13th of Locus
The Siege of Calamon
III
Troop Count:
~800 Calamonis, ~12,000 Alisan Troops
"When the dead rose in the Jinn, it was not the first sign that things were awry. But it may have been the last."
Those who fight under the earth must have it better than us who fight under a black sun.
Those were the thoughts of a man at the base of the northern Calamoni wall. Slightly taller than the norm. Slightly bolder, his hair was a bright, curly orange unlike most commoners of this place. He was swarmed with bodies, swamped with writhing undeath and their repugnant, acrid stench of rot and decay.
Because the dead were not dying. Not today.
His fist clenched tighter around his jagged mace until his knuckles became white. His fingers had become vibrant red. Blood ran from his left ear, still ringing in lurid agony. The ground was still rattling and rumbling from exca bombs dropped nearby. They'd struck close, not close enough to penetrate the stonewise walls, but close enough to ravage both armies' frontlines, to send the squads into frenzy. There was no chance in any deadworld for their souls to return. Copper moved his lips in silent prayer.
The bodies were, however, not as vacant as the souls. When the corpses writhed through the remaining men, he could see them: indiscriminate killing machines riddled with violet-eyed maggots, glowing through Hemah's scalding artificial sunlight.
His mace swept through an azar's lower jaw with a crunch, sent the bone flying bloodlessly through the air.
Once a person, all their own ideals, all their own belongings, all their own love and body and mind…
But I’m too romantic; they’re nothing but writhing mud, now. Maggot-infested mud
And the maggots continued to fester and squirm in the gap where that jawbone had once sat flush. They still squirmed in the gaping holes of the cat's skin, in the gash where a sword's slice had nearly cut the face nearly in two.
Perhaps there is yet a way to kill them dead, he hoped. Hemah's light grew ever dimmer as they were pressed further and further toward the city's wall. It was becoming too dark to see. It would soon be too dark to fight.
There were torches placed every ten or so paces along the wall. But as far out as Copper stood, there was no light cast upon him. He was in the vacant dead zone between the torchlight of his allies and the torchlight of his enemies. The ground was lumpy, squishy with corpses.
Flaming arrows seared overhead, letting Copper barely make out the indistinct shapes of the distant shieldwall collapsing as the dead threw themselves against it. There were living sel and azar fighting to that deadzone, still unsure whose side the deathless were part of.
Those deathless tore weapons from soldiers' hands on either side, cast their steels and bludgeoners and spears away to dark abyss. Complete chaos. Complete darkness, in this space of overlapping armies.
Copper stumbled backward over a body that had just begun to stir. The shield of a furtive soldier caught his back from behind. He feared a friendly sword through his chest, but found no such luck. He breathed. Then he shot a wary glance up at the vacant battlement over their position, atop the northern wall of the grand city. The only battlement bereft of archers and magi. A battlement that held only a dim violet light. The hue of a purple demon.
Rykaedi… Perhaps it would not be overly romantic for us to dance once more our deathless dance of withering, vapid pain. Festering, rotting, unable to feel yet so willing to make others feel. I’ll make you feel. If I could reach out and touch the power you wield, I’d show you mine mirrored creation. If I could read your mind for your deepest fears, sorrows, and regrets… I’d make them mine own weapons to wield.
He shut his eyes, grasped something strung around his throat. A clawing grasp dug into his leg.
Copper winced, unable to maintain the quiet poetry in his mind. He bit his lip, giving his best effort not to scream, or cry under the tearing pain throughout his leg. Blood was dripping hot from him.
He raised his mace high, slammed it down hard. Some hot liquid splattered his face. He slammed it down again, again, and again. Hot liquid sprayed all into the air. The flicker of a flaming arrow over his head again proved what he already knew: that hot liquid was black and red blood. Oozing white pus from the undead. A miasma of squelching rot. Those maggots fell and scuttled along the ground to their next hosts. He swiped a clinging one from his leg with the back of his hand.
Someone beside him collapsed into a mess of his own bile. Many more would. Copper did not.
This place would be one of many hells… if not for the Jinn's own hell that I've lived.
He tightened his grip again.
Krnch!
Down went his mace. He felt jagged teeth rip into the fat of his calf. Sharpened, as though by death. As though their souls were erosive, corrosive, damaging and vibrant with agony. The terror-fueled squabble of their broken, cursed minds.
He could hear the mutters of the dead: Ry. Kae. Di. Am I hearing things? Or are they chanting...? Ry. Kae. Di.
The corpse clawed at his lower torso, then ripped through the leathery armor of his chest deep enough to dig to his bones. Blood drooled out. Copper brought his mace up, but another of the creatures lunged at it like a dog and locked the whole arm in place.
Incredible strength…!
Another soldier sprayed a mess of blood all over Copper when he struck down the thing restraining his arm. A shield rushed forward and clubbed over the head of the one digging through his chest, nearly sent his own body spinning down with it.
"For Calamon!" screamed the fervored man. "For fucking CALAMON!"
Copper staggered. His legs grew weak. His breaths were heavy. To one knee, first. His ears were beginning to ring...
Then the nearest dead all dropped like logs. The Calamoni soldiers rushed forward with a terrible battlecry.
Their rush was stopped far too short — angrily pointed spears ripped into their chests and faces and sent their momentum all back at them. Copper could just make out the shadows. Then he realized: we're at the wall.
The torchlight had grown brighter behind them. They'd been pushed far back. Their numbers were dwindling to nothing. In lieu of the dead, it was a losing battle.
"Retreat!" someone screamed out, most likely having the same realization he'd had. "Re—"
The voice ended in a quiet gurgle, hidden away behind the sudden clashing and clamoring of metal.
The sel rushed forward in the dark.
Copper raised his mace. There was just an onze left in him, a sliver of fight...
A spearhead thrust for his shoulder. He stumbled under it, letting it rip into the fatty throat of the shieldbearer who'd only just saved his life.
Copper's arm swung his mace. KRNCH! The helmet buckled beneath his strength. The red-skinned man fell limp. But the spears behind him came quickly, and one easily tore into his swordarm.
Copper's mace fell. He thought to reach down for it, but quickly thought better. He could barely manage a thought as he grabbed the spearshaft. He jerked it back with voracious ferocity, accidentally lunged the point into the leg of an ally, then laid a devastating punch into the face of the sel stumbling on the opposite side. The spear came loose. Copper cracked the steel base of the shaft into the soldier's chin and knocked him further back.
No... This threat of death, this corroding of my body... He flexed his fingers before he braced the spear again. I'm stronger for it. His left hand pressed into his necklace again.
Then the dead were back to squirming upon the ground. One grabbed tight to his ankle before a rush of azar crushed him, pushed Copper and his allies back defensively.
Copper spun the spear as fast as he could. The tip slid between the ribs of a scimitar-bearing cat, loosed more and more blood with additional punctures until his heavy body collapsed.
Then came a second one from the adjacent shade. His paw moved like a club of its own, shattered the spear into two pieces effortlessly.
Copper grit his teeth. The club-like paw came for him next.
THUMP.
Knock, knock…
His body shuddered with the memory of those cold words. His hairs stood on end.
The Sea of Oblivion, the Dirac, the longing void beyond… Is this what you seek? For their sacrifice, this is what you would receive?
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Copper gasped. His face was soaked. His clothes were soaked.
His eyes finally pried themselves open. They were stiff. Stuck. Glued together. But now they were open a slight, at least, and burned with the dryness of a desert.
He tried to put his palms to his eyes, to resist the agony… but they would not move. His whole body resisted him.
That’s right, he thought. I’ve died.
He remembered the clubbing of the azar’s forearm against his skull. He was sure his whole brain had been crushed. But, then… why am I here now? Why is my soul still here?
The maggots tickled across his body, burrowing into his flesh. Something lay on the dark ground before his eyes. Something stretched out from around his neck by some thin, loose string. A necklace. The medallion at the end was a simple white molar. A tooth. Her tooth.
His limp fingers twitched. He could feel some warmth returning to his maggot-dredged leg.
My thoughts seem coherent. I can still remember...
He could remember her whole face. Bone white. Free of flesh and muscle. A spiked, jagged crown protruded from her skull. She was completely engulfed in a black and violet dress.
I still remember when I met that bitch...
A daemon of every sort, a creature beyond his past comprehension. Not because she was undead, not because there was a stench of rot pouring from that open cavity in the brick wall behind…
Because he felt attracted in a way. An overwhelming desire swelled in his mind at the sight of her. Even as he reminded himself of Cassius’ words, 'psychic resonance', he felt he could hardly resist her form, her stature, the way she swayed with her step.
And there was the horror, too. The insidious cry of every fiber of his being, the shuddering, the sweat pouring down his pale, freckled skin, and — though it could very well be from either possessive trepidation or her lacivious allure — the bludgeoning pound of his aching heart.
But, still clutching his chest, he was not most averse to either of those effects. It was a different feeling that twinged and pined at his soul, one he’d only ever felt in the overshadowing glow of that gaping door into abyss beyond. Indescribable. A feeling of nonexistence, of all existence surrounding him in one forlorn moment. Cold, hot, close, far… Every sensation all at once resided in that pang of guilt and love and fear and hate. A memory and a premonition. He had been here, he was here, he would soon be here. Familiar, and yet, so unfamiliar.
I still remember why I must kill her...
But once that barest deja vu passed, he was still collapsed supine beneath the shambling bodies. His clutching hand raced up for his throat, first for a gouged wound, then for an amulet. Something she had given him, something she had plucked from herself, for him.
A sacrifice, for her sacrifice.
A most amiable gift for one such as himself. One who had lost family and friend to her climactic disaster, watched his decrepit island fall derelict beneath a swarming sea of death and false, hopeless life. Solemnist, Soberist... Vile fuckers all for that vile island.
In his recollection, she expunged a tooth from the back of her mouth. A molar, dull and sacred all the same. She dropped it into his restrained hand and was done with it. Then she vanished away into the world. Rykaedi, Marrow Queen, Queen of Undeath, Lifeless Scourge, was returned to the realm of mortals. All thanks to… what was his name?
He wrapped the entwined tooth in his cold hand, held it tight. Then he thought of that sensation, every inch of it, every fleeting desire and resistance.
She’s protecting me. The tooth is…
His hand twitched forward through the dirt. It pressed into the bottom of the boot. His fingers slid up until they felt a cold, wet ankle. Then he clutched. The body began to stand. He clung on, letting the corpse drag him on through the dirt. His legs were rattled with pins and needles. His arms felt almost completely frozen.
Rykaedi. I’m coming for you.
There was a dull pressing in the back of his mind. Something unfamiliar to him. Hemah’s dull sunlight fell gently upon him once again. The burning of her heat was already relinquishing the stiff rigor mortis from his limbs.
Copper kicked his leg. Then he tried to swing the other one. It was still stiff. It took a few long minutes before it could move at all, and longer still before it fell under his own control.
Then he lifted his tightened neck. He looked up to the crowds of hoarding dead all around. Finally, he released the ankle of the lumbering Hunter corpse above. He began to his own knee.
There were shouts. The Alisan forces were rushing at them, one final push at the undead.
Little do they know, the Hunter forces have already fallen completely beneath the wall.
Copper’s glossy, dark eyes creaked backward toward the top of the wall.
You're up against Rykaedi, now.
Until I stop this farce myself.
Copper staggered forward, finally upon his feet. He stomped once, then twice. His body was immensely heavy. He nearly collapsed, caught his balance against the shoulder of an azar walker.
Then he continued on. There was an exca corpse ahead, writhing in a pile of bodies. His wings were torn, flapping gently against the ground.
Lost your wings? Or just can’t remember how to fly?
Copper collapsed to his knees beside the thing. His slow arm wriggled up to his collar and grabbed the necklace. He held it tight.
Comply to my demand, walker. Become my subject.
The bird’s eyes turned upon him. It stared deep into his necklace. She was speaking to him.
Copper wrapped his hand around the bird’s hooked foot.
“Go…” he gargled. He held the necklace tighter with his other hand.
The exca flapped once, then twice. He began to manage up from the pile of bodies.
Then he flexed his wings out to their full span. He struck down more heavily, making deliberate blows against the wind.
And up they went. A current of wind hit the bird’s wings like a mast and carried them up, higher and higher until they were above where the battlement should have been. He could see into the city, the glowing firelights and torches of those surviving Calamity within its walls. He could see archers and magi flinging fireballs and endless arrows and bolts of riddling lightning down at ever side of the wall, everywhere the mass of Alisan soldiers were flooding them.
More importantly, he could see her violet glow there. He pulled hard on the hook hand, urged the bird to settle toward that northern gate.
Then came the arrows. They could see him, somehow. They thought he was an attacker.
But in some ways, I suppose I am.
The exca swept for the wall. He weaved between the arrows, around blasts of fire and raw ley magic, closer and ever closer to the wall.
And then shot a wave of violet magic from that glowing spot upon the battlement. His bird made a crooked noise of famished distress, and then gave out the last of its… life. Copper was falling.
THUD.
The sound of his body hitting the top of the stone wall was accompanied by the sounds of shattering bones, a spray of blood, grinding leather as he slid and slid…
His body lurched to an abrupt halt. Something was pressing down on his side. He looked up.
“And so we meet again!” giggled a woman's enticing voice.
His eyes narrowed into piercing rage. There she was: Rykaedi. In dark tan flesh, in black hair that covered her eye just slightly. More beautiful than ever, more rotten than ever. She smiled a sickening smile, her white teeth glistened gold in Hemah’s rays.
“Ry… Kae…” Copper’s throat was dry and incapable. He so desperately wanted to threaten her, to take her life and cast her body to the hordes below. Torture, he wanted to return to her. Desperation, he wanted her to feel. Death, he wanted her to face.
You deserve to die, you rotten scourge bitch.
His hand smacked against the stones. He was still unable to move, now pressed beneath the weight of one of her pointed black heels.
“Copper, was it? I thought you might look for me. No surprise your travels took you here, eventually. Was it you who slaughtered my believers in Dunskyr?”
He showed his grit teeth.
“I should have known. I was wondering who had such a sickly vendetta against me, if not Castelbre. But now you two are collaborating? No, I didn’t think so.”
She released her foot. His body rolled over supine. She stood just over his head so that her billowing dress covered most of his vision. She placed her face right in the center of his gaze, right where the midday sun should have been.
“Are you here to kill me?”
Yes.
“Why?”
The world grew black all around them. He was back in the tomb where he’d freed her, back in that maze of dark tunnels beneath the Jinn where black-mass rituals and sabbaths had raised demons from pits beyond. Her skin flaked and faded away until it was fleshless bone. She was once again returned to her form as the Marrow Queen.
You could not release my mother to death.
“Could not?”
Would not. You took my whole family, my whole island…
“How abhorrent of me. And, for you? Do you want me to release you?”
His mind did not answer plainly.
“I didn’t think so. You like this control, no? This… speciality? How fitting that an ignoble paladin of a dead faith is now cold and morbid like those he’s set himself to destroy. You killed Madius Gavelith, High Priest of my order. He aspired to this power himself, once. Why do you deserve it, but he did not?”
He wanted to make the world immortal through this stripping. He wanted to abandon the deadworld.
“Your soul will grow ever flimsier if you hold onto this power.”
I’d abandon my soul to inconceivable void if it means I could strike out this power forever. I’ll make you regret having ever given me innumerable life.
His hand suddenly clutched around her cold ankle. The vision dispersed and they were once again beneath a black sun. Her dark face’s eyebrows raised up in gleeful surprise. Her lips twisted into an unbecoming smile.
His own voice finally broke free, crystal clear and without the gargling of his bloody saliva: “Rykaedi. No matter what, I’m going to kill you.”
Rykaedi’s own smile became a frantic, excited grin. “I look ever forward to it!”
She raised her violet-glowing hand.
And down it went into Copper’s skull, until his vision was violet, then red, and finally, black…