It wasn't fair, and Vac Fadric would cry about that later. Looking about himself with a freshly awakened set of senses finally under his own control again, he knew he might cry about much later.
If there were to be a later time to cry in, he resolved to himself that he would not allow such glamours to ever steal his awareness and sense of self again.
They had played with his emotions, kept him from seeing the inherent dangers all around him. Now Vac Fadric was unprepared, unbalanced, and he half knelt in what he now saw plainly as an arena, next to a young woman as four corpses stood before them snuffling and scenting at the air about them like hungry hounds let off their leashes.
At a scuffling noise, he turned and saw the doors through which they had initially entered this grand, open killing field slowly closed as two more bodies were pushed through.
Corporal Klee rolled to a stop a single pace from the now closed stone doors. The other body to have been shoved through had not cleared the doors as they had made their final movement to seal themselves shut. There was a snapping noise. Several snapping noises, as though an entire bundle of kindling was being readied for the fire.
It sounded, from a distance, though much like twigs and small branches being crushed and being broken, it was mixed in with a wetter sound. Something of marshy ground, and moist movements. The far end of that sharp sound was then swallowed whole by the rising scream of Private Tarhill. His foot had been caught in the closing of those colossal doors, and had been crushed by their overwhelming, grinding force.
Furtive, sluggish, movements as Klee struggled back to consciousness contrasted with those of Tarhill who now flailed about on the pebble strewn soil of the arena floor, tethered as he was to the now sealed portal. Aside from the place where Tarhill’s ankle had been devoured by the closure, his blood crawling a handspan or so slowly up the newly created seam by force of some macabre capillary action, Vac Fadric wouldn’t have even noticed the doors outlines in the otherwise flawless stone walls.
There was a rushing noise from behind him accompanied by four sets of throats groaning, and then his body was shoved hard to his left.
“Vlod!” one voice almost shouted repeatedly.
Vac Fadric tumbled in a confused jumble as he was tackled out of the way. The trembling of the soil beneath him could be felt as the revenants charged through the spaces where the two prisoners had been standing moments before, and now made their way toward the flopping and screaming Tarhill and the groggy Klee.
He had wanted to cry out to Klee, and to Tarhill, but a strong hand clamped itself across his lower face, stifling any such efforts on his part.
One of the lumbering Orcs had reached Tarhill first, followed closely by the two humans. The second animated Orc shambled more slowly. His midsection a mass of hanging and dangling viscera. He could not move with the speed of the others.
Tarhill screamed all the louder as he was pulled apart by the Orc and the two humans who had reached him, and now each had grabbed a limb and were tugging the young private apart as Vac Fadric and the Orc girl watched on in horror. Klee had made it to his feet and started toward Tarhill just as two of the boy’s limbs gave way with wet popping noises that made the Orcish girl retch beside Vac Fadric.
Klee had not made it two more steps when the last revenant tackled him to the ground much as the girl had tackled Vac Fadric. Though, the giant of an Orc then wrenched the man’s head to one side, and with his arm held tightly in his other fist, he bit down into Klee’s shoulder. Klee screamed then, like all of the pain and humiliation of the world had just fallen onto his chest. For all Vac Fadric and the girl knew, it had.
The Orc then worried at the wound he had created, shaking the body of Corporal Klee about as though he were a rabbit in the talons of a hawk. Klee’s prophetic words about being eaten by Orcs came back to the young Private as he watched his Corporal being chewed upon.
The beast sucked at the wound. And then shook the body again, breaking the arm it held. Then sucked again at the gorey mess it had made of the man’s shoulder and neck.
“...forbannet..” a voice hissed in his ear. He was then shaken, hard, the girl’s well muscled arm shot out, pointing at the thing that held the remains of Klee. As he watched the dripping masses that had hung from the thing’s abdomen, wounds that had killed the Orc he had been, began to slowly retreat back into the cavities through which they had loosely fallen.
Rearing back its head, still ahold of the sodden mass, the Orc began wailing. No words that Vac Fadric could make out, just the long, drawn out calls of one who was lost and forlorn by the world. “Aaaaaiiiiiiiiyaaaaaaaaaaaa!” Its basso voice rumbled out through the arena.
There was an answering call from the surrounding darkness that made up the furthest walls of the arena. A sound of joy… and anticipation.
There were spectators in those shadows, Vac Fadric now knew. They were not just being sentenced to death, they were being sentenced to a very public execution.
The thing that had once been an Orc trying to eat, or maybe drink, Klee was making grunting noises of great frustration. And pain.
Those hanging orts and gobbets of organ and muscle had all slithered their way back into some semblance of order as the shambling hulk was now able to straighten its spine, and was once again standing as straight as it probably had in life. It then switched its grip from the broken arm to the unmauled arm, and repeated the process on the other side of the body. Sinking Its teeth into the other side of Klee, it shook the corpse much like a terrier with a fat rat in its jaws.
The sucking sounds that came from the scarlet mass that was no longer really an identifiable person was louder than any feeding noises should have been, and the Orc girl beside him wretched again as her former countryman tried to consume the body of the Corporal. Meanwhile, the three other revenants who had descended on Tarhill now each had a portion of his newly made corpse, and were variously chewing on, or sucking noisily from, the bits they had been able to wrest from their fellows.
Vac Fadric had seen soldiers tear apart chickens and rabbits the same way in the mess hall after a hard day of maneuvers. These things were ravenous.
Reaching out, Vac Fadric grabbed the young Orc’s shoulder and with a tug, indicated to her that they should move back further from the frenzy unfolding before them. What she had interpreted from his grabbing of her arm however was ”It’s time to shriek, and flail about.”
The slip in composure had been a second or two. No more.
And at that, it had been too much. All four of the gore covered dead turned their pale eyes toward the young Orc.
And also toward the prone form of Vac Fadric… It was guilt by proximity.
Vac Fadric watched as eight sets of nearly clear eyes, like those of fish caught at dawn now that it was near dusk, hazed and became opaque. All four scented the air again, raising their noses in unison.
He needed a moment to focus. Also, he knew he wouldn’t get that moment.
Looking to the left along the wall through which they had entered, he saw the shadows that shrouded the more distant walls, the walls where he had earlier noticed the stepped pattern to the border of the arena, looked just as shadowed. The obscuring darkness started about thirty paces from either side of the now closed doors that had briefly trapped and crippled Tarhill. That darkness then ran as far along those ever retreating walls until they met back around here at the doors once again.
It was a glamour, Vac Fadric reasoned; he knew it must be. From the muffled noises that he could now distinctly hear that came from those shadows, he surmised they hid the spectators. It would allow those spectators who came to watch whatever happened on this blood flecked floor to do so without the inconvenience of being looked at with accusation by their victims. The Hearainan liked to watch, but hated being judged by their victims…
…Huh…humans would do this, too, if they could… he thought. He had never seen a human cast a glamour that could cover such a huge area. Metaphysically, Vac Fadric would have rated such a casting as being well beyond the ability of any single trained Talent. Lord Ashe, his mentor, had told the young man that he had witnessed only two trained mages who had been, in his words, completely lacking the limitations of other human Talents.
The largest of the Orcs took a tentative step toward him and the young woman who now stood beside him. He could see the pale flesh of its stomach where the magics that now fueled it had healed the wounds that had originally killed it. THe new flesh was so light compared to the surrounding skin of its abdomen that the new scars looked as light as the winter white skin of the most sickly of the Piincar humans he had met.
He knew he shouldn’t judge too harshly, as he had some Piincar in his own lineage, but some of them, with their incredibly light complexions, just always looked ill.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Reaching out again, he grabbed the shoulder of the young woman’s jerkin, and just ran for the edge of the wall beneath the shadowed glamour. To his surprise, she ran along with him without protest.
To his greater surprise, she matched his pace as they approached the wall beneath the glamoured darkness, and even pulled ahead of him slightly as they ran. While they were of a rough height to one another, her legs were longer, and as she stretched them out in her graceful loping gait, he saw that she would reach the wall well ahead of him. She turned her head to him, with an imploring look on her face.
He took her meaning and said, “When you get to within three paces of the wall, jump as hard and as high as you can!”
She shook her head.
She had no idea what he was saying.
…fuck… he thought, the soul of eloquence.
As he ran along, he tapped her shoulder, then Vac Fadric held one hand palm toward himself, and the other hand he mimicked running with his fingers towards the wall of his first hand. He then mimed jumping.
He prayed briefly to Rhoona, Goddess of the Sun and all Honest Endeavors, that not only would she understand what he was asking of her, but that this would work.
She nodded, then turned her attention back to running. Her pace even increased in a way that made him instantly jealous. As he watched her from behind, her fluid grace evident in every stride, she reached the base of the wall and wound up for a jump, trusting that he had a plan.
Taking a deep breath, he centered himself, gathered his Will, and opened his Talent for as hard a push as he could manage using the most simple spell from the Fulminata School. It was pure force, and he put all of his will into his Talent to shove the young woman up, and into the surrounding darkness above the stone wall toward which they had both been running.
“KAAAAAIIIIIYAAAA…!!!!”
The young Orc woman let out a shriek of terror and incomprehension as she sailed up and into the darkness, her long arms pinwheeling and flailing, her braids whipping madly about her head, as she cleared the lower stone wall and disappeared into the awaiting gloom.
As she entered the glamour, all sounds of her screaming were abruptly cut off. Vac Fadric smiled to himself, and let out a laugh as he reached that same wall himself, and slowed, turning back to the sounds of pursuit.
With his back to the wall, he could see the four revenants who had run after them, either following the sounds of their footfalls, or possibly somehow following their scents like hunting hounds, he didn’t know which. The two Orcs loped along more gracefully than their shorter, human, counterparts. The taller of the Orcs now within 50 long strides form the young private where he waited by the wall.
Having seen how they dealt with Klee and Tarhill, Vac Fadric didn’t think he would fare much better than they had. But, he would do whatever he could to keep the creatures from getting the young Orc woman he had just thrown into the cheap seats.
Steadying himself, watching the blood soaked things approach, he summoned his Talent once again, and called upon the Galvana School as he had tried to do earlier. Gathering all of the force around him, from the stone wall and the earthen floor, and then pulling hard upon the galvanic forces in the closest of the running brutes, Vac Fadric released the spell like he would release an arrow from a bow. At the last moment, he remembered to squint his eyes, narrowing his vision as much as possible.
The clap of thunder he produced was so sudden, and so all encompassing, he thought he had just been punched all across the entirety of his body at once. From behind him, in the shadowy darkness, there were several screams just loud enough to be heard through the concealing glamour.
Arcing out from the space an arm span in front of his body, a tree made from the violence of unbound light and the heart of storms raced from a thousand miniscule branches. As each tendril reached forward from Vac Fadric toward the closest of the running dead things, it joined, doubling itself one by one, then twenty by twenty, and on and on until a hundred by a hundred, to form one great, reaching, churning trunk of galvanic force.
Striking the running Orc, the runaway power shredded the thing’s chest and stomach, throwing lit and smoking flinders of flesh away from the thing, grinding its own movement to a sudden halt as it fell to its knees on the ground.
The smoking husk of a body sat on its knees on the earthen floor of the arena, head bowed over the smoking, hollowed-out torso as if in prayer. Its ribs and spine, mottled black and gristly white, shone in the limited light that shone down from the far distant roof above.
Vac Fadric thought his odds had just improved dramatically.
And then the thing’s head, tusky protruding teeth shining unusually bright and clean for things so recently doused in blood, looked up at him, though those dead white eyes were still sightless, where he stood near the wall. The thing’s left shoulder hung from strands of torn, burnt meat and the ragged ends of milky tendons from its exposed socket. That hand, now laying on the pebble strewn ground, was a blackened mess and was missing three of its fingers. With an awkward shrug and a wet >POP!<, the joint resocketed itself. From where he stood, he could see the expression of pain written across the mottled face as its body, animated by some blood magic unknown to Vac Fadric. It almost looked like it was about to break down in tears, the face was in so much pain.
Then, it did something he was not ready for. The dead Orc’s face shifted to a grimace of anger as it attempted to stand and found that task difficult. Raising itself from the ground, its upper body lacking internal support now swaying and bobbing horrifically, a reed bending to unseen winds.
It was the largest spell he had ever performed. It was, to date, his biggest success. He wished Lord Ashe were here to witness it. But, seeing the scraps of remaining flesh and gnarled bone look at him in anger and stand up to attack again let him know that it had not worked nearly so well as he had hoped.
He also wished his teacher, tutor, mentor were here to get him out of this. The man was adept at what he called “Shadow Stepping” and could have pulled his dim student into one shadow and then out from another shadow a great distance away. Vac Fadric had never mastered that spell. It was too complex, and too big, and somehow too… hard for him to comprehend the ways in which he was required to pull the forces of nature about himself as he “stepped.” He never regretted his failure to learn this spell so much as he did in these moments.
He hated that he wanted to be saved. But, he knew his limits. Vac Fadric was not a fully trained mage, nor was he a man in his prime of strength and armed as his station would have had him be. He was a teenage boy. He was “near” to all of those things. But he was also, distinctly, NOT any of those things.
Casting spells took effort. And that was something the average person didn’t realise about magic. Those with the Talent had to train to use it, to be able to cast without killing themselves either by setting themselves on fire, freezing their own hearts, or crushing themselves. A Talent also had to learn where their limits were, and learn how to not push past those limits for fear of damaging themselves with the magical forces they tried to control. It would lead either to their death, if they were lucky, or to turning themselves into an asologe. A brainless, shambling thing that was once a mage, but now drooled on itself and couldn’t comprehend why its chin and tunic front were both wet.
It was sometimes referred to by mages as the Final Unkindness. There had been an asologe at Jibiril Keep. Once he had been a mage named Syrt, who had been assigned to the base and sleepy little harbor town. But, through mishap, he now shambled around the barracks, sweeping the floor when he was told, and otherwise sitting on a chair by the door to the Leech Hall. Drooling.
The Orc took a shuddering step toward him. Its upper body swayed madly as it took another shuddering step. The three other dead things came thundering up to their slow moving kindred and then passed it, Vac Fadric realised his mistake in concentrating on this one gorey fiend he had only momentarily halted. He didn’t know if he could use his Talent to fend them off. He was tired. He was hungry. He knew he was probably sore, but all of these other more immediate concerns, like the four concerns running toward him now, made “soreness” a back of the saddle issue for him.
Taking a deep breath, gathering his will, readying his Talent, Vac Fadric combined the Schools of Aetheria and Fulminata. With a scream of effort and a final push, a great arc of force sped along the floor of the arena. The deadly wind was sent forward, scything along at knee height, leaving a wave of disturbed dust as if a ship pushed at speed along a clear calm bay.
One by one, each of the four dead men who were running toward Vac Fadric intent upon being his death, fell as their legs were detached in a bloody sweep of an unseen sword. The humans at just about their knee joints, the Orcs as mid-shin.
All four crashed to the ground with silent thuds and gouts of blood fountaining behind as they flailed about on the hard packed earthen floor.
Vac Fadric wanted to empty his stomach. He was light headed and nauseous, though he thought it might be from over exerting himself rather than from seeing the horrors flopping about as they attempted to stand again on their newly created stumps.
There was a susurration of sound from above and behind him as leaned, panting against the stone wall. He felt an on thumping, a vibration and then the sound of what could have started off as the mewling of a distant kitten growing ever closer and louder, but suddenly became a full throated scream as something blotted out the light from above him.
A half glance up, and he was instinctively throwing up and out his arms to catch the young Orc woman. All of her weight crashed artlessly into him as she fell, and they both went down into a tangle of limbs. There was a loud, hollow >CLONK< noise that he couldn’t quite place until he lay on the gravel beneath the young woman, with a distinct pain blooming above and behind his right eye.
Rolling her off of him as he untangled her now unconscious form from his own, he saw that she had gained several small wounds during her time in those obscured upper tiers. Though the lump now growing on her forehead looked much like the pained spot he imagined was growing on his own.
She let out a small, listless whine as he rolled her completely from his lap to the earth. Several grunts came from the arena floor. Looking to the felled dead, Vac Fadric saw that they were crawling toward where ha and the Orc woman now sprawled.
The closest one was now less than three paces from where he now sat, dazed and growing desperate. His breathing increased, and he pulled madly at the air, attempting to increase his ability to think by drawing in as much air as possible.
It only made his throbbing head hurt all that much more as he hyperventilated. The blood rushed to his cheeks, and sweat ran madly from his hairline down to his toes. He hated to even try it, but an attempt was better by far than surrender ever would be.
He felt the young woman beside him begin to stir. He felt the vibration in the ground of the ghoul slapping one of its giant nts down to pull itself closer to the meal it craved. Vac Fadric felt his heart beating, a rapid thudding that threatened to burst the wound on his forehead.
His tongue dry, and rasping against his teeth, he saw the yellow/white gleaming teeth of the oncoming monstrosity. A desperate “...fuck…” left his lips.
Grabbing the young woman with his left hand, he pushed his Will as hard as he could through his Talent. And then reached up toward the murky shadows above where he sat.
And released the spell…
