Moonlight shone on the street’s cobblestones. Above, on the rooftops, strange shapes danced, as white clouds traveled across the night sky. The girl was huddled to her long cloak, and held it tightly, walking as fast as she could, through the shadows of the empty streets.
Another shadow followed her closely rooftop to rooftop, with small golden glowing eyes like spirit lanterns.
An open window fluttered and hit the stone wall, making the girl jump. From somewhere, a haunting tune, echoed through the empty city. The girl kept on walking, and her shadow, kept on jumping without a sound. Even though it was early in the night still, the streets were all empty. Not a person walked, no one except the mysterious girl, no shopkeepers on a shady night market, no harlots or thieves, no mothers chasing children to tuck them in. Not a soul. And yet the haunting tune kept on coming, in perfect harmony with the wind that seemed to mourn like a woman.
B thought about lighting a fire, but eventually decided it was not time to make her move yet. Soon, they would start making their moves by the hundreds, and she would only have time for one. She had to choose carefully. She heard bones rattle from an alley to her right, but didn’t even look. She heard moaning behind her, but kept up the pace. Strange lights played were before had been only shadows, and the sound of fire, but no warmth or light came from the abandoned buildings.
“Keep on moving,” she heard Aaheru whisper in her mind. “They are disorganized still…do not be afraid.” Damn cat she thought! Keep on moving, he said, but she could feel the spirits almost caressing her neck with their cold touch. She didn’t even look behind her though. As if he had heard her, she felt him descend from the roof, like a small black angel and move to the street behind her. She breathed easier now, that she had him watch her back. He hadn’t heard him of course. There was a deeper link between them a deeper connection between master and familiar, that let them know where each other was. And it was a good thing, because Aaheru was almost impossible to spot had he not wished to, especially in the darkness, especially with his black fur making him a little less than a shade.
“It was about time you showed up, horror lord” the girl whispered under her breath. “keep moving…” answered the feline in her mind. And he sounded calm and cold. He had done this, thousands of times. B did not answer. She just ducked her head and kept on walking as if it mattered who would see her. Behind her, a small black cat stood in the middle of the empty street, as spirits and undead came at him from every corner.
B did as she was told, yet could not resist the temptation of looking back at her tutor, as he waited to hold off the inevitable assault of the undead. The small black cat stood firm and looked at the tormented spirits as they came towards him, moaning in unhallowed anguish. Then, Aaheru moved, and his moves seemed too fast for the eye to trace, as he drew a circle on the dust and dirt, that littered the ancient city’s street. After that, he kept on drawing, sitting in the middle of the circle, magic symbols, runes and small hieroglyphics, depicting birds, cats, the eye of the gods, and other, more complicated and incomprehensible to the one not acquainted with the art.
But Aaheru knew what he was doing, and so was B. There was no reason for her to dally anymore, and no reason at all to see that thing, whatever it was that Aaheru did again. One was too much. She turned her head around and started running. The faster she reached her goal the better. A strong gust of wind almost took her cloak revealing her fire-red hair, and two cold blue eyes, shining like moonlit mountain lakes beneath the curls that fell on her face.
A strong gust of wind that blew towards her, and made her feel like a great void had been torn in the fabric of reality, a cold and dark void between real and unreal, that searched for something to fill it, and on its search sucked like a vortex anything, including air.
And soon all was silent.
She didn’t look behind her, as she had nightmares about certain spells that Aaheru could cast. It seemed to her that sometimes it was a completely different creature, one that could crave warm milk and just sleep in her lap, and others, when his eyes glowed coldly, a hunter, that would chase the restless ones and grant them release, whether they wanted it or not.
“You will be safe for a while,” she heard the feline’s voice in her mind. “Go on now, and perform your duties.”
She nodded yes, unsure if the cat could see her. Still, Aaheru had done his duty as a guardian of the gateways, and so should she. Now it was the time for judgment. The great shape appeared thumping heavy monstrous feet and lumbering like a drunken giant. And at a giant’s size was it, but in no way so orderly. It appeared as if plague, death and decay had made their lair in this one, this hulking monstrosity that came at her waving a huge rusted scythe leaving maggots and rotting flesh along its way.
It was not one creature though, rather a mix of creatures, animal and human, and reached over two meters in height. Different kind of tissues had been stitched together, to create every limb and the body of the undead abomination, making it look like a nightmarish puzzle, a parody and blasphemy of every form of life on the world, so grotesque that the pieces were impossible to recognize.
B stopped in her tracks. The girl whispered some words, and her hands begun to glow. Soon the glow turned into flame, and her hands seemed to be on fire. But she was not burning. Instead a cold smile spread across her beautiful face. She straightened her arms in front of her as if she was stretching, and uttered the command word. The stream of flame that erupted drilled a hole to the creature’s centre, but didn’t slow it down at all. Actually the monster now seemed more enraged, roaring, and striding towards her, with large, rotten legs, made of a multitude of legs held together by rusty chains and stitches and dark magic.
But B did not flinch, and did not back down one step. She kept on streaming fire from her open arms, burning stitches and filling the ghost city with the smell of burning, rotting meat. She directed the beam lower then, and it cut through the monster like one of those swords of the far east. One of the creature’s legs disintegrated finally in a ball of purple flame, as the sorceress put more effort to her spell, finally making ti lose its balance, and fall. The combined effect of the damage the spell had caused along with the fall resulted in the enchantment weaved upon it being broken, and the monster appeared finally for what it really was. Parts of dead beings horribly desecrated to create an undead weapon.
The sorceress’ breast rose and fell fast, as she breathed heavily. The creature’s head had stopped just a few inches of her feet and stared at her with a glass eye. She kicked it hard.
“We are just beginning.” She thought. The creature was old and powerful and it hadn’t spent its years simply chasing and slaying people. Creatures like this, would enhance their knowledge through studies in arcane, forgotten libraries, and sought to rise in power by creating armies, of nightmarish undead. “They are everywhere.” She heard Aaheru’s voice in her head, but didn’t need him to tell her. With a roar that almost split the ground in two, they appeared, creatures stitched of rotting parting parts of other creatures, some larger than the one she had destroyed before.
If one could see the scene from above, they would be petrified by the sheer number of the creatures, as they came out of the nightmarish dungeons in which they had been created, like warrior ants leaving their underground lair in order to defend it. The creature, thought B, must have been eluding them for centuries, in order to have time to mass such an army. This, was more than an undead raiding force. The monsters were so many, they could take on the army of a small city-state and prevail, in which case they would double their numbers to say the least. B smiled as she saw they were not attacking, but instead waiting, and moving aside, for the larger of their number to come forth like commanders in an army. A quick look around her, showed her that there was no way out. She was completely surrounded, by walls of rotten flesh, bone and rusty steel. She saw the cat’s golden eyes looking at her from a roof like two golden fireflies. “Be careful horror-lord” she thought to herself. They creatures made no move to attack her. Their lord, B knew, would like to have a talk with her personally.
As if it had been summoned the undead master appeared in the sky, floating above the unhallowed dead like a spirit of vengeance. Its tattered robes flew like the banners of a defeated army worn and torn, yet once they had been expensive and luxurious. It wore golden jewels that sparkled with sorcerous powers. Its face, was a mask of dried-out bone, and above it a golden crown shone beneath the moon’s gaze. The empty-eye sockets of the creature held small dancing flames in the place of eyes, that indicated the presence of an intelligence, higher than that of an animated corpse, higher than that of a common man, higher than a general of war, or a charismatic leader. B knew, that he once had been an exceptional individual in life, had risen to be a lord of the undead, a defiler of the laws of the universe and nature. A lich lord.
“Intruder…” spoke the undead master, in a voice that seemed to sound like howling of the north wind. “Intruder, why do you interrupt my work? Do I seem to you, like someone who would be bothered with the likes of you?”
The sorceress smiled and drew back her hood. “My pardons lord” said the girl. “But your work…” she looked at the disgusting deformed monstrosities all around her “is finished.”
The Lich laughed, and It was cruel, cold sound, as if it remembered how to laugh but only used it, when the need in a conversation arrived.
“Far from, little girl” he hissed. “But you shall provide me with interesting components for future experiments…”
“I am here, to provide rest for your tormented spirit.” The sorceress answered all pretence of smile gone from her face.
“You speak with much arrogance for someone so young” hissed the lich like a venomous serpent trying to converse poison into words. “I run kingdoms, and was revered so long before you were even born. I led armies to wars and the skeletons of my enemies were let there to bleach beneath the blazing sun! Who are you to come and challenge me so openly?”
“I am..” said the sorceress and her hands and eyes blazed as if they had caught fire, till they resembled nothing more than pools of molten lava, and her hair seemed to turn to fire. The ground around her melted and bubbled from the heat and she became white-hot like a small blazing sun. “I am…Birgit…Enyo…Bergliot..Astarte” As her full name escaped her burning lips, it seemed she disappeared, turning into something else entirely, more like a creature of pure energy than anything else. “They call me… FIREWYRM” was the last thing she said before she vanished into the glow.
Aaheru, watched only the first stages of the transformation. He knew, that if something got caught in the explosion, would be reduced to ashes, and he had seen that before, from afar, a burning halo, spreading from the blinding spot that the sorceress was to incinerate everything in its path.
As the sorceress spoke the final word, the name she was known across the lands she had passed through, everything seemed to move slower. As the air burned, and the undead moved with big, hulky steps towards her, and she, changed and the lich just motioned for them to attack, Aaheru could see, but only as shades-only as black and white shadows of reality, as he stepped into the spirit dimension. Even in that dimension, B seemed like a beacon of energy, illuminating everything, and destroying the magical binds that animated the undead bodies like puppets.
Back in the physical world, which so wisely Aaheru had left, the halo of fire that B had created was powerful, that took the buildings of the city with it, leaving behind only the square markings of their foundations on the ground. A huge crater formed when the flame storm passed, right on the spot where the sorceress had been standing. In its centre, was the sorceress, naked and curled in an embryonic position. The last thing she managed to see, before she passed out, was that the lich was still flying above, even though its magical robes, had been burned, even though, its whole army had been reduced to black, foul-smelling remains, even though almost the entire deserted city had been completely wiped out.
Aenleth the ancient, conqueror of Asegra, Vil-tha, and Thel, had given many battles in his life. After his death, he had given quite his share of battles too, with looters and thieves, monsters and heroes, and he had won, and used his enemies’ bodies for grotesque experiments. Now however he stoop surprised as his work, his army and hideout, his entire small kingdom had been reduced to nothingness, before he had time to utter a simple spell.
But the most horrid revelation for the undead warlord, was that he, he had dominated cities and cheated death himself, he who used dead bodies, to create soldiers that would serve him better than living men could, he had barely escaped the destruction that girl wrought.
In awe and surprise he approached her, floating slowly as an angel of death from the night sky, reaching with a skeletal finger to touch her, as if to realize if all of that was true.
When it struck him. He could not move. He move, float, fly wave his arms, reach, speak, even think. He could only look, but as he came to understand, time as he realized it, seized to exist. All that existed was frozen moments succeeding each other, but not with the right speed, as if someone tried to read a book, and the words, the letters, the ink that flowed in the letters, flowed slowly, heavily, taking months to create a single letter. Beneath him however, the ground opened, and a pit, a chasm like a canyon yawned. And then the ancient lich saw them, the hands. Trying to come out, to grab him, to pull him below, to that endless pit, where the dead screamed and jackal-headed guardians pushed them in. Death was a dark and cold place Aenleth knew, even colder and darker than the existence of a lich. It was what he had been trying for years, centuries to avoid. Immortality, was what he had betrayed his fellow adventurers to obtain, and what he had bargained with demons from other words for, in the middle of dark, incent-fragranced temples, older than himself. Aenleth, remembered fear.
He had no time to wonder what had happened, he didn’t even have the physical concentration to think without a simple thought taking him a week’s heavy meditation. The old lich was just panicked.
In the air, the ancient litany of the Book of the Dead played. Slowly the ancient bones that the lich’es spirit had inhabited started to smoke, as Aaheru whispered the words in the spirit realm. Malignant specters appeared and vanished again, and it even seemed that the small feline’s form changed. “You are not going anywhere.” Said Aaheru,invisible now “not until I’m done with you.”
But it was difficult to tie such an ancient and powerful spirit to the powers of the underworld. For every time they pulled the lich in, there was a time he pulled out, for its spirit body was still capable of resisting.
Aaheru’s purpose was not to destroy the Lich however. No one could do that at the current moment, not even by completely destroying his physical form. The spell, that bound him to undeath was incredibly powerful and soon it would be free, in another form, somewhere else.
Thus, Aaheru released the caged time. In the spirit world, Aaheru was not even a feline. If someone could actually see with mortal eyes in the twilight realm, he would see the lich trapped in a huge cloud of darkness, one would feel the “Horror Lord” seeking into his soul, because there, in that parallel to reality world, he was powerful. For a moment that was what the lich saw, but to him, any site seemed better than the pit awaiting for him below. At that time, Aaheru, considered it time to end the spell. The caged time was released, and stroke back at the lich like a whip. It did not hurt him, rather only his physical form, and destroyed it. Aaheru counted on the fact that he wouldn’t fight back. His exit, was his destroyed body. Soon he would return to his phylactery, and find another corpse nearby to posses.
The liche’s laughter echoed through the night. “You have failed!” it screamed triumphantly. “You cannot destroy that which is eternal! I shall return and bring chaos and destruction for I have an eternity to wait!”
Too late, the bodiless spirit realized that what it was in, was not even the real world. Feeling the huge energy emanating from him Aenleth looked behind him and saw him, a huge warrior, greater than a giant with golden shiny eyes, even though the rest of him was made of pure darkness. Then, the caged time, came back again. Only now it was coming at him a thousand times faster and a million times stronger, like a hurricane of raw energy. If spirits could scream, then Aenleth would.
“Aaheru?”
The young sorceress woke up and looked sround her, and the first thing she saw was the moon above. She looked round her and saw the small cat looking at her.
“What happened?” asked the girl, and a nod of the small feline head was the cat’s answer.
Next to him, a small black box, almost invisible due to the mysterious material it had been deisgned of, waited for her. She reached for it, but Aaheru’s voice echoed in her mind a strict command that made her freeze. “DON’T.”
She looked at him, almost insulted, and he explained. “The box contains the lich’es soul, like its phylactery. However, the box itself is made of crystallized time. Touch it, and grow older by ten years. Or a hundred.”
“…then…how…?”
“there are spare gloves as well as any kind of clothe in the backpack. Wear these.”
She did. She got dressed and together they took the way back. They had to go to the elders to find a way to destroy the lich’es soul, or at least, to find a way to keep him imprisoned more than Aaheru’s unstable spell would allow.
“Wasn’t there a city here?” B asked casually as they were leaving the ruined wasteland.
“Showoff” the cat answered in her mind.
B chuckled a little. “Tell me was it spectacular? I mean from a third person’s view…was it like....”
“It was horrifying.” The small feline answered in her mind. “ I feel lucky to be alive after that…you are careless…and…and…”
She was looking at him wide eyed.
“Fine. It was like the sun itself had crushed upon the earth…”
“with?” asked she.
“…with all of his wrath and beauty” answered Aaheru disturbed.
She picked him up and squeezed him like a kitten, with a huge victorious smile on her face. The way back, would be long, Aaheru thought.
