Trench Crusade: Faith In A Foxhole

“Put your helmet on. Something is coming.” Sergeant Macduggal told me. I fumbled a bit as I placed it on my head. I had practiced this motion a thousand times before we made it to the front, but this was the first time it might be for real. 

“Put on the whole armor of God,” Johanus recited, his hands steady in his faith. He tightened his helmet under his chin and picked up his rifle. “That ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.”

“Amen,” all we privates muttered under our breath. Sgt Macduggal didn’t join us. He was climbing the ladder, peering over the edge of the trench. His large, gruff presence was usually a comfort, but seeing the veteran suddenly concerned and nervous made all of us worried.

“What do you think it is, Sergeant?” I asked as I picked my rifle up. I checked the bolt, pulling it back just far enough to make sure it would slide smoothly. The rough catch of the action tore at my thumb again, and I pressed the bleeding wound against the cross burned into the buttstock. This fresh blood joined the stain already there.

He was silent, peering over the edge with as little as possible of him exposed. The no man’s land beyond our trench was covered in ruins and barbed wire, with the late afternoon mist obscuring it even more. I hoped that the man had practice at seeing something where I couldn’t.

“Do you think this is it?” Ryan asked me. He gulped nervously when I didn’t say anything right away. He repeated the action I did, cutting his thumb and pressing it to the cross. He didn’t find obvious comfort in the ritual. I turned to him and started to answer, but the sergeant suddenly bellowed, interrupting me.

“ON THE LINE!” he shouted, and we all repeated it as we surged into place. One foot on the firing step, ready to move and fire. I ended up next to Sergeant Macduggal. I glanced at him for any clue as to what was happening, but he didn’t give a single sign.

“I’m not ready,” Ryan whispered beside me. I pretended not to hear him, but I wasn’t the only one close to him.

“Close your heretic mouth,” Johanus told him from his other side. “God and faith are with us, and that makes you ready.”

Ryan looked at him, pale and terrified. I agreed with Ryan, I think, but I didn’t say anything. Faith was what we needed here. Faith was what kept Sergeant Macduggal alive through this crusade.

That and good training.

This was the first patrol for Ryan, Johanus, and myself. The rest of the squad had at least two watch rotations under their belt, and the sergeant had a record-setting nine. Seven days on post, keeping back the heretic scum, and then seven days in the rear. We had been picked up during their last time, replacing casualties, and few of the rest of the squad had warmed to us yet. Johanus’s fervor had won him a few admirers, but Ryan’s cowardice was evident from day one. 

“We’re together and on the side of right, Ryan. That makes us mighty,” I told him, trying to convince myself. 

Motion out of the corner of my eye distracted me and I turned away from my frightened friend. The sergeant had raised his whistle to his lips, ready to blow. My hands tensed on my rifle. The blood-stained cross pressed into the flesh of my arm. It felt warm to me in the chill air of the evening.

No whistle came, no signal to fire. Instead, the sergeant's eyes went wide and the whistle fell from his mouth.

“INCOMING!” he bellowed in his deep, strong voice. He started to leap down into the trench, but the blast hit before he did.

There was no whistle of a falling bomb, no dull thud of distant artillery. I don’t know what the sergeant saw in the mire that alerted him to the threat, but he was too slow.

The fireball blossomed before we could take cover. Not that there was any to take as the bomb hit the center of the trench. The walls of the trench were rent and torn, blasted into a crater. The only thing that blocked me was Sergeant MacDuggal’s thick, solid frame. He slammed into me and I slammed into the trench wall. My helmet hit the dirt, stunning me as my friends got caught in the blast. I lost consciousness.

Time passed while I was lost in that state. That is one law even this war hasn’t seemed to break. I was in agony as I was jostled awake.

I was staring into the lenses of a gas mask, the complex tubes leading down hanging down. There was a symbol branded into the forehead of the mask, one whose angles hurt my head to follow. I tried to push myself away from him, but the pain was too intense.

This was the first time I had ever seen one of the heretics. The trooper of hell seemed surprised to see me move. I realized that what had woken me was him pulling the remains of the sergeant off me. The shaking had pulled against me, and I realized that, though I had been shielded from the worst of the blast by the sacrifice of my leader, I was not uninjured.

A thick spike of wood, as big around as three of my fingers together, penetrated my knee and pinned me to the dirt. My ignorance and shock had been keeping the pain away, but now that the wound was obvious, I couldn’t ignore it anymore. It flowed over me, and I threw my head back and screamed.

“Sir!” the trooper called out. “We’ve got a live one here!” 

His voice was surprisingly normal. There was no bark of inhuman voices, no rasp as the burning of hellfire. Just a man, serving the darkest powers of Creation.

I looked past him, seeing more like him going through the remains of my squad. Lanterns were scattered about, providing light that danced and flickered over their equipment oddly. They wore canvas robes, stained with mud and ash. Iconography jangled on their chests. I couldn’t tell what was rank insignia, equipment, or blasphemous icons. It was all so unfamiliar.

The rifles that were now pointing at me were not, though. They looked like they could have come from the factories at home. I looked for my own but saw it was in a pile at the center of the crater. 

That is what they were doing to my friends, I realized. They were a scavenging party, taking any equipment they could steal. Helmets, belts, boots, all the equipment we had carried was thrown together. There was a separate pile beside it for the remains of my patrol.

Few bodies were whole. Hands, limbs, and heads were piled haphazardly. As I watched, one of the hell troopers grabbed Sergeant MacDuggal’s arms and dragged him away. Another stopped him and pried his one remaining intact boot from his dead foot.

“What…” I coughed, spitting up blood. My ribs were broken and a cut in my mouth was bleeding. The trench wall wasn’t soft when I hit it. 

And neither was Sergeant MacDuggal.

“What do you want with me?”

“Me? Nothing.” The hell trooper stepped back, though his rifle didn’t waver. The lieutenant, he is in charge. He’ll be here momentarily.”

An officer in the service of hell? The stories about what happened to captives had kept us awake on our march to our position. Fear threatened to overcome me, but I remembered what I had told Ryan.

My friend was dead, though. I could see his hand poking out of the pile. He had the same wound I did, the tear in the thumb from our bolts. Ryan had been spared whatever torments would be visited on me and sent to a martyr’s reward, all without ever firing a shot.

“Please,” I begged the trooper before me. There was a human shape, a human mind in there. I hoped to find a human kinship. “Please, just kill me.”

“Heh,” the man said, a small laugh out of place on the battlefield. “Can’t do that, I’m afraid. The Lt. likes to find alive ones. He questions them. I can do one thing for you, though.” He dropped the hand from the front of his rifle, keeping it pointed at me by pulling it tight to his body. 

“Thought I lost this,” he said under his breath. He pulled out what looked like a dry and desiccated severed hand and dropped it at his feet. There were holy and sanctified tattoos around it, ones only the clergy had. He went back into the pouch. 

“I can do this for you.” He leaned forward and set a cigarette on my lips. “Some cold comfort between enemies.”

“Got a light?” I asked nervously. The cigarette smelled awful, and I didn’t know what horrible blasphemous acts went into making it, but its familiarity at this time was something I could focus on.

“I do,” a deep and cultured voice said. The trooper nodded as another figure walked up. This one wasn’t covered in the dull canvas of the others. His robe was black, and heavy, reaching to the ground. No mud stained it, though, even as it brushed over the churned-up dirt from the explosion. A veil covered his face, but I could partially make it out. He seemed like anyone else. I could have walked by him in the street.

“Do you got him, sir?” The hell trooper asked.

“I do, Archibald, thank you. Back to work.” The trooper saluted and slung his rifle, turning away. He stopped to pick up the hand, placing it back in one of the many pouches he had.

“Archibald was playing a small trick on you, I’m afraid,” The lieutenant said to me as he came close. He knelt down and extended his hand, flicking a lighter open. His hand was lean, I could see the tendons in it. It was also clean, a rarity in the trenches.“He only carries the cigarettes for old-time sakes. He doesn’t carry matches anymore. Once you have seen the fires of Hell itself, little things like that… they bring memories.”

I was shaking so hard that the man had trouble navigating the lighter to the cigarette on my lips. His only weapon was a knife through the sash of his cloak. The blade was wide, dark, with a wicked edge. My eyes fixed on it as the cigarette caught. 

“Am I to be tortured then? Do it, cowards. I hold to my faith.” I said as I inhaled the smoke. The tobacco was strong, and some of the pain faded before it. Why did they give it to me?

“Cowards?” the man said questioningly. “You think we are the cowards in this war?”

He brushed some dirt off what remained of the firing step and sat across from me, lacing his long, elegant fingers together. His tone wasn’t one of condescension or anger, but rather actual curiosity. 

“You serve Hell to get out of eternal punishment. You live your life in fear of God’s judgment. His love and forgiveness are available to all, and that terrifies you.”

The cigarette had more in it than I thought. My head was already swimming from the pain and concussion. I decided to antagonize the man into killing me. 

“That is what is at the heart of your armies. Cowardice and fear. You breathe in terror, your very souls stained with it. Each of my friends is worth ten of you.”

He glanced over at the pile of bodies, quickly counting them up.

“No, it seems the six of us were worth your whole squad.”

I had only counted four troopers and him. The sixth member had eluded me until that moment. She came in floating, the toes of her boots drifting inches above the soil. Her clothing of purest black covered her from the crown of her head to the toes of her boots, not an inch of skin showing. Her robe seemed to snap in non-existent winds as she descended into the crater with us.

“Helga is a great equalizer, though.” 

I had heard of the artillery witches, arcane monsters created through blasphemous science. Helga floated across the trench to the pile of bodies and stopped. The acrid scent of sulfur grew stronger than the spilled blood and bile of my brothers in arms.

“Monster,” I said unthinkingly.

“Monsters and cowards. I think I would be insulted if you were in your right mind,” the legion officer said. “My good man, you are the one in service to cowardice.”

“I serve God the most high, creator of Heaven and Earth.” The recitation of one of my enlistment vows steeled me some, and I spit the cigarette out. I could not believe I had fallen for their temptation.

“Yes, the most high Coward.” The man sighed. “I cannot blame you for not knowing. They wouldn’t teach you reality in your schools, would they?”

The casual blasphemy stunned me. I started to recite Psalm 144 but stuttered when I got to the second verse. The enemy office held up a hand, silencing me.

“He is a coward. He sits behind those adamant walls of Heaven, ringed by the entire Host Of Angels, and throws all of creation into the battlelines against us. We are courageous. We are the forces who demand He stand forth and answer for His infinite sins. Who in that scenario is the coward?”

“God is good. Rebellion against Him is rebellion against your own nature!” I said. I coughed again. The tremors made the stake through my knee wiggle, and I almost passed out again. The man snapped his fingers, pulling my attention back to him.

“May I borrow your Bible?” he asked me. I could see a faint smile behind his veil. “As you can imagine, my own is quite lost.”

I said nothing, and he reached out across me. My Bible was intact on my chest, the solid steel cover had protected it from the explosion. He pulled the clasp and I slapped at his wrist weakly. I was no threat, not between my concussion and blood loss. Still, I had to try.

He pulled the Bible from its protective case and started thumbing through it. There was no hiss of smoke, he didn’t burst into flame. To him, it was just another book like any other. My mother had paid a month’s salary to have it blessed before I left for the front, and it meant nothing to this man.

“Ahem,” he said and cleared his throat. “‘I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.’ Isaiah 45:7.” He closed the Bible and set it back on my chest. “You can see that your God even admits he does evil.”

“Torture me if you must, but spare me these blasphemies. My soul is saved, and I shall go to my reward.”

“I do not like torture. I find it distasteful. You never find anything worthwhile, so they just do it for the enjoyment of pain. That is too simple for me. If I wanted to hurt you…” He leaned forward here and placed a finger on the tip of the spear of wood through my knee.

“All I have to do is move this a fraction of an inch and you will know pain like you never experienced before. What is the point of that? No, what I do, you see, is I ask questions.”

“I shall not answer.” I steeled myself. Why would he expect me to tell him anything if he wouldn’t even torture me?

“That is what I expect. After all, God Himself hides from our rightful and just questions. The important thing is that we ask them.” He leaned back, steepling his fingers again. He seemed calm, in repose for the moment. It was like we weren’t on the front to him. He had the attitude of a schoolteacher, almost.

He opened his mouth to continue but stopped as my eyes snapped to the side. The witch floated toward us, every inch of her terrifying me. I cringed backward reflexively, eliciting more jabs of pain from my broken body. 

“Helga, please, you’re scaring the man. We’re trying to learn from each other!” he made a shooing motion with one hand, but the other fell to the knife handle through his sash. It was a familiar gesture, and even with his seemingly calm temperament, I knew that the knife was a well-used weapon.

The witch floated away silently, heading down the trench. We were the only squad deployed to this area for over two miles; she wasn’t going to find anyone. I was thankful that no one would find her, either.

“Now, my questioning is pretty simple, everyone we capture goes through it. No torture, no maiming, no attempts to get you to reject your God. As far as I am concerned, you are welcome to meet Him. But, first, I ask one question.”

“One question?” I repeated, surprised.

“Yes. A simple one, but one that burns inside me every day. Are you ready?”

I resolved to give him nothing, not even a nod. The silence stretched for a few seconds and I saw his lips quirk into a smile through his veil.

“Very well. Let me ask anyway.” He cleared his throat as he crossed one knee over the other, resting his hands on them. His manner disturbed me, this was too comfortable, too casual.

“Why did God send my daughter to Hell?”

“What?” I said, almost against my own will. The inanity of the question baffled me. Nothing about our positions, our logistics, anything military at all. Just a personal question.

“Why did God send my daughter to Hell?”

“How can I answer that?” I asked before remembering to keep silent.

“I know,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t want to ask you. I want to ask Him. But He hides from us and our reasonable questions. You are going to see Him soon, and I hope you will ask Him for me.”

“I don’t…” I said before shutting up. I shook my head, hoping the pain would help me focus.

“I was a man once, a normal one just like you,” he said, gazing off into space. I don’t think he knew if I was paying attention or not. This had the feeling of ritual about it.

“Not a soldier, though, not me. I was a cobbler. I worked in the factory, hammering on the heels of boots much like your own. I filled my quota, prayed my prayers, and paid my tithes. Life was good.

“My wife became pregnant, and the joy of it filled my soul. I would burst into song at work, hymns falling from my lisp at the rhythm of my hammer. Everyone could see it. I was so happy when the factory said I could have three days off to spend with my child when she was born.”

The man went silent here, and I looked around for something, anything that I could use to attack him. I didn’t want to hear his story. I didn’t want to think about the home front, and how good life had been before I left. I hadn’t been married, not yet. My fiance’s family were devout, with a long line of heroes and martyrs behind them. I needed to make my fortune and do a tour of duty, proving myself equal to them. 

That wasn’t going to happen now.

“Three days off the line, can you imagine the bounty? My daughter was beautiful and my wife healthy, both coming strong through the pregnancy. We named her Hope, and we loved her so much it stretched my very soul.

“Faith, hope, and love,” he said and leaned over to tap the Bible on my chest. “He even tells you here that those are the puppet strings He pulls to move you to his will.”

Anger entered his voice, the first I had heard. The wry amusement that had filled him before was absent now, and I noticed the grip he had on his knee. His already pale knuckles had turned white from the tension.

“Three days, and Hope started coughing. Little at first, adorable almost. Until the blood came with the coughs. They prayed over her, anointed her, and called for miracles that should have helped. I scrounged up money for medicine, but it didn’t work. Nothing did.

“Less than a week, and she was gone.” He slammed his fist down on his knee, hard. “You know what she couldn’t do within that week?”

“I… am sorry?” I said hesitantly. This was my enemy, a servant of Hell, but the pain of a father who lost a child was evident.

“She couldn’t accept the Gospel and find eternal life,” he continued, ignoring me. “Some priests try to sugarcoat it, but it is in His own words. ‘No one comes to the Father except through Me.’”

He stood suddenly, and I felt the menace of the man. This was a man who had not only seen the gates of Hell, he had walked forward and pledged to serve them. Heat rolled off him in waves. I flinched backward at his sudden movement, pulling the stake against my ragged bones. He didn’t notice my pain as he was caught up in his own.

“That is where my daughter is,” he said, spinning suddenly to point across the trenches. I couldn’t see it from my prone position in the shell crater, but I knew the horizon would be stained faintly red by the fires of the inferno and the industry that would support it.

“The greatest reward your God would offer me is eternal service bound to him, while my daughter, my beautiful Hope, is over there. I enlisted that day and deserted within a week. I journeyed to find her, even if it damned me. I fight to have eternity at her side because no torment the devils could devise is worse than Heaven without my Hope.”

He went silent, dropping his hands to his side. All the energy and rage left him. The man seemed exhausted. I glanced around and saw that all the troopers had stopped and were watching him. If he asked this every time they captured someone alive, they must have seen it before. They were still, almost reverent. I wondered if those in service to Hell could feel empathy.

“Why did God make me love her so much that I had to hate Him?” the man said in a whisper, almost at the edge of my hearing.

“That…” I said into the silence. My ribs ached and I had to pause to hiss a painful breath. “That is a second question, you said you only ask one.”

He looked at me through the veil, dumbfounded. I could read the shock in his pose. The veil bulged as he huffed a single breath, then another. It turned into laughter, real laughter, and he threw his head back. His laugh was warm, comforting somehow. It was a father’s laugh.

“I like you, kid. Too bad you picked the wrong side.” He waved and two troopers came forward. One stood at my feet and the other at my shoulder, and I realized they were preparing to lift me. He started to turn away, but I shouted at him.

“I don’t have an answer!” He turned back, holding out his hand in a signal to stop the two troopers. “I don’t not really. They tell us God works in mysterious ways, that He has a plan for us all.” My eyes fell to the pile of meat that was once my comrades and friends. Was this part of His plan?

“I don’t see much of a plan in this war. I don’t know if He… if He wanted to send your daughter to Hell or if it was a fluke. If this is all out of His control, what do we fight for? And if it is in His control…”

I trailed off as the implications of finishing that sentence hit me. God’s plan was set in stone from the first, and we all had to do our part. But if He was so great, why did I need to have this splinter through me? Why did devout Johanus die right beside the coward Ryan? What was the point of it all?

“I’ll ask Him.” I swallowed, suddenly nervous. “I swear it to you. It is a fair question. I cannot give you the answer, but I will ask it.”

“You know what that truly means,” he said. It wasn’t a question, for we both knew I did. “That is what we want, here on our side. That is the heresy that damns us eternally. We want to question God.”

Silence stretched between us. He turned fully back to me and drew the knife. It seemed to drink the little light the lanterns provided. It was the color of a hole cut in reality, to a darkness that wasn’t part of Creation.

“I can end this for you. I can spare you the journey to our rear, spare you the things they would do to you there. Just do one thing for me.”

“What is it?” I asked, though I already knew what he wanted.

“When you find Hope, please tell her Daddy is coming?” He leaned forward the edge of the knife against my throat.

I nodded and he sliced. I didn’t even feel it as I faded away, permanently this time.

The hell priest leaned back, sheathing his knife. The blood pumped from the young soldier's throat, but none stained that blade. He looked at the corpse for a second before turning away. The two troopers fell upon it and started looting. Another approached him, saluting.

“I just got to say, sir, I love when you do that.” The hell priest nodded and the trooper dropped his salute. 

“It is getting almost too easy. One little sob story and they renounce their faith and are ready to question God on the spot.” The hell priest sighed. “Well, he is in for a rather rude surprise.”

Helga floated up beside him, cocking her head slightly. The hell priest shook his head. 

“You’re right, I might need to fashion a new ruse. How does a beautiful young wife, stolen by heretic raiders sound?”

Struggle - 40k Story

In Orbit Over World designated 2923-47, 0.016.211.M31

This was far from the first time in my years of training that I found myself staring into the eye of my enemy. Whether it was down a bolter’s sight or in my face screaming for my death, I had long known the gaze of those that wished me dead. In all those intense battles, never before had I seen a gaze as malicious as the one before me. This baleful orb contained only madness and a hungry rage that thirsted to end my existence and shred my very soul. We Astartes were bred not to feel fear, the emotion written out of our very genes by a mind as far beyond mine as mine is the lowly rat. Still, meeting that unnatural gaze made something in my gut twist. I knew that it hated me simply for existing and would delight in tearing me to pieces, both in the physical realm as well as in the warp.

It was hard to see the daemon. Reality forced upon it a shape and a form, but it was so alien to them that attempts to focus on it saw your eyes sliding away. It was like trying to judge the shape of a cloud from the shadow it left as it passed over a hillside. Something larger, more twisted, forced into limiting dimensions as different angles of its reality all changed to reveal themselves.

Its eye staring back at me was in the center of twisted, writhing flesh, a grotesquery pulled into our world from the warp and given form but not shape. Pale flesh heaved and twisted. Patches of fur sprouted in all the colors of the rainbow, only to fall off, vanishing before it hit the ground. If I fell to this foul horror, my torment would not end with my death; I knew what awaited my spirit in the twisted chaos of the Warp within its grasp. Daemons like this one before me would torture and tear at me until I was devoured by a terror even greater than they. Every instinct in my body pushed me to draw the bolt pistol mag sealed to my thigh and destroy it.

As I watched, the eye split and ran like a smashed egg yolk. A long tongue emerged, slapping wetly against shifting flesh as the orb turned into a mouth. Teeth from different species ringed the hole into nothingness. The depths of its maw seemed infinite, opening to a hungry empty darkness. It made a deep, wet growling sound as it sensed my emotions rippling through the immaterium. A thin pseudopod of flesh extended towards me, thickening and growing until a fully formed human foot, complete with red painted nails, touched the bare metal floor and pulled the abomination towards me. It slammed into a wall of force rising from the glowing ritual circle placed around it. A hand fell to my shoulder pad.

“You’re ready for this. It’s just one more test in a life full of them.” The toneless voice of my mentor Ynasis drew me back from contemplating the horror he had called forth. My instructor in the arts arcane had been a nigh constant presence at my side for years since I had completed my ascension to an Astartes existence, but this challenge was one I must face alone if I was to grow beyond his tutelage. I stood straighter as I felt his reassurance and confidence in me through our mental connection. The unnaturalness of the daemon still registered as a physical response, but I marshaled my emotions. The daemon hissed and heaved against the barrier again. “With this, you prove your worth to wield the power you were given, prove that you deserved the training I gave you. Any Astartes can pull a trigger or swing a chainsword. This is where you take your first steps on the path your potential grants you.”

The true nature of the warp and its neverborn denizens had only recently been revealed to us by agents of the Warmaster, and like any new information we discovered, the Alpha Legion rolled it into our tactical and strategic outlooks. We explored the new shores of the warp slowly, and examined the data we found with care. I was not the first of the Librarian to undergo this test. Other students had been lost to the summoned daemons in the past, and each time we had wrapped another layer of protection around the ritual. Not for the student, of course, since falling to this beast meant they were not ready to battle in this new universe of unrevealed mystery, but for the others on the ship. The first daemon to breach the testing chamber took the heads of over a dozen battle brothers down with its black, smoking blade before we could send it screaming back into the warp.

We were fortunate beyond other legions for we in the Alpha Legion had only outwardly followed the edicts of the Council Of Nikea and never truly dissolved our Librarium organizations. Throwing a weapon from your arsenal only left it for your enemies to pick up and use against you. Our psykers had shifted within the Legions. Our training moved more to focus on hidden support abilities as the gifted disguised themselves as line troopers and officers. We still maintained our internal rank structure and traditions, but none of the observers of the larger Imperium would notice. My own training had been encompassed in this clandestine effort, and I found I had more talent for this subtle art than for the psychic blasts and rending power of the mind applied to combat.

This is not to say that news of the true nature of the warp and the beings that dwelled within had not changed our behavior. Shocked to the core by the information, the Legion Librarium threw themselves into research and study. Each one from the freshest recruit still undergoing genetic changes to the ancient masters who had battled at the side of the Primarch when there was only one each found themselves humbled by their true ignorance. We had communicated back and forth with the other legions, sharing what we learned with the Word Bearers who disiminated it to the other Legions. We found the reverence and worship of the sons of Lorgar towards these beasts distasteful. We approached it from a more analytical viewpoint.

It was difficult to maintain that detached, logical mind at the sight of the daemon in front of me, however. Its very existence was an affront to the whole of the material realm. The horror spread out across the psionic field containing it. Colors flashed across its expanse of flesh as more mouths opened across its surface, each one dropping a foul, oily ichor that vanished back to the warp after a few moments. Eyes from dozens of species glared at me, wanting nothing more than to devour my flesh and rend my soul. The targeting arrays built into my armour were confused by the changing form. Target locks and battle data kept flipping on and off as the meat shifted. I turned to Ynasis and nodded.

I had, along with the brothers who ascended and trained alongside me, been operating as a member of a scout squad for most of the past decade. We had been deployed where stealth and guile had been needed. Our training, though was more unique. Each member of us had been schooled in the arts of insertion, sabotage, and assassination as a head hunter kill team. Our battlefield training was a point of pride for us, but always we had deployed under direction of others. We had been selected for the potential I represented, and each of us trained to a specialization that could see us perform with flexibility in combat. My training, however, had been more intense than the others. My psychic powers had been bound and contained when we deployed simply as scouts, and our potential as a unit had been held back as a result. Now I would contribute fully to the efforts we made, and no longer feel as much a burden as I had when I was operating just as a bolter bearer.

My master had turned his mind to the study of these warp beasts like no other and a river of ink had flown from his pen. He bound them into service, to question and learn from them. Each lied as easily as my hearts beat, but his will binding them allowed him to sense their intent. They still told conflicting tales, for truth is an ephemeral thing in the warp, but sifting through their words revealed small nuggets of information we could use. He wished to push further in his research, but the Librarium ordered caution. This angered him, as he believed that mastery of the Warp would win humanity the stars, but he was dutiful and progressed slowly when he wished to run ahead. I felt this tension in him, even disguised behind his mental shields. I wished to pass this test and join as a partner instead of a student. All my training had lead me to this confrontation.

His emotionless faceplate stared down at me and nodded back. He dropped his hand from my pauldron and turned away. His command of warp presences was not going to be there to save me if I failed. I stood or fell off my own skill alone. The door irised opened and I could see a battle brother standing across the hall from the entrance, a bolter armed and ready to fire should the horror breach its containment. He didn’t move at all, but my helmet vox clicked on and I heard my long time friend Cartis speaking to me.

“Don’t let me clean up your mess this time, Hap.” I chuckled back at him and flashed a rude hand gesture behind Ynasis back. “You know you’ll be standing in my line of fire.”

“The only case where you will have to fire is when I am already dead, so it is not a worry.” The horror behind me released the high pitched giggle of a child with a treat. “This is not the worst thing we have faced.”

It is though. Ynasis didn’t speak through the vox, but directly into our minds. The horror perked up at the psychic disturbance, the giggle changing to an animalistic howl. You have faced perils of your body and done well, but this is a corruption of your soul and mind that you must master if you will wield the power of the warp. Cartis nodded, but I do not know if he could truly understand the threat behind me. I think no one without the gift can.

Yes master, I sent back. I steeled my mind and built a fortress of my will. Ynasis stepped through the door and closed it behind him, leaving me alone with the abomination. I faced the creature and readied myself. Its flesh rippled as its howling rose in volume. The noises were almost harmonic, trying to trigger an atavistic fear that I no longer had. A warning light began flashing in the corners of the room. I knew this was reflected throughout the ship we were on, readying the crew for the potential breach.

One of the layers of security we put in place was that this test would take place isolated from the main ships of the fleet. The Stormbird we were on was not only being crewed by battle ready Astartes, we were under the guns of the Sulimun. The Strike Cruiser was the backbone of the 2,923rd Expedition Fleet, and stood ready to destroy not just the monster but the whole Stormbird should I fail. The intra-ship vox crackled to life as Ynasis warned all souls aboard both craft that Librarian testing would begin and a daemon was going to be released. Everyone aboard knew that the safety features we put in place would only be tested if I failed.

“All crew to battle stations, prepare to repel boarders. Beginning initiate testing in 5, 4, 3, 2…” As the countdown ended, the warp circle collapsed. No longer restrained by the arcane science, the horror surged across the distance to me as if it had no bones to constrain its movement. My heightened reflexes allowed me to step back and catch the first claw as it formed and tried to take my head, but the flesh melted from my hand as a newly formed stinger scratched across my chest plate leaving a thick smear of some toxin behind. I shoved at the center mass, throwing it back a few feet. Battle training took over and I drew my pistol, but the weapon was unloaded. Ynasis spoke in my mind again, emotionless even as I struggled for my life.

That is not the weapon you need now. Bend your will and fight back. The horror lashed tentacles against me, trying to plunge through gaps in my armour. Finding none, the creature wrapped around my arm and pulled itself to me. It crashed over me like a wave, teeth and hooks forming to break my armour. My helmet’s display went black as the daemon covered my head. I felt teeth grinding on the flexible gorget at my neck. The giggle returned muffled by the flesh around me. Reviewing my training I almost forcefully grabbed my will and reached out in the aetherial realm.

It is hard to describe the appearance of the warp and how minds manifest there to those who cannot see it. Metaphor falls short of what our sixth sense reveals to us. Even when conversing with another practitioner, we find it difficult. Our own minds filter what we see into something we can understand and handle. When I say a human’s mind is like a flame, it is a weak analogy that I hope others can understand. The mind flickers and changes constantly, in motion at all levels. But, with training, you can learn to determine things about the flames. The central part moves in one direction. The colors shift and move but you can see the bands. And like a flame, a skilled tender can get it to bend to our will, make the flame work for us. This metaphor is poor, but it works.

The horror’s mind, on the other hand, bubbled like a boiling pot in zero gravity. There was nothing we could call a thought there. The creature was a twisted mass of emotions and instincts guided by a low cunning that desired only the suffering of the mortals and the taste of their souls. I gathered my will into a blow of pure psionic force and launched it at the creature. Its astral self twisted and flowed like the flesh it cloaked itself in when pushed into the material realm, avoiding my psionic blow. The backlash of pain speared through my head. Its efforts to crack my armour redoubled.

Again and again I cast forth my will, trying to break the beast. Each miss sent another spike of pain through my mind. The warp bound mind of the daemon kept twisting and changing even as its material flesh flickered and mutated. Its body flowed over me, seeking gaps. A servo in my leg popped and I fell to one knee, the motion breaking my concentration and closing my connection to the warp.

Warning runes were flashing on my helmet’s display showing my armour’s integrity was failing. I could hear the whine of overtaxed ceramite at the edge of splitting and cracking. As I gathered myself, my helmet went dark as some integral connection broke. I was trapped in here with only me own heavy breathing. I knew that if I didn’t defeat it soon, it would force a gap. Its liquid flesh would flow through and begin to rip me to pieces inside my own armour. I drew a deep breath and once again pushed my mind out. The daemon’s mind shone in the warp with glee, the joy a predator feels when its prey is injured and limping. I began to form another blast of pure will when I paused and began to rethink.

Every blow I made had been evaded however I struck; the daemon’s mind was too alien for me to target easily. I had to get it to hold still so I could destroy it. The predator instincts in its mind could be fooled allowing me to draw it in too close to escape. I let myself fall to both knees, as if I was defeated and exhausted. I let a slight crack form in my mental shield, tempting the horror’s mind in close. It struck quickly, almost too fast for my plan to work. My genehanced mind and extensive psycher training was ready for its movement though, and I gripped the beast in a fist of mental effort before it could retreat. It struggled in my grip but I held it fast through pure will. My body fell further as I opened my mind and turned from my physical self to my astral form.

What passed for the mind of the horror was cold in my grip, a cold so deep it burned me. I felt it bubbling against my projected flesh, but I held on even as it tried to change. My other fist rose and struck a blow against it. It rippled back, but could not evade it as it had before. I dealt it another blow, then more as fast as my will could move in the sea of souls. The flickering of the daemon’s mind slowed and dimmed, but I could feel its malice. Its glee turned to fear as chips of light flew from its form to dissolve back into the warp flowing around us.I could see other beings of the sea of souls watching us struggle. They waited for one of us to weaken enough to spring and devour us.

The horror’s mind formed spikes in my astral hands and almost slipped my grip, but it was weakened. I wrapped it in chains of eldritch force. It tugged against my very mind, but I knew I had it now. I formed a blade of my will and slashed deep, carving chunks from its spiritual form. Each piece drifted on the currents around us before being snapped up by beings too small to make out. Distantly I could feel the physical presence of the horror writhing on me, trying to push in before I cut away its presence in the warp.

Smaller and smaller I carved the thing’s mind. The mental chains I bound it with forced an order on it that I could strike. The tone of the mind changed again, from fear to pleading. I felt more than heard it promising me rewards, trying to show me terrible truths it thought would distract me, open me up to it. I resisted even this, striking it once more. The creature reared in its bounds, phantom tendrils lashing out against my astral body.

I felt pain like nothing I have before, but I was confident in my victory. Ynasis had taught me well, preparing me to face challenges of the warp. This test of my skills was the last one before he could confidently allow me to practice on my own. I snipped each tendril before it could draw back to the daemon’s mind. Soon the fight left it. I released my bonds one by one until the mind drifted free into the warp. Dozens of small predators snapped up chunks, fighting each other for faint tendrils of power. I knew it was not fully dead, for the beings of the warp cannot die. But I had diminished it, weakened it, and banished it.

I felt other eyes on me, larger warp presences watching me. I let the confidence of my victory move through me and grant me strength. My astral presence blazed forth with an internal fire, bringing light to that dark realm, showing I was ready for any challenge. I felt the large presences fade back into the general background of the warp. They knew that one day know matter what I did, when my life ended, my soulstuff would go to feed them and their kindred. Their infinite patience saw them retreat from a fight they did not have to win. I lowered my consciousness back into my body.

My helmet was still dark. I stood up, pulling the loose sack of flesh off my shoulders. It was covered in suckers and mouths, but without the animating will of the daemon pushing into it from the warp, it soon turned to powder and vanished. I removed my helm and breathed deep. I strode to the door, the leg of my armour grinding out with each movement. Slapping the activation rune, the door irised open to show the barrel of a bolter pointed directly at my forehead. I could see down the barrel to the mass reactive round.

“Are you you?” Cartis asked me, his barrel unwavering. I saw his finger on the trigger and knew I was seconds from death. My own battle instincts almost took over but I managed to repress them enough to only nod.

“He is,” Ynasis said aloud. He had removed his helmet and stood there staring down at me. A taciturn man, his face gave away nothing of the pride I could feel his mind projecting as he reached out to me holding a small package. I took it out of his hands and unwrapped it. A thick book, its binding was simple and its cover was a blank brown. Bronze ringed the edges, protecting it. Chains bound to its body would wrap my armour, making it part of my wargear for the remainder of my life. I opened it, quickly flipping through each blank page. Cartis snapped his bolter down and saluted with his fist to his chest as Ynasis released the book. Our brotherhood was not given over to the more martial rituals of the other legions, but this one was important.

“Welcome to the Librarium of the Alpha Legion, Journeyman Sergeant Hapax Legomenon”. Cartis gave a shout of pride and joy and wrapped me in embrace. He was taller and I had to dodge quickly to prevent my forehead from rebounding from his armour. A smile crept across my face before vanishing quickly. Though I felt the pride of my victory and ascension, I knew that the true hard work and difficult study was before me now.

Most Legions marked promotions and advancements with new and better weapons. Our Legion marked my ascension that day with an empty book. The symbolism of that could not escape me. I was given not just power and authority with this, but a duty to fill the book with knowledge that would guide my brothers in the years and wars to come. I laid my hand on the grimoire I was gifted and swore a silent oath that I would match this burden.

The Ritual - 40k Story

Sakana 3, agri world of the Imperium of Man, 0.101.482.M41 - From The Journal of Hapax Legomenon, Alpha Legion

Sakana 3 wasn’t an important world. Brought peacefully back into the fold of humanity during the Great Crusade, it had stayed far from the horrors of war for longer than anyone could remember. The third planet in orbit of a nondescript sun was decorated with few islands scattered across emerald seas. Its lay at the end of known warp tunnels, on the way from nowhere to nowhere. The forces of the Imperium had crowded its seas with fisheries and its scant surface islands with worker housing, but its inhabitants considered Sakana a paradise. The heavy hives and thick pollution of other Imperial worlds was absent, with steady sea breezes and sandy beaches the norm for its inhabitants. For centuries these bountiful oceans had helped feed the armies of the Imperium at the other ends of its single navigable Warp lane. My brothers in the Scattered Legions had ignored it, seeing no great glory or prize here. It had been spared from the eternal war that made up the galaxy because no one fighting on any side had truly cared about it. This had changed, as me and my team turned into a battlefront for the first time.

The Grand Commander of the sector had decreed that Sakana would raise its first regiments of Astra Militarum. Fifty thousand new troops to march to war in the endless life of combat and bloodshed that is the galaxy in the year Forty Thousand and some. This was always a cause for celebration; a world taking its first steps into the apparatus of the Imperium’s war machine with the community united in veneration of the God-Emperor and planet wide celebrations lasting for weeks. The beaches and avenues were crowded from sun up to sun down, workers and nobles alike celebrating in the streets below floating barges bearing new regimental flags and blasting martial music. The fisheries’ quotas were turned into delicacies served on every corner as the crowd celebrated the greatness of their world.

The Ministorum had decreed that these regiments would reinforce some war halfway across the segmentum, allowing those veteran troops to pull out and be sent to hold some obscure planet that was potentially able to attack supply lines that our forces would rely on during the assault on Cadia itself. This meant that the Warmaster would have to divert resources there to protect his logistical support through constantly shifting and changing battle plans that required more effort than sending my team and I here to halt the deployment of these new troops, by any means necessary.

If this seems a mission too great for just four Astartes and a double handful of mortal specialists, do not worry. This breed of warfare is exactly what the Alpha Legion was trained for, and our specialties would allow us far more options than a brute force assault on the hundreds of thousands of new troopers and support personnel. The fact that this also afforded us the opportunity to support the true task we were working on was not far from our minds as we carefully laid our plans. These were rapidly coming to a head, and the next several days would be crucial for both the galactic war efforts and our warband’s own, personal mission.

It became too late to halt any of our clandestine plans when an alert rune started flashing on my helmet’s display, causing me to glance at the vidscreen I had propped against the bare rockrete wall. The security camera covering the long hall outside showed a commissariat squad of one of the new regiments emerging from the elevator one hundred meters away. Five of them moved down the narrow hallway single file giving each door a cursory inspection as they walked past. The small team would almost certainly have orders for this specific door, but their recent training told them an enemy could lie behind every shadow even in the safest of enclaves. Laspistols remained holstered, but the shock truncheons they carried were energized and ready to go. The chronometer in my helmet told me my visitors were earlier than expected, but still within the time frame planned for. They were too late to stop what I had begun here in this habblock bedroom. I smiled in the red light of my helm, a momentary flash of mirth, then turned back to the work before me. This hab was tightly packed with rooms in narrow corridors. The planet’s one true city was thick with people, most working in the local space port, and homes were at a premium. It would take them almost two minutes to reach us at the pace they were going, enough time to finish.

I kept glancing at the monitor even as my hands continued the work almost without my attention. The squad’s movement down the hallway showed a lack of experience in tactical situations. They moved through potential lines of fire from unsecured cover without noticing the threat, and the trooper monitoring their rear kept jerking back to check behind them as he remembered it was his responsibility to keep his eyes back there. The fete the planetary governor had announced to celebrate the raising of the new regiments were just winding down, and these newly raised soldiers have not been tested in combat yet. The mass personnel carriers were beginning to launch that very day to carry troopers just like these to some far flung battlefield, throwing more and more bodies into the gaps the Imperium fought to preserve everyday. Unless our plan worked, of course. It would almost be a blessing for these poorly trained, backwater bumpkins if it did.

My marking of the last few arcane symbols onto the bare floor stopped just as the pounding on the outer door began. The glyphs and circles were complete enough for my purpose. The dark energy of the warp lay thick about the room. Angles that twisted the eye and curves that seemed to bend in the wrong direction marked every surface, turning the bedroom into one massive ritual chamber. I put the chalk away and turned to the rear of the room, eyeing the people tied to chairs against the wall one by one. The Astra Militarum uniforms they had put on at the start of their three day leave four days ago were rumpled and filthy. The medal marking their graduation from training was the only decoration on their chest. The Imperial aquila on their shoulders looked so lonesome and fragile compared to the arcane symbols painted on their flesh, the horrific shapes unmarred by the sweat dripping down their faces. The commissar squad knocked again, accompanied this time by a muffled shout.

“Private Gervin and any associates! You are wanted for the crime of being absent from maneuvers without leave! In the name of the God-Emperor and the officers appointed above you, open this door and surrender yourself for discipline!” The hacked security feed showed them bunched outside the door, unconcerned in their commonplace duty. None currently carried lethal weapons, they did not watch their rear for ambush or attack. New recruits celebrating after their graduation from training missing their muster was not anything surprising. They felt no suspicion that there was something larger going on. A few lashes and back to the line for all the absent troopers. I shook my head, almost chuckling at what would unfold when they finally forced their way in. The front door was nothing more than a perfunctory barricade, and this room had only the bed leaned up against its door to clear floor space for my work. None of it would not keep out the discipline squad long. I had planned my timing out well to meet my goals.

It had taken me a full day to cover the walls, floors, and ceiling with the barbed, eye twisting lines and symbols to form a cage for the power I was raising. I felt the weight of the Warp pressing against my mind as I gave one last look at this creation, checking every last intersection for the mathematical accuracy required. The only place unmarked by my work was the area around my prisoners. The lines of force drawn on the floor directed energy from their seats over to where I would be standing when the ritual was completed. Acrid smoke from incense and candles filled the air, circulating around the disabled fire alarm in the center of the room. The whispering of the daemons on the other side of reality was at a fever pitch. Only my centuries of training and experience kept me from succumbing to their calls. My prisoners were not so lucky. Not being gifted with the power to perceive the warp, they could still feel something pushing into the world, clawing at their very souls. Their ignorance of the science behind my work did nothing to calm their nerves. I moved over to them. The twisted vox grille of my helm offered no comfort as my glowing red lenses met the eyes of the woman who was first of my prisoner line.

“Are you ready Private Gervin, currently wanted for being absent from maneuvers without leave? The power is built; we cannot go back now.” She looked up at me, wide eyes peering over her gag colored by her lack of sleep. The black and gold panoply of my armour was reflected in them. I saw the terror causing visage of my helm, its crown of many horns adding to my gene enhanced height. I rose up completely. Her shorn head would not reach the top of my shoulder pad. I could easily have removed her head with a single blow, and she knew it. Snapping her bonds with my hands, I lifted her to her feet and drew a wickedly curved knife from the small of my back. I leaned in close and cut her gag away. She coughed, spitting it out and looked back up at me. I held the knife in close, the runes carved into its length shining light into her eyes. I asked her again, “Are you ready?” She looked at me, terrified but certain. The warp was felt as a pressure in the room, pushing to burst forth in our world, ready to respond to my will.

“I am ready, my lord. It’s too late to stop.” Her voice was strong and deep, resonating in the small room. My eyes moved down the line of still bound prisoners, each exhausted gaze meeting the eye lenses of my helm in turn. Eye contact with Astartes in his armour is difficult, but I tried to meet all their gazes. They all snapped out a curt nod, one after another. The creatures of the warp exalted in their emotions, their defiance and hope pulsing through the Immaterium. Their psionic howling reached a fever pitch. “We know our duty and must complete it.”

“Are you sure? Are you all sure?” I pressed her. I placed my heavy gauntlet on her shoulder, but I do not think there was comfort to be found in the weight of my cold ceramite touch. The wicked barbs on the back of my gauntlet caught the light of the candles and reflected back the colors of an oil spill. “We can withdraw now, and none of you will have to suffer what is to come.” She shook her head once sharply and turned her back to me. I placed the edge of my blade high on her shoulder, at the base of her neck.

“We are sure, lord. We all have our duties to bear in the grand struggle.” Gervin drew a deep breath, her back straightening and shoulders squaring as she came to attention as much as her tired frame could. “For the Emperor.” I am glad my helm hid my face from them as the pure strength and resilience of the human spirit moved both my hearts. I closed my eyes as the energy Gervin projected into the Warp charged the room with potent power. So many of my brothers think of humans as little more than animals, tools at best, but I swore I would never forget that theirs was the spirit that battled in a universe that hated them and wanted them dead, and they still persevered. We were forged to protect them, to take up the weight of wars so they could grow and progress. There was a bedrock of strength in each one that we must acknowledge and respect if we were to achieve victory.

“For the Emperor, “ I repeated back to her. I began to cut the runes of power into her skin. Gervin started screaming before the first symbol was complete. I wish I could have spared her the pain, but it was part of the ritual. The daemons on the other side of reality were drawn to strong emotions, pain and fear chief among them. For the plan to work, I needed the power her agony bought me. I hated it, but we needed her to suffer.

My attention could no longer stray from my work to the vidscreen showing the hallway, but I heard the squad outside scrambling as her cries rose in volume. Soon the hollow booms of their attempt to breach the door managed to reach us here in the back room. I had moved on to the next symbol as they managed to break down the hallway door, moving quickly to secure the entrance. If they were following standard protocol they were radioing for Arbites assistance. With only a door and small barricade between us, it was only a matter of moments before they would enter and reach us in here.

I could imagine the military police flooding into the room, securing the corners, checking the other doors in the small apartment to find only the one to the bedroom blocked. The outside room displayed only the aftermath of a party. The celebration of young adults who had spent the last few months in the harsh training of the Astra Militarum may leave mayhem behind, but it was trivial compared to what the power we had raised here. I completed the next symbol etched into Gervin’s back as they bounced against the door to this room. She screamed again and I felt the convulsing of the warp spirits rejoicing in her pain.

“Hold to the plan,” I whispered as low as I could. The distortion of my helmet speakers made my words into a harsh buzz. There was little comfort to be found in the deep rumble of an Astartes voice, but I hoped it would provide some small strength in the trials to come. I began the next symbol, the appearance of a chain forge of runes beginning to take shape around Gervin’s neck. The blood that flowed from the first one already steamed in the air, the latent energy of the warp bleeding through the wounds. I allowed my psionic presence to slip from my material form for just a moment. Viewing my work in the realm of the warp I saw how the whole room shone like a beacon. Terrors stalked outside the bounds of my wards, repulsed and attracted in turn by my work. What I was building here was a delicate balancing act, pitting my will and knowledge against the power of the warp.

The whining of las weapons firing sounded and the hinges on the door evaporated. I turned back to the entryway as they pulled the door away. They shoved the thin bed acting as a lone barricade back and stepped up to enter forcefully, but the sight of me froze them. I rose to my full height and turned to face them, spreading my arms and letting them see the totality of my presence. Gervin fell to her knees as I released her, gasping and retching. The fetishes and trophies covering this black and gold armour spoke of triumphs and treacheries, told of centuries of victories against their Imperium. The hooks, barbs, and horns of my war gear seemed prepared to rend and tear the flesh of anyone who got close. A freshly bleeding victim in the same uniform they wore was falling to the floor at my feet as I raised a glistening knife that looked like cruelty made manifest. Seeing a fully armoured Astartes is to see war personified, and the legends of our heresies stunned them for a crucial moment.

“It is too late, you are doomed!” I blasted over my helmet’s speakers and drew my bolt pistol. Two cracks pounded in the room as the rounds burst forth. My first shot took the center trooper directly in the chest, blowing him to a pulp and throwing him back into the troopers behind him. Blood and torn flesh splashed everywhere as the mass reactive round snapped stunned troopers aware again. My second shot found the frame of the bed in front of them and blew it completely clear of the door. The remaining troopers dived into the cover of the walls, away from the empty door frame. One responded quicker than the others and a stun grenade bounced into the room. My autosenses dulled the blast to levels I could easily stand, but sadly my bound prisoners were not so protected and collapsed, unconscious in their bonds.

The trooper’s entry following the grenade was straight out of a textbook. The first stepped through with his weapon already firing while the second and third through the doorway spun to quickly check any other entryways and secure the corners. They would then provide enfilading fire to their first compatriot who, had things worked out, pinned me beneath a barrage of small arms fire. The last one would enter low to fill the doorway and prevent me from escaping that way. No matter how well it was drilled into them, a perfectly executed tactical entry was not a match for what we had in place.

The first trooper only managed to squeeze off two hurried, unaimed shots as he breached the room before his advance brought him across one of my diagrams. He shuddered to a sudden stop as all the warp energy that had been building grounded itself in his soul like a lightning bolt. The metaphysical pressure in the room changed in an instant as he became a nexus for the forces I had been building for over a day. With a shriek that could only be heard with a sixth sense, all the daemons waiting on the other side poured into him. He collapsed to the ground as his eyes burned. Thin wisps of smoke emerged from all over his skin as the rapid expansion of warp energy began to cook him from the inside out. His body failed as his spirit was pulled into the realm of torment to become the plaything of the entities I had attracted.

The conditioned emotionless detachment of combat settled over me, but I still had a moment to feel a flash of pity for him. His death would serve my purpose, though I hated that I needed it. He had volunteered to fight his enemies on the battlefield and fall a hero to a mortal death. I consigned his soul to unimaginable torment in the pursuit of my goals. He was far from the first that I had sacrificed, and would almost certainly be far from the last, but this waste was always what I hated the most of my mission.

I moved to engage the others as soon as I saw he was no longer a threat. One had already turned to fire upon me but stopped when she saw her compatriot smoking on the floor. The other was tangled in some bedding that had scattered and fallen, laying out fully. His laspistol had spun from his hand and slid across the slick floor until it came to rest against the unconscious body of Gervin. The final trooper was kneeling down, peering around the doorframe to fire upon me now that his compatriots were no longer blocking his line of fire. Past him I could hear activity in the hallway as neighbors came out to investigate the fire fight.

The only exit remaining was the door against the back wall, opening onto a small balcony. I had chosen this room for the ritual to afford me this escape. It was the height of luxury in a habblock to have a way to access the outdoors this easily, even if we were several hundred feet up. Without looking I fired at the open door. The blast of a mass reactive bolt round echoed through the room again, and the trooper in the doorframe leapt out of the line of fire. I turned and sprinted towards the balcony. The sight of an armoured Astartes at full speed locks up the mind of most mortal humans as they are not able to comprehend something that large moving that quickly, and I knew that few troopers on this backwater world could quickly overcome that transhuman dread. As I emerged out into the sunlight, a laspistol shot pinged off my pauldrons, then another. The thick armour was designed to turn stronger weapons than these paltry things could muster so I wasn’t concerned. Another followed, blasting past my head.

Across from me was another habblock, a mirror of this one. The gap between the buildings was filled with bunting and banners. Streamers in regimental colours hung on every balcony, showing which regiment they or their kin had joined. Below, I could still hear merriment as the news of my attack had not yet spread. I knew that I could easily make it down and across, allowing me to flee through that building. I placed one foot on the balcony railing, gripping one of the bunting lines above me. This one, instead of the common fishing twine traditionally used for the others, was thick braided steel, and mounted to the wall with bolts as large as my armoured thumb. As I leaned forward, a lasround smashed into the railing beside me, blowing it to dust and throwing me off balance just as I began to leap into the gap.

I stumbled and fell forward. I dangled by one hand with nothing between me and the ground several hundred feet below except bunting and my heavy armour.

Cop Story

A few years back, I was at a family party when I made an off hand joke about my genetic predilection for charging shield walls. An aunt on my mother's side who LOATHES me overheard, and came up with a cunning plan. She worked for DHS at the time, and knew of a training event being run for a semi-local police agency that needed volunteers, so she told me about it.

It was going to be a riot control training, where cops would be trying to kettle and contain a protest that was starting to go bad. The volunteers would play the part of protestors who would try to resist the cops. Because of who I am as a person and the decisions I have made, I leaped at the chance. My wicked aunt was overjoyed, because she knew how hard these training events were on the protestors.

So the day of the event comes, and I lace up my fash stomping boots and put a shine on my SHARP head. Dressed to the nines to go resist some cops under the guise of helping them. I have a grin and a jaunt in my step as I show up and go through my own little training event, detailing what was to happen. The first event was to have the police close on us and  try to direct us using a riot shield line. The second would involve them kettling us. The final event, and one we had to sign a waiver for, was to have the cops use a semi-mild tear gas on the crowd to see how they reacted. My smile got bigger.

The first event was stellar. We line up at one end of a simulated street, with the cops at the other. They were supposed to push us out the back. I talk to a few people, come up with a plan. My smile infects them as they listen and nod. I start at the back, as the horn sounds to begin the event. The crowd starts chanting the famous protest song HELL NO WE WON'T GO as I catch the eyes of my co-conspirators. They begin to move people out of my way, and once I have enough of a lead, I begin to run. It is maybe 70 yards to the cop line and closing as my feet begin to slam down. My rage and hatred for cops pushes my already titanic legs to new efforts, and generations of berserkers sing in my blood as I see the whole crowd part before. I am grinning so hard it is hurting. I look and find their center man. As our eyes meet, I see him miss a step, and I know that my victory is assured. With a cry that surpasses and supplants languages, I drop my shoulder and connect. 300 pounds of 15 years of American football playing, tree fighting, Viking fury slams into this cop's shield and he just vanishes. I don't think I ever saw him again. The force knocks back everyone behind him and I have a clear line to break through. But that was not my goal. Since I had lost all momentum, I needed to get space around me. I reach out and grab the two closest cops by the back of their belts and hurl them, as far as I can. Which isn't far, because I was aiming at other cops. I repeat this, again, and again. By this point there is a gap in the center of the line a little wider than my normal reach and the entire cops are in disarray. Their line is shattered and they aren't even within 10 yards of the rest of the protestors. The horn sounds to end training and I, dazed, am still holding a cop in the air as he gesticulates angrily. They help each other up and mutter something I cannot hear as I go back to my fellows, to be met with high fives and embraces.

The next event follows on schedule. The first was to have taken significantly longer, so we had a nice rest. This time, the coordinator comes out and tells me I am not allowed to get a running start, but must instead stand at the front of the group. I agree, still grinning. My face hurts, but I cannot stop. This was the kettling event, and the cops come in from both sides of the street to contain us. I stand still, making what eye contact I can through shields and facemasks, looking for the weakest link. I find him quickly, the tell tale shuffling feet and shaking hand giving him away. I move to stand in front of him, and wait. I can tell he sees me, and he knows me, and the shaking grows some more. My face is numb now, a rictus of pure violent joy. They push in slowly, feeling the crowd. Since the protesters are just volunteers, and not fighting for anything, they give some ground easily, but not I. The pride I cultivated through decades of mosh pits would not let me take one step back in the face of the filth. I plant myself and lean in. The scared cop pushes back, but his fear betrays him, and he comes to a stop. With the way they are moving, the two cops beside him begin pushing me as well, but I just lower my head and dig deeper, pushing back. Soon 5, 7, a dozen are trying to match my strength, but as their numbers grew, so did mine. The support I had from behind grew. Their numbers kept them from fully utilizing their strength. Our line stops advancing entirely. Then we begin to push back, just a little, and one cop trips, taking down his closest neighbor. Before we can capitalize on this, the horn sounds again, and the event is complete. The cops back off, getting in a few shots and shoves that are beyond acceptable behavior between friends, but we protesters emerge victorious once again.

The third event has fewer protesters, as some volunteers didn't want to be tear gassed, but that's ok. This one I knew would be the culmination of the greatest work of my life. For I had a secret that was hidden from the cops. During my time in the Marines, I was at the bottom tier for available training hours, but I still needed a certain amount. So I had repeatedly done the gas mask training, which exposes you to just so much CS gas. I had learned to control myself through the pain and nausea.

The horn sounds and a few grenades come in, trailing smoke. I see some people laugh nervously and one turns to flee. Soon I can't see any of my partners, as the fumes grow. The feeling hits me like an old friend. Instantly my sinuses are empty, my eyes are weeping, and my throat is scratching. The cops had probably used more than was necessary to punish us for showing them up in front of the Feds. Every inch of my skin burned, but I stood my ground. It was a pain I knew as well as any.

The cops were coming through slowly, without shields. They were expecting to zip tie weeping people, learning how to move in their protective gear. They were not expecting a 6'3" ogre with reflexives quick enough pull the mask from their face, giving them lungs full of gas. The first one just drops and tries to purge his mask, so I pull it out of alignment as he coughs. Another comes through the gas at the sound, and I move up and repeat my motion. Two rolling on the ground, mask useless due to snot and tears. My quickness made me pant, and I start coughing myself. Two come out of the fog and see me, but in their haste to subdue me, one trips on a downed friend. This gives me the chance to twist the mask of the other as he looks back to see what happens. I hasten off into the mist, still coughing.

It isn't long before I come across a downed friend. After checking to make sure they are doing ok, I move on. I had nothing on my to break his bonds, or else I would have seen if he could stand with me. So I move again. My smile is gone now, replaced by coughs and sobs. I come up behind a cop as he is forcing a protester's hands behind his back. I don't like how roughly it is done, so I let the elastic on his mask smash it hard into his face before twisting it. By this point, the gas is starting to drift on the wind, and the observers start seeing the pile I had left behind. The horn sounds an end to training as giant fans blow the fake street clear. Support personal rush outward, but hesitate when they see cops down as well as civilians. As one, though, they turn and begin to clean the pigs. Two are right next to me, seeing me standing proud over the weeping body of those they thought protected them, and can't look at my face. I walk, slowly, proudly, my every stride perfect, to the aid station, where I begin to wipe my face clear. As the wipes clean me, a new grin breaks across my face. I had done good work.

Stephen: I Think We’re Alone Now

My head ached from holding the spell obfuscating my presence for so long. Anyone looking at me would find me boring, someone they didn’t feel they had to pay attention to. It was brilliant to see it in action, even if the mental load was taking its toll on me. It was new to me, one taught me earlier today by my mentor.

She wasn’t struggling, not for an instant. Even carrying a heavy duffel bag almost as long as she was tall, she was the picture of grace. I don’t know how many spells she was carrying at the moment, not counting the enchantments she had worked into her gear.

The equipment I was carrying wasn’t anywhere near as packed with magic as hers. Evadne insisted I enchant all my equipment on my own, and I was barely knowledgeable enough to handle the enchanting patterns. The earring I had would protect me from a few headshots and the machete tucked in Evadne’s bag had a strength and sharpness enchantment good enough to cut through bone, but that was it.

For my first actual field operation, I felt woefully unprepared. Just six months ago, I had been a glorified IT guy, trying to sell internet of things services to companies who didn’t need it. Hell, six months ago I had been alive. The woman in front of me had changed all that. It was her training that said I was ready, and the duty placed on both of us by the undead lord who made her that saw us both here.

It was a little before midnight when we reached our destination. The abandoned mall had been empty for a decade at this point, with none of the city’s revitalization efforts actually allowing it to succeed. We were interested in buying it now, the family thought it would be a good investment property, except for the current occupants.

That was why we were here.

“We’ll go in through the roof, start clearing our way down. Our greatest resistance will be on the ground floor, but we don’t want to let them overwhelm us. Their numbers will be their greatest strength.” Evadne pulled one of her many hidden knives and sliced cleanly through the chain link fence. Ancient leaflets and notices drifted on the wind as they were caught.

“You can get us up there, right?” I asked her as she slid through the gap. The bag she was lugging around snagged for a moment, but I got it free before following her in.

“Not a problem, trust me.” I did trust her, oddly enough. I was starting to understand her world view a little more now. My first months with Evadne, my first months as a vampire, were tough to adjust to. An understatement, obviously, but I knew I was slowly growing to see how I fit in here.

The fact that Evadne had opened my eyes to the wonder and splendor of magic, and everything it entailed, was a definite point in her favor. It was a fascinating study, and I had to admit she was a stupendous teacher, even if she was my murderer.

The family was just starting to put my advice into practice as well, and our fortunes were growing. Even the older vampires were starting to see that my guidance in the modern would was bearing fruit for us all. As they saw the benefits, they were starting to accept me. For the most part.

This, my first mission in defense of the family’s interest, would go a long way to buying me into their good graces. My newfangled ideas were not the traditional methods of teeth flashing in the night, and they hated that. Though obviously there was still a need for that, as evidenced by the fact that I was about to climb a mall full of zombies.

We aren’t sure when the necromancer set up shop in here, but it couldn’t have been more than two, three months ago.  The missing persons increases started right about then. We found out through a contact we wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t encouraged one of the mortal cultists to join the Neighborhood Watch. Not something they were used to, but it worked out in the long run.

As we approached, I felt an unusual chill. My entire body shivered, a sensation I haven’t felt in months.

“You felt that. Go ahead and take a look at the power around us.” Evadne pulled a coil of rope out of her bag and started coiling it. I focused in the way she had taught me, the one that opened my third eye to the energy that was around us. I cursed as the mental exercise made me drop the spell I had been holding. The unraveling energy was a spike through my mind, and the pain increased.

By the time I could see the flow of energy around me, Evadne had her rope coiled and ready to throw. I was studying the energy, which was different than any I had seen before. This was thick ribbons of darkness, flowing heavily around us. Usually the energy was light, frothing. This was like an oil spill over it.

“Why is it so dark?”

“It is cruelty, malice,” Evadne said. I hadn’t realized I had spoken out loud. “Something terrible happened here, and it has stained the area.”

“It looks like Basileus was here,” I said boldly. An insult to her sire, to the leader of our family, was not something that would be overlooked.

“No, it doesn’t.” She was shaking her head as she started preparing to fling the rope up. “His cruelty and malice are hungry. This feels… satiated.”

She flung the rope up as I looked at her in surprise. That wasn’t the remark I expected. Not just because Evadne detected the energy as feelings and emotions, far different from my colors. It made her better at reading people than I by far. Could it be that she had opened up a little, letting me see a glimpse of her true feelings for our blood thirsty master?

With a tug, the grappling hook locked in place. Evadne started climbing, moving as fast as a spider in a web even with the heavy duffel bag across her back. She was halfway up when I started to climb behind her.

In school, I loathed the rope climb. I was far more of a nerd than any kind of athlete, and I couldn’t make it more than two or three feet off the ground. Here, I was climbing it like it was stairs. The strength of my new body still found ways to amaze me. It took just thirty seconds for us both to ascend the four stories of the decrepit mall.

“What else do you see up here?” Evadne had set down the duffel bag and was pulling the rope up behind us. She coiled it up and opened the back as I searched for what she wanted me to see. Finally, after several seconds of fruitless search, I shook my head.

“No wards, no alarm spells, nothing.”

“Huh, that is odd.” Even with my elementary skill as a mage, I knew how to place an alarm on something. It was basic magic. The lack of any guard spells was unusual for a mage’s lair. “Is that a good sign?”

“It might mean that this necromancer is a one trick pony. He learned a single spell, maybe a book with a few, and started using them. No deeper tradition of learning.” She started pulling straps out of the bag, wrapping them tight around her. She handed me my machete and a fancy pistol. It looked like something a villain in an ’80 movie carried. I didn’t know what it was, but it had a magazine in it already.

I strapped the machete and gun opposite on each other on my hips. By the time I got it figured out, Evadne had converted the fashionable outfit she had been wearing into a black tactical look. The straps held the previously flowing garb in place, and provided mounting points for her knives. There were more esoteric accessories as well, ones I wasn’t as intimately familiar with.

“It also means he probably has guards out. We go sneaky as we can, for as long as we can. The zombies don’t stop until he does. If we can get close to him, we can end this soon,” she continued as she reached deep into the recesses of the bag. I gave a low chuckle as she pulled out an enormous machine gun.

“I thought we were going for sneaky,” I said as she removed a box of magazine and attached the complex belt of ammunition. Another box went into the small of her bag. The gun was only two feet shorter than she was and must have weighed twenty-five pounds fully loaded. She carried it like it was nothing.

“This is for when sneaky is over,” she replied with a flash of a grin. Her fangs were bright against her dark skin, and I realized my own fangs and talons were extended. I hadn’t notice, but the growing tension of the coming fight was getting to me.

“Also,” she said as she threw the strap of the gun over her head. It dangled at her hip, so large against her narrow frame that I was surprised that she wasn’t toppling. I knew her strength, though, as she was training me in martial as well as mystical arts. There were many a time that diminutive body had tossed me like a stick. “When we get in there, do not drink from the zombies.”

“Why is that?”

“They’re high in carbs.” She set off for the hatchway as I stood, stunned. A joke. Evadne must really be warming up to me.

“No, not really. Its two-fold.” I caught up with her, to see a small grin on her face. “One, with them rotting, the blood goes bad. Taste awful, smells funky, and is partially coagulated. But even if you get a fresh one, the spirit inhabiting it is too alien. It doesn’t satisfy us.”

“I’ll remember that.” We reached the hatch down into the mall. It was locked, and there was still that absence of alarms. I cut the lock with a swipe of my machete, the sheer sound loud in the still of the night. Evadne tsked.

“That wasn’t very sneaky,” I glanced at her gun and chanced a joke of my own.

“I really want to see you shoot that, so maybe sneaky is over.” Another quick flash of a smile and she was down the hatch. I don’t think she touched the ladder at all, just dropping the ten feet to the floor beneath us. I hopped over myself, not as graceful. I wasn’t sure how she managed that with the gun slung like that.

“Now we move fast, and move quiet. Can you read the flows of energy to guide us to the mage?”

“Me, seriously? You know you can do that!” Evadne had been a practicing wizard a full century before my parents were born, trained from birth in the traditions of her people. I was a fumbling toddler compared to her. And that was being generous to me.

“It’s good practice.”

I groaned and tried to read the currents of energy. It was difficult to focus with my headache, but I think I started to see a pattern. There was a center the energy was moving around, even if it was far off and out of sight. I pointed and Evadne nodded.

Was that pride I felt? I had done a good job, and my teacher knew it. I was still angry at her for taking my life, making me this monster. Why did I care if she thought I was talented?

We set off fast, low and stealthy. Evadne had her gun slung along her back, ready to swing to hand. For now, she carried an enchanted kukri in each hand, ready for action. I took my machete in my right hand and the pistol in my left.

We did a quick check of the floor, which was all administrative offices. They were rank, moldy, but free of any undead. Well, once we left the room at least. The floors below us were the stores, emptied of all but dust and trash. That had more open eyelines, wider stairs, and less choke points.

The third floor let us see all the way down to the bottom. It made it easier to search for the undead. Evadne kept an eye to the ground floor while I covered her back. Step by step, we made our way down one arm of the mall, to the central atrium.

It was huge. They used to hold concerts in it back in the day, and used it as a food court during regular service. It had to be at least sixty yards to a side, wide open, with a glass skylight overhead. The missing panes let in the moonlight, providing more than enough light for our enhanced eyes to make out the tableau below.

The floor was a heaving mass of humanity. Densely packed in, they were piling dirt on the floor. Streamers of them carried it in, dropped it, and headed out. The central third was full of dirt, at least a foot deep. The circle was growing with each handful they brought in.

“That is far more than the missing persons report suggested,” I said.

“Look at the quality. Some of those are dug up. Months, if not years, old. I bet that is fresh grave dirt they are bringing it. It has potent applications in necromancy.” Evadne was scanning the crowd for the necromancer even as she taught me. I tried to read the energy but it was too much here. I squeezed my eyes shut as the darkness and pain overwhelmed my mind.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see Evadne gazing at me. Was that tenderness in her eyes? She withdrew her hand and her gaze firmed up.

“Don’t worry about any magic. We’ll move down and across, see if we can spot the necromancer. If we do, I can take him out.”

“And if you can’t spot him?”

“We stop being sneaky.”

Down another floor. With the design of the mall, we had to circumnavigate the entire atrium to get there. By the time we got to our new vantage point, the behavior below us had changed. They were stomping the dirt down, trying to make it smooth. The spirits animating these dead bodies were alien to our realm, and they were not used to having limbs. Their clumsiness was telling, but they were learning.

“A ritual, maybe? Something I am not familiar with,” Evadne said under her breathe. I glanced at her but she waved my concern away. I hefted my machete.

“Do you see them?”

She shook her head. She put her blades away and pulled the machine gun around. She flipped up the cover to check the ammunition feed, then gripped the handles.

“We have to draw him out.”

“I feel kind of inadequate here,” I said as I wiggled my pistol. It was less than a third the size of her gun.

“Ugh, men,” Evadne said with an overdramatic roll of her eyes. “Once we get back, we can get you on the firing range, get your marksmanship up. Until then, your bullets are enchanted.” She pulled a magazine from the pouch on my hip and showed me the bullet. There was something acid etched into the tip, one of the looping circle shapes she favored in her spellcraft.

“Each of those is a mini warding spell, against the spirits piloting the zombies. It won’t knock out the spirit entirely, but it will mess up the connection. Aim center mass, the closer to the heart the better.”

“Marksmanship, huh? Does marksmanship count with fifty rounds a second?”

Evadne flashed me another one of those quick smiles, and I felt myself smiling back. With that, she rose over the waist high wall and unleashed a burst of machine gun fire into the crowd of zombies below us. I hefted my machete and pistol, spinning to cover her rear.

I didn’t see the reaction of the crowd below us, but I could imagine it. According to Evadne, a zombie wasn’t too smart unless the wizard controlling them was there. The spirits would have a rudimentary sense to protect themselves, but mostly they were hungry. Their desire for fresh meat was their main motivating factor, and many a wizard who lacked the will to control the spirit feed their urges.

Evadne kept up a sustained rate of fire, controlled bursts that raked across them. With her strength, she didn’t have to worry about the muzzle rising, so she was on point. We had discussed earlier that she would aim for the knees and legs, trying to disable them. A zombie crawling was still trying to eat you, but they were slow enough to deal with.

“They realized we’re up here and have headed for the stairs,” she said over the gun. Our ears were ringing, but I could clearly hear her. She shifted her position with the moving crowd. “I’m reloading.”

            “How many are left? Do you see the wizard?”

            “About forty. No, not yet.” I gave a low whistle, loud in the silence following her shooting. Her hands were a blur, and the gun was reloaded in the handful of seconds it took us to talk. She shot the bolt home and stood, firing from the hip at an angle. I turned that way and glanced over the edge, seeing the tracers leap towards the crowd of the dead coming up the stairway. These ones were older, moldier. They had been removed from cemeteries, not raised from fresh corpses. Better than the kidnapped and murdered ones, but they were more rotting than I was comfortable with.

And far more nude than I expected.

Behind them was a floor of disabled bodies crawling toward the frozen escalator. Their legs were torn up, missing in some cases, but still they came. The act of crawling pulled blood from their unbeating hearts, leaving trails like snails as they advanced.

My attention flared at the same second Evadne cursed. The gun ceased firing with a grinding noise. I looked and she had the cover of the rifle flipped up, clearing a jam. The barrel was glowing faintly from the heat of the fire. I turned back to where the horde was coming from and raised my own pistol.

The first zombie broke cleared the railing and turned toward us. I snapped off a single shot, aiming for its chest. I missed entirely, the shot pinging off the concrete column twenty feet behind them. Another came, then another. I started firing methodically, remembering to let the barrel come to rest between shots. Soon the weight of numbers saw me hitting them, but by that point they were a few yards away.

Each one I shot went down twitching, disrupted by Evadne’s enspelled bullets. It must have taken too much energy to create enough for the belt fed machine gun, so I hoped to make each one count. My own gun clicked empty as they were just six feet away. I debated reloading, knowing I was fast enough, but the complex action was one I wasn’t familiar with yet. I threw the gun at the leaders face and stepped forward, swinging my machete.

I aimed for the necks, trying to severe them. Between my strength and the enchantment, I could cleave a neck with a single blow, but only if I could hit it clean. Their raised arms and attempts to grab me made my blows clumsy. They were totally silent except for the clicking of their teeth as they snapped at me. No growls, no howls, nothing like the movies. The silence of the grave was far creepier.

I got a few good shots in, severing hands and arms. That helped, even if they still could club me with the remnants of their limbs. It was several seconds before I felt a hand lock on my wrist and pull me off balance. I stumbled forward, and more hands gripped me. They were tugging on me, pulling me into the crowd. I couldn’t get my arm free to swing it anymore, even with my strength, their leverage and numbers were telling. I felt teeth in my bicep, biting and pulling back. Another set, on my thigh.

I was getting devoured, and I couldn’t move enough to fight back.

There was no chance of a spell, my headache was too great. I twisted and pulled as much as I could, but I didn’t have leverage. The oddest part of being eaten was that I wasn’t panicking, not really. There was no dump of adrenaline into my unmoving bloodstream. I could focus.

It was too bad I couldn’t think of anything to do. A mouth on my hand, biting deep, and my fingers were gone. The machete fell to the floor, joining the few limbs it had managed to remove. There was still no sound except for teeth and the faint shuffle of feet on the tile floor.

There was a dull smack behind me. Suddenly, I felt a lessening of the pressure. Another, and I stumbled backwards. There was a still corpse at my feet, and I fell back. The weight of my body pulled some of the dead forward, and I saw a black streak smack clean into the head of one of them, smashing the skull and splattering all of us with brains. I was released as the dead turned towards the new threat.

Evadne stood there, gun held by the barrel in her hands. The smell of her flesh sizzling on the hot metal might actually have been appetizing to the zombies. The stock was covered in thick, oozing blood and hair from where she had been bludgeoning zombies with it. She twisted at the hip, a swing any pro baseball player would be proud of, and another skull caved in.

She was clearing a space, and I rose. As much as I could, the damage to my left leg was causing it to shiver as I put weight on it. My left arm too, the chunk taken out if my bicep made it limp. I thought about scrambling for my machete, but with only two fingers and a thumb on my good hand, I wouldn’t be able to use it.

Instead, I changed tactics. I started clawing at the dead, ripping into the flesh of their quadriceps. That dropped them to the floor, where Evadne could club them down. It took some work, but we stayed together and didn’t let them swarm us. The months of training were paying off, and Evadne and I were able to easily support one another.

Within minutes there were only piles of twitching dead beneath us. Evadne dropped her gun, now a twisted mass of metal with a broken stock and pulled her kukris out. She moved among the bodies, taking heads cleanly and ending their twitching.

“Did you see the wizard?” I asked. I pinched my machete between my remaining fingers and managed to work it back into its scabbard. It only took some slightly embarrassing work.

“No, but he must be close. These were moving fast at the end. We get down there and see what we can see.”

We descended the stair way, Evadne stopping every step to end another undead. The pile of dirt was pockmarked by her bullets, the work the zombies had done to smooth it completely gone. In the center was a pile of stones and a small cot. There was a water bottle and a camping stove next to it. The stones were flat and laid out in a pattern I couldn’t discern. Evadne pulled a camera from a pouch and snapped a picture of it.

“Can you see the energy, search for him?” Evadne asked. I started to try and focus through the pain, but Evadne quickly stopped me. “No, that would be too much for you right now. Rest a moment, I’ll search.”

She closed her eyes for just a moment, barely a blink, and I knew she was seeing the energy around us. It was amazing how fast she was at that.

“Quick question while we wait. A good learning opportunity for me.”

“Sure, what is it?” She was slowly spinning, trying to get a feel for where the mage was.

“This wizard is a necromancer, right? So, he can control the dead?”

She gestured out at the sea of once-moving corpses before us, not bothering with an answer.

“OK, so, what makes it so he can’t control us?”

“Just don’t let him,” Evadne replied with another flash of that wicked grin I was growing to like. Behind her, deeper in the shadows where colors faded away, I saw more movement. I pointed behind her, but she was already turning as a pack of undead dogs burst forth.

We fell back as they approached. There was no snarls, no growls. Just the soft sounds of their paws on the bare grave dirt as they approached. Fully a dozen of them, of all breeds. They look like people’s pets, taken and shackled to the dark will of a necromancer.

He walked behind them. A tall figure, with a long beard and a robe. He looked every inch the wizard of legend until I realized the robe was a dingy white bathrobe with a gym membership on the chest. Dirt stained it around the cuffs, and he held a thick book in one hand.

“You took them all down. Who sent you? What do you want?” he asked as he came toward us. His voice was thin, quavering. Controlling one undead took a constant act of will. The horde he had would have been a drain on his spirit. No wonder he seemed so frail.

“The question is, who are you? Why did you raise these people?” Evadne asked as the wall of dogs approached.

“My name is…” he started but was interrupted by a knife to his right eyeball. It was buried to the hilt. I hadn’t even seen Evadne move, but she was in the perfect form, holding steady as the body dropped. With his death, the connection he had maintained to all his servants was cut. The last few twitching bodies stopped, and the dogs fell over, fully dead once more.

“Never give them a chance to monologue,” Evadne said as she started walking towards the body. She slit the robe open, careful not to touch it until she had examined every inch of it for traps. I stood behind her as she squatted over the body.

“Nothing,” she said as she picked up the book. It was a weighty tome, hundreds of pages. She idly flicked through it before closing it and standing. “This is a new one to me.”

“What do we do about the… horde? We can’t let the cops find them.”

She sighed.

“Let us gather them up. In the center, on the dirt. We can get rid of them. Go ahead and drink him, you need to regenerate.” I picked up the old man and bit into his neck. He was weightless, wasted away by the power he was trying to command. No grand purpose, no final clash of will. Just dead now. My fingers started to regrow and my leg grew firm again.

It took us almost until sunrise, but we gathered the bodies in a pile. All the pieces we could find, in a mound five feet high and a dozen across. Evadne used her foot to draw a thick circle around pile in the dirt. She sketched a few symbols around the circumference then stepped back.

“This is going to be intense,” she said. With a gesture and a harsh phrase, everything within the circle burst into flame.

They were bright, white hot, but I felt no heat. A rush of air passed me to feed it, but no smoke, no heat. Everything was contained by Evadne’s circle, without any spilling over. The flames leapt up to the ceiling, shattering the last of the glass in the skylight. The smoke poured out. The fire became too bright to look at and I half turned away.

“None of their families will now what happened to them,” I said faintly. I thought the air rushing by would make it so Evadne couldn’t here me, but I felt her hand find my remaining whole one. I was surprised when she squeezed, and I turned back towards her.

She had tears in her eyes. I thought it was from the exertion until she squeezed my hand again.

“We must become better than this. We must.” I stared at her, not sure what she meant. Instinctively, I pulled her close. She wrapped her arms around me, and I found myself hugging the woman who had killed me.

“A better world is possible. We must build it,” she said into my chest.

We held that pose for half an hour, until the flames died down to ashes. I released her and stepped back, awkward. Evadne turned and broke the circle. I felt the heat now, but it was low, comforting. There was nothing recognizably human left inside. Even bones had burned away to smoldering embers. Evadne had the thick book in her hands, turning it over and over.

“Basileus will want that. There is power in it, great power,” I told her. “Plus, this will make it easier for us to buy the mall.”

“Yes, he will want this, won’t he? I’ve never even heard of this book before.” Evadne turned it over and over in her hands, examining it. The low smoldering ashes glinted off the smooth dark flesh of her shaven head. It was odd to see it in someone I thought so powerful, but she looked nervous. She wasn’t examining the book. She was fidgeting. “A great power…”

At once, she leaned back and hurled the book clear into the ashes. It caught almost instantly, the ambient heat enough to spark the ancient, dry pages. I looked from it burning to her.

Evadne was holding herself tightly, arms wrapped around her chest. It took a moment for me to register that she was shivering. I stepped towards her, holding my hand out. She looked at it for a moment, then up at me. Nervous, she reached out and grasped my hand.

“We can become better than this.”

There, standing in the light firelight, the thrill of defiance shivering through her, was the moment I started to fall in love with her.

Mission Failed

The enemy scout finally turned from your position, but you remained still. Waiting. It had been sixty-eight hours since you integrated with your combat mech, and you were starting to feel everyone of those hours. The mental and physical toll of being a mech pilot was heavy.

You weren’t thinking of the fact that no pilot had ever been successfully removed from their mech after seventy-one hours of integration. Their minds were flayed, stripped, and they never again woke. You had learned that fact in training, and there was a timer in the display you could only see with your eyes closed. But the hypnotism they gave you wouldn’t let you think of it. No matter how much a little voice inside tried to remind you of it.

Instead, you were thinking of the mission. Drop behind enemy lines and create as much havoc as possible before breaking for retrieval. It had gone wrong at the drop, with anti-air defenses far denser than expected. Only three of your squad made it to the ground out of the six who had dropped, and you had lost those two in the chaos of assault.

You had done well on the mission, but the retrieval was supposed to be yesterday. You hadn’t been able to break free of enemy assault for thirteen straight hours, and your weapons were almost exhausted. The fusion core that beat in time with the heart of your body still powered the lasers, but your missile and mass driver weapons were all but empty.

The scout before you was guarding a supply depot for enemy mechs. Even though they were on the other side of this war, the technology that fueled both them and you was similar enough that you could use their supplies. If you could get to them, and if you could get the time to connect to their supply drones.

The scout turned its back fully to you, and started to walk away. You needed to be fast for this, and you broke cover and started to sprint. The steel fibrous muscle bundles that allowed the twenty-two meter mech you were piloting to sprint flexed and pulled as you pushed yourself to your top speed. The heat reading on cast in your mind by your integration started to push up, but you didn’t care.

You also didn’t notice the sympathetic twitches rising in the muscles of your legs. That wasn’t supposed to happen, integration was supposed to separate the body from the mind enough that you could pilot your mech without feedback. You don’t worry about it. You don’t notice it. 

And your display still shows time passing.

With a mental push, you leap into the air. The jets in your legs fire, propelling the titanium mass of you higher than you should go. At the sound, the enemy scout starts to turn towards you, but you are already hurtling towards it, too fast for it to account.

The scout is built for maneuverability, for speed. It isn’t the mass of armor and weapons you are, and is half your height. You come crashing down on it, and it crumbles beneath you. Its legs snap and twist, and you stumble clear. It is on the ground, still trying to bring its meager weapons to bear. You step on its head, crushing the cockpit and the integrated pilot inside. 

The way to the supply depot is open on this side, but there will be more mechs. Behind their own front lines, you don’t expect to see heavier mechs to match you. The garrison forces are usually made of lighter mechs, fast scouts supported by tanks and infantry. 

You start into your lumbering, graceless run again, heading towards the supply drone ahead of you. You have barely moved thirty meters when a tank comes around the back of the drone, its cannon coming to bear on you. It fires, and you feel the impact on your thigh.

If you dared open your eyes, you would see the bruise forming on your flesh. If you do that, though, the tactical display will fall away, and you will be left unprepared. You keep your eyes closed, and target the tank.

Before you have a chance to cycle your lasers up to firing power, another comes around the first, with a third turning. You can’t take them all out with your laser, not at the heat level you have been pushing. Instead you paint them with targeting arrays, and fire the last volley of missiles you have.

You feel the shock of them releasing behind you, and a dozen missiles stream towards each tank. The training and skills you have earned on so many battlefields is strong, and each missile lands on target before the tanks can get a concentrated volley off. They disappear in smoke.

You make it to the cover of the supply buildings, and pause. The lack of movement causes your heat sinks to click on high and start venting. It is good that they have, as the flesh you occupy has started to turn red. Slick with sweat, it is sliding within the integration cradle you have been placed in. 

The battle computers ask your permission to try and integrate with the drones, and you authorize hacking. It is a risk, since the enemy could be launching counter-hacking attempts which could rip your mind to pieces, but you need it. Your fuel reserves are low, and your ammunition is gone.

While that is clicking through the various firewalls the enemy has, you once again attempt communication with your higher ups. The sensor array that sits behind the head of the neck, deep in your mind, was damaged, and you cannot signal your commanders or squadmates, no matter how hard you try. You think for a moment of attempting to hack base communication, but you do not know how long that will take.

Pinpricks. The sensation is faint, but you feel it. Along the titanium plates of your calves and thighs. Your sensors are picking up movement again, small and minute. Infantry squads are advancing towards you, pricking you with their machine guns. They hope for a lucky hit, making a shot through the overlapping armor the tender working beneath. You can’t give them that chance.

Pivoting at the waist, you raise your left arm. Usually there are anti-infantry weapons there, but that ammunition was exhausted long before you made it to the depot. Instead, you charge up the laser there. You aim at the center of the advancing line and fire. The heat rises again, and you do not feel your flesh start to cook. You do not allow yourself to.

The laser is a mech killer. It is designed to take down mechs of your own class, and could have holed the scout in a single shot. Against infantry, it is overkill. Anyone within a dozen meters of the thick beam is burst by their blood boiling away inside them. Twenty-five meters, the energy sends them crashing down, charred and lifeless. Anyone with eye protection would be blinded.

You pivot, scanning for more targets. Your mech’s automated system tries to release emergency coolant, but that ran out after the first day. Your heat sinks are registering their damage, but you override it. 

Sixty-nine hours, says a small voice in your head. You ignore it. No matter how familiar it is, you do not recognize it. You can’t.

There is a clock, and the drone behind you comes to life. The one beside it as well, and you turn your back to them. Mechanical tendrils rise from them and connect to the ports in your mech. Ammunition, fuel, coolant, all the lifeblood of the machine-mind hybrid that is a mech and pilot. The coolant spills through the channels of the mech, and the drop in temperature makes your body shiver. There is no accompanying movement of your mech, though. 

You hear a sound, transmitted through the skin of the mech. The deep thrum of combat lifters, air assault and bombers. You need to be on the move again. Your missiles are filled, your fusion heart beats strong again, and your guns are untiring. The enemy is between you and home. The mission is not complete.

And you have two hours, that small voice says again. You shake off the tendrils of the drones and move away. You target the supply depot as you move away, and the blasts of your lasers blow it from the face to the planet. You have denied it to the enemy.

You just wish you could deny that voice.

The Old World: Origins

No one knows where I was born, beyond “up north.” Every time someone said “up north,” they would spit. Because up north is where the monsters come from. It's where I was born, even if I cannot remember it.. 

I was found in a fjord during a spring thaw, a baby tangled in the branches of a tree that took six men to pull from the water. The shipwrights saw a tree of this magnificence and knew it would lay a beam for a ship like no other to sail the Sea of Claws. But the shaman knew something else came that day. His god sent visions, terrible ones, about the baby wrapped in the branches of the tree. None heeded his wisdom, for the warriors didn’t trust the twisted, sickly shaman.

I grew up in the town of Suderholm on the shore of the Sea of Claws, under the banner of Scarocat, called Doomfury. He ruled as Jarl under the mark of the High King of the Sarls, who ruled under only the gods.

Doomfury took me for his son, saying my survival of the rapids and twists was a sign of the gods’ favor. His wives were all barren, and some rival clans were eyeing the aging jarl’s lands as bounty when he inevitably fell. With me, the line would continue. My arrival broke whatever curse existed on Doomfury, and he had more children over the next few years. But he never forgot that it was my coming that broke the curse. He never thought of me as less than the children of his blood.

He trained me to be a warrior, and instilled in me a skill at arms to match any of the trueborn sons of the clan. When the horde of the Doomfury marched to war, our rage beat the sky itself. We all could shrug off wounds that would fell lesser clans, and waded deep into battle. I earned names in combat, even as a teen showing my talent for the press of sword and shield. Battle Eater. Witch Breaker. The Shout That Shatters Banners. My father boasted of my accomplishments alongside his own, in his cups claiming that I am the type of monster the soft south will fear beyond others. 

The fury of my father’s name never found me in battle. Though I fought with skill and strength, I fought cold. Knowing this, my father had delegated to me the flow of tactics and strategy, and many battles were won under my keen eye and eager mind. The other warriors didn’t understand my cold fury, but they saw it win us many battles, and looked past what they thought of as my deficiency.

With these victories, Doomfury’s fortunes changed, alongside our clan’s. We grew strong, taking on more lands, more thralls. Suderholm grew rich and prosperous, our longclaw boats always heaving with treasure, and our fields bursting with food. Soon Doomfury gathered banners of his own, and the Sarl took exception to it.

I was young, no more than nineteen when the Sarl gathered armies and marched on Suderholm. We had our fury, and the strength in our arms, but with the Sarl marched Godtouched warriors. Heavy, thick armor that turned our strongest blades, twisted mutations that let them spit poisons or take to the air and attack. We fought hard. We fought long. We fought, and lost.

The Sarl didn’t shatter our clan, he cut us down to size. Doomfury died, sacrificed to his Blood God on the blades of our enemies. Most of my brothers fell, and my sisters were taken as slaves. Husbands who survived were pressed into thralldom, leaving the wives and children to work our fields until we grew strong again.

With my father dead, the clan blamed me for living. I charged in the van, alongside my father and brothers, but no wound could end me. Deathblows turned away as the foe stumbled, or an ally stepped in the way of a blade meant for me. I earned the name Luck In Battle that day, a name I came to curse in the weeks following the shatter of spears. I almost danced between the foes, slashing and slaying with each beat of the battle drum. Arrows flashed by me, catching in my hair and armor, but none found rest inside my breast. 

One of my innumerable petty wounds turned infectious. The Plague Father’s Godtouched marched with our foes, pestilential flies that surrounded them clouding the air even after the battle chilled and our pyres cooled. As I lay in fever, they would gather in my eyes. I was too weak to blink them away.

While I was lost to fever, the clan spoke more and more against me. They no longer remembered the joy at our growthing strength, but only hatred at the ruin our hubris gained them. A sacked town, missing brothers, husbands, children. Our treasures carted away. The shaman spoke against me, remembering the visions and portents he saw during my early life. Harrald, my next oldest brother, began to gather support against me and my claim to the clan.

He lied about my birth, claiming that my original clan gave me to the river because I was cursed. That Doomfury was mistaken to take me in, that I brought the Sarl upon us all. None of the friends I loved or the siblings of battle I had made spoke in my favor, seeing that the shaman supported Harrald. A few tentative helpers would provide me with water, tried to feed me, but not many dared approach me in my sickness.

Less than a week passed from the battle before Harrald decided to challenge me for leadership of the clan. Less than weak, I found myself gathered up and carried to the challenge stone. I saw my brother through fevered eyes touching his spear to the sacred stone, asking the gods to watch our challenge and determine the fate of the clan. The ritual torches filled the air with greasy smoke, despite the sun being high in the sky. I was not allowed the honor of speaking to the gods. Instead I had a sword shoved into a shaking hand and a shield strapped to my all-but-useless arm. As Harrald turned away from the stone and entered the challenge ring, I was pushed forward stumbling.

Falling, my shield dragging me down, I collapsed to a knee. Harrald laughed, shouting about how my weakness was a manifestation of my curse. The fat flies buzzed around me, biting my ear as I stood again, shaking. Adopted or not, I was a child of Doomfury, and would not die on my knees. I tried to focus on my foe, not the faceless crowd surrounding us. Wracked with fever, I could only see him as a blur in the sun as he came in.

Harrald’s spear shot out towards me. He wasn’t seeking a killing blow, but was instead toying with me. Instinctively, my shield raised and shoved the spear over my shoulder. I tried to strike as he was extended, going for the soft flesh of the underarm. My strength was drained by my sudden move and I coughed up something thick, losing my opportunity as he returned to a fighting stance. He struck again. Again I turned his spear. Again I lost myself in coughing. 

I pushed forward with my sword, not looking, and connected with his arm. A slight blow, barely drawing a line of blood across his forearm, but I bled him before he bled me. He grew angry, I could see it clouding his eyes. Doomfury told us all that first blood might feel important, but it was never as important as last blood. I smiled, feeling my familiar battle mind settle upon me. It did not fire my blood, and gave strength to my limbs, but allowed me to see my enemy. See his mistakes, his weaknesses. Gripping my weapon tighter, I shuffled my feet into a battle stance.

The crowd was murmuring, the torchbearers turning to neighbors whispering. Some few remembered my battles, remembered me standing against all foes, standing over the fallen as they bled into the dirt. The shaman was looking back and forth, from them to me. I grinned and stepped forward. Harrald slammed his shield forward, hard into mine. The strength of battle was in me, but I was not at my normal health and I fell down. Harrald was on me quickly, crashing onto me. Fortune was with me, for this knocked another cough out of my mouth, along with a wad of phlegm directly into his eye. He recoiled, and I smashed the flat of my sword into his head, dazing him slightly.

Harrald lunged blindly but his strike was thrown off as I twisted. His spear lodged in the leather and wood of my shield. I rolled away, trying to take his spear with me, but he held on. I cut my shield as I stood, its weight slowing me down. I took my blade in both hands and stabbed trying to take him before he returned to his senses. The shaman shouted, alerting Harrald to my attack. Rolling away himself, he managed to avoid me long enough to find his feet. I struck once more, this time bleeding his thigh, a deeper cut. It wasn’t a life-ender, I knew, but these stings were angering him more.

With my illness, my battle strength would fade quickly, so I could not wait for him to make a mistake. I had to force one. I lunged as he cleared his eyes, but instead of landing the blow as I had the last one, I feinted and tripped him. He fell back and I moved to end this fight, when one of those cursed flies bit my ear. The pain was worse than any I had known in battle, and a fresh wave of weakness washed over me. My sword fell from my slack fingers.

My brother looked at me and grinned. He threw his shield, catching me in the gut. My wind left me, spittle and snot flying from my mouth as I gasped. Harrald stood and came at me. I was all but insensate at this point, but I somehow managed to catch his spear shaft as he pushed. His blade hit me in the middle of the forehead, driving to bone. Blood filled my vision, but with my second hand below the head of the spear, I broke the shaft. I tossed my head to clear my eyes, but the blood from a head wound is constant and fast. I had to wipe my eyes as I gripped the broken off spear point in my hand and moved in on my disarmed brother.

He got the shaft between us, pushing me away. His greater leverage was greater than my own and we separated. He shifted his spear shaft to a staff grip, me holding the broken spear head like a knife. I tilted my head, allowing the blood to collect in one eye. Harrald grinned at me, a manic rictus caught in the battle rage of our father, and I grinned back. I was struck once, him twice, but we both know he was getting the better of it now. I was sick and blood blind. But he hadn’t seen the battles I had.

Reaching up, I gathered a handful of my own blood and threw it forward, into Harald’s eyes. He instinctively recoiled and I moved in as fast as I could. I tripped him again, but this time met his head with my knee as he fell. His eyes crossed and he went limp. I stepped back and coughed again. There was ample time, my brother would not rise soon. Wiping my face, I leaned over to deliver the death blow.

Suddenly, a massive chill came over me. The air around me filled with a mist, a pestilential green, shifting with the gray of dead flesh. I coughed again, deeper, as the mist clawed its way into my lungs. I felt the chill fill me, sapping my strength. I turned, coughing harder, to see the mist flowing from the mouth and nose of our shaman. His fingers moved in mystical arts, directing the cloud to surround me. Falling to my knees, blood spraying from my lips with the force of each cough, I felt myself weakened further than any illness had taken me.

One of the ritual torchbearers turned, shouting at the shaman to end his blasphemous interference in a Gods judged duel. He added a twist to his motions and she too bent over retching. Another torchbearer stepped up and swung his burning brand at him. The first, still coughing, jammed her torch in the shaman's face. As the flames met the cloud leaving his body, the mist ignited. The fire burned unnaturally, blues and purples among the red and oranges. The shaman’s face melted in the heat, the flames burning into his head as the gas tried to escape it. His clothes burst into flame, the colors matching the rippling flames in the air. 

The fire followed the path of the gas, and surrounded me. It lapped at my skin like a liquid. I felt supported like I did in a warm bath, buoyed by the flames. It burned against me, through me, but not with the anger it burned the shaman. The heat felt like sunlight on a lazy day. It coursed through my veins, burning any sickness away. The blood on my face dried and flaked, cracking as I smiled. Joy filled me, and I moved quickly to end my brother’s life. He died unconscious, on his back, as an unnatural fire shifted around me and permeated my being. The eyes of gods had seen our struggle and judged us both. 

The flames left me, and I stood. I turned to the shaman, still alight with flames of every color, his flesh running like wax. His eyes popped and his bones showed through his liquid flesh. He seemed to scream, but it was lost in the roar of the flame. He stumbled and gripped the torchbearer, transferring the flames to her. Quickly, too quickly, the flames shot high to the sky and the shaman’s body burst, casting the flames in a widening circle. The townspeople gathered for the combat caught alight, their clothing catching as the unnatural fire flowed from person to person. Some managed to beat it out, but many were ended by the explosion. At the end of the pyroclasm, barely a dozen of Suderholm’s residents were standing. 

Singed, broken, and tired after the loss of war and kinship. Too few to rebuild the clan from the damage the Sarl had done. 

I stepped to the broken corpse of the shaman, only a few bones recognizable in the pile. His skull was there, burned black, with blue fire burning deep in the depths. As soon as I saw the flames I was caught, unable to even blink. I saw the flames, but I saw more. There was a multitude of futures laid bare before me, destinies beyond counting open to my mind. I fell to my knees, the pain in my head all but blasting my sanity away. I still could not look away, my hands reached out and gripped the skull. I lifted it, and the flames showed more, and more, and more. Too much for me. My mind was shattering, stretching, I screamed with pain, something not one the battles of my life had been able to pull from me, still unable to look away. 

One thread through them all drew my eye. I greedily focused on it, trying to learn my fate, but I felt my mind ripped asunder, tossed about on the fickle winds that come from the god of fate. I couldn’t focus and lost consciousness.

It was hours later before I awoke, cold with the wind blowing out of the north. The shaman’s skull had burned to nothing, ashes filling my hands. No sign of the unnatural flames remained, nor of the few surviving villagers. My clan, my life, had been removed in a pyre sent by the gods. My head throbbed, and I reached up to rub it. My fingers felt a new scar on my forehead. My brother’s strike had healed, but the scar was like none I had felt before. A heavy lid, but soft flesh behind it, it felt like a closed eye. I knew then that I was one of the Godtouched.

A staggering array of visions marched before me, but none with the force of the flame visions. I saw one thing in them, uniting them. A great warrior, uniting the treasures of darkness and bearing the mark of all gods. I saw him leading us south, to conquer and slay. I stood, wavering slightly. I searched the ashes of my town, but there were none of my clan left. The survivors had scavenged supplies and left, taking the last of the longclaws from the pier. 

I took up a sword and shield, wrapped food and bedroll into my pack and set off. Somewhere out there the gods would lead me to a warrior who could unite us all, and I would find him.

Your Summer Vacation

You were so excited when your parents announced you were moving for the summer. They had taken on temporary jobs at a resort in the mountains that you loved so much. With them as groundskeepers and tour guides, you would spend all summer in the woods and hills you loved so much.

When you got to the resort, you spent days running over and around everything. The other staff came to recognize you fast, and they always had a smile on their faces. They kept you out of trouble as best they could, but you were always getting where you shouldn’t. 

You learned the trails up into the hills the hikers would take like the back of your hand. You felt all the hidden glades, bungalows, streams, and waterfalls were yours more than the resorts. Everywhere you walked, you found beauty and joy.

The first three weeks of summer vacation pass. You were tanned by the sun, and growing like a weed from all the exercise. You felt so responsible and mature, being left to your own devices while your parents worked. Until they sat you down and told you what would happen next week.

“For the three days and nights of the full moon, you have to stay in your room. You can’t come out, no matter what,” Dad told you after they sat you down during dinner.

“There are things out there that could hurt you, that would want to hurt you,” Mom continued. 

You protest, of course. These woods are yours, and there isn’t a thing in them that would hurt you. You’re big and strong and can protect yourself. You know where you can hide and where you can run, and you can climb a tree better than any grown up. You know you will be safe without being locked up.

“It won’t be safe outside. You know we won’t do anything to hurt you. You’ll understand when you’re older,” they tell you, that terrible phrase that ends so many arguments. You tell them you are nearly ten, you are old, but they don’t listen.

The first night of the full moon comes and they lock your doors before the sun is even down. They lock your windows, closing them tight against the twilight light. Dad leaves a snack for you in there, just in case you get hungry at night. You fall asleep eventually, bored out of your mind.

The light of the moon through your secure window wakes you up. Dad’s snack smells good, so you get out of bed and eat. You stand at the window, listening to the sounds of the woods. They are different tonight, quieter. There is a new sound, above the celebration of the resort guests and the songs of nature. A howling, high and loud. It repeats again, and you fall asleep to the sounds of it.

The next night is the same, and the night after it. Dad slides meals in for you throughout the day, and you eat. You sleep when you are tired, curled up on the bed, but you want to do so much more. The howling is a mystery you need to solve. 

After those three days, caged in your room, you are left free to ramble again. The mood has changed some, but you can’t tell if it is your need to find the animal making that sound, or the adults around you. They seem cagier, more distant. Their smiles are slower to come when they see you. 

None of them know what the howling was. Your explorations don’t find any new tracks, no clue of the animal that made it. You even venture into the library, most of a morning’s walk from the resort. It is further than your parents want you to go, but if you can prove you are grown enough to walk to town, maybe they will let you be outside during the next full moon.

Nothing. You can find nothing about the howling animal. What it is, where it went, and if it is coming back. 

After the first two weeks, your interest wanes, and you get back to your ambling. It is more fun to just explore than to sit and do research. You are seeing less animals around, though. It is like something scared them off.

Again the moon starts to fill, and again your parents lock you in your room. You hear them passing outside, nervous and scared. You wish you could open the door and comfort them, let them know that you can help keep the family safe, but the door is locked. The howling is still there though and it reawakens your interest. On the third night, you promise to find what it is.

Your parents let you out and it is with renewed dedication that you set off on your search. You ask the adults around you, both visitors and staff, if they know of it, but they all grow cold and change the subject. You think they are scared of whatever it is, but you know the howls are lonely. They aren’t scary.

You stick with the investigation for three weeks this time, but your birthday is coming. You will be ten soon, and you are already so much taller, so much stronger than you were before. You know your parents will have to let you help them find the animal.

They don’t, though, even when you promise you won’t ask for anything else for your birthday. They give you a birdwatching book and a walking stick instead, and the resort staff throw a party with tons of ice cream. It's so fun and exciting you don’t even think of the creature again.

Until your father is locking you in your room again. This time, though, you are ready. You remembered how he sealed the windows and, while his back is turned, you are able to reach up on your tiptoes and open the lock. He doesn’t notice. He kisses your forehead and tucks you into bed, far before your normal bed time.

You sleep, because what else is there to do, but wake when the moon light falls on you again. The snack your father left is there, and you are so hungry. You’re growing fast, after all, now that you are ten. You eat the snack and turn to the window. 

It opens silently, and you are able to slip out. You fall to the ground outside, but your skill at climbing and exploring means you make no noise. The sound of your parents pacing inside the main room of the bungalow you are staying in doesn’t change, and you set off.

The howling is there tonight, distant. It is hard for you to know where it is coming from, so you explore. It isn’t long before you see the distant glimmer of a campfire. You approach, and see some of the staff of the hotel there. They are having a party, a small one, with the beers you aren’t supposed to know they take from the resort. They don’t see you as you approach through the brush.

The howling has died down now, but it can’t hurt to ask them what they know about it. You aren’t supposed to be out, but they have covered for you before. They think of you as a little mascot, and are willing to help with some of the tricks and plans you have had. 

You step forward out of the brush, and the first one around the fire sees you. Her eyes grow wide, terrified, and she screams. The rest turn to look at you and you see panic take over them. They scramble to flee, and it triggers something inside you. You chase them down, because you are just so hungry. You raise your face to the sky and hear it again.

And realize the only howling in those hills is your own.

Florida Gothic

Due to my Sins and Obligations, I had to drive one thousand miles to Florida for one day, then drive back. It is a decent sized town between Disney Territory and the coast. There is nothing here of note. 

I am the only person in this motel. Thirty-nine empty rooms, me, and the people running it. Second, there are only four non-chain restaurants within three miles of here. Three are variations on MALE FIRST NAME's Pizza Place, and the 4th is YOU GET CRABS. That is literally the name. There are, however, two Walmarts and a Target within three miles. Somehow.

So I decide to go to Crab Place, which is in the Target parking lot. About two miles, twenty-five minutes walk or so. On the way there, I realize that both the roads out from my hotel are one way, both going east. Something like three-quarters of the roads in this town are one way, and that way is Not The Way You Want To Go. I find out that most of the roads that are bidirectional are shut down because of work on the railroad.

Walking, I decide to take a short cut across a parking lot. There are some kiosks and stuff, the usual Southern market fare. Towels, fireworks, drug accessories, whatever. I end up getting accosted by a man in a dishdasha, trying to sell me carpets. After checking to make sure that I was not pickpocketed by urchins, I made my way beyond. Everything feels normal for the next few minutes, I think, but then something hits me.

I can, from this vantage at the halfway point, see three separate billboards advertising different laser hair removal companies. All of them have a hairless cat somewhere on the billboard. Why three? How can there be three here?

Get to CRAB, I eat quickly and leave. Nothing odd there that cannot be explained by being in a place named YOU GET CRABS. I head into Target, because my shampoo busted. Someone walks out pushing a cart with five big screen TVs in it. It struck me as very sinister. I cannot explain why.

I head back to the hotel. Waiting at a light for traffic to change, someone hands me three dollars and drives away. Like I was begging by standing there A few lights later, two people wearing gorilla mascot costumes and riding rascal scooters drive into traffic without waiting for the light to change. They make it across without dying.

At the hotel. I go to the front desk to ask for a towel. There is no one there. I am totally alone in this hotel right now. I open the room’s fridge to put some sodas in there, and end up spending an hour convincing myself the red streak stains are just pasta sauce.

There is a door in my room that leads nowhere. I open it, and there is just the wall. Even the wainscoting continues across. I blocked the door with the dresser. There is a desiccated lizard corpse under that. 

I am alone.

In 12 hours, I will be out of here. But my mind will always be ready to be cast back. To the town where the sun hid its face, and the sky wept at the acts done beneath it.

Date Night!

The night had been going so well that I didn’t even register the first time I got stabbed. It was so surprising, in fact, that they got two more in before I remembered I was probably supposed to react.

They were professional, whoever they were. As their one arm pumped the blade in and out beneath my ribs, their other hand was at the back of my neck, ready to guide my body silently to the ground. They weren’t alone, either, as I felt another set of hands already trying to remove my watch and rings.

It took them several seconds to notice that I was just standing there, not moving. I felt their mood change from one of calm but hurried professionalism to nervousness. I was supposed to be on the ground bleeding out, so they could search me quickly for valuables. For some reason, I wasn’t cooperating.

I sighed as I felt the hand move from my back. The bastard left the knife in me, though. I reached back, trying to grab the handle, but the angle was awful. I turned to them, faster than they anticipated.

“Little help here guys?” I said. Their eyes were huge, faces pale. As one, without looking at each other, they turned and bolted. “Guys, please, this is partially your fault!” They were almost around the corner before I remembered why we were here, and tied a tracking spell to the one that stabbed me. 

There was no one else around, so I put my jacket on, covering the knife jutting from just below my ribs. It was still an unusual bulge, but if anyone saw me on the way up to our apartment, they would just ignore it. People  in this part of town didn’t get involved in other people’s business if they could help it.

I disarmed the wards and entered the run-down, three room apartment that was our base of operations. There was a clatter coming from the kitchen, where my partner Evadne was elbow deep in something special.

“Honey, I’m home!” I called as I set down my parcel and removed my jacket.

“Hey, how was the concert?” she asked as she came around the corner. Her smile was wide as she approached me. She was dusting her hands on her apron as I stepped up for a kiss. Evadne was small; I had to lean over. I picked her up and wiggled her a little, just to hear her giggle.

“Great, wonderful, but the trip back had some problems.” I set her down and broke the embrace. I turned my back on her and gestured toward the obvious knife in me. “Someone ruined the shirt I bought. Do you think you could take the knife out?”

She gripped it and pulled it. Her strength was far beyond that of a simple mugger, so it came out without any trouble. My flesh mended over the gash, but sadly my new concert shirt didn’t have the same benefit. I pulled it off and threw it into the corner.

“What are you working on?” I stepped into the kitchen to see what she had been doing. There were knives, trays, jars of powders and herbs. More esoteric instruments dominated the counter, surrounding a bubbling black cauldron. “I can’t make out what you are doing?”

“Making some gumbo,” she replied as she followed me in. Her hand drifted along my lower back for longer than it should have tingled with a primal signal. I realized I was hungry in more ways than one.

Far more.

“Oh, I thought it was something magical.” 

Evadne whirled on me with her preternatural speed. Her apron swirled around her hips in a very distracting fashion, but I focused on her eyes. They were burning with a passion I couldn’t help but respond to.

“Do not say my gumbo isn’t magical until you try it.” The usual barely constrained laughter in her voice was gone, hidden behind the seriousness of what she was saying. I guessed I hit a nerve.

“I’m sorry, I will be delighted to have some. Is it ready?”

“It needs to simmer for a few hours. How about we go out for our other meal?”

“I hit him with a tracking spell. I can follow him.” Evadne doffed her apron and started for the other room. 

We both got dressed for a fight. For Evadne, this meant a wig, glasses, and all the jewelry she could handle. Her afro wig was enchanted to enhance her already powerful senses. The glasses were purple, designer, and enchanted so that active spell forms stood out if you looked through them. That kept her from walking into a trap more than once. The jewelry was enchanted with all kinds of fancy spells, a swiss army knife for a one-woman army of doom. 

My own gear was much simpler. A chain mail vest over light ballistic armor for protection. I had a pistol in the small of my back, and a knife under each arm. My enchantment skills were nowhere near close to Evadne’s, and my only enchanted gear was a single ring containing a fire wave spell. Nothing flashy.

Watching her change did nothing to help my growing hunger.

We set out, pacing easily in the early hour. We were alone on the street, looking like a fashionable student and her boyfriend for a stroll. The tracking spell led us to a small, condemned building. The door was hanging ajar, from a single hinge.

We approached slowly, examining for any surprises. We passed by the place once, then quickly turned and vanished into the shadows. The approach on the back of the street was less noticeable, so we climbed in there.

The two thieves were sitting there in the light of a camping lantern. They were both pale, nervous. Evadne snuck up behind one, I the other. There was no fight as our fangs flash out, burying in their necks. We drank them dry in under ten minutes. A quick check showed us the house was empty, aside from some drug paraphernalia in another room. No evidence of any crimes. 

“This must have been a local safe house,” Evadne said as we came back into the room with the two fresh corpses.

“What do we do with them?” 

She didn’t answer, instead kneeling down and kindling a fire in her hands. I watched how she did it, marveling at her skill. She set it down on one of the boxes they had been sitting on. It caught instantly, and started burning merrily. Evadne looked up at me, noticing that I was appreciating her skill. She gave a slow, languid smile as she straightened.

We left, walking a more circuitous route back to our apartment. This time we acted more like the young lovers we appeared to be. Packed full of fresh blood, we were more giddy, arm in arm and giggling at what each other said. 

We stumbled through the door already taking each other’s clothing off. Our mouths met, kissing deeply. Our senses were heightened far beyond anything a human could know. Neither of us needed to breathe. Out hunger was soon sated.

And it turned out the gumbo was damned good too.

Dread Marfila

It is wrong to call far-flung Marfila the Kingdom Of The Restless Dead. The title it is known as around the civilized countries is false in one important count. The place does not have a king. To someone used to the natural and divine organization of civilization, the make-up of Marfila is chaotic, startling.

Marfila is a country where ancestor worship is taken to an insane degree. While most homes have a shrine to a heroic ancestor, in Marfila everyone believes their ancestors are still around. Their spirits join into the Oversoul, which watches and guides them as they live. Everyone will join it one day, every single person in the country.

Their body, though, remains behind, and that is where the largest oddity of Marfila comes into play. Once someone dies, their body enters the labor force. Funeral practices strip the body of all flesh, leaving behind a pristine skeleton. Necromantic forces animate the skeleton, and it rises to serve the people.

Fields are tilled, animals are shorn, buildings are raised, mines are dug day and night, rain or shine, for only the dead labor in Marila. Crowds of them move about the countryside as messengers. Wherever a normal society would have someone working to earn their bread and rent, Marila places the dead. The living who make the choice to toil do so out of love for their labor, a passion for what they do. 

Marfilans do not leave their borders often, as the countries surrounding them rightfully punish their dark arts with a death more permanent than one they find in their home. They do accept guests freely, welcoming them with open arms and open homes. That is how I was able to research this report.

Instead of working for their betters, Marlins spend their day in study, in art, and society destroying acts of leisure. Their libraries are gleaming, beautiful edifices filled with finally made books. Music fills the cities, as the people there sing their joy. Sheer chaos and anarchy, without the order of a proper society like this must not be allowed to spread.

They are not kept in line by the need to get their food from their betters, either. Lines of the dead, bearing baskets full of food, march every moment of the day into vast storage halls, where it is free for the taking. Their streets are lined with stands, where food made by passionate cooks is free for the taking. 

Homes too are built everywhere. There are a dozen empty homes for every single person in Marila, as the work crews of the dead are working every hour. From chopping down a tree to putting up a wall, the labor of the dead is continuous. People will ask the Oversoul for a new building, an addition, a shed, and a squad of the dead will soon appear and raise it for them.

This reduces their crime, of course, which is the only testament to their national morals. What is the point of stealing bread or breaking into a home when you can go to a local supply depot and take whatever you need? They think this makes them better, even as they practice their darkest of arts.

But this comes at the cost of order, of discipline. How can anyone know where they stand in such a society? Nature has decreed some men to be the better of others, and grants them more. A beggar in a city has an important role, to be the one to remind everyone where they could fall. Marfila has no beggars, as no one has a place to fall. 

The dead are celebrated there. The people bedeck their dead in flowers and art, with many sketches placed among their ribs until they fall apart. Skeletons of beloved family members are bedecked in gold and jewels by their descendants, for such things have no value in Marila outside their beauty. A fortune spent on the dead, as the people in Marila think they have no need for it.

The blasphemous arts of necromancy are everywhere, in that city. The children learn it in schools, and learn that it is acceptable to live among the dead. It is not an uncommon sight to see a skeleton nursemaid pushing a pram while the parents walk, hand in hand, singing. It is unconscionable that the gods allow this.

The greatest of their cities houses Mill Park, their most sacred place. It is there that skeletons that are too badly damaged to be repaired by bonecraft and magic are taken. They are placed on a mill wheel which grinds eternally, with no wind or water to source it. The bone meal that is left after is spread amongst the flowers and trees of the park, which is tended by both ardent fanatics and idle dilettantes, as a place of terrible beauty.

The libraries there are also top-notch among the world, if you can stand to stay among the people. The idle people fill their time not just with stories and songs, but research and study. Though any mage who goes there to learn must be suspect in the greater world, for who knows what dark arts they picked up in that fell and terrible place?

For all this corruption and evil, we dare not march against the canker that is Marfila. The work crews of skeletons who labor to buy them this corrupt and shiftless life of ease are as ready to take up a spear as they are a shovel. Each enemy they fell joins their ranks, as every living Marfilans are all proficient necromancers. This protects the evil place from the wrath of decent, gods-fearing countries.

It is my belief that Marfila must be done away with by a coalition of all truly good nations, to stop their malign influence from spreading. Even now, stories are attracting away the children of their neighbors, stories about a life of song and beauty. Corrupting the youth like this is their greatest sin, and for the good of civilization and the natural order of the world, we must crush them.

A Shepard’s Story

It was known throughout the mountains that the best grazeland for sheep was in the northern territory of clan Wahlund. The winter snows were light, the storms broken by the surrounding peaks, and the clover so light and plentiful that it was softer than the finest feather stuffed mattress.

The Wahlund’s knew this as well, and so they picked the best shepherd for their northern grazings. Carlus was the son of a shepherd, and his father the same in turn, going back to the founding of the clan. Each learned their trade at their father’s knee, and could take a hawk on the wing with their sling by their seventh birthday. 

Carlus’s life was easy, up there. The wolves and cats that preyed on the more southern grazings had been driven away after generations of Carlus’ family hunting them. The sheep were placid, and didn’t wander far, since they were not curious about the world around them. This was a trait they shared with their caretaker.

The only predators Carlus had to fear came on two legs.

Though he was known as the best of their shepherds, Carlus was thought of as odd in the clan. He didn’t participate in the raids, the counting coup against the other clans. He ignored the maidens of the clan who wove garlands of clover for him to wear. He seemed to only care about his sheep.

This worried the clan elders, for they knew his bloodline was the secret to their safety. He needed a son to carry on the turning of the sheep. Every month, when he would return to the clan village with his sheep in tow, they would try and nudge more maidens in his path. It didn’t work. They grumbled and harrumphed at his odd behavior, but Carlus wasn’t affected. 

Carlus noticed their behavior. It didn’t feel right to him, the way they paraded around. He didn’t feel the emotions he was supposed to feel when they bent to lay their flower garlands at his feet. He knew the people of the clan thought he was arrogant, but it wasn’t that. He just did not feel like marrying any of them.

It was getting towards the end of winter, when the wool on the sheep was thick and fluffy. Carlus was thinking that he had two more weeks before he had to drive them back to town when he heard the faint sound of pebbles sliding on rock. He was on his feet instantly, sling loaded but slack in his hand. He waited, trying to find the sound again.

A clack of stone on stone and Carlus had the sling spinning. The sounds were coming from the west, where the rival clans lived. He had often thought of going into those peaks and ruining some of the simpler paths, but his own clanmates used them in their raids. They cared more about those games than they did the sheep.

The stone split the air as Carlus released it. There was a sharp crack, as of metal, and a figure stumbled through the sparse bushes he had been trying to sneak through. Carlus stone had taken him dead center in his chest, though he hadn’t fully seen him.

The man stumbled forward, his hand pressed to his chest. The overlapping plates of iron that made up his armor had absorbed most of the blow, but his ribs were tender. There was a spear in his other hand, which he was using to hold himself up. Carlus loaded another stone, but did not spin. His eyes were moving, searching for any other raiders.

Carlus heard no other sounds over the man’s gasping for breath. The man must be alone, just there to count the coup. He turned to examine the raider. He was young, about Carlus’s age. He went to one knee, head down, bearing his weight on his spear. Carlus stepped closer, sling still slack.

When the man raised his eyes to Carlus’, he felt like a stone had hit him. He gasped, stumbling so the stone fell from his sling, a slight no one in his family had made in generations. The piercing gray eyes of the raider were still confident and strong, even on his knees gasping for breath. Sweaty blonde hair poked out from under his leather helmet. He saw the look on Carlus’ face and gave a grin, even around his pain. He held his hand out and spoke a word in a language Carlus didn’t recognize.

When Carlus didn’t move, he shook his hand and repeated the word. Not knowing why he did it, Carlus reached out and grasped the man’s hand, helping him to his feet. The calluses on his hands were unusual to Carlus. Harsher than his own lanolin softened hands. Carlus was fascinated by the texture, and didn’t realize the man had stood back up, still hand in hand with Carlus. He dropped the stranger's hand, embarrassed. He was taller than Carlus.

The large man just laughed, and said something else in the unknown language. Carlus smiled sheepishly and shook his head, looking down at the stranger's chest. The man said something else, again unrecognized. Carlus kept his eyes down, trying to find where his stone had hit the armor. Anything to avoid meeting those eyes again.

The laughter was still in the stranger’s voice as he said something again, shaking his head. Carlus just remembered that the larger man was armed when that callused hand went around his throat. 

He panicked for a second before he realized he wasn’t being choked. The man instead moved his hand up, cupping Carlus’ jaw. Feeling his face against those calluses, Carlus leaned in as the man guided his face up. Guided him until their eyes met again, and Carlus’s heart skipped another beat. The man leaned in for a kiss and Carlus lost all sense.

The soft clover under them, the feel of the rough calluses on his skin, the gray eyes matching the storms over the peaks, those were all that was left to Carlus.

In the morning, he awoke. The stranger was gone, along with his pouch of sling stones. The counting of coup was a tradition in the mountain clans, and taking an opponent’s weapon was a great ritual. He dressed, and started to gather stones at the edge of the cliffs, knapping them against each other to better shape them.

The day passed in the stillness Carlus was so very used to, but it didn’t ease him like it had before. He ate his lunch in the peace and quiet he loved so much, but it didn’t satisfy him. The sheep rubbed against him, seeking comfort and trying to comfort in turn, but it wasn’t enough.

When the sun was setting again, there came the same tumble of pebbles down stone. Like a flash, Carlus was standing. His sling was unloaded, but ready to hand. None of the stones he had were as perfect as the ones that had been taken, but they were good enough. If they were needed.

The stranger, though it was odd to think of him as a stranger now, came forward again. His spear was strapped to his back this time, but his hands were not empty. In one was another sling, fine golden leather with beadwork along its length. In the other was a pouch much like the one that had been taken from him. Carlus couldn’t take his eyes off his hands, knowing that the gifts they carried were not all they would bring.

Days passed in that manner, the stranger vanishing before the sun rose only to appear again as it went down. They didn’t speak, just laying in silence when they were spent. Curled in each other’s arms, the last fading chill of winter wasn’t a worry to either of them.

The days turned into a week, and more. Carlus began to worry that he would have to leave, but couldn’t tell the stranger. The streams were running higher with meltwater from up higher in the peaks, and before too long it would be dangerous to take the sheep across. He needed to leave on the morrow.

His head was nestled on Carlus’ chest, and the sight of those sweat darkened curls rising and falling was comforting to him. Whenever he drew a breath to speak, though, the stranger would feel it. He would reach up and press a single finger to Carlus’ lips, urging him to silence. The night passed this way, and Carlus knew that even if he could speak, the language barrier was too great.

In the morning, Carlus gathered up his equipment, his tent, the last of his food, and prepared to set off. Before he left, he took a single stone from his pouch, and placed it where the stranger emerged each sunset. He hoped it would be enough.

The path back to the village took three days longer than normal. The higher water made the crossing difficult, but Carlus’ skill was in his blood. Only two sheep were lost to the grim currents, and he made it back just in time for the shearing festival.

Everyone celebrated his return, as they had feared he wouldn’t make it back in time for the biggest part of the celebration. Everyone came to clasp his wrist and shake his hand, grinning from ear to ear. For the elders had decreed that he was to marry, and the culmination of the festival would see him wed.

Carlus’ protests fell on deaf ears. His chosen wife was beautiful, demure, everything a Wahlund woman should be. She had dreamed of a great warrior, one decorated with trophies for a husband, but she knew that being a shepherd’s wife was worthwhile work. She hid her disappointment. 

But Carlus could not. He fought it every step of the way, until one of the elders drew him aside and told him he was embarrassing his betrothed. There was no choice but to accept it and move on. The elder handed Carlus a cup of the local mountain brew and threw a companionable arm around his shoulder.

With a sigh, Carlus threw back the drink, then the next that followed. Days passed in a blur, always with another drink in his hands. He barely registered standing in front of the priest, wearing a clover garland. The small, hesitant smile on his wife’s face as he clasped her hands didn’t register.

He was thinking of other hands. Rougher hands.

The festival ended but there were traditions to be had. Two weeks of ease and freedom from toil were promised to the bride and groom. Carlus protested as other shepherds took the duty to drive his sheep to the northern fields. The villagers laughed and said it was the blood of his family calling to him. They stopped him from following.

Time passed in a daze, as Carlus drank more. The elders said it was just him adjusting to being home, it was just him adjusting to being married. His wife moved into the small shack he kept in the village for when he wasn’t with the sheep, and started to turn it into a homestead. She seemed happy, even if she wasn’t sure Carlus was.

He would sit on the stoop outside, a cup clutched in one hand, watching the pathway to the northern pasture. The elders assured his wife that this would pass with time, that he would know the duties of a husband. Each of his fathers had figured it out, they laughed. She smiled, not sure of what they were laughing at.

Those long days of waiting for the time to end, for him to be able to go back to his flock, back to his peaks, were a mess to Carlus mind. He couldn’t think clearly around the liquor, but he didn’t want to. Each time his thoughts would clear, he would drink again. This made the time pass faster for him.

He was watching the path towards the peaks as usual when he saw the approaching commotion. There was a small parade down it, children singing and dancing beside an approaching figure. The songs were martial, old war songs of the clan, sung when returning from victorious raids.

Carlus had never sung them, he had never been on the raids. He had his sheep and his duty, and that was enough. That had been enough. Before.

Others came out of the village upon hearing the song, smiling as they approached the mob of children. Carlus stood, swaying softly and started toward them. The center figure was bearing aloft his shepherd’s crook, bellowing the song to the sky. He was triumphant, victorious, even if he didn’t have his sheep with him. Carlus’ sheep. They had been left behind as this shepherd carried a message back to town.

He began to run, stumbling his drink as he recognized the shepherd as one of his replacements. The others laughed to see him fall in the mud, but it was one of endearment. They thought he was excited to see how well protected his sheep were. He only had eyes for the decoration on the shepherd’s crook, the trophies he had taken.

A pair of rough, callused hands dangled from the crook, tied through their palms. 

Once Upon A Dark Lord

I was out of place in that company. A simple farmer, among the great and the good of three races. I kept looking down at my dirty, stained hands and back up at them. I didn’t fit.

The elf lords from the far off lands were the most beautiful beings I had ever seen. Tall and fine, they moved with a grace that looked like dancing, even if they were just pouring wine. I felt so clunky in their presence.

Dwarven lords, on the other hand, were as solid and unyielding as the mountains they hailed from. They were clad in layers of leathers and iron, thick armor that chimed as they moved. Though half the height of the elves, they looked at least four times as strong.

The humans didn’t stand out compared to the other two. They were quiet, withdrawn in the presence of those long-lived peoples who had called this conclave. My own king was among their number, but I couldn’t approach him. I was set aside.

I had been the one to find it, while picking stones in my brother’s field. I didn’t know what it was at first when I pulled it from the dirt. A black iron rod, as long as my arm, with a multi-faceted crystal topping it. It felt hot to my touch, despite being buried. I took it to my village headman and the priest, and they went white. They knew what it was.

Long ago, the Dark Lord was cast down from his terrible throne. His scepter, his instrument of rule, was taken by the victors, and soon lost to history. I had found it again, and all the great powers of the world feared the Dark Lord would rise again now that it was found. I was only invited to the conclave because they feared that the more people who touched it, the faster he would find out about it.

An elf lord was telling us about the last war against the Dark Lord. How he had stood with his troops against the evil that spilled forth from the blackened and burned lands. There was something odd about what he was saying, and I felt I had to speak up.

“Excuse me,” I said in that company of lords and masters. They ignored me so I spoke again, louder. “I have a question.”

The head of the wizard conclave turned to me, gesturing everyone else to silence. His beard and robes were as gray as the smoke that rose from his pipe, but I didn’t let his age fool me. I knew he was powerful. I could tell by the way all the others fell silent at his gesture.

“You say that this needs to be destroyed because, if the Dark Lord gets it back, he will be unbeatable. Is that right?” 

“It is true, yes,” one of the elf lords replied in a voice that was at the edge of singing. “Once he grasps that in his mailed fist, it will be impossible for him to be defeated.”

“Good, I understand that. Now, my next question is, how did he lose it in the first place?”

“As to that, lad, there was a great alliance of elves, men, dwarves, wizards, and all the free people of the world,” the wizard spoke.

“I was there, commanding forces against him,” one of the elf lords replied. “Stout dwarven warriors advanced under the protection of our arrows to pull down the enemy’s fortresses and destroy his bastions.”

“We humans too, we lead cavalry raids to cut his armies to pieces in the field,” one of the human kings replied, glaring at the elder races. There was always a bit of jealousy to humans. They didn’t have the glories of the elves or the dynasties of the dwarves.

“Wizards weaved complex webs to disguise their forces, and our greatest dwarven smiths turned out powerful weapons to arm everyone. It is said that my grandfather cast the blade that was used to cut the Dark Lord’s hand from his arm, dropping that scepter to the ground.” This was one of the dwarven kings, but in the depths of their helmets and beards, I couldn’t tell which one.

“I was there when he fell,” said the greatest of the assembled elven lords. “He lost his scepter and had to retreat, falling back to the dark shadows of the world. His power was broken.”

“That’s all well and good then, but if he is unbeatable if he has the scepter…” I trailed off to see if anyone would pick up my line of questioning. They didn’t, so I was forced to continue. “...how did you all beat him?”

“We just told you,” said another of the elf lords. There was a faint annoyance in his voice.

“A great alliance of elves, dwarves…” The wizard started, but I cut him off.

“Yes, I know but… Right, so is he unbeatable if he has this.” I said as I laid my hand on the scepter. Everyone in attendance gasped at me, but I didn’t feel anything.

“Yes, he will dominate the world,” my king said to me.

“And you beat him when he had it before?”

“His army was destroyed, his places of power broken, and he fled the field in shame?”

“But he is unbeatable with it?”

“Yes, totally,” the wizard said. He was visibly annoyed at me, and sparks danced in his eyes. I sighed deeply.

“Then I shall bear the burden of the scepter. To carry it to its destruction,” I said. Everyone cheered, but they didn’t know the truth. These idiots who ruled us couldn’t possibly fathom what was so clear to me.

Stupidity like that was something easy to defeat. Maybe there was a chance for me to find a little power of my own as these imbeciles fought the forces of evil that would stir at the Dark Lord’s bidding.

And if the Dark Lord was beaten by them, what did that say about him? I tucked the scepter under my arm and rested my hand on the crystal. Maybe it was time for a new Dark Lord, a smarter one?

When Faith Requests

The tithe came for us at the worst time. The red robed priests of the faith with their symbols of death on their robes. They reminded us of the glory of worship and service as they told us they would take our children. Behind them were their giants, with their guns. Their fists. They were silent, but they did more to remind us of the cost of worship. 

Johan was six months old, at the top of eligibility for the tithe. I held him in shaking arms as the priest came for him, murmuring words I couldn’t understand. 

The thick smoke of the censers made Johan cry. His bright red hair was the only part of him sticking out of the bundle when they came for me. I thought I could hide him, hide how well healthy he was. But he cried too loud, too forcefully.

So many of the children were sick. Twisted by the radiation and pollution of the factories we were forced to work in, for the glory of worship. Our service made so many of us die so young, made so many of us twisted.

I was told I was blessed to have a healthy son. One with strong hands, strong lungs. He cried as the priest took him from me, but I didn’t. There were no tears left for me. The ash of the furnaces had dried them up years ago. Silent sobs shook my body, but I kept my eyes downcast as the priest moved on. 

The giant that followed him was silent too. I stared at his feet as he passed. The red plates of armor with black trim. His presence was a threat, a reminder of what we had to worship. The whine of his servos in his armor were not enough to eclipse the cries of my son as they both left my tiny hovel.

He had such strong lungs.

I was not the only one to have to give a child to the tithe. Three on my work crew had to turn them over, but they were grateful. There was one less mouth to feed, a little more left in the rations they gave us. They didn’t have someone like my Johan at home. 

The acolytes tried to comfort me in the days following. They reminded me of the glory of worship, the glory of service. I was told of the rituals that Johan would undergo, to make his form more fit for that worship. That service only he could do.

The careful surgeries, done without anesthesia as pain was part of the service. I knew this myself, having worked on the assembly lines since I was old enough to see over the top of it. I had lost fingers to the snapping jaws of the rollers, an ear to the cutters. Pain was service. Pain was worship.

They told me of the augmentations that he would be given. That they would help him serve, help him worship. That by his worship, others would be saved. That the truth would pour forth from him and confront the enemies of the faith. 

I told the acolytes that I was comforted.

My reward for this service, for the service of my son, was a promotion up the line. I was moved away from the forges and their acrid smoke. I would work on more refined products, further from the raw cutting and smashing that had stolen my flesh. Away from the machine that I had serviced as an act of worship.

That worship that had stolen more of my flesh than I knew I had.

I was told to be grateful. Johan’s service would be one of pride in the faith, and his light would reflect on me when I finally died. Snatched up by a machine, or panting as my lungs filled with blood. The only two outcomes those of us who worshiped knew.

That worship bought us a place after this life, a brighter, better world. The acolytes would descend from their temples of death and pain and tell us that. They would assure us that we were fighting for the truth, for the faith, as surely as any soldier. That we would be rewarded in the end.

The temples would open their doors like jaws once a month and take us inside. We would march before the altars of bone metal, forged in the very factories we toiled in. Did my flesh go into their construction? Had my blood spilled across their surfaces?

The icons and trophies of the faith filled the rooms, and we were brough to our knees by the glory of what we worshiped. Music of war, of bloodshed, of the glory of pain filled the rooms as the choir of cherubs entered, and we knew that we were safe in the truth. We were protected by the silent giants, with their silent guns.

Censers were born aloft by their flight. The smoke moved among us, scented heavily with the incense and oils of that sacred place. So different than the smoke of the forges that tainted us even in this holy place, and even the music could not hide the bloody, hacking coughs.

Prayer scrolls trailed from their bodies, more symbols of death I couldn’t understand. These were repeated on the banners around us. Everywhere the same icons, hammered into the altars by the machines I now ran.

I raised my eyes from the altar, gazing at the cherubs. The wings stitched to their backs hid the propulsion packs that kept them aloft. Their eyes were a mirror of our own pain, even if they couldn’t understand it. 

The rituals were explained to me so clearly. How they would cut away the parts of him that made him grow, made him more than just a toddler. How the priest would pray as they cut into my Johan, anointing him for his new purpose. They would only take the purest white wings for my son.

I found him among the choir. His mouth was stretched wide, so the speakers could fit. His bright red hair was waving in the force from his repulsors. I could see the red flesh where the wings were stitched on. They were beautiful.

My son was singing. His lungs had been so strong, but not strong enough. Not for the benedictions he needed to sing now. Not for what he needed to do to protect us.

That strength wasn’t enough for the God-Emperor’s priests.