Chapter 1 : Ashes over Arrenfaeld

For peril, did the gales last sing, then the swards knew only a cackling.

Stationed upon the treeline were a dozen of the outskirts’ fiercest warriors: men who trained through starvation and proved their vigour from between the jaws of woodland cats. In their hands sat spears, assembled crudely with stone and bark. In their eyes were wroth, want, and that shimmer that dawned afore warfare. Behind them was a lush greenery—endless, entrapping, and a hamlet that hugged its tamest edge. Herded sons and daughters yet unwed to the spear looked on with dread. Their hearts were sour and their courage ill. Yet from behind the spines of barbarians, they could stand tall. They could challenge the horizon’s every hum with gall and throw it stares haphazardly like gristle down to tableside muts. For from behind the backs of better folk, one could read their oath tensed from shoulder to foot, in which was a pledge to turn sentinel if ever did the horrors' claws scrape too near or raider revelries boast too loud. A wall of meat and fury kept the weak elders and their cradled young alike provisioned for any violence that trespassed upon them, any violence that beckoned. Indeed, they could smell its call, looming on each breeze like a serpent coiled about its branch, lolling its forked tongue nearer in taunt.

Silence swept over them. On the wind was a prewinter chill; an unbelonging nip. Light screeched under the stomp of nightfall, so much like some child-eclipse born of a black storm's gatherings, then fell to low, red wisps that the wind fanned wide, deformed until the ache of day was a moan through the land. Like a city’s fire it was, snuffed at once. They could almost feel its ashes blast them.

The hamlet’s wall grew, its tenants distanced. The peel of snow-gusts made each space a cold, calling mile. A rattling coursed through all guarding bone. Night was announced to them. Twilight would gouge its depths and spurt forth its killers, eaters, the nameless murk of worse. The warriors could do naught but hunch lower, perch firmer, make their vigilance a frenzied sight and hope it hid the fear standing their hairs on end. They watched, counted the seconds of darkness. So lost were they in deep sights they forgot how to unseal their throats, and the commanding thrum of their dispelling became a lesser thing—a desperate thing. All their strength, before the looming cry of that black, glacial night, shriveled. Their stature was small, their composure undisciplined, but that commitment to slaughter could not subside. For the sake of all they knew and held dear, it could not dare subside.

Night cracked. A low, draconic hiss aired and shattered what serenity they clutched, stabbing into their sullied hopes like a pin to paper, that left flame in its wake. In the ashes of fear the whine hardened and begged, growing urged, until the pounding of hooves stole its sound.

Red forms lunged out from the hillside, mounted, and flying with the bright of evil. Their steeds were black muscle. Their shadows were crimson and caped. In their grips worked horrid tools of crude death, that could contort the flesh they seared and strip the tissue they tasted. Glossed in the smithery of mountain rock, glowing with the glossiest of bloods, they struck the woods devastatingly; pronouncing coming ruin as comets breach the skyline. And just as a meteor tangents, that which left darkness found fire in its flight.

Wraiths of the Reddlefjord! the vanguard of that damned hamlet gasped. The Ghosts o’er Galehaven! shuddered their flank. They were named the "Vandal’s Plague" by those who reaped under moonlight, and "Sunset’s Flail" by any and all who fell sniveling, cut apart before them, but to most men and women and do-gooders and fiends of Arakvan, they were the Crimson Clad, and their gallop was doom.

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The wall stabbed forth, just as they trained, just as they practised. Like a dam they welled the front, swallowing the enemy surge in their brutal countenance. The three riders raised their armaments high, commanding for themselves end-times and a blessing by the gaining moonlight, then brought each low. Spears snapped before the stride of the war stallions, caked in black iron as they were. Counters cut down—axeheads to timber—and cracked their cheap steels into shards. A sizzling mace, alight with blue fire, pushed the first vanguard’s nose in then out the back of his skull. The killer wore bright red with dark, dark bone ribbed across.

To his right glided a falchion, hefty, though twirling about as if it were weightless. The blood it spilled failed to keep up with its float. Its wielder gawked at all its brewed gore and was antlered at the helm, so as to threaten its inhumanity against all those fortunate enough for a chance to flee. With a symmetry, a precision, and an unrelenting, unsatisfiable thirst for victory and the stench of rotten skin that sweetened it, the two waded through the hamlet’s guardians. They seemed feral, wanting. Under the All-Father's eyes, the doomed folk of Arrenfaeld could swear as much. Spears lost their spikes at their parries, foes found their limbs stumped with each cut, until the sentinels were slain and the remains of the mighty could do naught but howl and squirm on their backs. Eyes blinked at organs unearthed and hands shook in that meaty flood of themselves. They bellowed, cried, begged for death and fought bitterly with the pain until their breaths stopped, or a finishing blow bashed them to mush. Hooves splashed through the mud of massacre, while helmed tongues cocked to relish the taste.

Together, the two depleted the right wall, while to their left worked a force of one. Tall, strong, with a broadsword in his clutch, he thundered his resent, emitting enough slashes and roars to mimic a maelstrom. His wicked laughs lodged in a bent neck, then grated out through the twist of his shadowed, reptilian head. His ears sprawled like wings, with eyes that shone gold, in daunting contrast to the drab green of his scales. His armour was a dazzling scarlet, though black wrappings enveloped it greedily, artfully, like an arachnid mummifies its prey. Gold lineage braved the shadows of his armour; a royal roadway in a grass of black. Swinging quick, and with force, his proficiency was beyond any hamlet’s demands, nearly beyond the reason of demand itself. Although a faint, undecided grin painted his face at that moment, it was a stone-clad truth that Veil Nadaar’s soul was an engine of ice. Blood fed it like gas to a flame, but when its fuels of wet red dried, it rusted, came jagged, and imagined only steeper evils to feed to its lust. In his eye, Arrenfaeld was tedious in death. Such butchery could revivify his heart, but the love of Veil Nadaar coveted more than maimed corpses. So much more, he thought, feeling the blood of his blade ooze between his fingers.

His smile died and soon there were only the dead surrounding him, masked in the low wail of wintry gusts. Alone with that odor again, he thought. Looking to his right, he watched complacently as Odr the Toothed and Arawn Dandril descended upon the hamlet. From his height atop the fallen, Veil Nadaar watched—without joy or pity—as fires crashed through windows and beheadings keenly awaited opened doors. He watched, mute, while skin kissed the earth, while life gushed between the flowers. He watched, silent, expressionless, then turned to the darkness behind him as if it could accomplish greater urgency. In that blackness there was an eternity that promised to swallow him. It was irrefusable. The breeze drowned the bliss of battle. The cold compromised any escape.

Veil grinned again. The moonlight caught the blood on his cheek.

A fine night for it all to end.