The raid on Crater Eyelet, as he marked it on his sea chart, began as the sun kissed the horizon.

They didn’t have guard dogs, but their goats did rather the same job. How such stubborn creatures made it to the Misty Isles may be a mystery forever, though likely some Giordanan refugee based on the coloration patterns. Be the beast black or grey, brown or white, a few gave annoyed bleats at the quiet approach of men. Nothing loud, but a territorial noise where nothing should have crept up the island at all. It gave the locals time to realize what was happening, while the Vassish tried to find a slope they could descend. They moved like shadows upon the sky. Their loudest noise was whispered promises to the goats to eat them that night.

Lucius found a gravel slope near one flank and leapt down it. The stone crunched and slid beneath him, cascading into the valley as darkness devoured it. In a crash of rock and flesh, scraping steel and sandals, he skidded to a stop at the edge of a fallow field. Weeds sprouted from between piles of manure–a tradition the islanders surely kept without understanding. It was something they did because their ancestors did it, or perhaps the demon told them to. They would have had no understanding of fatiguing the fields.

Lucius marched across it silently, approaching the fields of lush bushes ahead, and beyond them the cook fires. While he was still twenty paces off, he recognized them as the kuku plant. Huge as sapling trees and so laden with the demon’s fruit the branches drooped like a weeping willow tree. Just inhaling made his nose tingle faintly numb.

The man who emerged from the field had a mask on, wet and clinging to his face. He spotted Lucius, his eyes wild and red. Shock held him, his mind grappling with the surprise–the goats had been right to bleat. “Shit, Vassish!” he screamed, spinning on his heels.

Lucius sprinted after him. Over his shoulder he barked, “Fan out! Encircle them!” He plunged into the field, like a nightmare copy of a wheat field, and gave chase. While his men tried to scramble down the slope, often opting for safer routes than his own, the archers jogged to the front. They fingered their bows, squeezing the butt of arrows as dusk swept the world around them and blinded them. The only trustworthy light was the glow of cook fires, and then the dancing of torches.

The only thing Lucius could trust was also the only thing he had to trust; that even if he was caught up in friendly fire, he wouldn’t die from it.

Out the other side of the field, chasing the phantom of the farmer before him, he burst onto their ruddy trail. So sodden with mist and spilled irrigation, the mud almost sucked his sandals off. It squelched beneath him, soaking his feet and buying them time to rally. While they lit torches and found weapons like the haul of a battlefield scavenger, Lucius found the stone trail. Slabs of rock thrown into the mud that would have broken a wagon’s wheels, but made for the only sure footing like he was wading a river.

When he reached them, one among them stood like a shaman, swinging a smoky censor. The islanders inhaled like men and exhaled like beasts. They roared, straining their muscles and bulging their frames like cobras in the night. Such numbers, not even ten, wouldn’t have been much danger. The dark favored the individual, it drew out the difference in skill and his stigmata meant a protracted fight could only help him.

They had a stigmata of their own. Sadly, I was not given an opportunity to see the precise sigil upon the shaman’s chest, but I did see a drawing of it. I have dubbed it [Monsoon Haze] but I am still on the quest to find it once more. The power was remarkable.

Smoke exploded out from the shaman, swallowing up the entire world. All eleven of them, Lucius included, were thrown into a world of smoke. The field, the farms, the land itself, all was obliterated from their senses, augmented as it was by the burning of the kuku bud. Their foreign speech became a tangle of syllables, a chattering cry in Lucius’ mind as the drug made its way into his lungs and to his mind.

He steeled himself, having already experienced the drug before, and kept his stance wide, his grip firm. The islanders fused with the smoke. It wrapped around them like armor, obscuring all but their weapons which swung about like marionette toys. Lucius parried and dodged, but his counterattacks found nothing but air.

Outnumbered as he was, the task of tracking dark clubs in the smoke mounted until he lost track. Blunt ax heads hammered his sides. Crude swords made of obsidian lacerated his arms. The cackling of madmen haunted him. They taunted him for his hubris that he could invade them.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Then he caught one by the back of their weapon. He cleaved down sharp, blasting past where a proper weapon’s crossguard would have been. His steel found the flesh of a wrist and broke through skin and bone. The islander howled as blood squirted out from his stump and the weapon fell to the ground.

“Got ya,” Lucius hissed at the haze. The weapons all hesitated, surprise staying their attack for the moment. He charged them. The nearest to him had only a club so he threw his shoulder into the man. He had grasped the essence of their power–he had been missing because they weren’t in proper fighting stances, not because he couldn’t hit them. The weakness of their attacks had been the clue.

When he slammed his shoulder in, he found the wirey flesh of an emaciated farmer. The man stumbled back, feet sticking in the mud, and Lucius cut him down.

The islanders rallied, shouting death at him. They still outnumbered him eight to one within the grasp of the haze. They traded blows, cutting him left and right. They stripped the clothes from his arms and legs, ripping flesh beneath. In turn, they took out one man’s leg, another’s throat. Their foreign jeers and insults passed from one ear to the next as he began to pant.

“M’lord!”

“Loose ar–” A club struck him in the back of the head, hard against his helmet. It dazed him, broke his defenses. He inhaled the smoke with a grunt and fell to one knee.

The command had made it to their ears though. His raiders blindly loosed into the smoke. From outside they could see the howling and leaping, the screeching of monsters beyond their comprehension. They loosed again and again, uncoordinated and inaccurate but they so outnumbered the islanders that it didn’t matter.

Men screamed in pain, coughing blood, and more the raiders loosed. They dared to march closer, and the shaman retreated. The smoke moved with him, exposing body after body and then exposing Lucius on the ground–to a knee and a hand. Arrows had punctured his armor, leaking his life to the ground. Around him were seven islanders, dead or dying.

Some of the raiders hesitated, repeating the shout of “M’lord!”

His eyes were only on the smoke, on the capering form of the shaman as they retreated to a barn. He snarled and ripped one arrow out. Throwing it aside, he shouted, “Surround them!”

“You need a doctor,” one of his squad leaders urged, grabbing him and helping him to his feet.

“Surround them and burn them!”

There was hardly a fight after that. Lucius stumbled back to the edge of the farm, coughing but hardly feeling the pain. The effect of the kuku bud burned thick in his mind. His raiders did as commanded, surrounding the barn with torches and set fire to it. Oily smoke billowed to the sky and blotted out the stars. Men and animals screamed. The doors broke down, both came fleeing the blaze. While the animals were spared, the enemies were not.

The smoke curled around unnaturally, draping itself across the crate like a dome. It blotted out the light of the moon and loomed down to Lucius, the eye of it lit by the blaze. The demon manifested itself, pressed it’s will into the distant corporeal world. Its voice was the wind, its wrath the smoke.

“You will die, Northerner! You, and all that you love. I will consume you all. I will rot your bones and suck your marrow.”

The squad leader gripping Lucius trembled. He gawped up at the sky and asked, “What in Lumius’ name is that?”

Lucius laughed. He couldn’t have been happier for the demon to show itself like that. Not all his army saw it, but enough. They would spread the word to the other soldiers and they would have a cause. More than a cause, they would have a fear and–so long as Lucius could pull off the act–they would have a hero to cling to. He couldn’t have asked for a better stage to shove off and stand proud. He spat out the blood from his chest and grunted out, “Men!” They took a moment to turn towards him, to hear him over the whimpering and panic of the dying. “Do not be afraid. Raise your fists and cheer. Tonight, we spat in the face of a demon. Look! Look at it impotent. It can do nothing but rage. We have slain its warriors and won!”

Some of the braver, or perhaps more confused, men threw up their arms and cheered. They whooped with him and their reward was rain. The smoke turned to the first storm of the wet season. The sky itself pelted down at them, drowning their fires and torches. The regular heat of the Misty Isles became a bone chilling swamp in the dead of night. The only structure that could have sheltered them all had smoldering timbers and no roof. They were forced into the hovels of the men they had slain, shivering and wet without even cookfires to warm themselves with.

Lucius stayed strong, leveraging the pain killing haze within him and his own regeneration to stay afoot. He took on the burden of mercy killing the injured. No medical hope existed for them, so he slipped a dagger in through the ribs again and again. By then, his armor and clothing was as soaked as could be. He stripped down to his small clothes and entered the only hovel that had produced a flicker of light.

It was the shaman’s shrine, and his soldiers stood in the far corner from the twisted effigy of the demon. Before it was a bowl filled with the burnt ashes of blood and fat. The smoke stained the wooden carving horridly.

Lucius grinned at it. He had found something even better than the bag of kuku bud from Little Dog Island. Now, he had the face of his enemy itself, to be displayed in Aliston.