The Seed – part 7

by KM Scott

To BC – Happy Birthday, and have many more!

Hooves stabbed an unforgiving percussion into the damp grass, a rhythm of desperation whose rushing staccato wounded the hills with its ricocheted measure. The riders who tore across the fields on their mounts meant to signal neither hope nor anxiety with this thunderous alliteration. Indeed, if they meant to convey any message at all, it was a warning:

When you see us, guts will spill.

The woman riding ahead of the others sat on the saddle of her Segurian, a horse which had no bit, no reigns. When she turned her head left, the Segurian diverted its course that way; if she were to glance to the right, he would slow a bit, in preparation to change its path again. With every nuance and action, the horse reacted in kind. Even as the woman had slowed her breathing and heart rate, the horse had done the same.

This is how she and her sister warriors had been able to ride non-stop for hours at full speed. It was dangerous, even for practitioners of the Scinta religion, but today, it was deadly necessary.

The priestess knew how necessary it was when they came to Balmoral. They were far too late to combat the horrors there; all that was left was to comfort the dying and heal the wounded. Most of the latter would soon join the former, for the beasts of the Seed left virtually no one alive.

There were few methods they could use to help those who had been infected, but at least one victim of the attack had been given a lease on life through the calling of Astrith. She had administered the healing touch herself, a dangerous ritual that threatened the life of the healer as well as the sufferer. It was for that reason that such a hazardous incantation was performed more than once every few years.

It was quite a surprise, then, that it would happen twice in the same night.

The priestess thrust her arm into the air, her metal-shod fingers holding aloft a curved, bladed weapon that many noted with curiosity was made of wood.

It was a blade of her own creation that she dubbed, through the languages of her mixed heritage, the khopesh.

As one, four of the riders behind her raised their own blades into the air, these being far more traditional, double-bladed and made of metal. Two other riders – one swathed in a black robe, the other leaning exhausted on her back, simply continued to barrel forward.

The thick, gray patches of clouds above began to take on a darker hue as they rode forth; an unnatural dimming accompanied by a chorus of dread chitters, caterwauls and bellows in the distance. Coming around one last hill, the riders beheld a tremendous, black mass in the sky, undulating like a ball of serpents over the glen upon which hordes of fanged monsters would drop.

Clad in bright, fitted armor that complimented her feminine form, the priestess brought her horse to a stop and dismounted. No words, looks or gestures were exchanged any further as she, unhurried and with no sign of fear, stalked up to the edge of the glen, yards away from the horde. The four riders dismounted as well, following their general into the morass.

Each voice sang in a low hum behind her. The Scinta priestess then joined in, slowing her pace, and soon five female warriors stood in a motionless line, the swirling cloud of death just above them. At first, the hum was simply five well-trained human voices singing in unison, nothing more than a loss to the world of theater, if anything.

But it rose. It increased in pitch and timbre, and most especially in volume. It grew and grew at an impossible rate, sustained longer than the human capacity for exhaling could stand.

But still they sang. And as each voice rose, so did their swords, pointing higher until each blade was pointed directly at the Seed cloud. Neither the creatures in the sky nor on the ground seem to notice the almost deafening swell of the continuing hum. Amidst all this, the armored priestess began to quiet her voice, her face showing no strain, but her eyes glaring a burning intensity at the monsters above.

Her eyes grew incandescent, and energy radiated from her face, as if a sun had formed inside her. In one graceful movement, she turned her khopesh in her hands, raising the curved blade skyward.

She said something in ancient Tsadish that few alive could fluently speak.

"Leave my sky," she whispered.

The CRACK! that split the air shattered windows in Ambledon, which, for the benefit of those not local to the area, lies four leagues (or about 12 miles) away from Swallow's Cry. While thankfully no one was hurt, a number of the townsfolk, none of whom had witnessed the horror of the Seed firsthand, were quite alarmed to see the burning remnants of the creatures sailing through the sky and smashing into ash along their roofs.

The Sisterhood of the Scinta had, through devotion to the tenants and practices of their religion developed a spiritual sympathy with each other. Magical energies could be directed at a single member and focused through that woman. Doing so came at a price, specifically that all members participating would be temporarily exhausted due to the drain of their resources.

Which, of course, was why the sisters brought swords.

The wraiths, serpents and other monsters, knocked flat from the blast and woozily recovering, had just seconds to clear their jostled perceptions before their heads were smoothly lifted from their bodies.

Sister Sheena had trained as a surgeon. It was with reluctance that she had swung her axe, but noted the irony which she ignored the sounds of bodies being torn open, the spray of viscera all over her armor and tunic as eight irg-wraiths fell apart around her. Had she not had to desperately try and heal those the Seed had brutalized, she may not have become inured to the very horrors she was perpetrating.

The carnage was not as unwelcome to Sister Patricia. Slick entrails virtually rained down around her was she swung her kombahr – a huge mallet with a curved blade at the end of the shaft – at the horde, sending some hurdling into eternity while gutting others. Given her size and strength, it was typically expected that the towering Rathi giantess in her dark, foreboding armor would relish the bloodshed.

In fact, she was rather indifferent to it. Her real hobby was gardening.

"On your side, Gertrude," she said in her husky growl.

The cackling, elderly warrior behind her threw her arms about in movements that the uninitiated would see as random, wild gesticulations from a clearly senile old woman who, bizarrely, seemed to be dancing into a field of the fang-bearing creatures charging at her from her left side.

"Ancient feets and crippled knees

keeps one from flight and one from flee

one grasps one's bottles without stall …"

Wrinkled fingers, unprotected by any form of armor, whipped a glass bottle out of a large bag slung around her shoulder. The black fluid inside incongruously glowed with a quiet menace.

"Make them kindling, one and all!"

The explosion that followed was not as loud as the one that destroyed the Seed cloud, but then, it didn't need to be – the spell Sister Gertrude had hissed upon the potion she tossed at the creatures halted their threat – and their lives – entirely, leaving nothing but a crater in their wake. Her raucous laughter rang loud as she landed roughly on her back, several yards away.

The priestess trod evenly behind the other women, who had fanned out to clear a path toward the swarming Seed monsters up ahead. She quietly regained her strength as young Siobhan darted around her, eviscerating groups of the attacking beasts at once. These were not creatures smart enough to deduce the nuances of their opponents, and so Siobhan's talents were somewhat wasted; hundreds of hours spent learning dozens upon dozens of fighting styles, practiced upon volcanic rock, frozen river, and soggy marsh alike, just to be spent on a foe too stupid to appreciate just how deadly she was.

Well, not totally unappreciated. The priestess was certainly grateful for her young pupil's diligence. It gave her time to conserve her strength, for certain, but also allowed her to clear her head for the challenge she knew was forthcoming.

A challenge that had nothing to do with the collection of irg-wraiths that had covered the small cottage she was approaching.

As she stepped closer, the irg-wraiths began to notice her presence. They hissed and barked at her, slime spewing from their snouts as a few dropped away from their spot on the house. Each one shifted their weight from one hoof to the other, surrounding the Scinta priestess in a predatory dance.

She came to a stop. A perfectly calm, unflinching stop. It was not something the demon-beasts expected. It was even less anticipated on their part to see the woman they were preparing to tear apart deliberately remove her helmet, revealing a bob of raven-black hair. It landed with an unceremonious thud at her feet.

One of the braver wraiths edged forward to inspect his prey.

CHUNCH! The priestess kicked, and her helmet went flying into the wraith's face, crushing its snout and sending its fangs flying. Before its cohorts knew what was happening, the woman pivoted and sent her kopesh swinging in a circle. The blade was the focus of a daily meditation ritual and had been imbued with power since it was carved. The creatures it came into contact with erupted, their intestines bursting up through their skulls in a rush to exit their confinement.

Those creatures that had not been preternaturally disemboweled were temporarily blinded by both the innards of their brethren and a silvery powder that the priestess tossed upon them from a pouch on her belt. What started as digging at their eyes to restore their sight became flailing their extremities to curtail their suddenly being on fire.

"Burning," hummed the priestess, and the flames from the burning powder sprang higher, roasting their hellish fuel sources to cinders.

More Seed monsters had hopped down from the house to attack or escape, but by then it was too late. The priestess had turned her focus and her powders on them, roasting them alive in the process.

Notably, the little cottage remained unburned.

It had hardly been a few minutes between the charge of the horde at the cottage and the arrival of the Scinta sisters. Their attack on the Seed seemed like less time than that, and not partly because Sister Sheena had tossed a cursing elixir on a gaggle of the beasts. It was just an experimental thing, but it seemed to be doing the trick: around them, many of the irg-wraiths and serpents were slowing, collapsing, and gargling their own guts as their insides began to liquefy. It had been unknown if the Seed could suffer from illness, but Sheena's cursing potions had a long history of success – not that she ever wished to employ it. Until today.

The scores of Seed in the air and on the ground had been reduced to scattered clutches fleeing into the mountains. Those that were not dead were painfully dying.

It was not lost on the women that it would be particularly difficult to convince future generations that such a terrible onslaught had been stopped, and its forces eradicated, by a team of three priestesses, an acolyte and a crazy old woman. Were they to see the half-acre of dead Seed bodies that surrounded them, they would feel differently.


The kitchen was completely black. There had been an attempt to light a candle, but the rushed activity about the room blew it out, and so now, the room's two occupants – one crouched in increasing agony from prior wounds, the other lying next to him, barely hanging on to consciousness – were shrouded in darkness, waiting for the waves of monsters on the other side of the heavily barricaded wall to come bashing through. While Gerald held his wrist-blade at the ready position, Helga struggled to grasp her blade in her battle to stay conscious. If today was going to be their last day alive, they would not die alone.

The entire cottage had shuddered with an explosive sound that Gerald hadn't heard in the worst of thunderstorms, followed thereafter by several more concussive blasts. He eyed the haphazard reinforcement warily – none of his experiences with the Seed involved explosions. What new mayhem was this?

Why is it suddenly growing so quiet outside?

Helga's ragged breathing, while reassuring him that she yet lived, provided no answers, and while a new question of whether or not he should peek outside and see what was happening began to intrude on his pondering, he found it a strangely welcome dilemma. Anything to keep from wondering how Arnold was faring was an agreeable distraction.

BOOM! Another rumbling shock, this one smaller, but right at the house. Gerald threw himself over Helga's prone form as chunks of furniture flew at them. The heavy kitchen table was smashed in half and the door was rendered an unidentifiable pile of splinters.

The sight of this sudden destruction was almost as shocking as the fact that every last piece of newly made debris was hovering soundlessly in the air, inches away from Gerald's head.

This sort of phenomenon was impressive, but not new to him. Gerald sprang from his position and had both his sword and wrist-blade ready to thrust into the attacking horde.

The huge, hammer-bearing woman who stepped through the gaping hole in the wall, however, was a not a horde. His instincts froze him in place as he looked up – very up – at the warrior before him.

Her massive weapon held at the ready in hands large enough to crush his skull, her face almost entirely obscured by her helmet, save for the intense, baleful eyes bearing down upon him, she stood like the very image of doom amongst the pulverized remains of the wreckage which stood as herald to her lethal strength.

"I come in peace," she said.

Gerald placed himself firmly between the armored woman and Helga. "Peaceful callers knock first," he said. He reflexively switched to a charging stance, his sword held level with his eye line – something moved just beyond the mountain of a woman facing him. "Hold there," he shouted, "In the name of the king, show yourself!"

The priestess emerged from behind Patty, hands empty and weapons sheathed in a show of respect that even Gerald realized she didn't have to show. She moved with the deceptive grace of a panther, calmly standing next to the giantess, her eyes trained on him, large, gentle, hazel eyes, a pair of ground-glass lenses – "glasses", she called them – resting on the bridge of her nose.

Phoebe.

Gerald couldn't bring himself to speak. The bespectacled priestess and previous meaning of his life approached him, gently touched his arm, and asked, "Helga?"

Gerald wordlessly gestured toward Helga, whose eyelids were fluttering at that point. Phoebe was at her side immediately, whispering incantations between evenly-voiced pleas to stay awake. "Sheena!" she called, and the healer with green-tinted, golden tresses ran into the room.

Sheena lit in front of Helga, on her knees, bottles and bandages already being pulled out of her satchel. She began work on the fading sorceress, massaging her energy points and cleaning the dried blood from her hands and forearms.

"She's gone," Sheena whispered.

"What?" Gerald cried, but saw that Helga's chest was still rising and falling.

Sheena cast a quick glance at Phoebe. "The beasts came after her. So, she dismounted and …"

She handed Phoebe something; a large necklace studded with odd-looking jewels. Gerald couldn't make out what it was from his position, but it was certain Phoebe could – her expression had melted into a blank stare.

She looked to Gerald. "Who else was here?"

He knew it wasn't the time to explain the how's and why-for's. "Arnold. You remember, the blacksmith's son. He was-"

"Where is he?" she demanded.

How this woman was able to make him stammer after all these years was a mystery to him. "Th-the woods! Helga made him … fly out of here when the horde attacked. She said there was a cave in the woods –"

A horrible, unearthly, piercing howl came from somewhere outside the house. Phoebe snatched up the necklace and tore out of the cottage, her only words being, "With me! Now!"

The giantess fled after her. Gerald would not let his confusion stall him. He ran out after the women as they headed towards the forest at the edge of the glen. "What was that?" he yelled at them. "The Seed?"

"No," said Phoebe, drawing a rope out of her satchel. "One of our own."