When a piece of the divine is destroyed, what is left? If a thing of horror is removed from the world, surely that is a good thing; but if, instead, a glittering wonder is shattered, does that not lessen us all?
* The Marian Codex
☀
16th Day of New Summer’s Moon, 297 AC
As one, the seven remaining hearts spaced in a circle around the Tomb of Camiel flared like torches, then extinguished, leaving nothing behind. The circle itself broke apart into motes of blood-red fire, drifting up into the air before winking out one at a time. Trist lifted his sword to his right shoulder, settling into the Ox Guard, and followed the rising core of a dead Angelus with the tip.
The strands of Camiel’s Boons unraveled from the core, lashing out in all directions in flashes of yellow and white. A ghostly image began to coalesce, with the blackened core at its heart. Wings of bronze spread, with a scraping of metal feathers, and then tarnished as Trist watched, losing their luster unevenly. In some places, they even acquired a patina of sickly green, like old copper. The body supported by the wings was similar to that of a human man, though grotesquely deformed. As Trist watched, it lost all excessive flesh or fat, the stomach sucking in until it was nearly concave. All the Angelus’ muscles, however, remained, leading to a distorted contrast between wide shoulders, a strong chest, and famine-stricken ribs. The skin was pallid and bloated, like a water-logged corpse, and Trist remembered finding the bodies of Sir Tor and the miller’s daughter, near ten years gone. Finally, the monster opened its eyes, which were black as night. Just a breath behind, its forehead split open, revealing a third eye, just as dark as the normal two, in the center of the forehead, above the nose.
“Camiel!” A woman’s voice broke across the tomb like thunder, and Trist flicked his eyes to the side to watch Rahab manifest. Dame Margaret’s patron had skin pale and luminescent as mother-of-pearl, eyes the color of low tide under a summer sun, and wings that shone in beautiful pinks and purples, like nothing he’d ever seen before. “This is not you, brother,” the Angelus of the Sea pleaded. “Go back to your rest!”
With a roar that shook the entire tomb, and perhaps even the city around them, the monster that had once been Camiel, Angelus of War, lashed out with whips of fire, throwing Rahab aside.
“Hold it a moment!” Margaret shouted, and Trist heard the wet sound of her glaive chopping deeply into flesh. The agonized howl that followed pointed at the monstrous, demonic hound which had been guarding the tomb as the most likely victim.
Uncertain of his footing, Trist edged forward. He could see Camiel well enough, but not the floor of the tomb. For all he knew there were stairs, railings, benches, or any number of obstacles scattered about that he was liable to crash into. If he could have seen clearly, he would have relied on his speed to close the distance before the monster saw him coming, but it was just too much of a risk.
Instead, Trist made certain of his footing as he came on, ready to strike at any strands of fire Camiel threw his way. He didn’t have to wait for long. The corrupted Angelus had initially turned toward where Rahab had hit the floor of the tomb, but Margaret’s patron came up with her bright wings spread, and flew low toward their enemy, dodging around burning lashes as she went past, forcing it to turn back toward Trist. Once it saw him, it roared again, and swept half a dozen strands of fire at him in an assault that would overwhelm most Exarchs.
Unlike those empowered by daemons or Angelus, however, Trist had been bestowed with inhuman speed, grace and reflexes. He shifted his weight to the left, letting one strand slide past him and impact the stone of the tomb floor, sending up a spray of chips and dust into the air. The second and third whips he cut as they came, severing them before they could touch him, and then he pushed off his with back foot to dash forward into the gap, low past the fourth whip. He was just close enough to threaten Camiel with his backswing, a diagonal cut up which would have split the monster from hip to shoulder - if the last two burning whips had not caught him and tossed him aside.
The impact crumbled his cuirass, and flash-heated it at the same time, scorching the skin of Trist’s chest even under his padded gambeson. Worse, it threw him across the tomb into the wall, where he hit with a deafening clang, then slid down and fell to the floor.
“Get up, Trist,” Acrasia urged him, “or your friend over there won’t be the only one to lose an arm.”
Trist shook his head, got his feet under him, and leapt forward, rolling across the floor of the tomb just in time to let four lashes strike the wall where he’d been only an instant before. Another shower of rock chips and dust erupted from behind him, and Trist coughed.
“I’ve got your back,” Margaret called out, and he caught sight of her core rushing at Camiel. A glance to where she’d been fighting showed him that the daemon-hound was dead, its core dissipated and no doubt already Tithed. Cynric must have been crawling away from where he’d been thrown at the edge of the circle, for his core had moved, but was still low to the ground. Lorengel, on the other hand, visible as the only other core in the room, had moved around behind the monster and was doing something other than fighting, for he wasn’t moving nearly fast enough to be in combat.
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Trist raised his sword again, felt his way forward, and managed to make it to Margaret’s side in time to ward off a counterstroke in her direction. When he swung at Camiel’s incoming strands of fire, the hideous thing backed off, unwilling to risk further maiming.
“I do not think I can beat it without my eyes,” Trist admitted, gasping for breath. Pain shot through his chest every time he inhaled too deeply, and he suspected he’d cracked a rib.
“We don’t have too,” Margaret panted, next to him. “We distract it while Lorengel and Veischax bind it. All we need to do is give them time.”
“Together, then,” Trist agreed.
“Relax,” Acrasia whispered in his ear. “Just like earlier today. Let yourself see it.”
Trist grunted, but there was no time to respond to the faerie, and certainly no way he could relax in the middle of a battle for his life. Margaret lunged forward, her core advancing at his side, and it was all he could do to keep up and defend her. Without actually being able to see what she was doing, he was afraid that attempting any more than that would only get in her way.
Somewhere behind them, footsteps came tromping down the stairs from the nave above. “Cynric!” Margaret shouted. “Hold the stairs!”
“I’ve only got one arm left over here!” Cynric shouted back, but he must have done something, for Trist heard the ring of steel on steel, and he wasn’t stabbed in the back in the next few moments.
Whatever mind was left in the risen corpse of Camiel must have decided that it couldn’t win by fighting at range, and the next time the whips came, it was a feint. The moment Margaret dodged to the side, and Trist swung to protect her, the monster barrelled forward at them in a sudden rush of speed. There was a metallic clang, and Margaret’s core was thrown aside, but Trist was able to slip around the oncoming Angelus and get a horizontal slice in at its side. His Daemon-Bane Boon was of no use here, unfortunately, but he a spray of stinking ichor spattered against the steel of his plate armor.
“How much longer?” Margaret shouted from where she’d fallen, her voice raw.
“Almost finished,” Lorengel called back. “Hold it.”
“We are holding it!” Trist shouted, though he was the only one within range at the moment. He spun, let his cut pull his blade up, then reversed into a downstroke at the monster’s back, hoping that there would be nothing underfoot to turn his ankle. He felt the slice connect and took a step back, stumbling, settling into Tail Guard, with his left foot forward and the blade of his longsword trailing out behind him, tip down nearly to the ground. “Come on then,” he shouted to keep Camiel’s attention. The scuffling had left him as the only thing between Lorengel and the risen Angelus - there could be no retreat.
The world slowed, as it had so many times before when Trist fought, his survival hanging on the edge of a blade. There was that peculiar sensation, again, that he had felt for the first time in the cellar of The Fighting Lion earlier in the day. It was as if he had stepped back from his body, and was watching someone else fight from a distance, tethered only by strands of light. Suddenly, Trist could see everything in the tomb clearly.
The stone effigy which had marked the tomb itself was cracked apart into three pieces, all of which had been thrown aside to make way for the circle of gore in which they fought. His stumble had been over the dismembered leg of a priest, one of many making up the ritual ground in this room of horrors. Lorengel, grasping a length of black wood which now shone like the sun on the water, was scribing strange symbols into the stone of the floor. Margaret, in the meantime, had lost her helm at some point, and wiped blood from her mouth as she rose, settling her glaive for another charge. At the foot of the stairs, Cynric fought with an arming sword in his only remaining hand, the entire left side of his armor soaked in blood from where his missing limb had been torn from the socket of his shoulder.
That was not, however, the extent of Trist’s sight.
He could see the daemoness Loray winging through the night above the city, nearly to the cathedral, and just on her heels the black-winged monster with the sword, coming on fast. That would make two daemons, on top of dozens of guards racing through the cathedral toward them, and the horror raised her this evening.
It was too much for only four Exarchs, one of whom was already barely on his feet. Trist knew, in that moment, what he had to do.
The dead-Angelus threw its bronze wings forward at Trist, as if to slice him with the razor-edges of its feathers, but there was one difference between how Trist had fought it before, and how he fought it now. Now, he could see.
He leapt the wings, letting them hit the stone beneath them both, cracking it. Trist’s boots touched the length of the bronze wings, and before the abomination could react, he ran up their length, dragging the tip of his sword along one wing as he came, leaving a trail of gushing black and gold ichor behind him. The monster’s three eyes widened in horror, and it tried to step back, but it was slow compared to the speed granted Trist by the faeries. He swung a cut at its head, and the edge of his blade sunk into its angelic skull, spraying chips of bone and gouts of corrupted ichor in every direction. He set a foot on it’s shoulder, yanked his sword clear, and hit the ground running before it could turn, then headed right for Margaret.
Her eyes were wide as she drifted forward, and he put a portal right in front of her. Before the Exarch of Rahab could stop herself, she careened through, and Trist let the gateway close behind her, digging the toe of his sabaton into the stone to turn himself toward Cynric. As he ran, explosions of stone trailed him, the flailing whips of the corrupted Angelus never quite moving fast enough to catch him. Trist grabbed Cynric by the pauldron from behind, and yanked him back into a second gate. He sliced as he went by the stairs, gutting two guards in the gold and green livery of the Champs d’Or as he went by, then kicked off the wall next to the stairs and dashed back toward Lorengel.
A circle of light rose around Camiel as Trist drew closer, and the wounded monster screamed in agony. Chains the color of moonlight wrapped around it, but Trist didn’t stay behind to see what happened. Instead, he tackled Lorengel through a final portal, leaving the tomb at the bottom of the cathedral behind them.
They tumbled out into the cool air of the Ardenwood, rolling across the forest floor until they fetched up against the trunk of an old oak, and with the impact, Trist’s sight left him once again.