He woke from a nightmare of ebon mirrors and carrion mists, and fell back into himself.
For a moment, Azander Dane believed that he was dead: he felt weightless and cold, adrift in a white sea. Cold gripped him like an icy hand, and heavy pain pushed against the backs of his eyes like a fire in his skull. His breaths came slow and ragged, and something thick and wet covered his face. After a moment his dizziness subsided, and he came to realize that he lay on his back in a bed of snow. Frozen wind tickled the wide scars on his left cheek, and as he exhaled he felt blood trickle up from between his lips. Heavy white flakes drifted across his vision like dying birds.
She falls into the sky.
The white void was silent for a moment, but after he took in a long breath Dane ccould hear again, and the noises of battle crept into his senses like a sluggish wave, slowly at first, but then the chortled cries built to a crescendo, and the clash of steel hammered down on him like breaking glass. The perfect white space of his vision was interrupted by a shadow – long, thin, but it grew bigger. It was only at the last moment that he realized it was an axe blade, and Dane rolled up and out of the way.
His muscles screamed. The snow-covered stone sparked from the blade impact behind him. Dane stumbled and tripped on his own cape. His armor, though designed to be lightweight, seemed to weigh a ton as he ripped the cape away and rose to his feet. He wore no helmet, but his vra’taar was in hand, a long hand-and-a-half blade with a wicked edge and a short blade that protruded from the hilt like a baneful tooth. The air swam. Dane dimly registered the chaos of a battle all around him, but he only had a moment before the Gorgoloth was on top of him. The black-skinned brute was easily two heads taller than he was and twice as broad in the shoulder, and his knotted muscles strained with visible effort as he hefted his bone-white axe over his head in preparation for a crushing blow. Dane saw the ruins of a building behind the brute, so dark that the Gorgoloth nearly disappeared in its shadow. He senses movement behind him, and knew that another one of the beasts was closing in. Head spinning, Dane steadied himself, set his feet in the snow and prepared for the charge.
The Gorgoloth behind him leapt first. Dane saw its shadow fly towards him in the light of the frozen sun, and in spite of his fatigue he spun on his heel and took the misshapen, white-maned head from its shoulders with one swing of his blade. Black blood sprayed onto his face and chest. Instincts drove him. He turned in time to meet the first Gorgoloth, unarmored like his fellow so that Dane saw his scarred chest lined with rings and scars as he dove forward with an axe nearly as tall as Dane. Dane crouched and set his sword; the Gorgoloth’s reach would bring the axe down before it landed on his blade, so he waited, waited, and at the last moment threw himself forward, under the arc of the axe’s swing and into the ebon torso, where his blade chewed through bones as hard as steel and pushed through the stomach and out of the creature’s back.
Dane cursed. He’d missed its heart, which meant it was far from dead. A painful blow landed on one armored shoulder, and he felt the creature’s hot breath on his face. Large fangs like those of a wild cat bore down on him as the Gorgoloth struggled to rip the blade free. Dane put his weight down, twisted and pushed, and then he dropped back and fell away from its claws and teeth as he released his blade. The Gorgoloth hunched forward to follow, and he felt hot pain flare across his back as its nail-like claws raked through his armor. Its death groan rarrled against Dane’s ear as it pushed itself further onto his blade and impaled its own heart on the steel. Dane rolled away and tugged his blade free, and stumbled to his feet.
He stood at the outskirts of a ruined city at the edge of a vast canyon. Fighting raged all around him: black-skinned, bare-chested Gorgoloth with mauls and axes ran down scores of Jlantrians, most of which were soldiers who looked barely capable of putting up a fight. Cold wind howled through nearby ice-capped mountain peaks. Collapsed buildings, blocks of rubble and wrecked wagons lay strewn everywhere, some halfway out over the cliffs, all in such ruin that they must have dropped out of the sky.
Where are we?
An axe-head flew through the air, and Dane had only a moment to deflect it before he was attacked again. Four more Gorgoloth flew at him. Their giant mauls were soaked with steaming blood, and deep scars and tattoos cast in silver ink marked their midnight-hue skin. They towered over Dane and came in from all sides like a phalanx of shadows. Dane moved reflexively, thankful that his black and gold Dawn Knight’s armor was much more flexible than it looked, for although metal plates covered his vital areas the joints were leather and chain mesh, allowing him to dodge away from the first few maul blows that tore apart stone and snow in a shower of wet sparks. Their mauls were crude things of stone and wood, but with their reach the four giants could easily take their time; Dane would never be able to get close enough to do any harm, and since they were unarmored they’d easily be able to chase him down if he took flight. Dane crouched low, readied his blade, and waited for them to come at him.
A circle of cold blue fire erupted on the ground between Dane and the Gorgoloth, and they hesitated. The flames gave off no heat, and they crawled and twisted unnaturally into the air, pushing the giants back as the flickering arcane light illuminated their blank white eyes. Dane caught motion out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t dare move – even with the flames, the Gorgoloth looked ready to pounce. He tightened his grip on the vra’taar and tensed for an assault just as the flames flashed in a noisy explosion: a sound like thunder fell straight out of the sky and crashed down to the ground. The blue-white flames funneled into a whirlwind of frozen fire that erupted into the sky.
The Veil.
Dane turned and ran, knowing full well that the distraction wouldn’t last long. The Gorgoloth’s cries of fury and alarm were barely audible over the roar of the fires as they reached like dancing ghosts into the pale sky. Dane raced through the remains of a rubble-hewn lane, through cold blasts of wind-blown snow and intermittent walls of smoke and ash. Fighting went on just out of sight: every glimpse that Dane caught of battle was the aftermath, when there was only broken bodies and broken weapons left to show that there’d been fighting at all. Dane followed the shadow of his savior, the Veilwarden who’d crafted the arcane fires that had kept him alive, but every time he drew close the shadow vanished, just out of sight around the bend of a building or over another outcropping of rock.
The limits of the city were almost unfathomable. Shards of shattered stone and splintered wood lay in every direction. He was on the top of a tall mountain, for the sky was thin and Dane could see the majestic void of snowy valleys beyond debris that went on and on, acre after acre of discarded civilization left like refuse on the face of this frozen peak. Dane came upon bodies and ruin, and only occasionally did he spy other living things: when he did, it was always Gorgoloth, tall and ebon-skinned, white manes and whiter eyes like extensions of the snow.
Dane ducked in and out of hiding places. He wasn’t sure what direction he traveled in, or if he was moving closer or further from the mountain’s edge, because for all that he could see the narrow crest of the ridge went on forever, like it wasn’t so much a mountain he walked on as an endless and vastly tall wall of ancient natural stone that thrust from the snowy landscape like a vast scar.
The cold numbed him. Frost accumulated on Dane’s blonde stubble and gauntleted hands, and his throat grew raw from the air. He moved quickly and quietly, ducking in and out of ruins. He passed through the shattered remnants of inns and homes, a woodworker’s and a smith’s, but most of the structures were beyond his ability to identify, too ruined by whatever devastation had brought them here to be anything more than torn debris. Dane’s boots uncovered lost things in the snow: broken spinning wheels and old tables, children’s dolls and rusted axe-blades. Shadows moved around him, made thin and long by the sickly pale sun hidden by an invisible veil of ghost-white clouds. The sky had no depth, the peaks went on forever, and even the howl of the wind wasn’t enough to cover the cries of the dying.
I’m dead. I have to be. This is hell.
Still he walked.
© 2007 Steven Montano
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