Firebrand

“Let me out! I can’t stand it. Let me out!”

Lorilie couldn’t turn all the way around to see who was shouting, but she thought it sounded like Em. “Let us be calm, my friends,” she said in an effort to prevent full-blown panic.

It was not easy to convince them, chained together as they were, and anchored in this malignant chamber waiting for who-knew-what to happen.

“We have already endured so much,” Lorilie said. “We can endure anything Grandmother puts before us.”

Binning kept muttering to himself. There were sniffles and more sobbing, but no more panicked outbursts. A hiss drew her attention back to the seal in time to witness Grandmother’s sphere dissolving upon it. Some of the odd symbols moved more frantically, racing across the metal surface. A black viscous fluid began to ooze from the remains of the sphere and across the shining steel, swallowing the symbols. She could hear howls emanating from beneath the seal that turned her cold. Inhuman, they were. The panic started to build again, the weight of the earthen chamber closing in around her. Her own breath grew ragged.

The fluid now engulfed the top surface of the seal. It seeped over its edges, translucent with the hue of dried blood. A twisting, tortured groan arose from the metal, and the sound of hammer blows came from beneath it. A crack formed across the blackened seal and widened. It was as though all the world had gone still, silent, waiting. Lorilie heard not a breath, not the faintest flick of an eyelash.

She was not sure if her eyes were playing tricks on her, but dark mist appeared to rise through the crack. Her fellow captives shifted, cried. Binning struggled, yanking on the chains that bound them.

“Be brave, friends,” Lorilie wanted to shout, but it came only as a whisper, for at that moment, a clawed, scaled hand reached up through the seal’s crack, and a wave of despair crashed so violently into her she thought she would drown.

Zachary’s forces had broken through the ranks of Second Empire to face those who guarded the keep. They were sorely outnumbered, but he led the charge into the clearing. Gore clung to his sword as he raised it above his head for his soldiers to rally around and follow, and follow him they did, roaring all the way.

Arrows descended in the dark from guards on the curtain wall loosing at will, and blindly through the snow and dark. Zachary’s soldiers fell around him. He rushed heedlessly toward the wall and the enemy that loomed in the squall.

Donal and Rye tried to race before him, but they labored to keep up. Zachary caught the smashing blow of an enemy sword on his buckler, and deftly maneuvered his sword beneath the man’s guard and disemboweled him.

He did not pause, but moved on to the next defender, who was armed with only a cudgel. Down he went. The joy still burned in Zachary, and he laughed as his sword swept across the neck of another. There was only the snow and the killing, until he heard a familiar voice, a distinctive gravelly voice, shouting orders from near the wall. He angled his attack in that direction, thrusting his sword into a soldier engaged with Rye and then stepping over the body. He went on to the next, and the next after that. He had turned feral, as untamed as the wind that rushed around him.

He glimpsed the shape of Immerez urging his soldiers on, but there were so many swords cutting through the falling snow between them. Instead of being deterred, the fire in his blood rekindled, and with a savage cry, he charged sword first, slashing and knocking soldiers out of his way with his buckler.

And then, he halted. Everything, everyone, heaved to a stop, fell silent. Even the snow slowed as though each snowflake was suspended in motion. A darkening dread spread through the air. His steamy breaths blew flurries swirling away.

The pressure of the air split, and shapes darker than night blackened the veil of snow. Their screams pierced beyond the range of hearing. The sky was full of flapping, drifting terror that changed the pattern of the snowfall. The spaces around the combatants filled with a darkling mist, and creatures—entities of some kind—scuttled by, perceived if not seen. Soldiers cried out in terror on both sides.

What the hells? Zachary wondered.

Rye turned to him. “Sire, I think we should—” Some clawed thing ripped off the young man’s face, exposing jawbone and eye socket, before he could finish his sentence. He fell to the ground, and dark entities converged on him, jerking and tugging at his body. They slurped and gnawed in a frenzy of gluttonous feeding.

Zachary stabbed at the shadows, hit something that resisted the point of his sword, but he threw his weight into it and plunged the blade until it touched ground. The thing gurgled. He loosed his sword and plunged again and again until it stopped moving. He did so to the others that had clustered around Rye’s body.

When he finished, he saw Donal’s back to him, defending him from demons of the air. Yes, demons they had to be. Grandmother must have succeeded in opening the Aeon Iire, for what else could explain this?

The combatants no longer fought one another, but the dark beings that clawed and bit and feasted. A man dropped dead beside Zachary after he’d walked into a black mist. Zachary tried cutting at it, but it just continued drifting along and leaving corpses in its wake. How could they overcome mist?

He slashed through something skeletal, scattering bones, and fouled his blade in a winged creature that dove at him. A claw raked his shoulder, and only his breastplate saved him from worse. Fire lanced through the wound. Donal pivoted and killed the entity that scored him.

“I must get you away,” Donal said.

“How do you get away from this?” Zachary demanded. “They are everywhere.”