When they reached the location of the final battlefield, it seemed more a site of numerous natural and unnatural disasters than a battlefield. There were no bodies, only a path of crushed flowers leading away from it. It was not a clash of armies but, from what Tiriz counted, thirteen humans against a deity. Though one would think an army was involved, countless footprints interlaced the scene.
Along the site were spatters of blood and fragments of white “thorns”. What grass that was not scorched away or blanketed in frost was dead, touched by the Arcos’s breath yet among the decay were flowers where her feet touched the ground and revived the soil. At one side was what could only be identified as a colossal handprint.
Most would have fled at the sight of a display of only one such power. But such abilities were not new to the warriors that pursued the Arcos. At least one would have faced one of the sixteen princesses. Though the princesses were only a prelude, notes to a song only the Arcos could weave into harmony.
Craters dotted the landscape as well while melted stone formed a straight, unerring path where a surge of destruction was directed.
An ability unique to the Arcos was the power to control light. No other spawn had such an ability. As creatures that normally derived their power from the sun, such energy was their very lifeforce. To use it as a shield or weapon would be like a human firing arrows shaped from their own blood. Yet, the Arcos had no difficulty implementing it.
Few would benefit to ask what the Arcos was capable of. Even if she possessed only the sixteen powers of the princesses and her authority over light, those powers interacted and combined into near limitless possibilities. It would be better to ask what her immediate limits might be. Her power surpassed the collective abilities of all spawn. She was omnipotent.
Yet she still fell.
The Arcos had a number of defensive abilities that together should have made her invulnerable How then could she be defeated? There were several possible explanations. The simplest would be she let herself be defeated.
Another was both easier and more difficult to believe. That she was too perfect. She might have been so powerful that the small details appeared trivial and immortality allowed her to plan so far into the future that she had little reason to consider the immediate.
Humans were so fragile and focused on the short term. All they could afford to concern themselves with was defeating her in the present moment. They possessed a sense of urgency that few spawn experienced.
Even though Tiriz could not explain the numerous defeats of a living deity, she did not need to be told what happened at this battle. She already discovered what happened from the state of the equipment she found in the humans’ camp. Midbattle, they provoked the Arcos to unleash a ray of concentrated light. It had been daytime so the Arcos had no need to conserve energy and released something powerful enough to cut immediately through any opposition. Even her regular use of such beams had unquestionable penetrating power, easily traveling through flesh in an instant, but this would have been her using it to a greater extreme.
But the warriors wished for that. They had a shield covered in hide, probably kept it beyond the Arcos’s reach until that moment to not have the fur be covered in newborn life. When the beam pierced the hide, it was reflected back at the Arcos.
Of course, that would not have been enough. She could endure her own attacks but that would have proven to be the key moment that opened the Arcos to a continuous assault. Eventually, she succumbed.
Which direction their charge had been taken was all too apparent. In previous times, there might have been a fresh trail of flowers through the battlefield if the Princess of the Barrows remained but this time that trail was trampled beneath a flood of footsteps and paw prints. Oddly, the direction the footprints traveled along were not straight but curved and the path itself was unseemly wide. She could not be certain until she identified matching prints among the chaotic pattern but it seemed that her kind were leaving only to come back, there was no sign they departed from each other.
They followed the path and soon enough witnessed the cause of it all. A swirling swarm of spawn slowly moved forward. It was like looking upon a landborn storm, crowned by a halo of flying creatures. That was not customary. Spawn without instruction would normally still be inactive and those led by their rels would be organized.
Perhaps, that was what contributed to it all, a missing rel. Tiriz recognized some of those comprising the flood of bodies to be the subordinates of a captured rel. Humans had made strange decisions in this conflict. A rel that could speak into the cores of her subordinates from a distance like the Arcos had been captured earlier and threw their forces into disarray. The act was purposeful, that rel in particular had been targeted. It had not been the usual marked warriors but an army. The nations’ militaries always played a role but they usually fought defensively. The army Tiriz’s rel moved to intercept likely had been deployed to take advantage of a part of their forces being confused.
Tiriz expected her own rel to begin rescue operations at the news of one of her own being captured. The dyte had no logical basis for that assumption but her rel often acted outside of logic. Grafin Herst went against Tiriz’s first recommendations more often than she listened to them. Tiriz considered the possibility of offering the most efficient option second and observe whether or not her rel would be more likely to select the proper choice if it was not listed first. However, Grafin Herst made the correct decision that time and chose not to weaken their forces even further for the improbable chance that the missing rel might not be lost by the time they reached her.
As they drew closer, they could see a procession in the center of it all, or rather Tiriz’s rel could. Other rels were inside, escorting the Arcos home. As the distance closed, the more solid the swarm appeared to the eye, like a shifting wall, each spawn just a single brick.
When they finally reached the edge of the storm, the swarm did not part for Grafin Herst, no matter what she said. They were not hostile but certainly did not stop. If everyone tried to force their way through, Tiriz envisioned a scenario where their group was swept away in the chaos if they slipped through the surface.
But they had to, the Arcos was in there. Grafin Herst scratched her cheek with a claw and frowned deeply. She looked at it all contemplatively for a long moment.
Then her lips flattened, not into a smile, but she was no longer frowning. She looked at those gathered behind her. “Take everyone as far from the Arcos as you can, Ad Eu, until the next night. Then return home. Do not engage any humans but see if you can make as much noise and path as easily traceable they are.” She gestured over the chaos. Ad Eu’s hide blinked colors in understanding.
Tiriz took steps to follow but her rel singled her out. “Except you, Tiriz,” the rel amended. The rel pointed at the dyte as if there could be any mistaking who the order was from, maybe to remind Tiriz that her rel was still addressing her by that name. “You are coming with me.”
Not even the faintest trace of hesitation whispered in Tiriz’s core as she corrected her path to join her rel. Her instinct to return to the Arcos hummed softly, filling, however slightly, the emptiness that her liege’s loss left within her.
Apparently, her rel’s combat experience applied to avoiding being trampled by their own forces. Grafin Herst grabbed onto Tiriz with her unsuitably large right hand, then waited for a particularly large sample of their kind to pass within reach. She then stretched her left limb and grabbed on with her newly acquired hand.
They swung onto the creature’s back and rode it until they saw the opportunity to leap onto another, making their way for the center. Then they saw their Arcos. Grafin Herst saw her before Tiriz could. Whatever tears her rel had left flowed anew, the tears streaking unevenly. The tears flowed freely from Grafin Herst’s right side while the droplets welled around her yellow left eye. She closed her left eye so tight that a single bead of ichor formed along its edge.
Finally, Tiriz saw the Arcos for herself. If the great one had been grievously wounded, the other rels must have collected her parts. Her pieces merged seamlessly together and her wounds closed perfectly so long as the sun smiled upon her, even in that dormant state. Any enemy blood that collected on her would have been fed to flowers. She was like a monument to the beauty of life.
The Arcos could be whatever she wanted to be, but her form was always beautiful, to Tiriz, even if she always chose to appear mistakably human. She seemed to keep a consistent facial structure, her features regel and refined but this time period she appeared as the ancient statues of goddesses, neither muscular or entirely lean.
Even in seeing her liege in such pristine condition, a gasp escaped Tiriz’s lips. She witnessed confirmation that the worst had come to pass.
The Arcos appeared to merely be sleeping. A sleep so deep that Sheffield to be roused by the mourning that filled every mountain and valley.
The Arcos was all that mattered but as they finally reached the center of it all, a place of peace surrounded by endless crying, wails, and stampeding feet, Tiriz began to examine their surroundings. She turned her attention away from her liege if only to ensure her safety.
The Arcos laid on the back of a rel, the second Rel to ever be chosen to be exact. It had the body of a lion, the wings of bat, the tail of a scorpion, and the horrible face of their enemy. Beneath the Arcos, its second mouth remained closed shut, its charge resting upon its sharp teeth without harm.
There were only two rels present other than Grafin Herst. Several rels were missing. The first whose absence was noticed would be a rel like a horse but with wings and a horn on the center of its head. Tiriz would have expected to see it among those circling the air, patrolling to be certain they were not followed but led its forces to a distant land as did another. The other absent rel had more apparent reasons as to why it was not with them.
The other present rel, the Hybrid, walked at the Arcos’s side. Hybrid was akin to a completed version of Tiriz’s own rel. It possessed a pair of limbs the same shape as Grafin Herst’s right arm and a large upper body to match them. Its sharp and angular head resembled a mix of a wolf and a lizard with five eyes, two of which were the same yellow hue as one of Grafin Herst’s. The eyes were arranged with one in the center of its forehead and a pair on the side of each head, one set above the other and closer to the back to see what was beside it.
It possessed two mouths. One where one might expect a mouth with sharklike teeth to be and another that opened at the bottom of its “chin” with an arrangement like a carnivorous mammal, complete with canines. Its lower body was slightly leaner than the rest of itself with sleek yet powerful legs, unified with the rest of its body in a mottled grey color. A pair of flexible fins, like vestigial wings, stuck from its shoulders, moving about to provide balance instead of a tail.
In the back were multiple dytes and the rels’ most powerful available combatants. At the head of the procession were three of the remaining princesses leading the way. There was a general pattern to the princesses, they were modeled after humans but each had one or more deviations from that form to make it clear they were indeed not human. Also, a strange consistency would be how their eyes or hair matched the flowers they were sometimes referred to by.
Among them was one with snakes in the place of hair and silver eyes, another with the lower body of a horse with red hair and green eyes, and the one furthest back and closest to the Arcos was one with goat hooves and blood red eyes whose touch decayed any deceased material before it could trouble the Arcos.
The princesses were the only spawn seemingly unaffected by the loss of the Arcos. Reborn without fail before her awakening and after her defeat. They led the way while the rels recovered.
Grafin Herst took her place at the Arcos’s side and the other two rels gave her the slightest acknowledgement as if she had always been there. Normally, she and the Hybrid would have had something to say to each other. This was the rare occasion the two rels greeted each other with silence.
Thus the Arcos’s journey home continued. They carried the Arcos as if she was made of glass.They did not stop at or circumvent any obstacle. Those ahead cleared the way, filling any pitfall and likely prepared to flatten hills.
They stopped when they reached the ocean. There they were met with a rel vaguely shaped like a whale but was more akin to a living island, the third Rel ever selected. Its sad moans filled the air as it opened its enormous mouth.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The rel with a lion-like body flew into its maw to deposit the Arcos. Many of the crazed spawn spawn dived into the sea to follow the Arcos. If the Rel of the Seas departed, Tiriz was certain they would all leap into the waters and follow it into the depths.
“That is enough!” Grafin Herst decided, addressing no one yet everyone. “Cease this at once!” Tiriz doubted that her rel was ever meant to shout. It was not anything childish but her voice’s volume matched her stature. “Do you not see?” Tiriz’s rel continued. “If you stay with her, they can follow! You are endangering her!”
The Second Rel roared affirmation. The whale-like rel sang similar instructions even as cradled its compatriot and charge in its mouth. If volume was a factor to consider, the Third Rel eliminated that difficulty. Its song was a complex structure of deep moans and shrill cries punctuated with what some might think were chirps.
It was too unique an occurrence to know what would be required to restore order to the horde. Not only was the Arcos gone but their rel was missing as well. Maybe the dytes could control them but the dytes needed to be roused.
Underwater was one of the few places humans could not follow. The Arcos would be safest journey home with the Third Rel. The others stayed ashore to ensure no one followed the trail they blazed.
But the swarm heeded no one. Grafin Herst groaned then looked to Tiriz. “You memorized the identity of every active dyte, correct?”
“Correct,” Tiriz confirmed.
“Direct me to each one belonging to our missing rel you can find,” her rel ordered calmly yet firmly.
A dyte was to be treated like a rel. A rel could not be everywhere and required units to serve in their place. Even the princesses acknowledged their place. Perhaps a dyte would prove sufficient to replace the missing rel.
The missing rel appeared to select dytes based on stealth and mobility rather than a disposition towards being able to predict their superior’s will such as a collection of chitinous legs with a single eye, seemingly able to slip between any crack, and an avian dyte. With a noteworthy exception, a human-like design similar to Tiriz with hair the color and texture of fresh leaves.
The missing rel possessed the least dytes of all rels. The ability to relay all instructions directly meant there was little need for such subordinates. The avian dyte could be seen among others flying circles over the Third Rel. The crawling one with a single eye was nowhere to be seen and likely would remain undetected.
That left the humanoid for Tiriz to prioritize. She described the ones they were looking for to her rel and scanned for the sight of green among those that have yet to dive into the waters.
Her rel leapt into the storm of bodies and after a short while returned with the humanoid dyte. The dyte’s appearance was as Tiriz recalled, similar in height to herself with stark green hair and amber eyes, garbed in leather dyed white with minerals. Except her eyes were unfocused. Grafin Herst held onto the dyte lest it rejoin the others, giving no sense that the dyte saw or heard them.
A list of remembered facts placed itself in the forefront of Tiriz’s mind. The dyte possessed similar physical parameters to Tiriz herself, subtly stronger and faster than a human of her weight and build. It was improbable to the point of near impossibility for a spawn to be weaker than a human, pound per pound, so such knowledge in most cases would be irrelevant. However, unlike Tiriz, this dyte possessed an ability that made her worth being granted the position of a dyte by the lost rel. She could communicate with plants.
Although spawn shared traits with plants, there was no particular shared descent linking them. All life other than themselves strayed from the origin. If all mundane life formed a tree, the origin would be the soil it sprouted from. Plants happened to be closer to the roots while beasts dwelled in the furthest branches.
“Do you understand?” Tiriz’s rel inquired to the unresponsive dyte. “We must secure a safe path for the Arcos. Do you understand that you are attracting attention to her with your presence”
Light slowly flickered back into the dyte’s eyes and she regarded the rel. Grafin Herst let go and watched as the dyte stood still and comprehension took hold.
Spawn were not selfish like humans, the correct application of logic should should help the madness fade. The moment they became aware of their actions endangering the Arcos, they should cease.
There were firm instincts within spawn. They had to protect the Arcos and they had to obey the her instructions at all costs. Obeying took precedent or else there would be a flood of bodies always shielding her. The one instruction they could not obey was if she ordered them to harm her. The spawn would find themselves physically incapable of doing so. Endangering her might as well have been the same as harming her.
The dyte’s face twisted into an expression of sorrow only they could fathom. There it was. The purposelessness that set in once a spawn completed a task only to realize there was nothing else.
Tears streamed down her cheeks. She bent forward as if the weight of the whole world rested on her shoulders. Her knees buckled and as her knees touched the ground, she joined the chorus that resounded across every corner of the world with a heartwrenching wail.
That the Arcos was gone was the worst possible outcome. It would have been better if they fell in her place. A world without the Arcos was the closest they could ever experience to a hell.
“Tell me,” Grafin Herst drew her back into reality. “Why are you all doing this?
“Our…” The dyte hesitated as if failing to acknowledge the fact somehow would made it less true. “Our rel is lost.”
Tiriz expected as much but her core core still shook with the news. There had been nine rels across history. Six remained. Grafin Herst was the only rel with a name, the other answered to titles. Each had been selected by the Arcos, to lose one felt to Tiriz as if a fundamental law of nature had been excised from existence.
Grafin Herst frowned at the news. “I understand but this is not how a spawn without a rel acts. What was your final order?”
“Her final order was to protect the Arcos,” the dyte
Tiriz assessed that detail. It was a known phenomenon that a spawn with purpose could ignore the initial confusion of losing a commanding unit until the task was complete. But the Arcos was unique. There was no means to ignore it, simply endure it. Was it possible that the rel’s final order provided the guidance necessary to endure the grief enough to still act? Was it because the order involved the Arcos?
“When was the order given?” Tiriz interjected.
If Tiriz acted outside of her rel’s will, Grafin Herst made no sign of disapproval. Instead the rel looked to the green haired spawn, anticipating an answer. The dyte listed a time shortly after Grafin Herst’s force departed, perhaps in reaction to the same army, Tiriz and her rel intercepted.
Grafin Herst then led the dyte to explain everything after that point, luring her back to present. The confused spawn recalled it all slowly like her memories were hidden in a fog.
“The warriors approached. They made camp to rest but the Arcos told us to not block their way. As the battle began,she told us to keep a distance of a league away from the humans. The Arcos fell…”
“And everything went dark until now?” Grafin Herst finished for her. The dyte replied with affirming silence. “That I understand.” Every spawn know that despair so deep that it swallowed all else.
So, that was what a spawn experienced if they lost a rel and the Arcos near simultaneously? The spawn were acting on instructions but with a lapse in judgement. Tiriz structured the commands in order of priority and time given. The Arcos’s instructions did not appear to completely overwhelm the order to protect her. The order to stay away from those humans was once the battle began. So, the spawn should have been able to approach the warriors before that occurrence. She envisioned spawn still harassing the warriors.
“If we inconvenienced you and others, we did not mean to,” the missing rel’s dyte declared.
“That we can overlook,” Grafin Herst stated. “What matters is what happens now. We need you to make everyone scatter or if you can not bring them to their senses, lead them away from the Arcos so any remaining enemy forces might follow you instead.”
The dyte then said something strange. “Understood, that is what my rel would have instructed,”
Tiriz wanted to ask her fellow dyte to repeat what she just said but she knew what she heard. Did the dyte just suggest singularity? It was one matter for those named by Grafin Herst to say such things but could it even be possible for a spawn under the constant guidance of a greater mind?
Tiriz considered every variable and sorted them by probability. Was it the shock of losing the Arcos and a rel? Was it being parted from such an union and being forced to acknowledge one was alone? Tiriz would need to hear how the other dytes of the lost rel spoke, for confirmation.
It could have been a result of her ability. Being the only one in her company that understood mundane plants could perhaps force her to have higher self awareness.
The rel with the highest number of subordinates to address themselves as “I” was undoubtedly Grafin Herst. The second would be the Third Rel but likely not due to any failing in structure but in that their own own rel could not enter land and had the highest number of dytes. Regardless, the number of such cases was growing and Tiriz found herself to be the only one she knew to be alarmed by such developments. She was not privy to the assessments of spawn outside her rel’s influence, so perhaps the other rels thought more similarly to herself than her own rel.
The performance of such spawn do not seem to be compromised compared to their counterparts that spoke properly. Oddly, Grafin Herst’s forces seemed to have the highest rate of success working independently from their rel compared to those of other forces.
But what if it was a symptom of some illness, a disease of ideas? There always had been the occasional felum, a spawn born unable or unwilling to coordinate with others. Felums that could speak used “I”. What if this was how felums developed? Even if it was not, was it worth jeopardizing their forces with spawn that might act outside what was expected of them?
The green haired dyte addressed the swarm and the spawn seemed to at least detect her instruction. That allowed Grafin Herst to turn her attention to the avian dyte circling above the Arcos. The rel shouted to the airborne creature.
“It does not appear to understand you,” Tiriz observed.
“I can see that.” Grafin Herst picked up a large stone and held it in her monstrous right hand. She did not look back as she spoke. “Confirm this for me, Tiriz. Is the Princess of the Swamps still with us?”
Tiriz remembered the princess with snakes for hair being part of the procession. “She is still active.”
The rel drew back her hand. The stone rolled to tips of her claws “We will need her to volunteer her ichor.”
Most of the princesses had a secondary ability, some even tertiary ones, be it limited transformation or extreme strength, endurance, and agility. Regeneration was the Princess of the Swamps’ and was able to share that trait through her ichor. Though her ichor was particularly deadly to humans, a fate only feared more by her gaze and the ichor of the Princess of the Mountains.
The rel arched her back and planted her feet firmly. Her body moved all in one motion as she took a single step forward as the stone flew out of her hand. For an instant, the slicing of air could be heard, the next the left wing of the avian dyte crumpled and broke.
Tiriz blinked then blinked again as she watched the spawn fall from the sky, unsure if she could trust what she saw. Spawn could not normally be violent towards each other. But if the Arcos was involved, all actions were justified.
“Effective...” she observed as she calculated her own possible solutions.
Her rel aimed well. She only damaged a wing to cripple its ability to fly. If she had crushed the head, the dyte might have flailed about blindly and deafly in its manic state.
Tiriz would have recommended deploying a spawn capable of capturing it but with the resources they immediately had available, her rel selected one of the swiftest and surest decisions.
Grafin Herst fished the dyte out of the water while Tiriz collected ichor from the princess with snakes for hair. She returned to her rel who was holding down the avian spawn. A quick application of the substance saw the dyte’s wing grow anew.
The thought sparing a drop for her missing hand came to mind. It would have been logical but unnecessary. The ichor was for the avian.
The conversation with the avian dyte proceeded similarly as it did with the first dyte. Once it regained its senses and a few drops of the princess’s ichor was delivered to it, it took flight to locate the lost rel’s remaining dytes.
To Tiriz’s content and discontent, the dyte never referred to its rel as “My rel.”