The poets, whose words are like waves over cliffs, are always ready to employ the notion of fate and dress it in fancy language. They say everything is connected with invisible strings, flowing from the stars and reaching to the smallest speck of dirt – like a rock kicked by a child is bound to roll away, the child too was compelled to kick by powers unseen. We are but puppets under the will of Ariuth, whose reveries harden into matter under the moon. Wise is the man who lets him be guided by it, so they say.
***
Keuril, who instead used words like one would salt, had a different opinion, and he happened to share it exactly once, to a jongleur, during the little time they spent together hiking the trail that goes from the ruined Amenti through the mountains of Thernopsi into Zorok-thaR. Keuril told him that poets believe that everything was connected because they are used to handling the pen, to scribbling fluently word into word, rather than the sword, whose only job is to divide. Limb from body, wife from man, king from kingdom. A poet’s job is to fashion a story from the facts, making use of all sorts of reasons and lies — A warrior’s job is only in the facts themselves.
“Where the edge of my sword ends, that’s where the enemy begins. Nobody who’s held a sword in combat believes in fate.”
“Don’t the warriors of Bain Kukh always pray before battle?” retorted the poet. Morfran was his name, and he died the morning after, when he and Keuril were ambushed by a migrating gang of Swallow-Men. One of them clawed into Morfran’s guts and sank his beak into his neck before Keuril could slice it in half and send the rest of the flock away. Keuril didn’t stop to bury him.
***
“The Bain Kukh pray as a show for others so that their people might trust Ariuth is on their side and that the enemy might be foolish enough to believe it.”
To Morfran, who fled Amenti after sleeping with a nobleman’s wife, Keuril told his whole story, chiefly to shut him up, a loquacious man if there were ever any, and also in the hope, secret even to Keuril himself, that one day Morfran would sing his name in a tavern.
Keuril told of how he had no name to speak of beside the one his adopted father gifted him and how he had made a name for himself as a sellsword in the Zoroktharian Wars. He had been among the Bain Kukh soldiers and then turned on them to shed their blood as the tide of gold shifted from side to side. He fought against armored behemoths and slayed more men than he could recount. He was there when Zorok-ThaR fell, and the Immortal Synarch was found to be mortal after all – although Keuril decided to leave out which side he was on at that particular moment in history.
Mofran looked at the hulking man walking beside him like one would a great beast – as the light of the torch he carried danced on the mail of Ramithian metal and highlighted the features of his face, he couldn’t help but think that Keuril looked like one of the great colossi that they say adorn the palace of Rhungdar. Save for one thing: his right hand, which, from what Morfran could see in the darkness, looked like it had been crushed under heavy rocks.
***
“I suppose these are great times for a sellsword, with the advance of the King of Spring, old alliances crumbling, and nobles scrambling to keep their fiefdoms.”
“I’m not fighting for anybody now,” Keuril said, with a sudden hesitation, yet the tide of the conversation seemed unstoppable. Something in the sweet stillness of night, Morfran’s clever tongue or something hidden in the soul of Keuril, compelled him to continue that discussion. Maybe it was the hand of Ariuth.
Morfran, for his part, couldn’t help but pry. “May I inquire why? Is it, if I’m not too bold, the state of your hand that keeps you from fighting?”
“I’m perfectly capable of picking up a sword. But it kills only for me now.”
“A man with a mission. I suppose there’s a certain nobility to it, as opposed to mercenary work.”
“Killing is killing.”
“Yet if it were so, you would be content in killing for money.” Morfran smiled.
“I have to guess there’s something the sellsword values more than money.”
“Revenge,” said Keuril. There it was, the unwanted yet inevitable revelation.
***
They came to a clearing, and it looked fit to set up camp. They rested around the fire, and Morfran offered Keuril a bit of Amentian aquaforte, presumably stolen from the cuckold noble’s house – a bit of liquid warmth to melt Keuril’s insides.
“Pray tell, since we’ve come this far and fate may make it that we never speak again, who’s the unfortunate man who you have promised the cold kiss of the blade?”
“The one they call the King of Spring,” said Keuril.
Silence deep as an abyss interjected between them for a long instant.
“They say no one can defeat the King of Spring,” said Morfran. “Every army they send against him shatters like glass, and once the battle has ended, the shards turn their coats and fight for him too.”
“I don’t need an army. A sword is all that I need.”
“If that was sufficient, he’d have died a long time ago. Like anyone who tries to bend the world to his will, I’m sure he’s made a lot of enemies.”
“And lots of friends. The land is full of people waiting for the King of Spring to deliver them.”
Keuril thought back to the times when he called the King of Spring friend, when he called him by his real name. They had bled together and survived together. Until…
“I understand anger, believe you me,” said Morfran, “as far as passions go, it’s one of the more useful. Love makes you listless, and grief rots the soul. Anger turns your whole life into a point, clear and precise. Like the cut of a blade.”
And after another swig of liqueur, after which the bottle was empty, Morfran fell asleep. Keuril was kept awake by the memories, years contracted into days, bright like ever.
***
And now they were so close. Coming down the mountain, Keuril could see the flying war-bastion of the King of Spring – that menacing cupola of stone and metal, hovering some feet over the land, like a titanic kite lifted into sluggish buoyancy by arcane magic forgotten by most.
For a moment, Keuril for a moment imagined the King of Spring, somewhere in the belly of the beast, alerted by whatever eldritch instinct of his presence. Would his heart skip a beat? But maybe his gaze was directed at the last stand of the Bain Kukh, traversing the large limestone plateaux in their gold and black armor to meet him there – a bold gesture, a mass suicide imposed on them by the cowards that lord over them. Maybe they both were just small nuisances for the King of Spring, too insignificant to draw his attention to them.
***
The Zoroktharian held that long before the age of the written word, hidden beneath their land, a great power resided, whose nature was long forgotten. Zorok-ThaR means “Land of the Gods.” When the Immortal Synarchy ended, voices spread among the great scribes, old and rotten men prone to fantasies, that the location of such treasure had been revealed. Whether from a dream, from sacred scriptures, from the delirium of a syphilitic man, it mattered not – the faithful will believe.
Desperation breeds insanity, and if you’ve got enough coin, you’re free to indulge in your madness. Even at the end of everything.
***
That was why Keuril and his band were contracted to open the way to the Treasuries of Light, as the scribes came to call the place, and retrieve any information or item that seemed to hold power. They were sent to enter an otherwise unassuming edifice, an old unadorned cabin at the western ends of the Zorok-thaR empire; the locals called it Aaru and didn’t seem to pay it any mind. It was just there, as it had always done.
Blim, the massive Klyrith, pushed with his whole bull body the stone door, and, after a few seconds of sweat and grunts, it opened. First to enter was Raud, the one who gave Keuril his name and the strength to make that name count a little. He had done so hundreds of times, collecting orphans and giving them a chance to pay back the world in blood. He did it with Jeu, even if his minute stature didn’t portend great might in battle; Jeu made it up in wit. He had done so with Korellja, who became the most lethal woman in Zorok-thaR. And of course, Raud had done the same with Corr.
***
The insides looked just as unassuming as the outside, a square stone room of maybe 30 feet, eroded by time, adorned only by a tile floor with four columns on each corner and a small altar at the center of it.
“This is not exactly what I pictured when they called this place the Treasuries of Light,” said Keuril.
“I hope we’re getting paid just the same,” whispered Korellja in Keuril’s ear.
Jeu proposed that maybe they had followed the wrong directions. “There must be many of these kinds of places in the land.”
Raud shushed them all off. “This is the place. We will turn over every stone, and if we return home empty-handed, so be it.”
***
So they did. They checked the walls and knocked on the columns to seek for secret levers. Blim tried to move the altar, but it wouldn’t budge. Raud was just about to call the expedition off, when Corr spoke.
“You all, be quiet for a second.” He put his ear on a tile in the middle of the room. “There’s air coming from down here.”
Blim took out his hammer and smashed the floor, revealing a narrow flight of stairs vanishing into the darkness below. Torches in hand, the band descended.
The stairs seemed to draw an infinite spiral thrust into the heart of the world. The walls of the Aaru gave way to gaps from which one could see nothing but darkness, transforming the entrance to a dungeon into a tower keeping watch over a subterranean gaping void. When suddenly there wasn’t a step to follow the previous, Raud’s band found themselves in what seemed to be a long corridor, illuminated by red lamplights every so often, which shone over strange statues depicting what could only be forgotten deities. A cold and musty wind enveloped them.
“I wonder if it wouldn’t have been wise to bring the horses down here,” said Keuril.
“You like the idea of trudging back up holding a leash?” said Raud, and turned around to see the stairwell they descended was so far behind it had been swallowed by the dark.
***
A low grumbling, a tremor coursing through the floor, and then an avalanche of beastly flesh ran towards them from the end of the corridor. They weren’t like the tribal beast men that dwell in the shadows of caves and forests – they were something altogether more primal and terrifying. They were many but they moved as one. A glob of claws and fangs, clay statues left unfinished by their craftsman, over which the sun had never shone, fueled by a grudge so ancient it had slipped from their now unthinking minds and into their sinews.
“What are those things?”
“We’ll find out once they lie dead,” shouted Raud, and he jumped in front of the incoming enemy. Sword and hammer, Keuril and Blim followed him, and they held back the biggest part of the wave, slashing and crushing that mushy flesh, while the Korrelja, Jeu, and Corr dealt with whatever ghoul slipped past them. It was hard to see what these creatures had in common besides their ferocity. There were mantis-like claws sprouting over giant raptor bodies, roars coming from mare-like creatures, and tigers whose stripes were etched in scales rather than furs. A feathered serpentine creature coiled around Keuril’s leg and dragged him into the writhing mass. He screamed. Corr flashed his sabre and cut the ophidian aberration in half, who then convulsed back into the darkness.
“I never thought I’d be the one saving you,” he said, helping Keuril get up.
“I guess we’re almost even now,” Keuril responded while getting back into the fray.
And blow after blow, the band butchered those awful beasts, leaving on those ancient floors an even more confused mess of limbs and appendages, seeped in blood, but now completely still.
“Never saw anything like this before,” said Korrelja.
“I’m betting that no one living has seen anything like that,” said Jeu.
***
They plodded along the path, wary of every crackle and snap that echoed through it, until a gargantuan chamber opened before them. The air was rarefied instantly, as if the pressure wasn’t enough to keep it close in one place.
“How tall are these vaults?” asked Jeu, and the sound of his voice was overwhelmed by the reverb; as soon as it left its mouth – it seemed as if the void ate it. As they went deeper into the room, to them it looked like they weren’t in a room at all, just on a vast plain under a moonless sky.
“Still nothing that can be called a treasure in sight,” said Korrelja.
And having said that, from the unmeasured vast before them, a shimmer of light pierced through the darkness, quaking like a star in an astigmatic eye. They watched it silently float towards them, brought on by unseen waves, until the distance closed, and it was revealed that two winged beings, cadaveric angels flapping their rotten wings, held it ceremoniously in their hands.
“The crowning of a new king is a time of celebration,” a voice roared from the deep, and the darkness of that enormous vault gave way to a deep shade of crimson, revealing a throng of monstrosities encircling Raud and his men. A number so vast that all the stars in the clearest night sky seemed a scant group – countless eyes glowing with inhuman hostility.
“What’s going on?” Keuril asked.
“It’s not our business to find out. Retreat!” ordered Raud, but turning back, he watched in fear as the way they came swarmed with grotesque aberrations.
“We’ll fight our way out!” shouted Keuril. And bravely, they ran towards the enemy.
“Everything is in its place,” declared the voice of the deep again, with a slimy and delighted tone.
***
And with the desperation that comes from having one’s back against the wall, they fought. Screeches and hisses pierced the air as Raud and Keuril made their way, chopping away with their swords like one would cut branches on a tree; Blim smashed his hammer into the brains of a giant reptile, bathing in its brain juice; Jeu slid across thousands of bestial limbs and slashed wherever his daggers could reach; Korrelja stood behind, bravely keeping away with her arrows as many enemies as she could from closing in. But not even the entire Bain Kukh army had enough arrows to keep the swarming pandemonium away – soon they were just a foot away. A giant slug lunged forward and, opening a gash in its gelatinous body, went to swallow Korrelja whole. In a split second, Corr grabbed her and put her out of harm’s way.
***
The undulating star, and the demons carrying it, floated closer and closer in the ancient heavy air suffused with with bestial blood.
***
Keuril cleaved through enough demonic flesh that he had opened a breach in the wall of demonic bodies, like he tore apart a flow of water only with the swing of his sword. Just for a moment, but enough for Raud to sound the retreat. Jeu jumped on the front with Blim panting behind him. Corr holding Korrelja by his side followed, and Keuril still swung his broadsword, which had all but lost its gleaming guise in the deep red of the creatures’ blood, before running away with them. They ran like they had never run on any retreat before – their muscles sustained only by fear and the hope of seeing the sun again.
“Where’s Raud?” shouted Keuril when they were just about halfway through the corridor, his voice barely audible over the hissing chaos still so close behind them.
But even if his voice were as loud as thunder, nobody could have answered. The troop looked towards one another, already knowing.
“Do not turn back!” shouted Korrelja. “We will mourn him when we’re safe.”
Keuril knew that was what Raud would have wanted. Nevertheless, he tossed Korrelja to the side and, collecting all the air still left in his lungs, he turned his feet back again and faced the darkness alone.
Was there hope to find Raud alive? Keuril wasn’t a fool, but neither was he so heartless as to leave without being certain that all hope was lost – Keuril had to at least see Raud slain, and if that meant he was to follow him in death, so be it.
“Isn’t it funny for a soldier of fortune to care about something other than money?” Corr joked, painting heavily. “Someone should see that you don’t get yourself in trouble.”
***
The demonic writhing mass still hissed from the back of the corridor, but instead of coming to meet Keuril and Corr it seemed to always stay at the same distance, no matter how fast they advanced, until when at the entrance of the gargantuan they were trapped just a while before, the beasts retreated and parted from side to side. They let them enter unharmed, like they were all following orders Keuril wasn’t aware of.
“Come, strugglers. Do not fear,” roared the disembodied voice. “You’re not to be killed by anyone else but the King.”
***
And upon entering, Keuril and Corr were met by the sight of Raud held and hoisted by an ever-growing, shifting dune of flesh: bodies piling up on each other, rising up to reach the gleaming star above. They didn’t know what was happening, but one thing they knew. Raud was alive.
Keuril didn’t waste a moment. He grunted, and sword unsheathed, he ran like a wild beast. Corr couldn’t keep up. The beasts who had moved away for his entrance jumped up to stop him. Keuril fought. He lashed his sword blindly, cleaving everything in his path, but for how many limbs he severed and necks he cut, that many fangs and claws sank deep into his flesh, halting his bloody path. Soon he found himself unable to move. Almost blinded by blood, he gave one last look at Raud, who the demons had almost brought to what seemed his final destination.
***
With one last gasp, twitching every muscle he could still control, Keuril freed his right hand, its skin left hanging in the mouth of a beast, and with the last drop of strength, he threw it in the direction of the star.
Like an arrow it flew, and guided by some eldritch hand, it struck one of the angels. Washed in the blood spurting from the angel’s wound, the star, the scintillating gem they were bearing fell from their hands and it seemed like a comet tearing up the sky with its light.
***
The middle finger on Corr’s open hand, taut and stretched, the skin just a hair distant from the gem, now less than a hair, an infinitesimal amount of space, a fateful gap always already crossed, the awaited keystone to keep the arch of history standing in its right place. Now, it feels like every living thing is holding their breath.
It’s the entire story of the cosmos compressed into a point, refracted into Corr’s mind in coruscating light – it engulfs him, and he dissolves into it, with the weight of wax dropping from a melting candle. Who could have thought that death would have come so peacefully, a gentle dissipation into deep waters until what’s left are just a few bubbles that pop without a sound.
But the king only dies a mock death. His vernal title is not for nothing – the King of Spring ever birthing himself anew. A body of fire, from the fingernails to the eyelashes, a body fit to sit on the throne. And they’re asking so little of Corr. A promise and a cruel decree, whispered in musty air, carried from beyond the stars.
That’s where they came from, with dark veiled schooners sleepsailing silently into the void, falling into time, like one tumbles when playing leapfrog. Should’ve seen it, the virgin cosmos: a white unblemished parchment. And a speck of light, not unlike this one, or maybe this one exactly, who can say, kept in black hands to hatch like an egg.
The first sound was theirs, the first moan under a newly minted moon, and so everything fell into place – all at once there was everything and will ever be. For the King of Spring and his new eyes every instant is present at the same time.
***
There have been other moments like this, when an old friend strikes to kill. Keuril swings the blade. Now at Corr; now at the King of Spring. He has cut through the armor, just enough for Corr to feel warmth pour out, and it surprises him to know that there is still blood in you. The saber meets his two-hander, and the same song comes on loudly, brought on by the clanking of metal and the rush of horses, storming over the soldier’s prayers shared in a foreign language. The captain shouts his order, reminding everyone that if Ariuth’s watching he still comes second in command to him. Time has stopped for Corr, when the thorns have grown around his heart and punched through it so that the cosmos could pollute it. We’re still there, in the Treasuries of Light, where the Outer Gods put their power to rest, where they seeded this world with the germ of rebirth. Have you touched it yet, Corr? Has that gap closed, or you’re still reaching, almost frozen? Do you still hear the voice in the taverns? Jeu is telling a really vulgar story, the one with whores, who always follow wherever war goes, even if men take violence with them to the brothel. Jeu has told this joke many times but it’s so funny even Blim can’t help but laugh, and Korrelja’s eyes are daubed with wist knowing Raud has saved her from being the unlucky character in some other soldier’s joke, that her sword meant she had the capacity to wound men instead of only soothing them. He didn’t save her from being sacrificed in a forgotten pit at the ends of the earth.
Raud found Corr languishing in a dungeon for petty thievery, and he entered the prison like a liberator king enters a city – that is to say like someone who exists only in fables, and such he seemed to Corr up until he had to pierce his heart with the sword he had gifted him. Then, Corr’s name fell differently from Raud’s mouth, different from the first time it was said. He didn’t seem a king anymore when his corpse was offered as a present to the forces beyond man. So fell Blim and Korrelja and Jeu, all of them a feast for the demons, all of them except Keuril. He is still fighting now in the Treasuries, now in the war-bastion hovering over Zorok-thaR right before the last battle. Swallowed by hate, rebirthed as a new person and baptized by rage, He still swings his blade.
But now Morfran, who’s dead only in fiction and alive in faith, who as Ariuth spins every yarn before every deed is even done, has to cease his singing, suspend the story and let the ending hang for a minute, or years, or centuries…
Dedicated to Kentaro Miura.
— Vin likes to write and to listen to music. He also has got a substack he someday plans to write something for. Follow him on X @pinealbrand