The years became blurs of fury mixed with the motions of his sword.
Soon, it became mechanical. Nothing more than an instinct.
He put down hybrids, corrupted beasts, and Darkseed-infected humans with just as much prejudice as the other.
And after a while, he realized he’d stopped even thinking about his skills increasing anymore, or his System telling him how much of a hero he was.
When he was a boy, there’d been some small joy in that – in watching the numbers increase, even if their fluctuations seemed arbitrary.
Now, he looked on them as one looks at drops of frozen rain – with passing curiosity only.
Sometimes they were a useful shield against the killing of those who cowered before him. Women, children, domesticated pets, even one or two Greycloaks themselves who had been infected.
Where Gyko’s armies went, her Darkseed went with her. And they knew she couldn’t be slain until her taint was cleansed from the bodies of all she touched.
Lydia had come down with the infection during his 30th winter during the Cleansing of Gallant – a village of little strategic importance in the Northern Heartlands. He’d put her down himself. She didn’t resist.
“Do it, Art…” she’d said as she’d dropped her blade and clawed at her face, talons appearing where her once silken hands were. “End…it…”
There’d been no tears in the aftermath. She was burned in a pyre with the rest of the villagers they’d cleansed that day. He’d watched, numb to the world, until Carliah placed her firm hand on his shoulder.
“Remember what we’re fighting for,” she told him again – that familiar tune she loved to whistle in the dark abyss this world had become since Gyko’s ascendance. “This is the final stand. The last Archon. And that makes you the last Lightborn.”
Her words were distant – like echoes down a dark, abandoned tunnel stretching on into nothing.
“You’ll be a hero they speak of until the end of time itself,” his Commander continued, before marching off to oversee the burning of another heap of corrupted village-folk. “Kaedmon gave us an angel as our first Lightborn. It is fitting that a human should be his last.”
Artorious remained by the funeral pyre as more bodies were tossed in screaming heaps onto its wooden beams. He watched the flames lick at flesh, burning away the disease inside the bodies, until his eyes settled on the spot where Lydia’s ashen skull stared back at him with hollowed-out eyes. He stayed there till the flames turned to dust and sent a column of smoke spiraling into the uncaring night sky.
If Kaedmon was up there, he hoped he was watching.
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Battles became second nature. Death – a minor inconvenience.
He and the Greys broke the backs of Gyko’s invasion force at Rowan’s Ridge – a series of mountain passes that bordered Westerweald with the Reach, Argwyll’s Eastern region. It was a battle, they said, that was presided over by Kaedmon and blessed in his name. They had lain in wait for the Archon’s forces, knowing she had sent all her reinforcements from the Reaches to claim Westerweald once and for all. This, Carliah told them, was the chance to finally turn this war in their favor.
As they Greycloaks surged along the mountain tops, their ranks bolstered by the volunteer forces of King Lysandus III, it was said that angels could be seen cheering them on from the heavens.
But the Lightborn had no need for angels, nor any kind of Divine Intervention. He flew like a wildling into the ranks of the plant-monsters and Hybrid vanguard of the enemy, breaking them before they had a chance to push toward Caer Krea. In the far distance, the capital of Lucent stood tall and proud, having withstood siege after devastating siege over the past few months. The toxic plumes of Gyko’s corruption had long since been cleared away by the efforts of the Greycloak mages. With the Lightborn at the head of their armies, they were unstoppable.
He’d lost count of how many monsters he’d slain. How many people – he hadn’t even tried keeping track. He no longer even looked at his System updates. The obscene ‘Congratulations!’ he received for every kill and the Spirit Core counter increase meant as little to him now as Carliah’s praise. He wasn’t doing this for them. He wasn’t even doing this for himself.
At the battle’s climax he stood atop a mountain of hybrid corpses and stared into the fading ranks of the enemy. They stared back, hatred mingling with terror in their eyes. All he had to do was lift his sword and they turned tail and ran.
“Into them!” Carliah cried out from his rear. “Press the advantage! Leave none alive!”
He watched them run for their lives, scrambling down the mountains as they were riddled with crossbow bolts and wildfire from the mages. Those who were wounded crawled towards a salvation that would never come. Yet they crawled all the same, their entrails smeared across the pallid earth.
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It was like watching the closing act of some cheap play unfold before him. There he was – the hero – standing with his triumphant army as they smashed the enemy lines and clenched victory by sheer force of arms. The stories would paint him as gliding above them all, singing hymns to Kaedmon as they split open the lesser races of the earth.
The reality was that he simply stood and watched the end come like a lucid dream – the dream of a child whose parents had been slaughtered by the very same monsters that were now dying before him.
But that boy was gone. Perhaps he’d never really existed.
He looked into the hordes of dying creatures and felt the rain that had started to batter the bloodied ground beneath him. It settled on his skin like a thin, watery veil, washing away the blood that matted his face and hands but not eroding the simple truth he had been granted on this hill of death:
Artorious had died a long time ago. He was the Lightborn, now.
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The final battle had come.
The air around the Ashfall mountains was thick with dust and smoke. Around him, vines of molded green coiled around his Brothers and Sisters as Gyko made her final stand among her servants.
From the ruined quarry where she had been birthed, she now shot towards Kaedmon’s skies, challenging the Divine realm herself with her sheer scale. A monument to suffering, the Queen of Toxins belched a cloud of corpulence towards the mages who were burning her roots, commanding her enthralled servants to fight to the very last man against the encroaching army of the Greys that had pushed her back to her last stronghold. Her lithe, snake-like body shook as she summoned more black thorns to pierce the chests of even the most armored among them. Hundreds had died. Thousands more would if he didn’t act now.
And act he did. He had come this far, and was looking his ancient enemy in her vile black eyes.
When she saw him among the crowd, a kind of eerie quiet settled over the battlefield.
Both figures from the pages of myth acknowledged the other – the Enemy – in this decisive moment. It was the curtain call of their drama. The denouement their entire lives had been building up to.
The Darkseeds had all been hunted down and destroyed. What Artorious was looking at now was Gyko Prime. The progenitor. The final nail in the coffin of pain and misery that had dominated Argwyll for four long, bleak centuries.
And without another moments hesitation, he moved to strike.
His sword became a blaze of holy fire that sliced through the myrmidons of the toxic queen. His armor, ragged and charred from constant combat, took the impact of her thorns as they lunged for him, appearing beneath him in a desperate attempt to slow him down. Yet his eyes shone with conviction that was buried deep within his blood. He carved the thorns and corrupted belches of the dark one as a child deals with impudent insects. The last of her hybrids surged forward, fear in their eyes as their Archon commanded them to halt the advance of the one she knew was coming to destroy her – for good this time. He showed them just as much mercy as he’d afforded all who stood in his way these last few years of his life.
When they lay in crumpled messes of blood and charred intestine behind him, he charged towards Gyko’s roots and called for the mages to let the fires of the heavens pour down upon the fiend, adding the radiant blaze of his own sword to the inferno they cooked up and launched at the demon flower.
He heard her cries above him. He felt her claws raking his back. He felt his armor shattered, his pale body raked with fresh scars – scars he would carry for the rest of his life. But still, he kept hacking at her. He sliced away her noxious petals, her shriveling stem, and any beasts she summoned in a last ditch effort to stop his relentless assault.
And with every strike he made, her screams dominated his mind.
Womanly screams from a creature who knew death was upon her.
Screams that seemed familiar…like those of a boy’s mother who had once died to protect him.
When the dread Queen finally fell, speared on her own corrupted thorns, her talons writhing in death-spasm, he crawled up her quivering body and found the point he needed to – her chest that barely heaved with life, the black heart within pumping any blood the beast had left.
“Now, Lightborn!” he heard Carliah cry. “Finish it!”
He drew his blade in an arc across the sky.
He aimed the tip at the Archon’s chest.
And yet…it wouldn’t come down.
“DO IT!”
Carliah’s voice seemed far off. Not commanding. Almost passive.
“..Artorious!”
…yes, that was his name, wasn’t it?
With the enemy of mankind dying under him, the Lightborn felt something tug at the back of his brain.
All the blood that ran within him commanded him to finish the job he was born to do. The job Kaedmon needed him to do.
The job he’d been chosen to do.
And yet, there was a piece there – something faint – that had suddenly woken up when he’d heard just how…familiar Gyko’s death-wails had been.
He knew it as something almost alien to his very soul. It was not what one would call ‘doubt’ exactly. After all, he knew what his duty was. Nor was this sensation that gripped him and stayed his hand one of mercy. He hated this Arch-beast that had terrorized mankind more than anyone else could. He had done so ever since he was a boy, and he’d seen the monsters terrorize his home. He had hated them ever since his mother had held him in her soft arms and rocked him, telling him, ‘Be good, Art. Or the monsters will come for you.’
What struck him now was something more simple than all these things. He was not a philosophical man. His brain was not trained to think – it was trained to kill. He was an engine of war. A tool. Kaedmon’s Law – yes. That was absolute truth. There was goodness in the Law. Certainty. ‘You can only be what you are supposed to be’. There was purity in that. He admired it.
…he had to, right?
On the eve of Archon Gyko’s death, Lightborn Artorious Pendragon of the Greycloaks committed a crime. A crime none of his predecessors had ever dared to commit.
He thought about the person that was holding the sword that stabs.
And he thought about how that person wasn’t Kaedmon, or Krea, or Carliah, or any other human in the entire world.
It was him.
And it wasn’t their lives that were going to end when he made this final stroke.
It was his life.
“FOR FUCK’S SAKE, DO IT!”
He knew something was wrong as soon as he felt his blade come down. He saw the hole he ripped open in Gyko’s body. He saw her beating heart stop as his sword’s blade was driven through it. And he saw her smile up at him.
“…see you in the next life, Lightborn…”
Through all the cheers, and all the frenzy of victory, he did nothing but walk away from the corpse, hands shaking, breath haggard.
Around him, the humans of the kingdom celebrated. Some of them fell and wept openly to see the Archon finally fallen.
All of them cried tears of joy. Except the Greycloaks.
He could feel their eyes on his back. Eyes that would now never look at him the same way again.
And he knew it, then – the next 100 years would be the loneliest years of his life.