As the third sun set, Brother Faerbar began his mass to the men that would join him on the walls tonight. He did it as much to put steel in their spines as to feel a fraction of the light he missed so much, though.
The way that the broken stained glass would glow and the darkness would be forced out of the stone structure as he recited the old words was a balm to his spirit. After seeing how few men here had taken up the light, he needed it.
As battered and looted as it was, the Grand Temple of Rahkin was still probably in better shape than the spiritual landscape of the city’s inhabitants. Despite how many hours he’d spent scrubbing its floors between his meetings with the Queen and her generals to discuss the city’s defense, it still looked no better than it had when he arrived. That was except for in moments like this when the divine gave them all a taste of what they'd missed for so long.
For a moment, all of them together here in fellowship didn’t see the timeworn stone or the threadbare walls. They didn’t even see the dull red light of Balzaar as he galloped alone across the heavens. Instead, everyone could see the world as it had been, with white light, veined marble, and blue skies.
It was the way things should have always been. These were high standards, though. In truth, even the holiest of men that he’d known were far from perfect. Less than half the men in Siddrimar had been devout enough to catch Brother Faerbar’s fervor. Outside those hallowed walls, he hadn't expected to find even half of that devotion.
Still, in the sea of eyes that looked at him as he lectured on the fight to come, less than one man in ten looked at him with the blazing gaze that he’d come to expect as the true blessing of the light. All of them looked at him with rapt devotion, and some even with fear, but those things were not enough.
He couldn’t say what was required beyond righteousness, but he didn’t need to. There was no time left for speculating now. That thing was on the move. Whether their place was at the altar, or the gutter no longer mattered. At this point, Brother Faerbar no longer cared if they were rich or poor or even a man or a woman. Stained souls could defend the lives of their fellow man almost as well as those with pure ones, as far as he was concerned.
All that mattered was that one could hold a sword and stand in the face of the devil because it was coming for all of them. The scouts had been reporting it for days. Further dungeons were emptying, and nearer dungeons were filling as the dead shuffled their forces and prepared for something larger than usual.
Would they actually try to breach the walls for good this time? He wondered.
Rahkin was the capital. It had walls between walls and districts that could be individually defended, so all might not be lost even if the main gate was breached, but once the dead could roam the catacombs at will, it would probably be over.
Brother Faerbar had learned that lesson already. Above ground, it would be a bloody battle, but it would still be a battle. Below it, though, it would be nothing but a slaughter in the dark.
The terrible memories of the crusade, and all the men he’d lost in the Lich’s lair were almost enough to shake him free of his blessing, and the Templar had to pause mid-sentence to steady himself.
“The light will not prevent your death,” he started again, “But know that your death, should it come to that, will save the lives of countless others. More important than any of our lives, though, are our immortal souls.”
He drew his sword, willing it to flare with light to better drive this point home to the hundreds of kneeling men who were listening to his words before the battle to come. “For as long as we hold this city, you and the souls of everyone you love are safe! But if it falls, then all of us are damned, and you shall spend an eternity slaving away for the monster we fight, becoming one more foot soldier in its terrible army. Is this what you want?”
“NO!” some of the men yelled in unison.
It was less forceful than Brother Faerbar would have liked, so he continued. “And what of those you love, not just those who are living now, but your children and your parents who are already buried. Do you want this darkness to unearth them as well? Because it will, it—”
“NO!” they cried out louder.
This time, almost all of them joined the call, and it brought a grim smile to his face. He understood too well. The idea of your own death was a terrible, frightening thing, but it was his brothers' deaths that haunted him at night.
Not now, though. Right now, the light was too bright for any darkness in his heart, and it had grown all the more powerful since he’d come here for one simple reason: those souls that he vouchsafed fueled his own powers in the same way that they would if they ended up in the hands of the darkness instead.
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This wasn't something he'd fully realized in the Darkness' lair of evil while he was trying to beat back the misshapen hordes of the damned, but during his time in Jordan’s manor house. That was one of the main reasons he’d had to come here. It wasn’t just that he didn’t want to feel the souls of the children he’d raised in the light slip through his fingers either. It was bigger than that. If Siddrim had given him such a gift, then he needed to use it where there were the most people possible.
That was the only way to give all of this meaning and the dead purpose. He didn’t share any of this with the warriors before him, though. Instead, Brother Faerbar blessed them and sent them on their way.
Unit after unit, mostly led by the remaining noblemen with their fine armor and their magical blades, came up to him one at a time to receive the Templar’s blessing, but he would not be joining them. Not tonight, anyway. He would let the mages of the Collegium handle the monsters that mere men couldn’t instead. He was needed elsewhere.
For too long, the dark forces had been probing every weakness that Rahkin had to offer. For week after week, they’d sent various monstrosities against every wall and gate, and if the monster they were facing was making such a big deal of the frontal attack, then Brother Faerbar was fairly certain that the true battle would be elsewhere.
It was only then he took a much smaller group with him to the sheltered harbor that was the weak link in Rhakin’s chain of defenses. In every other direction, walls and towers held back enemies, but in this one, there was only water, and that seemed less effective.
At this point, he was unsure if Oroza worked for the darkness they fought or opposed it. He’d seen evidence for both. He hoped that the other Gods and Goddesses were on the side of man, though, otherwise, they were screwed.
The attack on the walls started as soon as the fourth sun, Pheadron, ran below the far horizon. Brother Faerbar could hear it distantly, but he wasn’t concerned, at least at first. Instead, he and the thirty men he’d selected waited in an abandoned tavern just close enough to see the waterfront.
They didn’t have to wait too long. An hour after the fight started, but several hours before midnight, the first sodden zombies began to wade onshore. They were pitiful, waterlogged things with rusted armor. The Templar didn’t even need to dispatch them himself. While he fought, he kept the visor of his battered helmet down and hid the light that might frighten larger prey while he waited to see what would follow them.
The things that came next were a real horror show. First, there were corpses that had been stitched together out of several people until they were two times the size of a normal man, and the ones that followed them had been crafted from so many limbs that they looked more like crabs than people.
Brother Faerbar joined the fight as soon as these abominations broke the surface, but only because the dregs he’d chosen to fight alongside him would have broken and fled if he hadn’t. They were horrifying and strong, but they were not difficult to kill.
He was just beginning to doubt his certainty that the true battle would take place far from the walls of the city when it finally broke the surface and began to glide toward them. When it reached them, its tentacles wrapped around the docks. It didn’t climb them, though. Instead, it smashed them to flinders.
The Templar wasn’t sure exactly what it was in the dark, but even as he ignited his sword to try to understand, he realized that he'd probably made a mistake. He could see the monstrosity towering above him like the brow of a ship now, but so could the men fighting beside him, and several of them broke immediately.
Some part of him didn’t even blame them as he called to everyone else, “Rally to me! Do not let them establish a beachhead and take the docks!”
The last time that Brother Faerbar had fought something like this, it was Oroza’s leviathan, deep beneath Fallravea. This one was worse, though. That thing had been a mockery made from cast-off human limbs, but for this, someone had found the half-eaten corpse of a true kraken and reanimated the thing. The fact that they’d used other random bodies and carcasses to make it whole made it that much more disgusting.
Here, a person had been used instead of the foot-like fin that belonged there, and there snakes and giant eels replaced tentacle sections that had been bitten away or rotted off. In addition to that, everywhere there was a hole large enough to be a structural concern, it was riveted over with metal plates or thick, scaly hides from who knew what.
None of that mattered right now, though. What mattered were the writhing tentacles that could just as easily crush a man as sink a ship or bring down a building. For the first few minutes, it was stuck at the water's edge, and for every trunk-like tentacle he removed with his glowing blade, it slew a few of his men.
Once it managed to drag itself ashore, though, the destruction only got worse. That was for two reasons. The first was that now, every time it failed to strike down Brother Faerbar, it would crush a wagon or knock down some part of a building. The other reason was the zombies it began to vomit up, though.
These slime-covered monstrosities were heaved up past its three rows of sword-like teeth. They weren’t the sort that tried to fight you, though. They were the sort that exploded. Brother Faerbar found that out the moment he cleaved one in two and the alchemical contraption ignited.
One moment, he was the brightest light on the waterfront, and the next, he was bathed in green fire as the corpse he had just cleaved in two exploded, riddling him with poisoned shrapnel for the second time in his life and knocking him back into the ruins of what had once been someone’s home.
It was a painful blow but not so terrible that he couldn’t rise to his feet once more. Brother Farbar yanked out the largest pieces of metal that had penetrated his armor with his free hand, and then he leveled his sword back at his enemy and mentally steeled himself to return to the fight.