...Live, girl. Live and carry my will within you.
That was the first and last command that Eisa, Goddess of Winter had given Eirawen when She made the girl Her Champion.
Life was important to the Goddess, but only in how it was used. The strong were meant to live, the weak were meant to die, the unworthy consigned to the Void of Oblivion. To be a Champion of Eisa was to be strong, to fight and prove oneself worthy of life.
The bounded field that now held Eirawen was a mockery of life, it stole life, it leeched strength from the unwary. It tried to suck at her feet, it tried to drag at her arms, it tried to clutch itself around her with malevolent will, but she endured, her power, the power of the goddess, forcing it back, denying it purchase. Tiny explosions of power scampered across Eirawen’s bounded field, seeking a gap, seeking a way in.
Eirawen examined the crater itself, which at first seemed to be the uniform grays of raw bedrock, but scattered radially around the crater itself were tiny bits of darker gravel that streaked outwards towards the edge of the crater itself. Her feet crunched on the gravel as she moved about, trying to spot some way of defeating the magical barrier, or at least negating it temporarily so that the Seventh Seal could rid this land of whatever malignancy tainted it.
A skeleton pushed itself out of the gravel off to the side, picking up a wicked spear with a jagged, serrated edge. It was nearly identical to all the other skeletons that the Seventh Seal had encountered, though slimmer in stature. It, like every other skeleton that they’d fought before, had a metal plate bolted into its forehead.
It lunged forward with its spear in a powerful thrust that caught Eirawen directly on her breastplate. The blade screeched as it skidded across her armor and Eirawen stumbled backwards from the force of the impact.
As she regained her footing, it thrust again at her, but she caught the spearhead between her two swords and swept it to the side, stepping into the undead’s guard and bashed it in the face with the pommel of her sword.
The skeleton stepped back to recover, but Eirawen brought her knee up in what would have been a devastating blow had the thing wore flesh. Instead, it snapped off one of the lowest ribs. She shoved back with her upper body and the skeleton sprawled flat on its back; Eirawen finished it off with a savage stomp to the skull with her plated boot, pulverizing it.
The clatter of bones alerted her; the skeleton of a massive snake, easily a hundred feet in length, slithered towards her, jaw open, wicked teeth gleaming like jagged hooks.
She planted one of her swords blade down in the crater and a keening screech filled the air as the barrier flickered and weakened around her. Taking her remaining sword in one hand, she lunged underneath the snake’s strike, diving beneath the hungry jaws. She pivoted and swung her sword up, beheading the skeletal snake.
She strode back to her sword planted in the crater, trailing sparks and flashes of color as the weakening barrier of the crater clashed with her own. Ignoring the skull that snapped its jaws uselessly at her, Eirawen thrust her other sword into the ground, and the barrier flickered, faded, and finally dissipated.
As the barrier went, so did the power that animated the snake’s bones, collapsing them into individual parts that crumbled to dust.
Around her swords, a growing sheet of ice gradually expanded outward, greedily sinking into the cracks and crevices of the bedrock.
Eirawen glanced around herself and blinked a few times, surprised and disturbed at a change she hadn’t noticed. She closed her eyes in thought, trying to figure out what exactly had changed, and it finally came to her: the unnatural, deathly silence was gone. She could hear the wind blowing, and dimly, she could hear the screeches and howls of animals in the nearby jungle.
Eirawen yanked her blades free from the ground and sheathed them and strode back to the edge of the crater.
She gazed down on Daveth, and in a rare display, remembered to salute, fist to heart.
“It might be safe for the Seal, now.” She advised her commander.
*****
“Shove them back, you assholes!” Aldric shouted as he slashed at one of the boar-headed beastmen, opening an ugly wound on the thing’s face and clipping off the end of one of its tusks.
Puffing furiously on his pipe, Aldric drew back his foot and booted the beastman in the chest, sending it stumbling backwards. Aldric stepped forward, the half-remembered words from his fencing instructor guiding his steps as he thrust forward with the point of his sword and skewered the beastman through the heart. He whipped his blade clear, blood splattering everywhere.
Everyone everywhere was struggling with them. Aldric had no idea how many there were in the herd, he’d barely had time to snatch up his sword before they’d been swarmed. The pigmen squealed and snarled and hammered at everything with their huge, hairy fists, sometimes hurling rocks or bashing everything with improvised clubs.
“Daveth would have loved this.” Aldric grimly promised himself, trying to scrub pigman blood from his face with an equally bloody sleeve. “Fuck!”
Alysia and Lynnabel were side by side, each favoring the other as they alternated between offense and defense. Lynnabel would bring her shield into play while Alysia would strike, Alisia would raise her shield when her sister was ready to land her own blow.
“Form up!” Aldric yelled, slashing his sword across the neck of one of the beastmen, bringing another hot gush of arterial blood spraying everywhere.
A hot jet of flame roared somewhere; Aldric hoped it was the mages at work and not something flammable going off.
“Protect the Lord Captain!” Lynnabel shouted, and jostled her sister. Aldric could hear screaming and shouting everywhere, but he couldn’t hear the sound of the crank gun, or the cannon. What’d happened to them? Why hadn’t there been a cry to arms?
Aldric was battered and bruised and liberally splashed with his opponents blood, but unharmed. The rest of his troops- he wasn’t sure. He lunged forward into the press of bodies with his saber leading the way as Lynnabel fell in beside him.
“Good to see a friendly face.” he called, and Lynnabel flashed him a smile as she lopped off an upraised fist and drove her blade through the chest and out the back of a beastman that had charged in from the side.
After the first surprise incursion, the grotesque beastman invasion was turned back. When Aldric demanded to know exactly how they’d come out of the jungle without anyone noticing, the pieces came together that the beastman swarm had hurtled out of the jungle at a breakneck pace and cleared the defensive line easily, too quickly for the cannon and by the time the crank gun was swiveled around, the beastmen were already in the camp.
A total of sixty pigmen, fat, skin mottled thick tusks jutting from extended jaws, most without clothes or weapons were heaved into a bonfire while men and women from the Tross worked to repair tents, replace furniture, and make an accounting that’d give Aldric a clear cost of damages.
Several of the infantry had been beaten down and trampled to death by the pigmen, and while the man wasn’t saying anything, Aldric was certain at least one had been sodomized.
The mages for once had held their own without taking losses; Aldric appreciated that more than anything as mages were difficult to replace.
Aldric fumed and muttered and complained that his second in command, Daveth, wasn’t around to help him pick up the pieces. Likely the man was enjoying his field trip out in the jungle without worry or incident.
He’d review the damages after a bath and a change of clothes, he decided.
*****
Daveth’s army tentatively cleared the edge of the crater. Every man, woman, and elf was reluctant to be in the crater; it smelled like a tomb and was noticeably cooler than the jungle- blatantly unnatural. The building at the heart of the crater looked to be several stories tall and carved of the same bedrock as the crater itself. From this distance, half a mile away, individual details were difficult to make out.
“So... how did you beat back the barrier?” Daveth asked Eirawen. “That had to be some top-tier magic.”
Eirawen eyed Daveth contemplatively. “I consecrated the ground in the name of Eisa.” she replied simply.
Daveth stoked his chin in thought. “How long will it last?”
“Not long. An hour at best.” was the terse reply, so Daveth nodded and immediately ordered his men to form ranks and advance on the citadel.
No creatures marched along the ramparts or cupolas, nothing manned the parapets, it was if the castle itself was completely deserted. Still, a feeling of loathsome dread swept into the members of the Seal as they marched through its gates.
“I don’t like it.” Daveth muttered to nobody in particular. “Every fiber of my being is telling me to get the fuck out of here while I’m still alive.”
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He’d drawn a sword at some point, though he couldn’t recall when. Audra clapped him on the back.
“You think anyone wants to be here?” she asked sympathetically.
“Thought you’d be all excited for ‘forbidden secrets no man was meant to know’, and all that.” He chided her, and she gave him an apologetic shrug and a queasy smile in return.
The stronghold looked to be made all of one piece and carved from the bedrock itself. The pillars were unadorned and symmetrical, giving rise to functionality over aesthetic. The entry hall served a purpose, yet beyond that purpose it bore no distinguishing marks or characteristics. No symbols of power, no banners, murals, carvings or statues adorned its niches. It could have belonged to anybody, it was dedicated to no one. The floor was covered in the disintegrating bones of tiny animals. They made a dreadful crackling sound as they were crushed underfoot.
The feeling of dread intensified the deeper they moved into the castle’s interior, if dragged at the heart, squeezed the lungs until it was painful to breathe, it weakened the muscles and dragged at the body.
Eirawen flickered with a strange dim light that radiated from her armor. Her armor was black with blue highlights in the baroque patterns scrawled across each piece, and yet it shone with a dim light that seemed to push back the suffocating feeling of despair and the inevitability of death. Strangely, despite the chill that surrounded her, the oppressive sense of impending doom lessened.
As the members of the Seal unconsciously fell out of rank to crowd around Eirawen, She suddenly stopped in her tracks, drew her sword, reversed it so it pointed blade-down, and drove the tip into the blank gray bedrock of the floor.
She knelt, and although everyone could hear her whispered prayer, whatever words she said seemed to pass through one ear and out the other.
Hoarfrost sprouted around her and raced across the floor in every direction. Once it struck a wall or a pillar, ice crystals bloomed up the obstruction. Flakes of snow drifted down from the high ceiling and the air chilled.
Strangely, the sense of dread faded, and although everyone shivered and stamped their feet to stay warm in the cold, it was at least preferable than the soul- draining sense of impending death.
A whispering voice from a thousand throats, a chorus of overlapping tiny voices exhaled in the gloom.
“Why are you here?”
Eirawen rose to her feet and tugged out the blade from the floor.
“Death cannot be cheated.” Eirawen replied calmly, striding through the hall, her brisk steps a direct counterpoint to the Seventh Seal’s reluctance.
*****
For as long as Eirawen had been in his command, her laconic speech and utter indifference to everything had baffled Daveth. Now her sudden switch to an almost predatory hunger was a shock. He doubted if he’d ever seen such an... anticipatory look on her face before. She seemed damned eager to fight whatever monstrosity lurked in the castle. The steam-wagon built by the Brotherhood had been handled with brutal efficiency, the monster beneath Ankar-Set had been met with a grim relentless assault; the final battle against the Baron of Landeck in Nauders; each of them carried a sense of simple and utter indifference. She could have been swatting flies for all he could tell.
Now she was alive, awake in a way he hadn’t seen before, practically itching to dash ahead of the Seal and jump into a fight. He knew that feeling, had felt it himself across dozens of battlefields under a variety of circumstances.
His hand flicked out and he snatched Eirawen’s arm, feeling his hand freeze on contact with her ice-cold armor.
“Wait.” He ordered.
She blinked as she looked up at him; had she forgotten that he was even there? She glanced around as if seeing the other members of the Seventh Seal for the first time. “Ah.”
Shaking his hand to get rid of the freezing chill, Daveth eyed her.
“What’s up ahead that’s got you in such a hurry, soldier?” He asked, and rubbed his hands together to try and warm them up.
Her eyes lost focus for a moment; he wanted to give her a shake to snap her out of the fugue she was going back into but she seemed to snap herself out of it herself as she smiled up at him radiantly.
“Even a Champion can die, Commander.” She turned away from him as if that explained everything and continued barching across the long entry hall, crushing frozen bones under her metalshod boots.
“Everyone, let’s go.” Daveth ordered, thrusting his hand out after Eirawen. “Time’s wasting and there’s killing to be done.”
*****
After the length of the entry hall, Daveth was expecting some sort of throne room of some sort; instead there was a blank wall.
“The fuck?” Audra muttered, bewildered. “She sure moved like she knew where she was going.”
Daveth nodded. There was a surety, a purpose to her steps in these dank halls.
Eirawen drew back her foot and kicked at the wall and rebounded smartly, overbalanced, and fell on her ass. She started at the wall for a moment and picked herself up while everyone watched her in uneasy, uncertain silence.
She raised both of her hands overhead and slammed them into the wall with such force Daveth could imagine the entire castle vibrated from the impact. As dust sifted from the ceiling in several places, he revised his opinion in a hurry and moved to stop Eirawen before she brought the whole place down.
She slammed her fists into the walls again and the wall cracked beneath her assault. She did it a third time and part of the wall shattered, spraying flecks and chunks of stone everywhere. She disappeared into the hole, still hazy with dust, and Daveth pointed at the hole. “Get in there! Follow after her! Staggered formation! Breach tactics!”
Breaching tactics varied from encounter to encounter and situation to situation, but the deployment was essentially the same every time: one file charges in and immediately flanks to the right, while the next charges in and flanks to the left, right and left, back and forth until everyone was on the other side of the breach. If it was infantry, a shield wall would be deployed, if it were cavalry in the breach, they’d spread out behind the shield wall, if there were archers they’d position behind the shields, if it were mages they’d raise defensive barriers with magic, so on and so forth.
A staggered formation would make sure the files overlapped in the center so that they could immediately strike out in a wedge formation once assembled.
Daveth stepped through and brilliant flashes of light and crackling booms echoed through the breach in the wall and the screams began in earnest.
*****
Just beyond the hole in the wall was an octagonal chamber, and on each side of the octagon was a skeleton, each with a metallic plate bolted to its skull, each with magical power crackling off of them in waves. Chains were bolted to their backs in some way, thick, teavy ancient chains formed of some dull blue-gray metal. Those chains led to the underside of what appeared to be the largest skull Daveth had ever seen.
It looked like a normal human skull, but it was at least a foot taller than Daveth himself. It was massive, hideous, draped with moss and bits of decaying matter. The eye sockets were vast holes filled with the same violet fire that he’d occasionally seen in the skeletons he’d encountered before.
One of the skeletons had blasted lightning from its shredded fingertips and several men were down.
“Charge!” Daveth yelled as he saw Eirawen do just that. “Archers! Enfilading fire!”
They had no mages of their own, no cavalry. The best they could hope for was to quickly beat the thing down. Mages had to concentrate to cast magic, active combat held the chance to disrupt that concentration.
The soldiers thrust their spears ineffectually into the skeletons; arrows rattled harmlessly off of them, those that slashed at the skeletons with their swords and axes had marginally better success, but even Daveth could see that the skeletons were healing.
The air was filled with a malignant laughter as the skeletons unleashed spell after spell. Daveth could do nothing as his forces were blasted apart by lightning, cooked under rolling waves of fire, blasted apart with magical force.
“Boss, throw me.” Stronghammer appeared at his side. “Throw me past the skeletons. Let me get a crack at that skull.”
Daveth didn’t hesitate; he picked the strapping youth up and hurled him over the skeletons and watched them turn as one to track his movement.
Stronghammer swung his warhammer in a powerful two-handed swing that slammed into the giant skull with sickening force.
YOU DARE STRIKE ME?
Stronghammer barked a laugh and swung again as the skull turned towards him. The second blow shattered one of the skull’s teeth and the air was filled with a howl of rage that blasted the survivors backwards. Daveth hit the wall and blacked out for a moment as he felt ribs break.
Eirawen’s dim glow erupted in a strange, flickering witch-light, a flame as beautifully blue as the heart of a glacier. She blasted forward against that massive pressure.
“The Void awaits, blasphemer!” Eirawen screamed, blades shattering a skeleton into burning bits of bone.
Your Goddess was young when I was an ancient, creature, and now she is as dead as these flesh-things.
“All things face the Void. I am certain She is waiting for me on the other side.” Eirawen responded, her voice dripping fanatical zeal.
Daveth struggled for consciousness, catching Eirawen’s movements out of the corner of his eye as he tried to haul himself upright. Suddenly it seemed as if Eleven’s voice was echoing in his head in time to the sickening pain scrawling through his body.
“Ancient secrets lurking in the halls of silence. Uninvited vermin, scratching at the walls to gain purchase.”
He drew the sword she’d given him, a massive blade nearly as long as he was tall, a blade that was silvery and as wide as the palm of his hand. A row of cabochon sapphires ran down the fuller. He staggered forward and managed a two-handed swing against one of the skeletons and the sapphires flashed, the skeleton shattering to dust.
The skull spun to him.
YOU!
Eirawen’s blades carved deep into the thick bone of the giant skull, but the thing only had eyes for Daveth.
A complicated spell circle appeared underneath the giant skull and once again the air was filled with scathing, mocking laughter.
Daveth launched himself into a lurching, screaming run, desperately ignoring the pain in his ribs and the pounding in his head. He slammed into the skull, forcing it out of the circle, blinging the blade down against the giant skull in a brutal overhand slash.
Eirawen launched herself at the skull but one of the remaining skeletons knocked her into the heart of the spell circle where she simply vanished.
Daveth swung from the hip, feeling the broken ends of his ribs grind together as the blade slammed into the giant skull.
The blade cleaved through the skull like it was made of paper, sapphires blazing a brilliant blue that was painful to look at.
The skull shattered like porcelain, a handful of teeth clattering against the ground.
Daveth hit the ground on his knees as the remaining skeletons crumbled away to dust around him.
The strange witchlight that illuminated the cavernous room was gone. The skeletons were gone. The skull was shattered. Eirawen was gone.
He was all alone in the black and all that was there to welcome him was pain.