RE: Monarch

I ignited my sword. Violet flame radiated, and the center grew red. “Bolster the first group with the rank-and-file.”

Maya stared at me, dumbfounded. “Help the well-organized contingent of men that isn’t struggling, while you get yourself killed aiding the second group? I don’t need your protec—”

“It’s not like that.” I shook my head. Whatever our issues, for the moment, we needed to bury them. “You have the harder job by far. I thought it was odd from the beginning that only half of my father’s bannerlords are here. Combined with what you said about the talk of sedition? This wasn’t an accident. They have orders to leave the nobility out to dry, I’d put money on it.”

“The King knew this was going to happen?” Maya gave me a look of disbelief.

“If I’m right, this was the plan for the assault on the enclave. To thin the herd. They’re just acting on old orders.” I looked at Maya, all too aware of the difficulty of what I was asking. “I need you to find a way to push them toward the center and force a merge.”

Maya’s brows knitted together. “That’s a tall order.”

“I know.”

“Can you give me cover?”

“Between us and the men?”

I nodded. Slowly, I drew in as much mana as I could, weaving the pattern for air in every thread. The threads grew taut within me and frayed. Still, I wound the mana tighter and added more. And more. … And more.

At my limit, I turned towards the smoke and raised an arm, releasing the pressure. A cyclone shot from my hand, becoming visible and gray as it took in the smoke. Before it dissipated, I guided it towards the first group.

Maya chased behind it, Kastramoth running alongside her.

When I finally released the spell, the column of smoke dissipated into a cloud, drifting over the men like morning fog. Maya disappeared within it, the xescalt staff in her hand glimmering before it vanished into the dark.

I considered the group with my father’s bannerlords. They were falling back towards the edge of the Everwood. Several nobles had already turned tail and fled into the forest. And as my father himself was fond of saying, only a fool fought elves in the forest.

Circling to join them from the rear would take too long. At this rate, what little defense they had could crumble in minutes.

I needed to go through.

I poured mana into the inscriptions on my legs, granting myself as much speed as possible, then charged directly at the center of the enemy forces, a wave of violet fire in my wake.

Sweat poured down my face as the enemy’s back grew ever closer. There were thousands of them.

Heart, throat, chest.

It’d been a long time since I’d fought anything resembling a human. There were too many creatures in the sanctum to know every monster’s weak point by memory. Some even had contingency organs that would function should the primary organs fail.

Heart, throat, chest.

Maybe it was natural that the artful dance Cephur taught me years ago had fallen by the wayside, in lieu of brute force. The sword was a brush. But it was also a bludgeon. Sometimes technique didn’t cut it, and the only way over a wall was smashing straight through.

Heart, throat, chest.

One of the drephinic elves, a male around my age, turned, probably sensing the sudden shift in temperature. He opened his mouth to shout a warning.

I slipped my sword beneath his sternum. It easily pierced his torso, the blade exiting his back. He coughed blood onto my shoulder.

With a burst of mana, I let the flames overtake him and planted a foot against his chest, sending him careening into the mass, creating an anchor point of violet flame to draw from as it hopped from person to person.

Then the wave of fire hit, setting the entire cluster of drephin ablaze.

I’m not sure what exactly I expected. From the way Maya described them, I’d opted for caution. Unleashing everything I had. But now, as I struggled for air amid the inferno, my mana spent, a queer sickness came over me.

The elves burned the same as anyone else.

A blackened and charred figure, barely on his feet, staggered towards me, sword upraised. I knocked it aside, and he continued to stagger forward, ruined fingers clinging to my plate.

“Help… me…”

I drove my sword into his heart, a quick death the only mercy I could grant. Violet embers filled the air.

The panic on the back line faded quickly. I’d felled dozens with the opening move, perhaps a hundred. But as the flames spread, the elves further up shifted. Their skin bubbled, bones deforming as the burning pelts on their backs fused with their skin—not a result of the fire, but of something else. As their features became more feral and canine, the fire died.

A legion of wolves, angry and snarling, encircled me, all padding feet and snapping mouths. I could see the bannerlords now—bloodied, exhausted, and still alive, but only because much of their force was now four-legged and focused entirely on me.

I dug deep, knowing before I felt it that the opening salvo had cost me. There was a dull ache in my core, warning that my mana was low. Almost tapped. I reached out for the still burning flame, now drawing close to the friendly forces on the opposite side of the horde, and pulled.

The encroaching fire died quickly, filling me with recycled mana in exchange. It wasn’t an infinite loop. Using diffused mana was dangerous—a lesson I’d learned the hard way shortly after my awakening—but it was a useful tool, so long as it wasn’t treated as an infinite pool to draw from.

I released it incrementally, drawing a circle of fire around myself and fueling it slowly, until the flames raged overhead. I left the front open as angled gates, barely large enough for a single person to fit through.

The wolves circled, nosing at the entrance. One passed the entrance, only to immediately double back, throwing itself through the door in an almost unbelievably fast hairpin turn.

I raised my left arm and braced, reinforcing it with the demonic gauntlet as a precautionary measure.

And was immediately thankful that I had. The wolf’s teeth punched clean through. A half-second later, its body rammed into me, pushing me back a solid foot.

Trying to push me into my fire.

If I was a typical fire mage, it would have been a solid maneuver. Fire mages were notorious for accidentally setting themselves ablaze, and with the stage I’d set, it was a smart solution.

But this was Dantalion flame.

I extended my left arm into the blazing wall.

The wolf yipped and snarled, struggling to free its teeth from my arm like a hooked fish as the fire spread over it.

Three wolves outside the gates of fire reclaimed their elven form, flesh bubbling as they stared at me, reddish eyes full of rage. Each held an odd looking short sword, blade extending up, then out in a circular curve.

I waited.

The first rushed forward, swinging his blade in a complex curving pattern. I feinted as if to meet him halfway, then altered my sword’s trajectory at the last moment, carving through his leg, and finished him with a follow-up strike.

Their movement was difficult to focus on, like trying to track a river’s current by sight alone.

Something in the air felt charged, menacing. Every hair on the left side of my body tingled, and I whirled, using the feeling as reference.

I saw him for only a moment. The same faceless, fur-clad figure with a twisted staff. Only instead of holding it above his head like before, he pointed the staff directly at me.

The feeling rapidly intensified until my armor shrieked. A wave of brutal, unrelenting pain swept over me as the metal plate that covered my side exploded, leaving nothing but numbness and panic.

All around me, the ring of fire dissipated.

I reached down towards my side, slowly. My hand came away covered not in blood, but black tar.

Other than weaponized wildlife, I knew very little about what was happening here or why. No clue of their command structure or their strategies, apart from the fact that they had enough sense to capitalize on division in the ranks.

My hand burned. I held it up to my face and watched in a mix of horror and fascination as my gauntlet and glove fell to pieces. The demonic gauntlet was unscathed, but the reflective darkness spread passed it, up my arm, towards my shoulder until it finally reached flesh.

And the wolves whispered. I could hear them. Repeating the same phrase over and over as the army pressed in on me.

Even as the battle raged some distance from us, a sword pressed to my throat.

“Scion of the desecrator.” Cold red eyes stared down at me. Even for an elf, he was a slight man. Sword in one hand, staff in the other. His upper body was bare, ribs pressing against his skin.

I chuckled. “My father’s sins are many—” I leaned down and coughed blood, feeling the unknown darkness eating away at my midsection. “—Fuck that hurts. Can you be more specific?”

The man placed his thumb beneath his sharpened teeth and bit down, drawing blood. Wetness dripped down my forehead as he drew diagonal lines. An X. “May this sacrifice… stay the end… of all things.”

“It will. But not in the way you think,” I said through gritted teeth.

Any feeling in my legs deadened, and I toppled over before he could kill me.

“Den Mother. Your will is done.” The man held his arms wide and stared at the heavens, in a gesture of supplication.

It was over.

I tried to relax, to let my mind lapse into nothingness. But I could still feel that darkness, like thousands of mouths, gnawing away at my skin, my muscle, my bone.

At first, I thought it was a hallucination. A wave of my father’s guard sprinting towards emerging, flanking the elves from within the smoke. But from the way they were shouting, casting terrified glances over their shoulders, it was too oddly specific for a hallucination.

They crashed into the elven horde. At once, the tide of the battle shifted, the bulk of my father’s surviving forces focused on tearing through a section of the enemy.

Maya rode Kastramoth out of the smoke at their rear.

Even in the pain, I had to smile. She’d used the gruesome appearance of her demon to herd them. Thousands of armored, disciplined soldiers, reduced to cattle.

The man above me scowled and pointed his staff in Maya’s direction.

There was a flash of steel, and the elf’s head plummeted to the ground. Erebus vaulted over the decapitated elf, knocking his body aside, dispatching the onlookers before they could stir from their trance-like state. Kerai stood over me and roared protectively.

“Pardon the intrusion–Elphion… ” Erebus trailed off, eyes widening at my wounds.

Just shortly behind him, a thick man with a bushy red beard wielding a broadsided axe covered his left. Another of my father’s bannerlords. “Watch your back, idiot.” He yelled to Erebus. With a loud grunt, he cleaved through two elves in a single blow, then glanced at me. “The prince?”

Erebus shook his head.

Raugor tore an elf’s throat out and grinned at me. “What a show. You’ll be eating well in Valhalla tonight, boy.”

To distract myself from the pain, I tried to recall Raugor’s house. Even his first name. But my mind was too foggy.

Suddenly, Maya was there. She knelt beside me, her face a mask of anger and grief. “I failed you. Again.” Her hands glowed green.

“Don’t!”

Maya recoiled. I repeated it, softening my voice. “The darkness spreads. Stay clear.” Understanding dawned in her expression, and she pressed her hands to my chest and the left side of my stomach, well out of reach of the encroaching black.

Panic filtered in. “I can’t—I can’t heal this. There’s too much damage and the spell—whatever it is, it lingers. The best I can do is help with the pain.”

“It’s alright.” The fire in my nerves was likely the only thing keeping me awake. Around us, the sheer brutality of the carnage was horrible. Mangled bodies were scattered everywhere. The number of charred elves was too many to count.

I looked away. “The cost was too high. We need to find a better way.”

“Very well,” Maya said. She seemed to center herself, ruthlessly reining in her emotion. The grief in her expression faded into cold stoicism. “Their magic seems similar to their sister races. Mystical. And they’re not weaving as far as I can tell. Fewer casters than us, more potency.”

“Would you be able to heal this, if you’d caught it early?”

“Hold it at bay, perhaps. Not reverse the damage. I’d need an assistant to slice the blighted flesh free and regenerate it piecemeal.”

“So… don’t get hit by it.”

“Yes.” Maya let out a choked laugh and fell silent.

“Erebus.” I called to him. The bannerlord was standing guard nearby, pretending not to listen. He knelt at my side.

“Yes, your grace?”

“How did you identify the leader? By his staff?” I asked.

Erebus shook his head. “There were more than a few staff-wielders amongst them. It was the pelt. The leader was the only elf wearing a white pelt.”

“Did his death factor in the retreat?”

Erebus nodded “Almost definitively. After he fell, their fighters grew disorganized, their morale broken.”

“How many of them were there? Best guess?”

“A few thousand.” Erebus mused. His expression grew dark. “If they hadn’t whittled us down at the beginning, I doubt they would have dared to attack so brazenly.”

“Thank you.” I said.

Maya stared down at me with eyes of stone. Her fingers brushed my cheek. “Don’t leave me behind again. Please.”

I tried to give her a reassuring smile. “It won’t be like last time, Ni’lend. I’ll see you soon.”

Finally, the darkness took me.

In the endless black that followed, a familiar voice spoke.

Again.

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