Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial-Epilogue: Fall

Another early fall.

The leaves fell like rain around the traveler as he approached the manor on the hill. His long cloak brushed them where they lay thick on the path, before fluttering in a spiral of wind that sent the leaves swirling around him in rustling eddies.

That wind formed a lonely music across the hills. It stirred the bare trees, whistled in the valleys. The sky bled red.

Far to the west, a storm grew in strength despite the lateness of the year. It would be some time before it reached this far, but the traveler paused and looked. When he breathed the air, he scented ash and cinders. Lightning flickered over the distant mountains.

Perhaps it was time to see what brewed beyond them. Only, if he was noticed…

Too soon. He must be patient. He’d learned well that lesson, and had plenty of practice.

The manor was old and worn, but still proud where it crowned the tall hill overlooking the woods and fields of that autumn touched country. The structure’s windows were dark, yet something within it called to him. When had that call grown so loud? When had he begun to feel compelled by it?

He’d strayed far from what he once was.

Silent turrets marked his approach. Beasts lurked around the hill, but none drew near. The doors were shut. He drew a hand from his cloak, revealing long and gnarled fingers tipped in sharp nails, and reached out. Precious rings that’d kept their beauty even as his flesh was mottled by time caught the final rays of daylight, burning on a hand made tough as rough leather. The doors parted at that barest of touches, swinging forward with nary a whisper of air.

Within lay a grand foyer, lit enough to give an impression of the space but leave much in a growing darkness. He cast a large shadow ahead of himself, like a reaching phantom intruding upon that clean space. Behind him, the sun set and made the shadows creep longer. His longest of all. It stretched into the manor, crawling up the walls, splitting and branching, reaching.

Searching.

He found what he sought, and in a moment he stood in a different room deeper within the manor. It was lit by candles and a hanging chandelier rather than only by a fading dusk through the windows. Heavy curtains were drawn so nothing of the outside world broke through, creating a hollow of shadows and candle flame.

Colorless eyes roamed. There were stands everywhere, most bearing blank canvas. Some were already touched with oil, but few were finished. The walls crawled with fresco, forming a chaotic tableau of strange scenes so it were as though he walked through a gallery of time.

Here, he found a youthful elf standing before a congregation of knights clad in all the colors of autumn, delivering words to them while the sun set. The knights held their gauntleted hands to their swords, yet their faces smiled. Each had golden eyes.

There a shining form stood atop a mountain, pointing eastward while bloodstained armies flooded into a land of green shadows and pensive fog, the lands behind them drowned in fire and water.

More and more, years worth of masterworks spanning ages in both subject and the style of their making. A beautiful young woman with dark hair straddling her lover, his bleeding heart cradled in her hands to stain the bed they lay on. A collective of twisted and unworldly shapes kneeling as golden fire scoured them, reshaped them. An angel with barbs in her feathered wings sitting upon a throne of thorned vines.

A warlord with the head of a lion, eyes small and gleeful in a laughing face while a great city burned.

A field of graves with ghosts dancing across the night sky, the ground below full of pits from which more flooded. A similar scene where the dead took the forms of beasts and ate the living.

His eyes lingered on a piece where the paints had barely dried. It showed a warrior in black armor wreathed in fire, surrounded by the dead as they hurled themselves into him like moths into a bonfire. The world about him was dark, and he was dark, a hole in the world and a light to which damned things flocked. He stood upon a hill of bones, and the crowns of lords crumbled under his foot.

He paused by a half finished canvas showing a hooded figure cradling a large egg in its arms. His crooked fingers reached for it, pausing bare inches from the image.

The fluttering of wings drew his attention upward to the ceiling. Things perched on the rafters, watching him with eyes that glinted in the darkness. He sensed more gathering throughout the scattered stands. Some were small, others large. All watched him with intense hunger. They whispered and murmured. Their voices were like the chittering of insects, the rustle of rats, the croaking rasp of the bitter and the sick.

A calm voice filled the room. “They are not used to having royalty among them. Forgive our poor manners, Your Majesty. We do not often entertain guests.”

The traveler turned to the figure at the far end of the spacious room, who’d patiently waited while he appreciated the gallery. He ignored the whispering things. They were little threat to him. “I am only a count these days. There is no need to stand on ceremony.”

The painter paused, lifting his brush so it poised in the air. He was a man, tall and thin, dressed in fine but simple clothes. He'd been painting directly onto the wall, adding to the crawling frescos.

“Ah," the painter said. "So my friends spoke the truth. I welcome you to my home then, Count. Though, it seems as though you hardly required the invitation. Have you overcome that much of your curse, at least?”

“Of course not." Laertes made no effort to hide the bitterness in his voice. "You have invited all manner of blasphemy into this place. There was no threshold to obstruct me.”

Something squatted next to the painter. It looked something like a bloated toad crossed with a very old man. Its neck expanded and it let out a deep, warbling croak as it stared at Laertes with perfectly round eyes that shone such a light green they were nearly white.

The Count began to pace again, his heavy steps thumping in a steady beat as he walked. “I am not the only one who has altered my persona of late,” he said in his slow, rhythmic voice. “I hear they call you Anselm these days.”

“So they do. You are the one who taught me that names have power. It’s a lesson I learned well.” The painter's left hand reached out to stroke the head of the toad thing, which continued to stare hungrily at Laertes.

“You were ever selective in the lessons you chose to heed,” Laertes growled as he reached the edge of the strange gallery and faced the painter’s back. “Your meddling in Garihelm has not gone unnoticed.”

The man lifted his brush and began working again. “So are you here to punish me for the actions of our friends from Talsyn?”

“That depends on your answer. Did you give them the Blood Fly?”

“I did not reclaim Yith when I had the opportunity.” The painter lifted his brush again and leaned closer to the wall, focusing on some small detail. “My attention was elsewhere.”

“The renaissance. Your actions there did not go unnoticed, Anselm of Ruon. You were clumsy in your involvement. I am not the only one who stumbled upon your name.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“It is a good thing then that you found me first. I’ve been wanting to speak with you, O’ King.”

Laertes would not be distracted. “What were you doing with those souls? Yith tore through many promising names in his rampage, all of whom bore your shadow.”

“You’ve answered your own question. They were all promising, all… interesting. I nudged. I woke their talents. I gave them the dreams that drove them to bare their souls to the world.”

“And you cost them their lives.”

Anselm paused a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was subdued. “Yes. But some of those I encountered remain, and they will become historic. Have you seen that Laessa woman’s works? She has a fierce talent. And I thought that commoner boy she courted was the pick! I’ve rarely felt so pleased to be a fool.”

“You were never afraid of that. As I recall, you were once my fool.”

“Another name, another time. I’m an artist of a different sort these days.” He waved at the gallery. “And to what do I owe the honor of your visit, besides admonishments about my hobbies?”

The creatures crept closer. Laertes glared at the shadows, and they receded. He had no patience for pests.

Though, some of those things lurking in the deeper darkness of the room… those were not pests.

Instead of answering, Laertes looked at the work the painter was presently laboring over. It showed something like a cavern, lit with cold colors to give it a frozen, desolate look. Embers rained down from above, the only points of warmth in the scene. They gave off little light, doing nothing more than adding depth to the scene’s gloom.

“Perhaps,” Laertes said in a quieter voice than he was accustomed to using, “I sought answers. Or mayhap closure?”

He took a step closer. The demon sitting next to the painter opened a toothless maw at him in threat, but Anselm placed a hand on its head again and it settled.

“I taught you to be restrained in your meddling. With power must come balance. Your actions have not been restrained.”

The painter snorted. “And yours have? My friends found a rider some nights ago. A knight in white and gold, with a complexion quite similar to yours. The tales he told us before their play was done…”

The things gathered in the shadows stirred. Laertes kept his reaction controlled, knowing their hunger was only barely restrained by the one who’d mastered them.

Anselm turned finally to regard the Count, though the shadows seemed to cling to his face as tightly as they did to the vampire’s. “What were you thinking, spreading your curse to the likes of those? If you were so opposed to Hasur’s plot, then why give his traitorous children such a powerful ally?”

Laertes glared at the man sternly. “The Ark is no ally to the previous king of Talsyn’s kin. She simply wished for a throne, and for the strength to claim it. While I had no desire to see House Vyke ascendant, neither do I wish to see this new Accord grow too powerful.”

“So you tipped the scales. Good to see nothing’s changed.”

The bitterness practically dripped off the artist’s tongue like venom as he turned back to his work. Laertes caught a glimpse of something else in the painting before Anselm’s body blocked it. A figure lying upon the cavern’s cold rocks.

“Still…” Anselm started working again with confident, brief strokes of his brush. “Considering how hard you’ve worked to destroy the legacy of your own people, I wouldn’t think you so quick to revive it. What if this bloody queen you’re grooming grows too strong?”

“She is an eel swimming in a sea of sharks. I am unconcerned.”

“The hubris of a king, indeed.” The artist laughed, brief and loud. “Shall I paint you upon a throne again, Laertes of Ergoth?”

The vampire’s voice became harsh as the shadows deepened around him. “Never. And you will keep that name from your tongue.”

As quickly as his anger came, it faded. The Count leaned forward and spoke in a curious tone. “To my eyes, it is you who seems to be trying to build a kingdom. How broken shall you leave this land you seem intent on ruling?”

“Ruling?” The painter shook his head, perplexed. “I have no interest in that.”

“Then what is it you hope to gain from all of this chaos you have seeded?”

The artist thought about it a long while. Then, lifting his head to stare at the ceiling, he gave his answer.

“If I wish to see the sun, then I must first climb. I cannot wait for enough debris to pile up on its own.”

He stepped back from the wall. “But first, I need all my actors in place.”

Laertes saw what lay at the center of the painted cavern and understood. “But that one betrayed you.”

Reynard smiled as he put the final touch on his work.

In the darkness, in the cold, in that prison of crushing depth and cutting stone, the rumbling echo of great forms of iron disturbed an all too brief quiet.

It woke the pit’s lone inhabitant from a dream. The woken dreamer clutched to that sleep, tried to fold themselves in a calm they knew they could not hold. Once that control slipped, they would become undone again.

They could feel it like a rising tide inside themself. It filled the iron bones their gaolers had fashioned for them, buzzed against the inside of their frozen skin, formed a whining drone inside their mind that became ever louder.

It was inescapable. Part of them, eternal and immortal, drawn out by that place. They could quell it, ignore it, sometimes even calm it. But it always came back strong as ever. They tried to hold it, tried with a fervor that went beyond desperation and into despair.

But they could not hold it. They were made of it.

Almost as soon as they’d woken, it erupted from their raw throat and their flesh as fire and sound.

They screamed.

Eventually, the prisoner was too exhausted to continue. The walls of the pit were blackened and freshly scarred, but it did nothing to compromise the prison. It stretched above them so far they couldn’t see the top. They may as well be at the bottom of an ocean, so deep no light could reach them.

Dreams did not come again. They had to lay there at the bottom of their gaol, and simmer as the rage boiled up again. Sometimes it almost drowned out the despair, but the two were intermingled too closely to be truly told apart. Once it came out, they would lose themselves to it for another small eternity, an endless moment that would last for hours or days.

Sometimes, they could hear the occupants of other pits near to their own like a quake through the walls.

Sometimes, those would go on for weeks.

But that rage, and that pain, burned in the prisoner like an inexhaustible furnace. It could not be quelled no matter how it was vented, only lulled into the occasional stupor, cooled by distraction.

There was no distraction down here. Just noise, and weight.

Dreams were the only escape. Only, those bittersweet passings also served as reminders, and once faded back into the darkness of the pit the scream would build again and burst out.

So the prisoner waited to self combust, caught between the impatience of wanting the inevitable to pass and dreading it with a fear that went beyond reason.

There was a time the prisoner cultivated their reason, prided themselves in it. It was so rare for their kind. And yet always it failed them, and was consumed by some baser need.

When would they go mad?

They’d already gone mad. It had happened around the same time the tears had formed bone-deep scars in their face. A cruel irony the ones above had let the prisoner keep their wings. Those bones were iron too, and far too heavy for flying.

The scream built. Even knowing it was useless, the one in the pit tried to hold it down. Self control was all they had left, the only power they could hold over the ones above. The ones who ruled this place had sewn their spirit to iron, given them stone flesh that could still somehow feel, placed them in this blackest depth.

They’d taken it. That one thing the prisoner had managed to hold before they’d come apart. They’d clutched it as they fell burning, a non-thing, a comet hurtled through spaces too vast to fathom. And yet they’d held it, that little thing.

But it was gone now, taken so they were just left with the cold rock and the distant sounds of glaciers moving and their own traitorous mind.

They would lose it again, as they had hundreds of times before. Soon now.

The prisoner reached out and took one of the stray embers that fell from above like a snowflake, cradling it close. It provided no warmth, but the light was a passing distraction.

Even as their cold hand touched it, the ember burnt out.

And the scream came again.

Distant chains rattled. Iron engines turned. Brittle continents cracked.

They were building more pits. Always digging. The noise never ended.

Hate.

Rage.

Sorrow.

Grief.

Pain.

Weight.

Fear.

Longing.

Regret.

Hate.

Hate. Hate. Hate hate hate—

Hate him.

Metal wailed. Thunder rumbled far, far above. Dust and bits of broken ice rained down. Embers fell and died against the blistered rocks.

Something else fell into the pit. It clattered against the walls, tumbling, echoing against rock. It struck near the prisoner’s head and almost went down into the depthless cracks below.

A hand shot out and grasped it. The one in the pit drew it close and opened their fingers.

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It was a ring. It was fashioned of ivory, or bone, and held a black stone. The stone had something inside. Memories. Dreams.

A message.

The prisoner held it close, and opened their eyes.

End of Volume 2