Faerie Knight 163

163 - The Knight and the Dragon

I hear voices, in the night.  They speak to me of the gate, and how to open it, and what lies beyond.  

I hope my sister returns soon.

• The Journal of Decimus Avitus

☀

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

Trist sucked in a breath and tried to open his eyes, but found only darkness.

There was a ringing dullness in his ears that muffled sound, dust in his lungs, and for a moment he panicked, forgetting that his eyes had been ripped out weeks before.  When the memory returned, he made the mental shift required to see the world around him as the faeries did, and discovered that he was lying amidst a pile of rubble, the cellar that had once held the Gate of Horn now strewn with broken rock.

Above, in the city itself, Acrasia screamed.  Though every piece of his body hurt from the explosion of blue fire, Trist rolled onto his hands and knees and felt about for the hilt of his sword.  Once he had it in hand, he opened a burning portal in the air, just in front of him, and launched himself through.

The motion threw him out above the Sun Eater’s massive bulk, and Trist swung his sword to point downward as he fell.  Below him, Acrasia’s shadows had been torn to pieces, leaving her defenseless against the black-winged daemon.  Sammāʾēl had pinned her to the ruined streets of Vellatesia with its left foot, the claws piercing the faerie’s whipping strands of fire.

When he hit the scaled ridges of the daemon’s back, Trist used the momentum of the fall to drive his longsword down with both hands.  A single scale chipped and broke, allowing the tip of the blade to skitter off the monster’s vulnerable hide, drawing stinking black ichor that welled up from the wound.  Immediately, Trist’s Daemon Bane Boon lashed out from his core, causing the Sun Eater’s flesh to blacken and curl, as if it was a dry and withered leaf that had been set aflame.

Sammāʾēl threw its massive head back, twisting the long, serpentine neck about so that its eyes locked on Trist.  Then, jaws wide to reveal fangs as long as a grown man was tall, the monstrous head shot forward, fast as a striking adder.  Trist rolled to the side, through a sparking portal that opened with but a thought, and emerged onto the broken street just within reach of Acrasia.  He lunged forward and made a rising cut into the outermost toe of the daemon, chipping another scale.

As Trist had hoped, the monstrous creature recoiled in surprise and pain, lifting its foot and allowing Acrasia to crawl away.  “Into the sword!” Trist shouted to her, and had just enough time to see the faerie dissolve her corporeal form before he was moving again.

“Small creature,” the daemon roared, loud enough that Trist’s ears ached.  The stinking breath of the thing swept the street like the first wind on the edge of a foul storm, tossing dust and dead leaves out in every direction.  “Insignificant.  Foolish.  Presumptuous.”  Each word carried with it the reek of rotting meat.

It reared up, and Trist tumbled through another portal, emerging just beneath the daemon’s chin.  He plunged the tip of his blade into the underside of the neck, where the scales were not as thick, and felt the first hand of the tip catch.  Trist’s weight dragged the blade down with him, scoring its way through half a dozen scales before finally slipping free.  He opened another portal, and fell through it just before the Sun Eater’s clawed foot swiped through the space where he had been.

Trist emerged behind Sammāʾēl’s rear legs, on the left side, and chopped at the vulnerable tendons in an attempt to hamstring the daemon.  Again, a scale chipped, blackened, and burned away at the touch of his sword.  Black blood slickened the length of his blade, now, and Trist took a moment to flick the longsword out to his side, sending gobs of ichor flying before they could roll down and soak his hand.  He was worried about losing his grip over the course of an extended battle.

The pause was just enough of a distraction, however, that it left him open.  The Sun Eater’s tail whipped through the air with terrifying speed, making a crack that Trist immediately recognized from his training with Auberon.  The tail caught Trist across the middle of his torso, deforming his cuirass with an audible crunch, throwing him off his feet entirely and flinging him backward through the air.  Trist had a moment to wonder if this was what it would feel like to be hit by a siege ram, and just enough awareness to open a yawning portal behind his body before he could hit a half-fallen stone wall.

Instead, he tumbled out of a sparking gate onto a mostly clear street, then rolled half a dozen times before landing on his back.  Trist’s breath came in wheezes, every inhalation shot through with a sharp pain from his sides.

“Broken ribs,” Acrasia said, suddenly there next to him and not inside the sword.  She got her hands in between the plates of his armor and found the buckles, clawing at them frantically until she got them loose.  Together, they tore the deformed plate of metal off and threw it aside.

Finally, Trist felt like he could get a breath, though his ribs did not cease to pain him.  Perhaps two city blocks away, a terrible crash sounded, and a cloud of dust rose, picked out by the light of the stars above, and the white circle that marked where a sun should have been in the sky.

“It was smart to get yourself away for a moment,” Acrasia said, her hand still on his shoulder.

“Had to,” Trist said, with a cough.  His mouth tasted of coppery blood, but he could not stop now.  “It will find us, soon.”

“All the more reason to get away from here,” Acrasia pressed him.  “Make a portal out.  Get us back to Auberon, or to Lutetia.  The other Exarchs will need you there.”

“No,” Trist said.  “The Marian Codex said that Sammāʾēl cannot keep its hold on the sun when it is unable to concentrate.  I need to stay here and press it, until the sun returns.”

“Trist, no,” Acrasia said, ducking as a wave of dust and grime shot out from the fall of more ruins, only a block away.  “This thing will kill us!  This is a fight for someone like Auberon.  It already almost had me once.  I don’t want to die here.”

“Then go,” Trist said.  “I release you.”

“-what?” Acrasia asked, her eyes wide.

“I promised,” Trist said, forcing his aching body upright and getting his feet beneath him.  “That after the Gate was destroyed, I would let you go.  That I would not tie you to me.  We have both caused each other much pain, Acrasia, but I still remember the little girl who was my only real friend.  Take your Tithes and go.  Take my Boons and go.  Do not die here.”

“If you do this,” Acrasia said, as still as a deer who has spotted the hunter, “it cannot be undone.”  Behind her, the wings of the monstrous Sammāʾēl spread, a jagged patch of night blotting out the stars overhead.  It rose into the sky, and its attention fell on them.

“I know,” Trist told her, raising his sword again and setting himself into a High Guard.  “I once swore to protect you, Acrasia,” he screamed against the wind kicked up by the descending daemon.  “Go now.  I will hold it here.”

Something bright snapped, and fell away, leaving Trist unburdened.  The broken oath, he understood, and smiled.  Acrasia disappeared, leaving only the descending monster, as large as a castle falling down upon him.  

In the moment before the Sun Eater hit, all the color drained out of Trist’s world: the vibrant white, yellow and orange fires that swirled around his core guttering and dying, like a doused flame.  The darkness of unnatural night ceased to be a gauzy curtain through which he could see, and instead became impenetrable, as Auberon’s Boon left him, along with all the others.

And yet, something remained.

Perhaps it was as Auberon had said; perhaps there was something of two mothers in him, the mortal woman who had carried him in her womb for nine moons, and also the daemon whose power had soaked into Trist from the moment of his conception.

Just before Sammāʾēl fell to crush him, Trist moved.

He did not appear in two places at once, as he had when protecting his wife far to the north, in the city of Basilea.  There could hardly be said to be any of him left at all, as everything Trist was scattered out in every direction, flying apart and yet somehow not perishing.

The sight that had not dimmed, that did not require eyes of flesh and blood, fragmented into a dozen places simultaneously.  A dozen shimmering forms, none more or less real than any other, appeared around the daemon as it hit the broken stones of the street.

From the rear, Trist sliced out the tendons just above the daemon’s heel.  There was no humming strength gifted by the faeries, and no curl of invisible flame to scorch Sammāʾēl’s flesh, but a spurt of ichor jetted out nonetheless.

Beneath the neck, Trist made a rising cut, vertically up where the scales were weakest, parting the monster’s hideous hide and drenching the street in a spray of foul black liquid.  To either side, half a dozen forms, each with a raised sword, plunged them down, piercing the membranes of each wing and pinning them to the ground.

Two swords, driven by four hands, came from either side of the great head, thrusting into the two eyeballs.  One eye was already scarred and milky, wounded moons before by the hand of Ismet ibnah Salah, but the other was bright until the moment steel entered.  The swords sunk to their very hilts, deep into the sockets and the skull behind.

At the rear of the head, a final sword descended, falling on the point where neck met skull.  It struck through scale and hide alike, sliding into the flesh beneath and then into the very brain stem of the monster.

For the space of a heartbeat, the world stood still.

Then, the carcass of the daemon fell, slowly at first and then with a great impact, bringing down every building on the street that was still standing.  The disparate parts of Trist reassembled with a shudder, and fell onto a great slab of marble, all that was left of some ancient statue or fountain.

Trist’s fingers uncurled, and his ichor-slick sword tumbled out of his hand, scraping down the length of the stone until it fell to the street below with the ring of metal on rock.  His limbs and muscles twitched, utterly out of his control, and his mind was too exhausted to exert any will or purpose over his own body.

Overhead, a shadow moved away from the sun, and a bright, shining crescent, slim as the blade of a sword, broke out of the darkness.  The sky began to lighten, now a muted steel-blue instead of the black of night, and the stars were muffled for the first time in weeks, made dim by the emergence of a greater light.

The ichor on Trist’s hands and arms, having soaked in through the plates of his vambraces and gauntlets, began to smoke, and he hissed in pain as his skin burned.  Desperately, he ripped off the pieces of armor, then his gambeson and shirt beneath, using the linen to wipe the ichor from his raw flesh.  Out of habit, he felt for his wine-skin, and then remembered that it would now be useless.

With every moment, light crept back into the world.  Somewhere, Trist knew, Claire would be seeing this, and King Lionel, Ismet, Yaél and Henry and all the rest.  Would they know what it meant?  Would they think him dead?

Alone in the ruined city, Trist watched the sun return.