Stormday, Week 1, Month Unus, Year of God 489

  A crimson haze permeated Kane’s dreams. It swept over the barren landscape where Kane’s mind had drifted during his period of unconsciousness.

  He dodged a blow from the shadowy figure before him. It was a man-sized entity made entirely out of dark grey smoke, and it was trying to kill him. Kane countered with another punch, this one connecting with his adversary’s head. The figure, which had been silent during the prior segments of their fight, screamed. It was a bloodcurdling, fear-inducing, primal shout that sounded like a man, woman, and child experiencing unimaginable pain all at once.

  Kane flinched. What was he doing? The smoke-figure recovered and aimed another punch at Kane. His temporary hesitation caused the strike to slam into his forehead. Now Kane screamed as pain flared through him. His vision went temporarily white as he fell to the ground. He splashed into a sticky liquid that he realized a second later was blood. He glanced around him, and realized with terror that he was lying in a field of blood. Bones, chunks of skin, viscera and other human remains poked out of the ankle-deep expanse. The smoke-figure aimed another blow at Kane’s head, with both its fists.

  Acting quickly, Kane grabbed the fist as it descended. It sent shockwaves through his arm, but he was able to grab it and wrench the attacker to the ground. The being fell to the ground, and Kane scrambled on top of it. He picked up a nearby femur and began to bash the struggling attacker’s skull in. As he began to do so, the figure screamed in a terrified sound so loud and terrible it made the first scream sound like a lover’s whisper. As the bone impacted the smoke, it turned into a pale-skinned head with red hair and terrified eyes.

  Kane flinched. It looked just like one of the heathens he had killed during his Sun Caste battle. The blow had completely punctured the figure’s right cheek, bone, blood, sinew and brain spilling out. The face whimpered, its mouth too ruined for a proper scream. As Kane watched in horror, the face changed into that of a young child, equally disfigured from injury. It looked like the child his father had abandoned many years ago. The face lingered in form for a second, then changed into that of an elderly woman that looked just like Lucie. The face changed into the forms of many painfully dying individuals, most of whom Kane didn’t recognize.

  Kane gradually grew more and more nauseous as the macabre display continued to change and evolve. Eventually, it evolved into Kane’s own head, brown hair and beard stained crimson and eyes staring ahead in pure agony and terror. The real Kane turned away and vomited into the bloody expanse. The sight of the blood and vomit mixing caused Kane to retch and heave until he fell into the blood, coughing.

  All of a sudden, a profound wave of emotion washed through him. This emotion was guilt. Kane felt immense remorse for some reason. Maybe it was because he had killed a person. That person would have killed him if he hadn’t fought back, but that only made the guilt feel worse.

  “Why?!” he screamed at the sky. “What is this? Have I sinned?” No response came. There was only the crimson mist, the bruises on Kane’s body, and the brutally marred face beside him.

  Abruptly, he woke up. His eyes shot open and he gasped, flinching a bit. He felt wetness beneath him, and he panicked for a split second before realizing that it was just sweat, not blood. He pulled his covers off and sat up on his mattress. He was safe and calm, surrounded by the peacefully sleeping forms of Eri’s family lit by the dim reflections from the hallway. Some of them stirred slightly around him, sighing contently before turning back down.

  Kane’s heart raced, and he took several deep breaths to help himself calm down. He sighed and laid back against his pillow. The memory of his nightmare came back to him. It was so vivid, and he winced in its memory. His mouth felt dry, so he stood up and silently paced to the pitcher of water resting on a stool in the corner of the room. The mattresses were arranged in rows, so Kane didn’t have to step over anyone to get to it. He fumbled in the darkness for a second, but was able to pick up the pitcher and gulp down a mouthful of tepid water without breaking anything. He slowly began to creep back to his mattress.

  “Hey,” a quiet voice said.

  Kane almost jumped out of his skin. “Eri?” he asked. “What are you doing up?”

  “I heard you,” Eri said. “Are you okay?”

  Kane sighed. “I don’t know,” he begrudgingly admitted. “I had a horrible dream.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” asked Eri, sympathy entering her voice.

  “No,” Kane flatly stated. He walked to his mattress and laid down, pulling the covers up around him. Eri was silent. In a few minutes, she was snoring again. Kane, on the other hand, couldn’t fall asleep. He tried calming himself down and thinking of calming things, but that barely helped. He just had to muscle through the limbo between now and the dawn.

  After what felt like forever, the sounds of people moving in the hall outside caught his attention. The Lux lights in the hallway began to turn on, casting a rosy glow through the ajar door. Kane saw Eri awaken, and she groaned and rubbed her eyes.

  “Ohh man,” she sighed. “I partied last night, we had a New Year’s meeting in the middle, and now I have to get up at the butt-crack of dawn and work.”

  “At least your life’s not in danger,” Kane replied.

  “True that,” Eri admitted. “Let’s get breakfast.”

  When Kane, Eri and the rest of her family arrived at the meeting area, the familiar scent of food did not greet them. In fact, the cooks were standing in a clump together instead of doing anything.

  “Dale just told us to stand around and gather everyone in here,” an older man said. Kane didn’t recognize him, but Eri’s mother nodded.

  Kane was immediately filled with unease. Why was nobody working? What did Dale want? Then it struck him. The Blade of Rain! he thought. We might die!

  “Hey Eri,” Kane whispered urgently.

  “Yeah?” Eri replied. “This seems kind of suspicious. Why is nobody working or eating?”

  “Exactly,” Kane whispered. “Be on your guard. The Blade of Rain might have something to do with this.”

  “Will do,” Eri whispered back.

  It took another ten or so minutes for the last stragglers to enter the chamber. It was packed like a box of clams with over 1,500 villagers. Every resident of Mossflower Hold was here. They milled about in buzzing anxiety, anxiously wondering what would happen.

  All of a sudden, the Marquess Royce entered the room through a side door. He looked especially haggard, his elderly face marred with worry and his Rain Caste robes in disarray.

  “People!” he bellowed. “I have a special announcement to make today.” He paused for dramatic effect, but nobody really noticed.

  “What is it, my lord?” a random voice from the crowd asked. “I’m hungry.”

  “Today, we will have a very special ceremony!” Royce called. “You will be taken into the sacred chambers of our village and you will be blessed! Now is an opportunity to cleanse yourselves of your sins to have a better year.” He choked on the last part, a short flash of distress moving across his face before disappearing. “Follow me.” He turned away in anguish, almost as if he was forced to say something he didn’t want to say.

  “What about breakfast?” the same voice called. Royce didn’t answer. He walked through the side door, and people began to follow him.

  “Stay close together,” Eri said. “I’m worried about what could happen.”

  “Me too,” Kane replied. “I’ll stick with your family for now.”

  They moved as a group into the area beyond the door. It led into a chamber Kane had never seen. That was presumably true for everyone else, as Eri audibly gasped.

  The room was a vast, ornate cathedral-like chamber carved into the rock. Its ceiling reached almost fifty feet above the ground, and every inch was decorated with carved bluish rock, inlaid with carved chunks of marble. Floating Lux lamps hovered in the air, giving the spacious chamber a blue cast. Several areas were hidden from view by a grey folding wall, which Kane presumed were Royce or Dale’s sleeping quarters.

  Royce navigated the group around the folding wall, and the sight that greeted Kane and his group was even more intimidating. A vast hole, almost twenty feet wide, was located in the far corner of the chamber. It was made of the same material the rest of the chamber was made out of, and spiralling stairs of alabaster stone descended into the depths.

  “The, cough, cough, wheeze, ceremony will be, cough, down here,” Royce gasped. He had been overtaken by a fit of coughing and bent over, propping his chin up as he hacked and shuddered. “Follow me.” When the coughing fit was over, he began to descend down the stairway. Kane, Eri and the others followed him.

  The descent took far longer than Kane had anticipated. They were going deep into the bowels of the earth, and Kane’s anxiety grew greater and greater as the group climbed ever downwards. His hands began shaking, and he shoved them into his coat pocket to disguise them. He saw Eri doing the same, a look of distress spread across her face. The alabaster stairs eventually bled into rough-cut stone steps of dark grey. These stairs of poorer quality continued on for what seemed like ages, until finally they ended.

  The stairs led into a medium-sized cavern. It wasn’t huge, but was big enough to hold the population of Mossflower Hold. The air was dank, humid and stank of rotting mildew. It was lit by a couple of floating Lux lamps, hovering in the air. The ceiling was rough-cut and appeared to be natural. The ground was coated with moss, which was thickest around a small pool of stagnant, brackish water in the far-left corner of the cavern. Almost immediately, Kane spied a small crevasse just large enough for a man to squeeze through on the other side of the pool.

  Dale was hovering near the top of the chamber. His eyes burned with some sort of harsh rage, making him look like a predator who had just spotted a nice, juicy turtle for dinner. Royce was the first person into the chamber, and he took flight and hovered up to float next to the priest. Kane nudged Eri.

  “Do you see that crack?” he whispered.

  “Yeah,” Eri replied. “Looks big enough to squeeze through.”

  “Let’s stand over there,” Kane said.

  “Yeah,” Eri replied. “We should go there in case of an emergency. But we don’t know what’s on the other side.”

  “Let’s just go there,” Kane said. “Never know what’s gonna happen.”

  “Move it!” one of the villagers behind them exclaimed. “Stop holding up the line!”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Okay, okay!” Eri replied exasperatedly. “Sheesh.” She and Kane moved towards the crack. Slowly, the villagers reached the bottom of the stairs and began to crowd into the room like fish in a barrel. Eventually, the stench of so many humans blotted out the musty, dank aura of the room.

  It was at this point when Royce started a heated conversation with Dale. They didn’t seem to notice the crack. The speaking was in Highchant, but Kane, having been a former Rain Casteman, was fluent in the language. What he heard filled him with utter dread.

  “Why?” Royce asked. “Why are we going to massacre them?”

  “We’re supposed to, you idiot!” Dale responded. “We found the Blade of Rain! God’s finished constructing paradise, now all we have to do is unlock it!”

  “I thought our job was to bring salvation to the commoners!” Royce replied harshly. “I thought that righteous commoners could come along with us; why are we not giving them the opportunity to gain salvation!?”

  “Do you give your food the opportunity to redeem itself before you eat it?” sarcastically asked Dale. “No! These peasants are our food! When we sacrifice them, you’ll live in pleasure and decadence for the rest of eternity!”

  “I can’t stand for it!” Royce shouted. “I’m a shepherd! I can’t, in good conscience, kill my flock!”

  “What’s a shepherd?” asked Dale. “A flock? Is that something from one of those old books you read? You’re nothing but a heretic who hides behind his title! You deserve to die for disobeying the God of Rain!”

  “YOU deserve to die for being a filthy murderer!” Royce shouted.

  “I’m higher rank than you!” Dale screamed. “Everything I say goes!”

  “NOT in my house!” Royce bellowed. “I’m in charge here!”

  As the shouting match continued, the villagers down below began to mill around anxiously. Their two leaders were arguing, and the people couldn’t understand them. Kane’s heart began to beat painfully against his chest, and he began to hyperventilate.

  “What are they saying?” asked Eri. Her voice was hushed and tense, and although she could not read Kane’s mind, she absorbed his emotional residue and got the gist of the situation.

  “Dale’s gonna… He’s gonna…” Kane gulped and shuddered. “Gonna kill us. Royce doesn’t want us to die, but that may change.”

  “Sun,” cursed Eri under her breath. A look of twisted panic spread across her face. “I should tell my family.”

  “Don’t!” Kane exclaimed, a little more loudly than he would have liked. “If people start panicking, then the Rain Castemen will notice!”

  “They already are panicking,” hissed Eri, gesturing around her. “They can sense it too!”

  Before she or Kane could continue, a bright flash of light flared close to the ceiling. It was immediately followed by an incredibly loud sizzling sound and a scream of agony. Kane turned his head to watch Royce drop out of the sky, clutching at a sizzling hole in his chest. Dale’s eyes glowed with white Lux, and the afterimage of a Lux blast still hung in the air. Royce hit the ground with a sick, wet thud, causing the people around him to gasp, scream or jump away.

  “Okay then!” Dale shouted in Lowchant. “Now that one pestilence has been disposed of, time for the next!” He turned his eyes to the crowd and they began to glow with Lux.

  Kane instinctively knew what would happen next - death, destruction and pain. His heart thudded like so many hoofbeats as he turned his gaze to the crack in the wall. He began to move to the crack, but it was too late.

  A terrible whooshing sound reached Kane’s ears from behind, but it was immediately drowned out by a cacophony of screams and sizzling. He stopped in his tracks and turned his head to see what was happening.

  As Dale swooped his head, a bar of white-hot Lux seared downwards across the room, catching dozens of people in its path. Where the terrible light met flesh, the latter was seared or disintegrated. Kane heard the screams of dying villagers and screaming people. With a sickening jolt, he realized that these were people he knew, he had worked with for months. He felt nauseous, and it was all he could do to not waste valuable time vomiting. He turned back towards the crack and continued to enter.

  “Eri!” he called. “Follow!”

  Eri was bent with her hands on her knees, hyperventilating. Sweat trickled down her forehead and into her thick jacket, and her eyes were wide with fear. Kane realized that he was sweating as well.

  “What the sun?” Eri gasped. “Sun, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun. O God! What’s happening!?”

  “Run!” Kane shouted. “Crack!” He began to squeeze through it. It was around six feet tall and one-and-a-half wide, so he had an easy time entering, only having to stoop down a tiny bit. The crack was only a yard or so deep, and Kane emerged into a musty rock corridor that was cramped, but movable. It extended off into the darkness. He saw Eri enter behind him, as well as a couple other villagers he didn’t recognize. The sound of another Lux-beam followed by fresh waves of screaming assaulted Kane’s ears.

  “Let’s go!” Eri shouted. She waved for the villagers to follow, but they hesitated, twitching around in fear.

  This hesitation forced them to pay the ultimate price. Another wave of Lux seared through the air, but this time, it pierced directly into the chamber. Eri flinched by reflex and dove out of the way, but her companions weren’t so lucky. They were incinerated by a wave of white-hot hell. They died so quickly they couldn’t even scream. When the beam subsided a split second later, all that was left of them were piles of ash and a few charred bones.

  “Run!” Kane called, scrambling down the tunnel.

  “Going somewhere?” a haughty, familiar voice intoned. “I don’t think so!”

  “Run!” Eri screamed. She and Kane began to sprint down the tunnel even faster than they had before. As Kane ran, he turned his head to see Dale fly towards them. He saw the priest swoop towards them. Fortunately, the man had misjudged the angle and banged into the crevasse.

  “Sunshit!” the priest blasphemed. “Sunshit and godshit!” He was momentarily disoriented, but that gave Kane and Eri enough time to run farther down the tunnel.

  “You can’t run!” Dale shouted. “Kane! You’re a traitor! Running with livestock like that little farmer peasant!”

  “Shut the sun up, Dale!” Kane shouted. “You killed my friends!”

  “Die!” Dale shouted. By this point, he had gotten to his feet. He shot a beam of Lux from his eyes, aiming at Eri and Kane. But he was disoriented, and the beam went wide. It struck the rocky ceiling, causing the very ground to shake. Small pebbles and dust motes dislodged from the ceiling and tumbled to the floor.

  “Faster!” Eri called, picking up the pace to near-superhuman levels. Kane’s legs and chest burned with the strain, but that sensation was nothing compared to the fear pumping through his very soul. He began to run yet faster.

  Two things happened at once, both of which worked out in Kane’s immediate favor. Firstly, he tripped on a rock. He yelped at the sudden impact and fell to the floor, shoving into Eri, who was immediately in front of him. The two crashed to the ground. Secondly, Kane fired another bolt of Lux. It missed Kane’s back by a foot and zoomed into the ceiling. The stress from the blazing light was too much for the endless tons of rock above to bear, and the entire chamber began to collapse. The beam hit the ceiling a few yards back from where Kane and Eri were sprawling, and the devastation was greatest there. With a tremendous roar of stirred earth and stone, the roof of the chamber began to collapse.

  Kane, Eri and Dale each let out a shriek of surprise before the rock fell. A deafening crash like a thousand bolts of lightning striking the same place at the same time roared through Kane’s ears as his entire world shook. He was pushed against the ground for what felt like an eternally long second, then the rumbling subsided.

  “What was that?” groaned Eri.

  “Tunnel collapsed,” Kane grunted. He abruptly became aware of aches and bruises all over his body. “Ow.”

  “Is he dead?” asked Eri. “Dale?”

  “Probably,” Kane said. He lay in complete silence for ten seconds, and could hear no sound other than his and Eri’s breathing. “Yes. Lux doesn’t make you any more tough than you already are. He probably was squished like a bug.”

  Eri sighed in relief. “Good riddance.” She then jerked and vomited onto the ground. “They’re all dead.” She groaned in agony. “Dead. Halvanorsin. Octavia, Wideomon. Those three were turned to ash just an inch away from me. Hundreds.”

  “I knew them,” Kane groaned. The weight of what had just happened hit him like a falling brick. “Those were people I knew.”

  “Charred,” Eri gasped. “Charred like meat, like sundamn animals.”

  “We need to get going,” Kane said. He looked around him and groaned. “We can’t go back.”

  “Why not?” Eri asked, then saw what Kane did. “Oh.”

  The portion of the tunnel not two feet behind the two had caved in. The passage was blocked by tons of dark grey rock. The immense weight was so thick that no sound could be heard coming from the other side.

  “We can’t get back!” Eri shouted. “Damn!”

  “I guess the only way is forward,” Kane said. “What lies down the tunnel?”

  “No idea,” Eri said. “Probably death. We don’t have any food, and we might run out of air before we starve.”

  “Sun, you’re quite the optimist,” Kane snarked. “Well, in the immortal words of my sundamn, cruel fool of a father, ‘Move it!’”

  Eri snickered. “Sounds like quite the man.”

  “He was harsh,” Kane replied. “Condescending. Can’t say I miss him. But he hugged me before he sent me off to be branded. He wasn’t a complete monster like Dale was.”

  “I hope my own family isn’t dead. Mom, Dad, Sye… We were going to have dinner together after church,” Eri groaned. “My aunts, uncles, cousins… We were gonna harvest the clams tomorrow. Now, none of us might ever harvest clams again.” She sighed and tears began to leak down her cheek.

  Kane felt himself begin to sob as well, the salty taste of tears dripping into his beard. He hadn’t known any of the dead as long as Eri had, but they were just as familiar, just as much family. Losing them felt like a hole carved in his chest, blood and entrails seeping out as Dale held a sacrificial knife above his torso, grinning wickedly.

  “At least the bastard who did this is sleeping with the worms,” Kane sobbed.

  “But he’s not the only Rain Casteman in the world,” Eri replied. She wiped tears from her eyes, but that did little to staunch the shaking and sobbing that emanated from the both of them. “No offence.”

  “I’m not a Rain Caste bastard,” Kane said. “None taken.”

  “We should eradicate those monsters from our world!” Eri shouted. “Avenge our family!”

  “How under the sundamn sun do you suggest we do that?” Kane asked harshly. “Dale practically killed himself with his idiotic Lux firing. The only reason they bother using Sun Castemen as expendable bait is so they can execute criminals and ruin the enemy’s morale. If we fight the Rain Caste or the Wind Caste, they’re unstoppable. No weapons are capable of reaching them in mid-flight, and they can blast us to cinders with impunity.”

  “We’ll find a way!” Eri cried. “Maybe what lies down this tunnel holds the answers.”

  The two sat for a full minute, crying. When they felt no more tears come out, they stood up, dusted themselves off and began to walk down the tunnel.

  They were in complete darkness, and walked adjacent to the walls, using their hands to guide themselves. Eventually, a faint light emanated from the other end of the tunnel.

  “What’s that?” Kane said. “Light?”

  “Yeah,” Eri replied. “What could be causing it?”

  The two began to move towards the light. It got brighter and brighter until Kane and Eri emerged into a chamber unlike any other.

  The sight that greeted them was utterly alien. The tunnel ended in a broken, cracked segment of wall that opened out into a gargantuan area that branched off to the left and right. The ceiling was hung with an endless row of Lux lamps that would never burn out, stretching with the corridor. The entire area was made of golden, bronze-colored or grey metals that shone with polish.

  “Gah!” cried Kane, shielding his eyes. He had gotten used to the dark, and the sudden light was jarring. However, the sheer size of the chamber and its construction impressed him. Who had built it?

  As the two stepped out of the crack, they got a better look at the area. The chamber was actually a corridor. It was around fifteen feet tall, twenty-five feet wide and stretched seemingly forever off into the distance on both sides. The bottom of the chamber was a slight slope, and there was a foot-deep layer of still, dark water running with the corridor. The sides had platforms of latticed metal, with bridges connecting the two platforms at regular intervals.

  “My god,” Eri breathed. “It’s massive!”

  “How are we gonna get out?” Kane asked. “And what even is this? There’s nothing in scripture even remotely like this!”

  “It seems to go on forever,” Eri said. “But the world isn’t infinite. If there’s one entrance, there’s probably another somewhere.”

  “What direction should we go?” Kane asked. “This area is crazy huge!”

  “I don’t know,” Eri exasperatedly replied. “How ‘bout… right?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Kane replied. “Let’s go.”

  He stretched, then moved onto one of the platforms and began to walk. Eri followed closely behind. The minutes began to move into hours, and Kane’s grief mixed with awe slowly began to be replaced by simple, primal discomfort.