50. Purity

There was a mass rout.

Lace ran. She dragged Kiren with her. Haden lifted Tommyn over his shoulder and bounded down the steps leading to the courtyard.

Heroes were being picked off and dragged away by the spawnlings. Steelfeather, Copycat. Others, too. They tried to take Titaness, but she was too large to budge at all.

Several fighters confronted Evangel. D-Ranks and C-Ranks. Evangel swept his hand, and a roiling miasma rotted them all to bones.

No other Heroes tried to get near him, instead opting to flee.

Lace couldn’t process it. The shrieks. The blood. The lightning.

It was too much.

She could only run.

She spared a glance back. Gantho was trying to get down off the wall, spawnlings rushing up around him. He detonated one of his pebbles in front of him, which exploded in a shower of bright sparks. The explosion took out two of the Beasts, but six more swarmed him and dragged him to the ground.

His screams joined the others’.

Spawnlings were already flooding into the grounds. Certain Heroes put up a scattered defense while the House of Healing was evacuated, but they couldn’t hold out for long.

Lace ran for the main hall where the rest were headed. Counter was motioning people inside.

Kiren suddenly dug his heels in, forcing Lace to stop. She tugged insistently on his arm, but he wouldn’t budge.

“He’s still in there!” Kiren said and nodded at the House of Healing. “Excelerate.”

Lace swore. She followed Kiren as they went for the smaller building.

Evangel wandered through the gates in a plodding gait. He stepped over Titaness’s corpse, a smile on his twisted face.

Barely anything about him resembled the unassuming, aged man he had once been.

He was no longer Elder Maxim. He was a monster, through and through, and his appearance reflected that.

Hunched-over, lumbering, writhing with additional limbs and screaming faces, he was exactly like the stories her mother had told her as a child, the ones that had frightened her so.

Those stories had come true. Her nightmares had been realized.

There wasn’t much time. They made it to the House of Healing. Lace guarded the door while Kiren ran inside.

Spawnlings came at her, too many to count. Too many to fight by herself.

She called upon the spirit that lived in the wind. Nothing happened.

It didn’t answer.

Something was wrong with it. Drawing the poison from Excelerate’s veins had shattered its power, somehow.

The spawnlings were almost on her, all chomping maws and raking claws. They were close enough that she could smell their putrid stench.

Lace readied her gale-staff and ran an air current through it. She gasped for breath as the wind blade sputtered to life. Her Power was stretched to its limit.

She made a horizontal swipe, cutting two spawnlings out of the air. Three more came. She weaved the staff in a whirling pattern, cutting limbs.

They kept coming.

She dodged and ducked, struck where she could. No matter how many she killed, their numbers kept growing.

Most of the surviving Heroes and apprentices had already cleared out of the courtyard into the safety of the Guild Hall. Counter held the door along with a few others. Somnus rendered spawnlings limp and unconscious with her glowing touch, and Voicebox produced deep, powerful trumpets through her horn that sent the creatures rattling.

“Fucking move it, kid!” Counter called. Even his commanding voice was almost lost in the din. “We can’t stand here forever!”

The door to the House of Healing burst open. Kiren and Good Doctor came out, dragging a lolling Excelerate between them.

“That’s the last of us!” Good Doctor said. “Frog-Face already took Mina and the others through!”

Lace nodded and turned to put down a spawnling that endeavored to gnaw on her leg. She sliced it open head to stem, and it sank to the ground with a pitiful whimper.

Now we just have to make it back to the Guild Hall.

Looking at the dozen or so meters they had to bridge, it seemed an impossibly wide distance. A veritable ocean of crawling brood flooded the courtyard, hurling themselves at the few humans still living. Some were still distracted as they feasted upon the dead, but their attention would soon be turned back upon Lace and the others.

Evangel stood, aloof, taking in his victory. He oversaw the taking of corpses. He would speak an order in the language of Beasts, point at one of the felled Heroes, and a team of spawnlings would quickly form to carry away the unfortunate victim.

Lace funneled a blast of air into the ground, blowing away those spawnlings closest to her. The exertion drove the air from her lungs and forced her onto one knee, but the Beasts kept coming.

Kiren left Good Doctor to carry Excelerate and ran up by her side. He drew his greatsword and swung it in wide arcs, cleaving spawnlings in two and giving Lace time to catch her breath.

“This isn’t working,” Lace said, her voice choked and hoarse. “We won’t make it through.”

“It’s our only option,” Kiren growled, “so start chopping.”

A great wailing filled Lace’s ears, echoing from the walls.

A flood of sparkling, almost crystalline water shot over the far end of the wall to the south, by the broken gates. It washed over the battlements and into the courtyard, carrying away the spawnlings that had crawled onto the wall. The Beasts that were touched by the water undulated and cried out as if stung. They yowled as their skin shriveled and bubbled, turning black and then falling off. One layer at a time they were peeled, stripped bare, until at last, they were dead.

Despite the blood and muck and corpses the water washed over, it somehow remained perfectly pure. It ate into the horde of spawnlings crowding the courtyard, and they fled to escape its reach.

A man was carried onto the top of the wall by a mass of water, which then sank away from him. He was rotund and rosy-cheeked, standing with an easy grace on one of the stone crenellations despite his considerable bulk. He wore a large pot on his back, perhaps a meter in height. Some of the water traveled up his legs and collected into the pot.

The large man surveyed the courtyard with his gaze, and he seemed not at all shocked by what he saw. Rather, he cracked a wide, friendly smile which balled up his round cheeks.

Evangel rounded on the man, his face drawn into a ghastly snarl. Something thudded into his back, like an arrow but wider and more massive, with a solid metal wedge at its tip.

Lace followed the projectile’s trajectory and traced it to a man who stood by the splintered gates. He had short, fiery red hair, a long beard, and wore a roomy shirt and hose with a large quiver on his back. He carried a bow as tall as himself, with a sturdy body into which intricate ornamentations had been carved.

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The man nocked another arrow, though ‘stake’ might have been a better name for it, considering its shape and size.

Evangel scrabbled at his back to tear loose the one embedded inside him, his arm unfolding into several smaller ones that reached farther.

A third man, this one with long, dark hair and a broad-shouldered build rushed up to Evangel, and, without missing a beat, swung a blunt sledgehammer at the monster. He hammered the stake in almost all the way to the bottom, and several of Evangel’s vestigial appendages went slack.

The Beast who had once been man roared his rage and indignation and lashed out at the long-haired man, his massive hand sparking with a terrible power.

The man ducked away. Evangel put his palm out first to shoot him with a blast of dark lightning, but the red-haired man fired another stake which struck him right in his hand. In an instant, the lightning died away, and Evangel stared dumbfounded as the flesh around his hand began to die and fall away.

A woman with a shaven head slipped past the Beast, seeming wholly unconcerned by him. A loose, silvery thread fluttered behind her, wound around each hand. She ran with light steps, contorted her body with expert precision to move through the messy ranks of spawnlings.

The seemingly innocuous wire cut through all the Beasts it touched like a knife through butter, bisecting swaths of them at a time without so much as an arm raised in the effort.

The spawnlings uttered barks of confusion and panic. Sensing their fortunes turning, many of them started to flee towards the gates.

The round man atop the wall put his hands together in the shape of a circle. Water sprayed out of the vessel on his back and gathered into a curved line on the ground before the mass of spawnlings. The water from the vessel arced through the air and landed with the rest of it. Put together, it made a wide circle around the woman and a good chunk of spawnlings, probably one or two hundred. Those monsters caught in the water’s path shriveled and died, and those trapped on the inside would not cross it.

The woman made quick work of the spawnlings within the circle, flicking that thread about like a whip.

Lace wasn’t familiar with any of these four fighters. They evidently weren’t Heroes. They were something else.

One thing was clear, however.

They knew how to hunt Beasts.

The red-hair and the black-hair backed up and gave Evangel a wide berth. The monster reared back and thrust his unholy staff to the sky. A web of chain lightning surged from the staff, forming a growing cage around him. The two fighters avoided the attack by a wide margin, and eventually, the lightning faded, throwing Evangel’s grotesque form back into darkness. The Beast panted.

With jerky movements, he followed his cohorts in a retreat. The red-hair raised his great bow to put another stake through him, but the spawnlings rushing past him threw off his aim, and the stake buried itself in the stone next to the gatehouse instead.

Within a minute or two, silence settled over the Lodge. Hundreds of corpses lay splayed out on the grounds, most of them spawnlings, but some were Heroes and apprentices who hadn’t been dragged off.

Lace glanced back. Kiren and Good Doctor looked just as dumbfounded as she felt.

“Those are…” Good Doctor whispered.

“Purifiers!” Counter called. He strode across the battlefield, stepping on squishy Beast corpses. “Could have used you sooner.”

The red-hair hung his bow over one shoulder and walked towards Counter so that they would meet halfway across the courtyard. The black-hair fell in behind him, then the bald woman. The round man came down off the wall and stopped at the bottom of the stairs, huffing and puffing.

The Purifiers. Lace knew only wild rumors, but they were supposed to be the priesthood’s secret weapon against the Beast scourge. Men and women crafted into perfect weapons, scattered across Aribel in small cells.

Judging by what she had seen here, their reputation was well earned.

Kiren and Good Doctor carried the still-unconscious Excelerate inside, while other Heroes poured out into the courtyard to secure the Lodge while they had the chance.

Lace found herself lingering, subconsciously moving closer to the Purifiers.

Counter and the red-hair reached one another. They stared at each other for a good, long moment.

Counter’s dour face cracked in a grin. “Damn me, if you aren’t a sight for sore eyes.”

The red-hair nodded and reached out for a handshake. Counter disregarded it and bundled the man into a strong hug instead, nearly lifting him off the ground.

The black-haired man placed the haft of his sledgehammer in the crook of his arm and the head on the ground. A secretive smirk set his lip twitching. The bald woman coiled her thread into a compact spool and stuck it in a holder attached to her belt. Despite the death she had doled out with it, the weapon was perfectly clean.

Counter let the red-hair down, took a step back, and cleared his throat. His face returned to its regular stern expression.

“Legario Stencin, I presume?” he said.

The red-hair nodded. “Yes.”

“I see. Then, with the Purifiers to aid us, we won’t have any trouble stabilizing things here.”

Legario chewed on his bearded lower lip. “I’m afraid our orders are a little different. You see, our intelligence suggests that Evangel is performing a ritual in the city. Was he able to make away with any of your dead?”

Counter frowned, deepening the age lines on his face. “There wasn’t anything we could do to stop him from taking them.”

“Then things are more dire than we feared. We will remain here for a short while to make sure you can re-establish a perimeter, but after that, we must pursue our quarry.”

“Are you insane?” Counter asked. “This is not the time to run off chasing glory! We have youths here. Do you want their deaths on your hands?”

Legario shook his head. “I do not. Which is why we must go. If Evangel completes that ritual…” He waved Counter close and whispered something to him. Lace couldn’t tell what was said, but the Hero’s normally angry red face went a startling shade of white.

“Yeah,” Legario said. “So you understand the urgency. Now, I must speak with your Guild Master, if he still lives. Can you show me to him?”

Reluctantly, Counter led Legario into the Guild Hall while the other two purifiers remained. He had a haunted look on his face.

What is Evangel’s endgame here? Lace wondered with a growing, cold lump in her stomach. It must be about that One Among the Stars thing.

Lace made to return to the Guild Hall and check on everyone when she noticed the fat man doing something most strange. He was stooped over a stretch of grass beneath the wall which, by some miracle, had escaped all of the fighting. He dug in the dark soil with a small spade. Running his free hand over the dirt, he withdrew droplets of clear water which flowed upward through the air and trickled up his arm.

She went over to him and watched as he gathered water back into his pot.

“Holy water,” the man explained without looking up. He wiped his sweat-beaded forehead and smeared dirt on it in the process. “Well, this is just water. The prayers make it holy. Beasts absolutely hate the stuff.”

“That’s your Power, isn’t it?” Lace asked. “Controlling water.”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re a Primal?”

The man looked up, eyebrows raised just a hair. “You’re right on that account.” He returned to his work. “What happened to your Sprite?”

“Uh, my what?”

The man made a vague gesture, searching for the right words. “Your… ghost. Invisible helper. Know what I mean?”

Lace caught on now. “Oh. Right. It helped me save someone, but it was… shattered, somehow.”

“You should be more careful with your Sprite, in times like these. Beasts abroad. A truer friend you’ll never know, if you let it blossom.” He threw away a chunk of dried-up dirt and dug his hole deeper. “I have one too, you know.”

A flicker of light twisted on his shoulder. It formed the shape of a slender, womanly figure with fuzzy features, about the size of an outstretched hand. The little creature had no eyes or hair, with long limbs that moved gracefully as it did a little pirouette on the Purifier’s shoulder.

The creature—a Sprite, as the man had called it—stopped and turned its head upward, towards Lace. Despite its empty countenance, Lace felt an insistent gaze upon her.

“She’s a little shy,” the man said. He gave the Sprite a tickle with one big finger, which made the creature giggle, its pale blue light flickering as she did. “She’s called Ray.”

“Hello, Ray,” Lace said politely. “What exactly is a Sprite, if you don’t mind me asking? A mentor of mine once told me the basics, but he was vague on the details.”

“What they are isn’t important,” the man said. He wiped his hands on the grass, tucked away his spade, and stood with a full pot of water that seemed awfully heavy. “It’s who they are. You would do well to remember that, if you want to salvage the mess you made of yours.”

Lace felt a pang of guilt, and she bit her lower lip. She could still feel her own Sprite at the corners of her mind, scattered into a thousand pieces. In pain.

The man flashed her a bright, fatherly smile. “Names are powerful things, aren’t they? They turn friends of strangers and enemies of misfortune. My name is Magge Miller. I’d like to know yours.”

“Lace Amar,” Lace said.

Magge nodded. “I will remember that.”

The Sprite, Ray, perked up at hearing her name. She tugged insistently on Magge’s ear and whispered something into it.

His eyebrows shot up. “It seems she’s familiar with the name Amar.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible. I’m no one.” She frowned. “But maybe… my father. He was a Hero before me.”

Magge shrugged. “Anything is possible. Sprites talk, you know?” He looked over towards the other Purifiers and sighed. A weight seemed to settle on his shoulders.

“Well, on you go, young lady. I have a hunt to see to its close.”

Lace left the company of Magge Miller with more questions than had been answered.

Something he had said stuck in her mind.

Names are powerful things.