CHAPTER FOUR
"Death is not defeat. Surrender is defeat."
Unknown author. Litany of the Battlesworn.
Halfhand struggled futilely against the crowd forcing the two Children forward into the clearing. There was grasping hands all around his neck, arms, back, pushing forward like a tide of unrelenting flesh. Through the fingers all around his face, he could see the foreboding stone construct rising before them with an ominous black object buried in the front. Halfhand wondered how many of the travelers through Tefike have met their terrible fate here.
A murmur bubbled through the thick throng of villagers around him, resolving into a dull synchronized chant. The chant resonated in Halfhand's brain, yet he could not resolve any of the words, as if they slipped in and out of his ears like a thief of thought. But it made his nerves crawl like a terrible itch that made him want to claw his skin into bloody ribbons. His left hand pulsated with a deep throbbing pain testifying to the evil gathering force here.
Finally arriving in the center at the stone construct, the two Children were forced unwillingly into a kneeling position. The first thing Halfhand noticed was the shallow trough dug into the ground before them, speckled with dried blood, running black in the torchlight.
There was a fist-sized obsidian figure embedded in the rocky monolith right at eye level for the kneeling Children. Yet even this close, Halfhand could not catch any true details of the figure. No matter how he focused, his eyes seemed to slip around the edges of the object of power. If he squinted, it seemed to grow hazy countless limbs. But once he made eye contact, he struggled to break away his gaze as if an invisible force was holding his head. It was becoming difficult to think, to wrap words together, to even struggle against his captors.
The mob of villagers gathered in a circle around them, torch light reflected in their ravenous eyes. One of the villagers carried a long viciously curved sword in both hands, its jagged black edge now stained a violent purple from its past victims. He gave a practice swing of the blade through the air and strolled to the side of them. There was a palpable rush of excitement from the crowd, boiling to a climax of palpable greedy exuberance.
As the crowd's rumbling became a deafening howl, the obsidian figure seemed to hum and vibrate in anticipation. A heavy presence sat in Halfhand's head, forcing him to bend his neck forward in offering to the wicked blade. The Presence assaulted his mind, alien violent images attempted to pour into his mind, assaulting his mental barriers like thousands of razor needles drilling into his skull. Visions flicker through his brain, of fields of blood and deep, of deep unquenching hunger to consume, and of a black formless entity of infinite hunger. He felt detached from his body, as his thoughts were pulled apart into intangible threads.
Think! Act! Halfhand fought the sense of crushing sense of powerlessness and the obliteration of his conscious mind. In the void that consumed him, he could feel the sense of urgency of the proximity of the executioner blade to his corporeal body. He grabbed desperately at the threads of his Self, pulling them together in the infinite void.
There, he found his mind's voice, and the last trace of his consciousness screamed the litanies into the void. "I am the Light. The Light within me!" It was just barely enough. The words of power within him glowed like a torch of whiteness, flaring from his soul, beating back at the ravenous insanity. He clung to the building white heat, pushed and pushed against the Dark Presence. And he was in his body once more, the words of power flowed from his voice in an explosive roar, and for a brief second, his voice snapped through the spell.
In that second, Viellain spun and rose in a fluid motion, his bindings disintegrating, his hidden blade glimmered in a violent arc as it severed cleanly through the neck of the executioner. It was enough for the falling executioner's blade to topple harmlessly behind Halfhand's neck in midswing. "Do it!" Viellain screamed, as glittering knives appeared in both his hands.
Back in control of his body, Halfhand fanned the glowing power of his soul flowing through his body. He sent the righteous power into his right hand until his limb felt like it was scorching heat and the power was seeping into the molecules of the gauntlet, turning it into an extension of his body. This was his ability of sacrifice, his Regalia of Light.
He slammed his right hand forward against the obsidian figurine. There was a brief pause of resistance before he could make physical contact. He flexed his fingers hard against the shield of force around the figurine, the gauntlet's metal glowing white as if heated on a hot forge. He felt the resistance crack as a chorus of simultaneous shrieks pierced Halfhand's mind. The cursed figurine shattered underneath his grasp, and a howling maelstrom of energy exploded out. The torches all blew out instantly from the concussive force and the clearing was swallowed by a violent vortex of red energy. Halfhand was flung back, slamming heavily into the ground, his head smashed against the ground. He tasted iron on his tongue and bright stars flashed in his vision.
Halfhand stumbled to his feet, blinking his eyes against the distorted landscape of the clearing. He struggled against the double vision of the head blow, but it seemed as if a veil had fallen on the clearing as the torrent of malevolent energy swirled violently around. Distances, sizes, and shapes fluctuated as if stretched and compressed, as if reality itself was being torn. The clouded moon seemed to grow even more faint.
In the charged darkness, the villagers wailed and cried, clutching at their heads in this new nightmarescape. The dark silhouettes of the villagers seemed to twist and transform into grotesque shapes with sickening crunching noises and tearing of fabrics. Then in union with gibbering howls, the mass of terrible silhouettes surged forward.
The first villager to stumble onto Halfhand appeared to be a butcher, once a fat man in an apron and cleaver. Yet in the storm of insanity, the butcher's bulbous body seemed to have ballooned into a grotesque proportion that seemed nauseatingly impossible. Halfhand dodged underneath a massive hand that was more tumorous growth than fingers, and delivered a heavy blow to the slavering disproportionately small face to the sound of skull fragments crunching.
There was no further break as he was inundated by rushing figures of the villagers flashing between human and terrible vissages that could be described as beasts or demons.
Somewhere behind him, he could hear the muffled whistle of Viellain's deadly projectiles flying through the air impaling any vulnerable soft spots. But even as some of the mad assailants fell, they were replaced by more horrific subhumans, mind and body completely lost to madness.
They assailed Halfhand from all sides, grabbing his cloak, kicking, biting and clawing. It was only time before he found himself dragged to the ground. He rolled away from his savage blows from the maddened villagers.
There was a bright flash of torchlight that struggled against the thick darkness. Viellian could be seen, one of the ritual torches in hand and his flask in the other, igniting the torch successfully against the swirling torrent. The sickly light barely illuminated the inner ring of the mob around the Hand of Light. The orange light struggled, casting light on the seething mass of assailants. No longer hidden by clothing, black burns and ritualistic scars covered the villagers torsos like diseased poxmarks in imitation of tattoos. Even in their flickering torchlight, their bodies were distorted in grotestquoe and shifting shapes. Halfhand could see a dense aura of evil dwelling in each body, that blended together with the cutting vortex of malevolence.
Viellian blew through the torchfire, and the continuous blue plume of his Herald's Breath licked out in a wide arch around the Questioner, scorching anyone unlucky enough to be in range. Tortured bodies flared up in the path of the naphtha-fueled fire, flaring up and toppling in agony, spreading the flames to whatever they contacted.
In the hazy light of the fires, Halfhand spotted the nearby black executioner's sword half buried in the ground. Fighting through the crowd, he desperately grabbed the hilt.
The hilt was slick like oil, and almost immediately he could feel the concentrated evil of the blade grasping at him, as if probing for cracks in his spiritual armor. Instead, the Child of Light forced his Regalia of Light to burn down through his right hand into the cursed blade, fighting it and beating it into submission. The blade writhed in his hand like a strangled serpent. Using it was like swinging through water, and it obeyed grudgingly. But it was enough to allow Halfhand to clear the suffocating space of tortured flesh around him. The curved executioner's blade cut through his assailants, leaving wounds and amputations that poured thin blood like wine.
Through the nauseating shifting nightmarescape, he finally spied the villager carrying his confiscated sword, the gilded rune markings glittering like a beacon. He charged through the crowd towards his sword, leaving a wake of liquifying bodies in his wake, wading through a rising pool of blood and ichor. The cursed sword was shrieking and shaking in his grip, as the steel began to buckle and crack under the strain of the raging battle of wills, until the material finally shattered and the blade cracked in half.
He threw the shattered piece of the executioner's sword at the villager swinging Halfhand's scabbarded sword like a cudgel. The jagged piece impaled the villager in his chest, who toppled backwards, leaving his grasp on Halfhand's sword.
Halfhand grabbed his runed sword in mid air, the familiar hilt fitting comfortably in his right gauntlet. He unsheathed it and immediately, his regalia of Light flowed into the sword, pouring into the material designed to hold its power. In contrast to the cursed blade, this sword felt weightless like he was wielding the wind itself. The sword seemed to mist in the tumultuous red storm. He charged the growing horde, the blade melting through corrupted muscle and bone like butter.
Suddenly, a shining bonewhite crescent flashed above Halfhand. He barely twisted his face away as a sharp bladed instrument cut down, catching Halfhand's right breastplate and carving down his breastplate with a shriek of grinding metal.
He stumbled back, touching his breastplate, feeling a deep gouge going down his plate armor, but the tempered steel still held.
Through the whipping fog energy, an ominous figure rose, looming over Halfhand. The figure was like a stick, impossibly thin and tall. It stooped with its arms tapering to wicked scythelike bone that rested on the ground. It was like a nightmare version of a preying mantis, wrapped in heavy aura like a cloak. A familiar human head above a stretched torso gazed down at him with lidless eyes, a familiar haunting incessant humming from its mouth stretched too long. It was the bartender. The once bartender charged at him with jerking movements like a puppet. Its scythes rained down like a violent razor rain as it skittered after Halfhand.
Halfhand ran and dodged before the creature, but other villagers caught in the path were not as lucky. One was cut nearly in half from head to groin, and a second impaled like a writhing roast before the body was sent flying into the hazy darkness.
Halfhand retreated until he felt the hard surface of the sacrifice monument on his back. He ducked as a scythe like appendage came down, cracking into the hard rock. The scythe seemed to be stuck, as the creature struggled to pull free. Halfhand lunged forward, slicing through its spiderlike limbs at the joint. The limbless bartender toppled to the ground, looked up at him with emotionless eyes, continuing to hum its song. Halfhand impaled the chest cleanly with his blade and then decapitated the bartender, but that did not silence the bloody song. Screaming, he hacked the body again and again, blood speckling his face, until the unrecognizable pulp of the remains was finally silent.
If the mob had been led by any intelligent mind, they could have overwhelmed the two Children of Light with their sheer numbers. Yet now they were robbed of any sentience, just unadulterated madness. Many even turned on themselves, biting and clawing with mindless zeal. It had become less of a battle, and more of butchery as Halfhand and Viellain hacked down the villagers until not one more stood. At some point, the psychic storm had dissipated into the air, and the moon barely recovered its gray light.
Gasping for breaths, the two soldiers fell to the blood drenched ground, back to back. Blood and worse spattered Halfhand's face and armor, soaking every shred of clothing. His muscles and joints burned. His sunburst cloak was long torn to shreds. He still gripped his sword tightly in case of reinforcements, but no movement stirred in clearing or the treeline. After a few minutes of blessful rest after what felt like an eternity of unrelenting blood, they helped each other up to unsteady feet.
Halfhand stood over the bodies of the fallen, in piles of scattered severed parts and stinking innards. The fragments of the statuette lay on the ground, seeming to bleed black ichor.
In the light of the remaining torch and burning bodies, Villain slowly began to search for his spent arsenal, at least those that could be salvaged. The Hand of Light had made out well. His cloak was ruined, and he was drenched in blood, but he seemed to be unscathed otherwise.
Halfhand followed, his sword aimed at each body in case they stirred. Some of the faces were contorted in terror, others in rage, and yet others in serene peace. But they were all human faces. A lump formed in his throat as he looked from body to body. There were no severed tentacles or carapace. No fangs, claws, or nightmare constructs. All unambiguously human. Not a single deformity outside of the ritualistic scars crawling over their back and torso.
Did he imagine it? Was it an illusion? Halfhand's head pounded like it would explode. Halfhand ran his fingers over the vicious rend in his steel armor. No, of course not, no human could have done that. "Just witchcraft." He muttered to himself.
"As black as witchcraft can get." Villain spat on the ground. He fumbled shakily in his vest until he finally found a full flask. He took two swigs, and poured the rest over the shattered melting remains of the obsidian figurine. He dipped the torch down until a healthy fire roared before him. He lit a second torch and handed it to Halfhand.
Halfhand watched the fire, expecting...something. Anything seemed to be possible tonight. But nothing came from the shards as the fire consumed them unabated. "Viellain, that thing spoke to me in my head. Did it speak to you?"
The Hand of Light was silent as he watched the blaze. He seemed to be debating something internally, spinning one of his daggers in his hand. FInally, he growled. "Never mention that to any other Hand. You will be dragged down to the deepest dungeon of the Fortress to be questioned. Even I would not be immune if I mentioned such a thing. We should go."
Halfhand gave a simple nod to the warning. They picked their path through the piles of bodies back into the groves to retrace their tracks. They made their way through the grove, torch and weapons in hand. As they weaved through the treeline, Viellain spoke again to break the grim silence.
"I have heard of something similar. There was an incident on the Windbiter's Finger. This should be taken with a grain of salt, as the testimonials are piecemeal and the witnesses unreliable. All reports point to a deep sea fisherman trawling up a shard of black glass from the Aryth Sea that was described in a similar pattern. A traveling Inquisitor had picked up the initial rumbling of suspect worshipping in the fishing village. Now, what he found was not anywhere close to this flaka we bumbled into. But he sent for a Purifier squad, and they were able to manage that village and cleaned every speck of that place. Yet every member of that squad and the Inquisitor himself was dead within a year. Their deaths seemed unconnected, some in battle, other disease, and some suicide. But all were as dead as dead can be. There are no coincidences, fratis. And what happened tonight here makes that fishing village a domestic spat. " He paused. "And we will need to finish what we started here when we return to the village."
They found their way back to Tefike unaccosted. The village was as they had left it, deathly silent without a sign of human life. Each unlit house stared sullenly at the two Children through their black windows.
Their horses remained where they had left them, rousing from their sleep to their masters' approach. Halfhand patted his warhorse's side reassuringly and rustled through his weapons pack. He pulled out the detachable silver blade which he affixed securely to the socket above his left otherwise useless hand. Viellain reloaded his collection of deadly projectiles and flasks.
Resigned to their grim task, they moved from house to house in Tefike, knowing that any remaining denizens would need to be put to the sword. They kicked down doors, sweeping through the houses. However, there was no life left in the village. Every residence spoke the same story. Each living area was in general disarray as if lived in by wild animals. Food sat rotten and uneaten on shelves. Excrement, blood, and unmentionable body fluids smeared into every wall in unreadable glyphs. The stench was terrible, a mixture of negligence and rot that was stark to the well maintained exterior of each house. Halfhand forced down the building bile in his throat as they finished their investigation of the last house.
"In order to properly clean this place and the ritual site, I will need to use up the fuel I have packed and it will likely be a week's work for the two of us. Not counting about any farms close by as well." Viellain said, as he checked the content of his saddlebag.
Halfhand gritted his teeth. "We do not have the time. This is just the the tip of the darkness. We have to forge on."
Viellain gave a laughing bark more from incredulity than humor. "Tip of the darkness? Sheer exhaustion is keeping me from just running gibbering into the woods right now. This should be enough for us to bring a full legion."
"I cannot quite explain it. I just ask you to trust me." Halfhand looked east. There was a faint pink haze of the encroaching dawn that was slowly being swallowed by a heavy aura of darkness. "We have come too far to stop. I know the terrifying corruption here is the prologue. No. Send one of the pigeons to Hand Jebrel. His Vindicator squad can clean up here. We will move on. We must."
Halfhand tore off the remains of his cloak and mounted his warhorse. Viellain shook his head and sighed, "Very well, may our glorious deaths be sung beautifully in every tavern in Amador."
The two rode out of Tefike. On the road leading out, Viellain staked a sign. On it, he drew the unmistakable mark of a large X with horns in black ink. Tefike was declared Excamona.. It represented a message that no Light-fearing traveler should miss. Here lies Evil. Only death and obliteration awaits entrance.