Quote:To be continued . . .
I originally posted this at RB. This is part XII of a story whose middle never got off the ground.
Always East: A new adventure beckons [size=3]
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The auburn haired woman sits on the steps outside of Larzuk's smithy and stares northward, her gray-green eyes unfocused, tear tracks etched into her dust encrusted cheeks. An empty wineskin rests on her lap, now a pillow for the curly head of a sleeping blond haired boy. At her right side lie two suwwayah claws, adamantine edged, and a pair of deep maroon leather gloves. To her left stretches the rest of the boy's body, cushioned by her leather back pack and mud stained, blood red cloak.
Her arms are crossed over her chest. Her hands grasp opposing shoulders, fingers digging deep into the black leather jerkin. She seems oblivious to the sounds of warriors roasting rabbits and growling jests across the cooking fires a mere stone's throw down the cobbled street. The sky above her is a perfect blue dome, unmarked by cloud or bird, the setting sun a welcome warmth in the crisp autumn air. The only movement of her body is the slight tremor of her left foot, a tic that will not stop.
A light breeze springs up from the southwest. Her disheviled hair, the black dye only evident now at the bitter ends, waves to frame her face with a gently glowing auburn aura. This angelic portrait stands out in surreal contrast to the dirt and ruins of Harogath around her.
A sharp clang from the smithy, hammer on steel, intrudes on her reverie and returns her to the present. She notes the tic in her foot. She takes a deep breath and relaxes her arms, her hands floating gently down to rest by the boy's head. The enforced calm spreads into her joints, stilling the muscles that had triggered the memory of battle below the northern peaks four days ago.
Her foot ceases its twitching. She centers herself in time and place.
The ground finally stopped shaking in Harogath after four days of quakes. No tremor disturbs Gulzar as he lies comatose in Malah's house. The dent in his skull from the giant tentacle's blow stubbornly refuses to heal. The wrapped body of the Iron Wolf, Scorch, alongside the corpse of Occhisonya the Amazon is prepared for the ritual funeral pyre that Qal Kehk deems appropriate. The two figures lie in state, arrayed in the square before the shattered city gates.
Another tear falls, this one spalttering on the rock steps as she bows her head in grief. A thought forms, unbidden, of the forthcoming wake to be attended by less than a dozen people. Such a small tribute to the heroism it should celebrate, in a deserted yet victorious city. This wake should have been a celebration attended by a multitude, a riot of song and ale, a rejoicing in the final, glorious triumph over the forces of Hell. Glory has been drowned in a sea of splintered bone and shredded flesh, however, leaving the dull aches and scars any battle leaves.
The smith's hammer comes down again, jarring her back to clarity. A decision has to be made before the winter snows block the passes south. There will be no shelter here in Harogath, one time bastion of the Northern clans. The Druids have gone back to far Scosglen, their estimation of the weather's chaotic future plain to them, if to no one else.
The two relatively undamaged buildings, the smithy and Anya's bath house, stand across the street from each other in stark contrast to the piles of rock, wood, and rubble left by the earthquakes that had spread out from beneath Mount Arreat. The last donkey in the city, Dach, stands quietly next to Anya's house, absently chewing on a mouthful of straw. Wulf gave him to Angeleyes partly in thanks for her role in the last battle, partly out of consideration for a woman with a boy to look after. One chest, a barrel of salt pork, a barrel of flour, and four sacks of oats are tucked into a corner of the bath house awaiting the decision to undertake a journey.
There is little else of value left in the city since the mad rush to abandon it. After the looting in the aftermath of the defense against Baal's screaming hordes, the mercenaries still alive left the city to its fate. Small wonder, after the savagery of the battle before the gates of Harogath.
The demons had fled in terror from the destruction of their king, his throne, and the Worldstone. The flux in the forces of magic and nature had driven them mad. They crashed against the city walls like a wave of red flesh and bone, a tide of snarling scale and fang. They were destroyed by the bloody swords and axes of the Warriors of Harogath, ripped apart by the fell spells of the Necromancer Zekial. The demons' stinking corpses remain in heaps, a feast for the vultures just beyond the old gates. The incessant croaking of the scavenger birds explain, perhaps, the absence of songbirds in Harogath, a city once famous for its mocking birds and whipporwills.
The hammering stops. Soon the sound of the grinding wheel begins, setting her nerves on edge. Her awareness withdraws into her memory to block out the noise. This inward retreat triggers another daydream, or more precisely a daymare.
The recent past rushes back to her in a whirling collage of images.
The cold frosted caverns, the ice breathing trolls and bull headed minotaurs swinging flashing axes. The fury of the Three Guardians, corrupted by Baal's evil. Six dead bodies left on the mountain, mutilated beyond recognition by Talic's flashing blades and Korlik's halberd.
An army of walking dead rises before her to disintegrate in explosions of bone and lightning. The pitiless vipers writhe and fall before flashing blades and gouts of flame. Bits of green cloth, a broken staff, and a shock of black hair are all that remain of Pyra, her body shredded and splattered across the eldritch walls and stone floors of the Mountain Keep. Jemali the Legionaire lies a pike's length away in a pool of gore, his face ripped away by a vipers fangs.
The giant red throne room echoes with the clash of steel, the bellows of giant lizard demons, and the insane cackle of Tal Rasha, host to Baal, Lord of Destruction and Mad King under the Mountain. Now the floor is littered with limbs torn off and heads crushed, parts of what was once a righteous Paladin of Westmarch and three brave pikemen of Greiz' Legion.
The lurid red glow of the Worldstone Keep springs up before her. The wall of lethal, waving tentacles reach for their life's blood, groping for the remaining members of her warband: Occhisonya, Scorch, Gulzar, Shadow, and Angeleyes, the auburn haired mage slayer.
She relives the leap across the chasm, Shadow beside her, a cry of "Umalegree," and the surge of adrenaline that quickens her movements. She lands before the crab-formed body. Again and again her claws slash, again and again she blocks chitinous blows aimed at her head, again and again Shadow imposes her form between Angeleyes and the hot orange plasma of death erupting from Baal's hands. She hears the battle cries of her companions as they fight to cross the narrow bridge over the chasm, struggling to reach her side through animated, giant tentacles of Hells' malice.
A claw skewers Shadow, but gives Angeleyes an opening to leap onto the demon's back. Her legs wrap around its neck.
"Umnadri!" she screams, in memory again, bringing dark orbs of nothing into the demon's eyes. Blinded, he still laughs in mad anticipation of destroying her. Shadow twitches in convulsions of agony on his left claw. His right claw misses its blow backward. "Umpestili!" erupts from her throat, her last scream of the battle. Her claws dive into his eyes, the blades' edges glowing bright green.
In and out, in and out, a sewing machine gone mad, her hands blurr as eye sockets shatter, her muscular thighs gripping his neck in desperation, trying to hold on as he twists to disloge here. The blades' tips find the soft tissue of a demon's cortex. With one last muscular convulsion, her back fully arched, her legs aflame with the effort to hang onto the desparately bucking demon below her, she plunges both claws deep into the demon's skull.
The adamantine blades penetrate the soft pulp and meet at the top of his spine. A horrific grinding sensation vibrates through her body.
All motion ceases.
The noise of battle, so cacophonous just an instant before inside her head, goes mute. The great crab-demon body collapses. Its sudden flacidity catches her off guard. She loses her grip and balance simultaneously.
Her hands come up from her lap, away from the napping boy' head in Harogath on the steps. She stuffs her fingers into her ears in a vain attempt to quell the memory of the high pitched scream, the endless wail of a demon disentegrating into ichor and bone.
She is still in that chamber, her nerves on fire, her claws falling from her grip, her muscles losing control as a seizure takes violent hold of her. Her limbs flail in a grotesque tarantella that moves her, as if by its own will, toward the edge of the bottomless chasm she'd leapt across to begin the melee.
Now her head lolls over the edge, now an iron grip latches onto her right ankle. The fear of a giant tentacle's hold on her is replaced by horror as she is pulled back from the brink to face her sister-in-law's death throes. It is the last vision she has of Mikel's mother alive.
Occhisonya kneels, pulling Angeleye's body hand over hand toward her own. The blond woman's eyes blaze bright green, lit by an internal fire all the more horrible to see for the gaping hole in her trunk. Blood pours out of her mouth, her entrails erupt from her abdomen as she performs one last, selfless act to save a comrade in arms.
Occhisonya looks down into her eyes. Her hands move from leg to shoulders, then grasp Angeleyes tightly in a frenzy of need.
"Don't you dare die, wench," she croaks. "We are --" a geyser of blood erupts from her mouth, interrupting her briefly -- "victorious." The hands dig into Angeleye's shoulders, the bright eyes bore into her own. The broad, beautiful mouth moves, but no sound, no breath cames out. The Amazon's grip tightens in a last convulsion, her jaw sags, and the fire in those beautiful green orbs abruptly fades.
Angeleyes stares for an instant, for an eternity, into eyes gone cold. Slowly her body stops its spasms. She pries the dead Amazon's fingers from her shoulders and stands to survey the glowing cavern, as still now as it had been chaotic during the battle.
Gulzar lies on his back seven paces away atop of a pile of shorn, gory tentacles. His chest moves with breath, but he is otherwise still. Scorch is torn in half, his torso neatly resting on one side of the pile of flesh, his legs the other. Occhisonya's inert corpse, a trail of guts leading from the flesh pile to the body proper, is a heap of limbs and blood. Shadow, a dark lump, lies atop the demon's mangled and disorganized jumble of legs, feet, thorax and claws. The demon's head is curiously absent, though a pile of black goo and gore spreads out in a pool before the carcass.
Angeleyes limps to the dark huddled form and touches it. A near replica of her face looks back at her, her own visage with duskier and with softer features.
"Shadow, return to the umbra and regain your strength," she whispers. "Go."
Shadow shakes her head gently. "I can't. I won't. It isn't."
Angeleyes frowns. Something is completely wrong. Her shadowy double, the ally she could summon from any source of light induced darkness, her familiar for as long as she had been a mage slayer, isn't behaving correctly. The bond, that small tug in her heart normally felt when Shadow is near, is now powerfully evident by its absence.
"What's wrong Shadow, what has happened to us?" Angeleyes asks dumbly.
"You are letting me go, I think, and it seems right, Angel." Shadow shrinks slightly, withdrawing into a hole that isn't really there. "I've been part of you, always. You were taught to summon me from within you. All the shadows ever did was give me form and a means of travel." She shrinks a little smaller.
Angeleyes clenches her jaws in stark fear, again, as she relives the daymare for the hundredth time. She aches again with impending loss. Her foot twitches with a new fervor.
"You are part of me." Her voice takes on a frantic edge. "You are always there when I call you, and I always release you when I can. Don't leave me. You can't leave me!"
She reaches to touch the shadow. Her hands go through the dark form, which shrinks around her wrists. The reply ebbs to a soft whisper.
"Angel, the part of you that is me is the darkness in your soul that hates magicians. This the Viz Jaq Taar awoke in you. I am your impulse for destruction. I am your rage given form. It wasn't shadows that gave me life, it was your soul."
Frantically, Angeleyes tries to grip the dark puddle of shadow and air that shrinks again, now the size of a large melon, now the size of a grapefruit.
"No, don't leave me, Shadow! No!" Angeleyes' voice cracks, her body shakes uncontrollably.
"Let me go, Angel. Your appetite for destruction has been sated. The Lord of Destruction has touched us both. His demise is taking me into the depths of Hell. It will take you if you let it." The whisper fades. "Let me go. Free yourself." The black air ball is now the size of an apple. "Save your soul, Angel," comes the quiet hint of a whisper, now from inside her own head. "Save yourself for the love for young Mikel."
Angeleyes lets go of the cherry sized shadow-sphere and watches it blink into nothing.
Deep in her daymare, she is unaware that in Harogath, her left foot twitches spasmodically, the toe of her worn leather boot moving back and forth on the step where it rests. Her hands grip her shoulders, and she begins to silently weep again, face down, her tears dropping gently into Mikel's hair.
Larzuk's heavy footfall approaches. She doesn't hear it. A strong hand touches her gently on the shoulder, but she is back in the glowing red cavern beneath Mount Arreat.
A feather light touch to her shoulder startles her. She turns her head to behold a tall, shimmering anthropoid figure standing behind her, three paces distant. The touch was his wingtip, reached forward in a consoling caress. She is in the presence of an Angel of the Light. An angel, an archangel whom she vaguely recognizes.
"Tyrael?" she croaks.
"Yes, rogue, it is I, Tyrael. You have won."
"I won, Tyrael? Won what?"
"One scimitar, Angel, the scimitar you broke off into Shenk's heart, and that I have reforged," replies Larzuk. "I am not the archangel Tyrael." He smiles broadly, perfect white teeth turned slightly rose with the setting sun's reflection.
Her mind awakens, and she is back in Harogath, looking up into Larzuk's quiet brown eyes. He lays the blade across her knees as he kneels beside her.
"Young Mikel sat vigil over his mother's corpse all night. He is rested now, as I hope you are, though that wineskin causes me worry. When the sun sets, we will light the pyre and send her back to her spiritual home, to Phylios." Standing, he pats her shoulder gently, affirming something strong and profound: the touch of the living, the touch of a friend. "I'll get Deckard Cain now. We'll have such a wake as can be managed."
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The wake is a solemn affair. The twelve stand in a semicircle facing the beir. Mikel throws a lit torch onto the platform, which ignites immediately. The flames spread with supernatural speed. Rather than burning red and orange, they burn a bright blue-white, cold rather than hot. As the pyre climbs into the starlit sky of the new moon, Qal Kehk leads them in the funeral dirge of the Amazons of Phylios, and then the funerary chant of the Barbarians of the North. They sing each song three times. No song of the Iron Wolves is sung, as no mage's dirge is suitable for a warrior. That concession Angeleyes had wrung from Cain after three days of heated argument. Scorch was blessed to be burned with a warrior as it is. As the flames subside, the last bottle of Qal Kehk's Scosglen malt is passed from lip to lip. A short toast precedes each gulp.
"Her spear was like lightning, her eyes like the stars!" toasts Larzuk.
"She ran like a deer, she moved like liquid fire!" toasts Anya.
"She earned the blue paint, so bold her mein, so strong her heart!" rumbles Qal Kehk.
"She drank like a Warrior, and laughed like a god!" cries Wulf. With a great "Huzzah!" the handful of remaining warriors add their chorus of assent.
"She gave her life for her comrades, she brought her wounded home," weeps Malah.
"She avenged her husband's death, and she braved the demons of hell for us all!" cries Cain.
"She gave my brother a son," stammers Angeleyes. And then she weeps.
"She left us to cross the desert, to fight, and to save the world from evil," says Mikel. "She's a hero, like in the stories." He pauses. "My mother, the hero. I'll miss her."
Unlike the rest, whose eyes glaze over again with tears, Mikel stands alert, eyes bright, watching each and every spark fly into the dark sky. "She'll live in the stars forever."
After the last sparks fly up, he becomes agitated.
"Look, everyone. Have you seen those stars before? The one's next to the Great Scythe?"
At first they don't understand him, but he keeps staring up, pointing to the sky. To humor him, and then to affirm what he sees, the rest of the funeral party gaze up into the heavens and see, for the first time, five dim stars, oriented to the North Star in a long line: a spear, a sign of the Amazons of Phylios.
And they are amazed. They each walk into the city, and carry back a hundredweight of rocks to the square. They build a cairn on top of the pile of ashes from the pyre. And then they drink, and sing, and drink, and weep. Angeleyes keens in lament for the sister she never really knew outside of a battle, and the brother she lost to vile sorcery.
And then they sleep. In sleeping, they let go, and in letting go, at last, they free the spirits of the fallen to travel to the final destination.
Mikel stays awake all night, in another vigil, until the dawn comes and the stars slowly fade into the morning sky. He does not care for strong drink, and he is unwilling to miss a moment of contact with his mother, the new line of stars in the sky.
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"So, Angel, are you staying with us, or leaving?" Larzuk asks when the dawn comes and the cold water has cleansed each pallate.
"Mikel and I will travel south, Larzuk. We will take Gulzar with us, perhaps as far as Lut Gholein, perhaps back to Ensteig."
Gulzar had awoken from his coma with the sun's rise. After an hour's close examination, Malah determined that he was well enough, if a bit weak, to be on his way and out of her care. His chainmail was wrapped in a bundle on the back of the donkey. With his helm replaced by a swathe of bandages, his pike spear more a walking staff than weapon, he stood as a parody of the bold, deadly spearman who had marched to battle against Hell's minions.
"What about you, Larzuk?" asks Angeleyes. "Why are you staying here in this ruin of a city, with winter approaching and the people fled?"
Larzuk gives her a look of frank appraisal. "If you understood how Wulf felt about you, you might stay as well. He wants to start a family, and thinks you are near a goddess. He'd be as fine a husband, a fine swordsman."
Larzuk grins.
"Anya and I are to marry at the solstice. War is done, and I smell a change in the world. I'll not let your victory go uncounted. People will come back to Harogath, Angel, and I mean to be here to rebuild with them. So too will Cain and Malah. This is a good place, nay, a holy place. Harogath is where life in the Northlands will begin again, now that Secheron is abandoned and cursed. The clans and the tribes will come here to trade. So will the Druids. There's a future here, Angel, if you can but look forward to see it."
His eyes glow, and he seems to grow before her. His optimism almost sways her. Then she looks at the cairn in the square, her suwwayah's imbedded in the top, and shakes her head.
"No, Larzuk. I am moving forward into my future, not hanging around the grave of my past. I've left my fury with my blades." She moves toward Dach the donkey, to assist Gulzar with the loading of the oats.
"I've got a new purpose, Larzuk, that has to do with the living, not killing the living. I have a son, my nephew Mikel. I am his family. I will teach him how to hunt with a bow, how to wield a scimitar, how to sing, how to play practical jokes, and a hundred other things. What I won't teach him is to hate. The Lord of Hatred fell before me in Kurast, the Lord of Terror in Hell, and the Lord of Destruction here in the North. We'll leave their memory and legacy behind us."
Lrzuk steps toward her, looks deeply into her eyes, and then surprises her with a sudden, powerful and warm embrace.
"Go with the Light, Angel, and with the blessings of the Northfolk. Go with our love as well." He squeezes her again, an embrace rich with emotion and affection.
Despite herself, she hugs him back fiercely and finds her eyes once again filled with tears. So she kisses him, on the cheeks, and then fully on the lips. The kiss lasts for a bit longer than propriety would suggest. Then it gets downright interesting. They break apart, breathing heavily.
She looks up into his eyes, winks broadly, and for the first time in months, she laughs. Her laughter cascades out of her mouth like a waterfall from the glacier's first spring melt. Her body shakes, this time with mirth rather than the residual effects of trauma. Larzuk begins to laugh in response and surprise. She wiggles her hips and raises her eyebrows suggestively.
"Until Anya kisses you like that, Larzuk, don't you dare marry her, or you'll drive yourself crazy knowing what you might have had if the stars had aligned differently." With a shake of her head, sunlight twinkling from the cherry sized emeralds hanging from her ears, she turns to finish the preparations for departure. Larzuk's eyes never leave her, even after Anya stands in front of him and takes off her jerkin to get his attention.
As the three travellers and the donkey depart Harogath a half hour later, Larzuk is still laughing, Anya still blushing, her jerkin once again draped over her frame by Larzuk's gentle hands. Wulf sits by the fire, roasting a rabbit and drinking away his sorrow that Angeleyes, the rogue turned assassin turned rogue again, was leaving and heading east, always east, into the future.
Fin
