Faerie Knight 168

168 - Embers

I understand the words in my dreams, now.  They are an offer.  A bargain, to reclaim my birthright.

• The Journal of Decimus Avitus

☀

17th Day of High Summer’s Moon, AC 297

Awash in warm sunlight, Trist lay across a slab of ancient marble in the ruins of Vellatesia.  The warm breeze raised the fine hairs on his arms and chest, and his wounds stung, but those things were both very far away.  He looked at the world, and at his own wounded body, at the same distance from which one might view a tapestry or a window of stained glass.

His connection to Acrasia was broken; in any traditional sense, he was no longer an Exarch at all, and yet his sight had not departed him, and a diminished remnant of his core remained, pulsing a red so deep it was nearly darkness instead of light.

Carefully, he split his focus, leaving Clarisant behind with a wineskin that he hoped would be enough to save a life.  Outside the broken walls of Lutetia, he watched Lionel’s footmen charge through dirty water, thigh deep, while flights of arrows passed over their heads.  Morax, the bull-headed daemon that Trist had last seen during his escape from Cheverny, charged out of the city streets, head lowered, and gored a man on his horns before shaking the body aside.

That was fine: Margaret was there, riding a wave of seawater, a polearm in hand, and he could trust her to deal with it.  Lionel had used the Exarch of Rahab well, and the flooded ground played to her strengths.  Trist doubted there was anything in the city other than Avitus himself, and perhaps the abomination that had once been Camiel, that could stand against her while she held such an advantage.  He manifested a portion of himself atop a pillar of stone that stubbornly refused to collapse with the rest of the city walls, and waited for one of them to appear, with his sword in hand.

Before the gates of Maʿīn, Valeria du Champs d'Or held Ismet ibnah Salah in the air by her throat.  Trist manifested a portion of himself there, and swung his sword into the daemonic Exarch’s extended arm.  He felt so weak, with all the power from days upon moons of Tithes now suddenly absent from his muscles, but she did not see him until he was already mid cut.

Valeria cried out in pain and dropped Ismet to the ground, where the Caliphate Exarch heaved in a great breath.  “You!” Valeria snarled, backing away from Trist, clutching her bleeding arm.  He hadn’t been able to cut through the bone, not reduced as he was.

“Get up, Ismet,” Trist said.  “I cannot stay here long.”

“Trist?” Ismet gasped, and lurched to her feet.  

“I need to focus on Lutetia,” Trist said.  “That is where Avitus is.  Finish her.”  His attention left Maʿīn, and refocused on the battle around the flooded walls.  As the waters receded, dying fish flopped on the muddy earth.  Able to focus on Dame Margaret’s battle with Morax, again, he watched her dodge the bull-daemon’s charge and score a cut at the back of its leg, hamstringing the monster.  

The other Exarchs were in the thick of the fighting now, as well: Lorengel and Cynric astride their destriers, laying about with their swords at a few Kimmerian mercenaries who yet survived.  Bors was facing off against the raven-winged daemon with a sword, Cail, and as Trist watched, the Exarch of Masheth used his spiked flail to yank the monster’s weapon from out of his grasp.  

Further ahead, Sir Guiron was past the walls and cutting his way into Sir Moriaen’s reserves.  Most of the defending siege engines had fallen with the city walls, when Margaret’s great wave came, but the enemy commander had held back his scorpions, arranging them in the city streets to fire upon Lionel’s men as they advanced.  Once Guiron had forced his way into the reserves, he headed for the teams of engineers that manned the ballistae.

Trist saw all of this, and judged that he did not need to take action in those places.  Instead, he turned his attention from the ongoing battle to the Cathedral of Camiel.  The fragment of himself that had stood upon a lone pillar of stone vanished from the sight of mortal men, but it was not truly gone.  Instead, he simply shifted into the depths of the Cathedral, where he and the other Exarchs had encountered the abomination once before.

There, a man lay across the stones, ancient and withered.  Trist felt, as much as saw, that his musculata armor was too large for him, and only wisps of white hair decorated the bald skin of his head.  His face was wrinkled and spotted with age, but Avitus’ eyes burned with malice.

“I did not think you could do it,” the old man said, then broke into a fit of coughing.

“Sammāʾēl the Sun Eater is dead,” Trist said.  To his sight, the core within Avitus was still withering, and it was like watching a plant die over the course of many days, all sped into moments.  “Your Accord is broken, and you are an Exarch no more.”

“It isn’t fair,” Avitus spat.  “It was mine by right.  I am the son of the Emperor.”

“When I was helpless before you,” Trist told him, “you taunted me and ripped my eyes from my head.  You caged me.  Spiked Acrasia to a wall with iron, and beat Enid to the brink of death.  I hate to think what you must have done to your own daughter, to turn her into the monster she is today.”

“So what will you do?” Avitus croaked back.  “Pull out my eyes, for revenge?  It won’t help you.  I’ve already broken the seal.”

Trist shifted his awareness to the stone floor, where Lorengel had scraped sigils so many days before.  The sigils were now smeared with blood, and he saw that Avitus had cut his own palm open.  The wound was still bleeding, and must have been only minutes old.  

In the center of the room, the horror that had once been the Angelus Camiel was shackled by chains of moonlight.  As Trist watched, the dark of Avitus’ blood crept up the chains like spreading rust.

“No,” Trist said.  “You are a traitor and a monster, but I give you mercy.”  He lifted his sword, and struck the old man’s head off, then kicked it aside as he turned to face Camiel.

The monstrous Angelus’ core was darkened and mottled, shining out from within its chest, as lashes of white and gold, flecked with sickening black and gray, reached out toward Trist.  The horror spread wings of tarnished bronze, spotted with a sickly green patina.  The Angelus’ body looked starved, with a shrunken, concave stomach, famine-stricken ribs, and the bloated skin of a corpse that had been days in the water.  All three eyes fixed on Trist, black as the night that had fled with Sammāʾēl’s death.

Trist lifted his sword into high guard, and the corrupted chains shattered.  He lunged forward and cut, but the edge of his blade skittered off the bronze wings with a high pitched, scraping shriek that pained the ear.  

The abomination, in turn, barreled forward and flung Trist back with a mighty swipe of its arm.  Trist crashed into the stone wall of the tomb, and the stones broke beneath him, sinking him the width of two fingers into the crumpled wall.  He groaned, but the monster was already upon him, charging forward again, and this time with its lashes of fire clawing forward, grasping like fingers.

Trist withdrew his attention from the tomb beneath the cathedral, and instead appeared next to Bors.  The Exarch of Masheth was just yanking the spiked ball of his flail out of the shattered skull of the daemon Cail, but Trist did not have time to let the man use his new Tithes.  “Bors,” he said.  “I need you.  I need all of you.”

“Trist, lad,” Bors said, eyes wide, spinning to face him.  “We did not think to see you here.  How-”

“There is no time,” Trist interrupted.  “They’ve twisted Camiel into something monstrous.  It’s coming, and I need all of you to help me stop it.”

“Avitus?  The Sun Eater?” Bors asked, lifting a horn from where it hung at his side.

“Both dead,” Trist said, and the Exarch nodded.  Bors lifted the horn to his lips and blew, and a great blast rang out across the battle.  The older man sounded the horn again, and a third time, and then dropped it and cried out.

“Exarchs, to me!” Bors shouted.

Lorengel and Cynric were first, pushing their destriers forward and up out of the water onto the city streets.  “I see you did for that one, Bors,” Lorengel remarked, and then his eyes fastened on Trist.

“Sir Trist?  How are you here?”

A wave deposited Dame Margaret at the ruined base of the walls, and she ran up to them, while Guiron trotted back from the enemy siege engines, which were no longer firing.  “I’ve done for Moriaen,” Guiron declared.

“Trist!” Margaret cried out.  “You’re alive.  Did you do what you needed to do, in Vellatesia?”

“I did,” Trist said, unable to keep a smile from his face at being reunited with so many familiar faces.  “The Sun Eater is dead, the Gate of Horn destroyed, and I have killed Avitus as well.  There is only one enemy left on this field we need contend with, but it is the greatest of them.”

From the depths of the city, a crash sounded, and then a horrible wail, and all the Exarchs turned to look.  The roof of the Cathedral of Camiel was collapsing, broken blocks of stone raining down onto the streets around it.  Above the cathedral, the stained bronze wings of Camiel spread wide, and it gazed down upon the soldiers of friend and foe alike before diving at them, like a hunting hawk that has caught sight of its prey.

“They told us, but I could not imagine it,” Bors gasped.  “To think that something so holy should be twisted into such a monster.”

“I no longer have the strength to face it alone,” Trist admitted.  “I’ve given up nearly all my power to set Acrasia free.”

“We could not defeat it the last time,” Cynric said, and Trist could see that he was pale with fear, and the man’s eyes flicked down to his lost arm.  

“There were only four of us then,” Margaret shot back.  “And we were still weak from being imprisoned.  Now we are six, and recovered.”

“It does not matter how many we are,” Bors said.  “It is the last enemy before us, and we are the only ones who can fight it.  We destroy the monster now, however many of us it takes to do so.”

Trist smiled, and they exchanged nods before gripping their weapons.  “I will bring it down to you,” he said.  “Get ready.”  He refocused his attention, withdrawing from the group of Exarchs, and appearing in the sky with Camiel.  The abomination had plucked a soldier up, and fastened its whips of silver and gold fire about the man, drinking down the soul directly without need of an Exarch to Tithe for it.

Just as it dropped the corpse of its first victim, Trist fell onto it from above, plunging his sword into its back and then wrapping his arms and legs around it.  With a shriek, Camiel fell from the sky.  It tried to spread its wings to catch itself, but Trist did everything he could to tangle it with his limbs and prevent the monster from arresting its fall.  In the heartbeat before the once-Angelus hit the stones of the city streets, Trist withdrew his attention and allowed that portion of himself to vanish.

Camiel hit the streets of Lutetia like a falling star, throwing an explosion of dust and fragmented stone up around it.  When the monster rose, shaking the dust from its wings, it stood encircled by five Exarchs, each with weapons in hand.  Trist’s attention refocused, and he joined their number, sword held up to his ear in Ox Guard.

“One more,” he said, suddenly weary.

“One more,” Bors repeated.

“Together,” Margaret said.

Camiel sprang at them.