and spoke fondly of his home village, instead, with a wistful dearness to his eyes that made Alyss long to see it for herself. And, sometimes, he even spoke of his mother, with a tenor so saddened that it drove her own heart to ache.
Emboldened by the young man’s words, and in a voice that quavered infuriatingly, Alyss sought to match his efforts.
Anxiously, she tiptoed about the scarce, fond memories she possessed of her own mother, and the rare occasions she’d found respite in her youth. She spoke tremulously of the few nooks and crannies she’d discovered in the manor, to secret herself away from family and enjoy a scant moment of peaceful solitude.
She lectured with a hesitant grandiosity of the palatial grounds and massive manors boasted by the Cells Heads and High Lords, that she’d visited time and again. These stories, she found, were Taiven’s favorite, and when he hung on her words with rapt attention she felt a swell of pride, and that same, somewhat-queasy giddiness from before.
Mostly, though, her companions heard her tales in silence, beset by a quiet pity. There were certain things, many things, that she never discussed, and of which they never asked.
But Alyss felt her voice grow more confident with each passing self-expression, more assured and comfortable and relaxed with every day that crept sluggishly by. She felt herself slowly, surely, emerge from the shell that had so long suffocated her, and allow her many lessons in etiquette and command to settle snugly into her soul.
And she even felt that maybe, possibly, very, very eventually…she might be capable of sharing the rest.
Perhaps. One day.
The High Inquisitor spoke the most of them all.
He told tales of war and glory, his voice proud and booming, of brutal victories and narrow rescue upon the Frontlines. Some of his stories were familiar to Alyss, recognized in roughly embellished form from songs she’d heard at galas and Aristocratic ceremonies. Others were entirely unknown, too gruesome, perhaps, for transcription, and so violent as to make her shudder.
Though Alyss, herself, hardly found war’s routines to be a captivating thing, Taiven took to them with considerable delight, and whatsoever bright-eyed questions he asked, the Immolator happily answered. And so the rift that had grown between her two companions, if indeed it had ever truly existed, grew smaller and smaller still, until it was replaced by a steadfast companionship.
Admittedly, not all Glare’s tales were of war.
He sung, too, the praises of his adoptive father, a Cardinal whom Alyss recognized as Cell Head Ian Patrusc. Father Ian, as Glare referred to him, for all his luxuries and titles, was a man that genuinely embodied those greatest and most honorable tenets of the Faith. A priest so wise as to end conflicts with a single word, so merciful as to heal any ailment with but a touch. A servant, Glare professed, who’d make the Holy Triumvirate, themselves, proud.
His songs were bright and gaudy, and heartfelt enough. Alyss got the sense that the handsome Inquisitor really was proud of his victories, of the lives he’d saved, of the Spawn he’d slain. She believed that he really did worship his Cardinal.
But there was something else in there, too.
Something false lay within his presentation of the tales, something dark was hidden beneath his victories and rescues. Alyss never asked him about the rumors she’d heard of the Inquisition, and the Immolator never brought them up.
Instead, every now and again, upon very rare occasion, Glare told…another sort of story.
This second type, this secret type of tale was one the Immortal recounted more softly, more quietly, more humbly, and far less self-assured, lacking all manner of pomp and circumstance.
He spoke of an era before he’d met the Cardinal, a period when the Inquisition had been but a glimmer in his eye. He spoke of being found by the Coterie in cryonic suspension, a babe lost to the ages.
A child out of time.
He spoke of being sent to a small chapel at the edge of a lake, and of being raised there. Taught there. Of the friends he’d made in the fellow orphans who called it home. Of a young girl, with flaxen, short-cropped hair and laughing, amber eyes. Glare had not been Glare, back then. He’d just been Caleb. The mage who stood before her wore his Blessing as if born to it, but he hadn’t been. Not then.
Which meant, Alyss knew, that the Immolator must have triggered.
Glare, Light of Remembrance, fury of the Frontlines, never once spoke of his trigger. He never once spoke of how he’d come to leave the chapel, or of what became the orphans that were once his friends.
Never did he tell them how that story ended, and never did they ask.
And so it went.
And so they marched.
Hours turned to days, days turned to weeks, and slowly, steadily, the weeks multiplied.
Still, they marched.
They plodded ponderously across shattered asphalt, waded steadfastly through deep drifts of thick ash, and laid themselves down to rest beneath rumbling, stormy skies, with no stars at all to light their way.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
There were no streams, nor lakes, with which to wash, yet never did they find themselves becoming rank or rancid. Alyss’s Shadow Form only included herself and her immediate belongings and, as such, caused all manner of grime, and detritus to evacuate her. Glare, similarly, exercised his Breaker capabilities to purge himself of filth.
Taiven also boasted some manner of cleaning himself, but its specific mechanics eluded Alyss for a while. Until, one day, she somehow managed to summon up sufficient courage that she might ask him, directly.
In response, the swordsman claimed his clothing was all self-cleaning. When Alyss directed, a good bit shamefully, his attention to his very much bare upper body, the man simply shrugged, and, in typically ludicrous fashion, said that he ‘just scoured it with Entropy, once or twice, that’s all.’
As if such a thing was even possible. As if Entropy, itself, could be manipulated free-form. But he and his barren chest had gotten uncomfortably close to her at that point, by way of demonstration, and Alyss had swiftly retreated to her pavilion.
And so the days marched on.
They walked. They scouted. They surveyed. They stopped. They ate. They slept.
And, the next day, they did it all again.
Until eventually, inevitably, life found them.
If you could call it life.
It had all started ordinarily enough. On a day no different, nor visually distinct, from any of the others. Except, through one of Alyss’s forward servants, her advance scouts, she’d picked up a strange noise, a sort of…gurgling.
A choking, wheezing, squelching, squishing sound, as if someone was suffocating on their own vomit. Having heard nothing for weeks, she immediately informed her companions, who took up arms without delay, readied themselves for quite possibly ruinous battle, and made for the grotesque commotion’s source.
And, equally without delay, they found it.
It was a horrid, horrid thing.
It was all curled up into a little ball, a fetal, infantile sphere, sharing just about the same size and proportions as a human child, except that there was nothing human about this creature. Its whole body was a tattered, blackened, rust-red mess of dried, loosely-flapping skin and gaunt, emaciated flesh. The child-thing had no hair, no scalp at all, really, and across its exposed skull a web of miniscule, creeping, blood-red capillaries pulsed nauseatingly.
~~~
Canadian
~~~
The name Alyss observed meant nothing to her.
Nevertheless, the revolting, pathetic thing turned towards them with sunken, orange eyes that shone like headlamps in the ashen dusk. The skin-flaps that hung about its mouth quivered as it extended a skeletal finger towards them, and let out a low, keening moan.
The woods about them exploded.
Countless scores, legions, of the child-thing’s far larger and more formidable brethren let out a groaning, gurgling, sickening battle cry as they raced rabidly towards Alyss and her companions. Though closer to adult humans in size, their proportions were equally as haggard as the child-thing, yet they were, one and all, so much stronger than their collective appearance might have implied.
These Canadians were stronger than the Shamblers of the second floor, stronger perhaps than even a Marble stage Brute, so strong their movements alone pulped the ruined, lifeless ground beneath their feet, and stirred great swathes of ash into the air.
As her allies flickered into motion, Alyss found herself momentarily incapacitated, taken aback by the ruthless savagery of the feral creatures’ charge, hacking for air and desperately scrubbing the ash from her eyes. Before she had the chance to mount any manner of defense, Alyss felt a grip like iron clamp down upon both her shoulders.
Her fine, black hair whistled through the wind and pain exploded in her lower spine as she was slammed viciously down onto the ground. The Canadian’s foul, rotten, fetid breath made her stomach churn as it brought its repulsive, stringy, dangling face near to her own.
Its grip tightened, and Alyss felt her shoulder blades begin to creak and crack.
“Killlll….meeeee….,” the fell creature moaned, its words spoken in a dialect incomprehensible to her. She screamed and squirmed as its diseased, repugnant maw raced towards her vulnerable neck.
KRAKK-THOOM.
The wretched thing vanished as quickly as it had arrived, vaporized into a thousand bloody globules of guts and gore which misted immediately upon her lavish robes, drenching her in mutant ichor.
Alyss shut her eyes tight, barely managing to stave off retching.
“Look alive, milady,” her once-more savior rumbled in that lightning-infused voice, lithely twirling his delicate bone-blade to rid it of blood whilst he scanned the ranks of their foe. “Take to your Breaker state, perhaps,” he suggested, and promptly disappeared in another flash of crimson lightning.
Alyss gagged again, stumbling awkwardly to her feet as she called her Nightmare to her. Her eyes rolled back and she shuddered with the sudden surge of eldritch might that perfused her alongside her Shadow Form.
Rivers of foul blood melted off of Alyss, and she rose into the air.
With a clawed fist and a jaw clenched tight, she called upon her shadows, near one hundred of the creatures heeding her call, forming writhing tendrils of darkness that reached out to rend her enemies asunder–
Alyss blinked.
There were no enemies to rend asunder.
The ground before her, for leagues in every direction, had been churned to pieces, torn apart. All about her were blackened bits, burnt ends, and bloody chunks of Canadian. The misbegotten remnants of the creatures were…everywhere. Dozens, perhaps nearly one hundred of them, destroyed in the space between heartbeats.
There, at the other end of the makeshift battlefield, were the culprits.
Her two colleagues stood tall, talking casually with one another, speaking words she couldn’t quite discern. Hero and Glare, chuckling over the legions of damned they’d so-recently, so-quickly, so-easily dispatched.
They cut quite the figure.
Both were shirtless, yet somehow unblemished by their gruesome melee. The High Inquisitor stood a measure taller than his ally, perhaps just under a full head so. A noble, handsome, shining knight, who well embodied the spirit and image of his Faith. Taiven, on the other hand, made for a somewhat more savage warrior, still crackling with that brutal, beautiful red lightning, and surrounded, as always, by his entourage of shades.
In contrast to the silent, stoic sun that blazed behind Glare’s back, Taiven was thronged by a veritable menagerie of arcane entities. About his feet pranced the silver wolf, yipping contentedly, no doubt pleased to have seen such action. At his left side rumbled the ever-present volcano, and above him hovered that lightning-avatar, ever-watchful, scanning their surroundings for further foes.
They looked noble, the two of them. They looked mighty. Despite the fact that only one was Immortal, they both looked like Gods.
Alyss felt ashamed as she approached them.
“Ho, miss Nycta!” Taiven grinned at her, happily. His smile made her chest flutter. He slapped his fellow slaughterer on the shoulder, laughing again.
“I was just saying, to Cale–”
“Indeed!” the Immolator interrupted him, grinning broadly. “Can you believe it, milady? It seems we’ve finally encountered some foes without a trick up their sleeves!” He spread his shining, immaculately-tanned arms wide.
“No Masters!” Glare laughed. “No Strangers! No alien Gods! Just good, old-fashioned, normal monsters.” He grinned fiercely, pounding one fist into an open palm, a flicker of the war hero she knew from the songs making itself known. “Fucking finally.”
“Precisely,” her Hero agreed, his smile dimming a measure.
“One can only dream that this might continue,” he muttered. “Still, no reason to get complacent.” Then he glanced at her again, and winced. “Sorry about drenching you in blood, back there.”
Alyss just shook her head, mutely.
How could the two of them be so…so content? So inoculated to combat? So immune to the horrors of war? For the Inquisitor it made sense, perhaps, given his background, but how could Taiven possibly feel the same?
Glare cracked another joke, elbowing his companion affably, and Taiven’s grin renewed itself.
Why is he so used to this?
She sighed, about to speak up, when something caught the corner of her eye. From one of the fresh-made corpses, something was emerging. Bubbling forth in clumps of ghastly shadow, dripping upwards off the edges of rust-red skin. Alyss’s eyes widened as she recognized it for what it was.
A soul.
The first one she’d seen since this wretched delve began.
Alyss closed her eyes, drew in a deep, deep breath, stretched out her hand…
And pulled.
From eighty-nine disparate locations scattered across the breadth of the battlefield, little shadows identical to that first one darted up and into the air, forming a great, surging ball of pitch-blackness, a vortex of pure pitch-blackness that swarmed straight into her soul.
Alyss gasped sharply as they did so, her eyes still shut tight, her limbs trembling as if electrified, her Blessing singing with magnificent power.
“…um, Alyss?”
Alyss’s eyes snapped open. Taiven’s were widened, and directed towards her, the young swordsman’s gaze flipping between the cadavers and herself.
Oh, right, she thought. Of course. He can see them.
“You can create servants from corpses,” Taiven realized in short order, saving Alyss the explanation. Glare quirked an eyebrow up, turning to stare at her as well. “But why–”
“Not corpses,” she said, groaning slightly, still flush with power. “Souls. I can only reap those creatures that possess a soul.” Her expression fouled.
It was what she hated, truly hated, about her Blessing, more than anything else. It was what made her power so special, so desirable. Unlike other Blessed, who knew not how exactly to trigger a Trial, Alyss could control her progression precisely.
She could only advance via the consumption of souls.
There was no other way. Not that she’d found. Never. Father had been delighted by this, of course, his repugnant glee tempered slightly by the discovery that only sentients, apparently, possessed them. He’d sent her immediately to the slave pits, to let the unholy harvest begin. The euphoria that accompanied such nourishment only further sickened her.
Alyss spread her arms out towards the corpse-field, gesturing at it broadly.
“Which means these creatures were, at least at one point in their lives…,” she grimaced. “Sapient.”
Taiven quieted in an instant. Caleb’s enthusiastic demeanor fell away, and he scowled.
“Of course there was a catch,” the Immolator muttered, staring angrily out at the field. “Of course. It couldn’t–”
An expression of anguish flittered briefly across his face.
“You…,” he started, painfully, “you don’t think they’re still–”
“They’re not,” Taiven interrupted, firmly. “Believe me, they’re not. I would know if they were.”
“Their song was suffering and pain,” he grimaced. “Howling. Maddened. Frightened, but not sapient. Not sapient” He shut his eyes tight, looking away. “Perhaps…perhaps long ago.”
They shared a moment of silence amongst them, perhaps in respect. Strangely, Alyss felt quite relieved. Compared to ripping the life from a screaming slave against both her and their will, this was…a far preferable alternative.
“Do you think this was the Dragon’s doing?” Glare asked, an uncommon darkness in his eyes. The Inquisitor was dead serious, more so than she’d ever seen him act before.
“She hates humanity,” he swore, not for the first time, filled with a certainty that made her curious what exactly he, Rover, and Quarrel had faced during their ill-fated game. “Were these…”
He grimaced.
“Were these human beings, once?”
Taiven’s frown deepened. Alyss weakly shook her head.
“We can’t know,” she said. “There could be any number of causes. We don’t even know if she’s capable of this, capable of creating…non-mechanical things. We barely know anything about her.”
They sat in silence for a while, the three of them, mulling over dismal things. But, eventually, they continued on. What else could they do?
The only way out was forward, and the only way forward was through.
They met the creatures regularly, from then on. The Canadians. They met them in groups both large and small, in all manner of locales, deranged and rabid every time. Now that she was expecting them, Alyss invariably managed to locate the creatures prior to their arrival, and thus she and her companions were always ready.
And the march became a slaughter.
Alyss couldn’t do much, herself, her mundane servants incapable of meaningfully harming the creatures. But nor could they do much to her, so long as she kept her Shadow Form active, and thus she took to a more commanding role, overseeing the melee from on high, directing her colleagues and monitoring for stragglers, or surprise attacks. Not that such direction often proved necessary.
For Glare and Taiven had become powerful beyond belief.
She’d known it for a while, or at least she’d suspected as much, but now her suspicions, or fears, or hopes, were well and truly confirmed.
Confirmed, because the creatures couldn’t even touch them.
Glare was a sun given flesh and form. His lances of light punched through steely skin and wrought-iron bone like brittle paper. His incandescence crescendoed alongside his efforts, until those mutants nearby him liquefied before they got the chance to scratch his brilliant armor.
Taiven was a ghost on the battlefield, a mirage, an ephemeral specter of death and destruction. His crimson shade roared with eldritch glee whilst its liege-lord tore Canadians apart as an arcane storm, dozens at a time, vaporizing them, immersed in a vibrating shroud of rich, red lightning. She never saw him move, until it was already over. Throughout all, Alyss only ever got the sense that he was holding back.
Neither of them even broke a sweat. Not once.
And with every magnificent victory, with every overwhelming conquest, with every bounty of harvested souls, Alyss’s hopes grew.
These were no normal Blessed she delved with. These were no mundane warriors. They were prodigies, geniuses, the kind of talents that came into being once in countless generations. The two of them might not know it yet; all Glare knew was war, and Taiven knew nothing at all. But Alyss knew. She knew very well.
And Alyss began to hope.
And Alyss began to dream.
She began to dream the most dangerous kinds of dreams.
She began to dream of freedom.
Why?
This delve was more terrible, more horrible than anything she could have imagined. She’d never expected anything to come of this, not at all. She knew this entire exercise would be meaningless, in the end. She knew she’d find no friends among the Coterie, no friends outside of Nycta. And if, even if, somehow she did…no one would oppose Soultaker. No one would oppose Vaultkeeper. No one would stand a chance against the Horsemen.
So…why?
Why, when Alyss lay herself down to rest each night, did she feel a swarm of butterflies fluttering about her gut? Why was the feeling only emboldened with each passing day? Each passing day, that they grew stronger, and smarter, and more united. More bonded. Why was she starting to enjoy this?
Why was she beginning to thank the Gods for sending her on this march?
This march to Old Ottawa.