Authors: Laszlo,Jeremy
Watching as his minions neared the top of the wall, from out of the sky green and yellow magical fire lanced out and Sigrant felt the emptiness that came with the loss of his underlings. With wicked speed the cursed demon prince bore down upon his vampires upon Valdadore’s wall and obliterated them, hundreds at a swoop. His suspicions confirmed, he dared not face the prince in an open fight.
If that were not enough, the prince’s beast commander too was in the air, throwing fireballs and ripping Sigrant’s weakest from their holds upon the walls. Even so, with the events playing out in extreme slow motion before him, he could not help but wonder if he could survive a blast from the prince, or perhaps even attack the demonic man unaware. His speed was so great, after all, that no mortal stood a chance against him. Sigrant nearly acted on his impulse, but two things held him at bay when the momentous decision was made.
First, his troops, though falling en masse before the prince’s assault, were making progress, some of them beginning to top the walls and battle the defenders. This meant, of course, that more power would be on its way.
If time would hurry the hell up
. Second, even in the darkness, at an impossible range, the invading king watched as a being moved so fast upon the grounds surrounding the city that only Sigrant and his harem would be able to track her movements with his eyes. He knew her in an instant, recognition bringing forth a scowl. Not only had the prince somehow been resurrected from whatever hell he inhabited after death, but so too was his bride restored to his side, seemingly more powerful than ever. His scowl deepened. She was near his equal, and reason made him believe that she, not the prince, was the bigger threat of the two.
For now, there was nothing better for him to do than watch and calculate odds.
Seth let the wind gather in his great leathery wings and used them to glide, more or less, in a great circle around the city. Sigrant’s troops clung to every wall, clawing and scratching their way to the top like horrid insects hell-bent on destruction. It was a precarious path Seth strode down. One he knew would lead him to an inevitable battle of wills. But he knew in his heart it was necessary.
For those watching his actions from the tops of the walls, the fields below, or the camp belonging to king Sigrant, it appeared as if Seth incinerated those vampires upon the uppermost reaches of the wall, but in fact it was not the case at all. Seth had instructed all of his troops to only kill as a last resort. Their main purpose at present was to buy time for Sara to grow stronger than the invading king. Seth’s main purpose was to make it appear that he was simply killing the enemy, and spare Valdadore’s troops as many casualties as possible.
He knew it was impossible to save both sides of the conflict in entirety. One sought only to destroy, the other sought only to survive. For the majority to live, some
had
to be sacrificed.
So it was that Seth swept down from the darkened heavens once again. With his hands out before him, he paralleled the great western wall of Valdadore and sought out his enemies with the power only he could wield. Nearly simultaneously, he siphoned the lives from nearly two hundred of the enemy troops, before releasing a fraction of that power back as a great blast of fire.
With this method, he contained the vast majority of the tainted life forces of Sigrant’s troops, and spread magical fire upon the stone of the city. The fire only lingered for a minute or two, but kept those attackers below the blast from climbing further while it lasted, buying more time. Then, seeking out their only hope, Seth unleashed the remaining tainted power into the woman he loved, making her more Sigrant’s equal with every feigned blast.
It was a dangerous game Seth was playing in more aspects than was rational. The gods wanted the power from those dying on the field, and by collecting it and pouring it into Sara he was denying them that which was rightfully theirs. He could not help but wonder if such an act made Sara and him a target of the gods. He imagined that eventually he would know the answer to that question first hand. Another dangerous aspect was simply the unknown. Man was not made to possess such power. At what point did the power take over and the man lose control? Was there a limit to what a person could contain? Was eternal life possible? It certainly seemed so. Would the immense power alter a person in irreversible ways?
Seth himself was powerful by mortal standards. Hundreds, likely near two thousand souls that had been sworn to him had perished and come to join his own. But Sigrant, and now Sara too, far exceeded the power that he himself contained. If the physical changes that were so obviously apparent were so extreme, could not the mental and emotional changes be just as vast? Could anyone recover from such extensive change and remain sane?
He had a plan to bring Sara back to a reasonable level, but feared that like his previous attempts at saving her, something could go awry.
Flapping his wings, now against the cold breeze, he felt he was finally getting the hang of his new appendages. Reaching out all along the western wall of the city he turned to ash all that clung to the top half of the wall before lancing fire to coat the stones in a temporary barrier. Again, he fed Sara life.
Time. They needed more time!
* * * * *
Borrik felt utterly useless winging along the skies, mimicking his master, throwing fireballs in an attempt to dissuade the attackers from wanting to climb further. It was working, but his human and feral sides were at war within him concerning the usefulness of such tactics. Through his shared pack consciousness he watched as his few remaining men fought atop the walls, hurling the blood-sucking beasts back over the side instead of tearing them to bits.
From time to time he would wing in close to the wall and rip an unsuspecting creature from its surface and fling it into the air, more for show than anything else. But truthfully his more primal side enjoyed it immensely.
Deciding that his feral need to kill, or at least maim and injure, should be satiated once more, he swooped low to tear yet another of the vampire creatures from the wall. Just as he grasped the foe, a flood of images flashed in his mind of a sizeable breach not far from him. Releasing his prey, he flapped hard and began to climb.
Within seconds he crested the wall and slammed to its top, landing in a crouch, lowering one palm to the stone to assist in adjusting from flight to land assault.
Before him, nearly two dozen of Sigrant’s bloodthirsty monsters clawed and bit like savage animals trying to break through Valdadore’s defenders and get into the city to feed. The bulk of the troops here belonged to Seth, the rat troops commanded by Borrik himself via his wolven pack members. Tucking his wings, and leaning yet further forward to charge, Borrik sprang ahead, recalling his secondary arms as he ran along the wall.
Though he imagined himself an odd sight, a great wolven beast of a man who was rapidly degenerating, a second pair of arms as he ran with wings tucked against his back behind him, it was what he watched as he neared that he found even more peculiar.
All along the wall, though especially right ahead, Seth’s young rat soldiers battled the vampires. Both sides fought savagely, ripping and tearing at their foes, like caged animals over a scrap of meat. It reminded Borrik of a traveling troop of acrobats he had seen once. The way the combatants fought was almost like a dance. They lunged and leapt over one another and darted this way and that. Lunge and feigned attacks were used by both sides, and he was impressed to find that Seth’s young troops seemed up to the task of defending against the creatures. Oddly, both sides fought nearly identically. They did not fight as men fought, but then again, neither side was truly a member of human kind any longer.
As Borrik watched, however, he witnessed proof of not only the power of his master, but also the thoughtfulness of the dark prince as well. Witnessing as he rushed ahead to lend himself to his allies, Borrik saw a small rat soldier fall beneath a pair of Sigrant’s creatures. Dragged to the ground without a chance of escape, the small hairy soldier grasped at the medallion given to him by his creator, and Borrik heard the scream that followed.
“Seth, save me!”
That was it… Poof. The rat soldier vanished. No smoke. No flash. No boom. Nothing. Gone. The rat soldier had disappeared and those who would have killed him within an instant fell to the ground where he had been in a tangle of teeth and claws. Borrik was astonished. He knew Seth had enchanted the medallions, but had no idea what their effect could have been.
Reaching the spot where the rat man had went down, Borrik grasped at the creatures who had felled Seth’s soldier and tossed them back over the side whence they came.
“Poof,” he growled with a smirk, having done a little magic of his own.
Looking up, he watched ahead on the wall as another young soldier invoked his medallion and then another. But just when he feared that the defenders would begin to grow too thin to hold the wall, up they came once more.
From within the city the rat soldiers climbed back up the wall to resume their posts in a fairly steady stream. Seth hadn’t made them vanish, he had simply removed them from harm’s way so that they could fight on.
Smiling at his master’s genius, a wicked feral smile of fangs and saliva, he charged forward once more to help those who fought on ahead of him.
* * * * *
As the battle waged on, Sara felt her power growing by the second. Then at other times she felt a huge wash of power through her, so intense that had she been weaker she would have been overcome. Though she was growing stronger and faster and more agile by the second, it was as much a curse as it was a blessing.
Because she was constantly in motion, momentum was beginning to become an issue. With each passing moment she moved faster. Higher speeds meant more time to slow or stop, and also made it more difficult to change direction. So even though time stretched out before her, she was in a constant state of flux, having to relearn her limits and the consequences that came with her power over and over again as they constantly changed. Even so, she was a terror on the fields surrounding the city.
To Sara it felt as though she walked among the shadows of men, so attached to the ground they seemed, that they appeared barely to move as she slipped between them unnoticed. She grabbed them and hurled them like playthings back the way they had come across the fields, and even at the distance that they landed she could hear the cracks of their bones and their screams as they slowly began to mend. She too understood that killing them was a last resort.
Seeing that the defenders upon the wall were beginning to see more than their share of the action, Sara rushed to the wall and, using the climbing vamps like stepping stones, she leapt from one to another up the wall simply to dislodge them, as she could now make the full thirty story jump with little effort at all.
With bodies raining down below her, the lethal princess of Valdadore cleared the top of the city wall and landed as lightly as a wraith upon the stone defenses. Moving down the wall she walked among and between combatants, breaking limbs of some enemies and flinging over the side the screaming and wriggling bodies of others. It was a mundane task at best, as she now moved too quickly and was too strong for any of them to combat. If it were a fight to the death, Sara did not doubt that already she could handle the whole lot of them at once. And that was before the third generation of her underlings began to awake and feed.
Within two hours Sara had made a few dozen laps around the defensive wall of the city, clearing its ramparts of invading vampires like so many leaves into the wind. She had felt them begin to arise, not that she could sense their actual awakening. But she could hear the new wave of screams that began within the city, and could feel the power that now came at an even increasing speed. Hundreds had turned into a few thousand and now that number had spawned a generation of tens of thousands.
Sara had no idea how many people sheltered within the city. A hundred thousand? Maybe three times that? She pondered going to count them, thinking she would barely be missed in the short time it would take her to do so, but decided against it. She did not want to see firsthand the source of her power and the reason for its rapid growth. She knew that multitudes of people within the city were facing savage creatures that had no regard for their lives. She tried to stop her imagination when she envisioned young mothers and their babies falling before the teeth of one of her kind. The thought sickened her.
Gritting her own teeth Sara knew she had to stick to the plan, and the plan was to kill as few as possible and save all that could be saved. But time was running out. Morning was coming, and the spread of her alteration would have the Valdadorians leaping up to the walls within a short time to feed upon their own defenders. Another generation, perhaps two, and no humans would be left within the city. Time was running out, but if Sigrant had fifty thousand men, Sara was not yet his equal.
Just a little more time.
* * * * *
Garret stood within what could only be described as a hell of his own. All around him the enemy swarmed, and they came at him several dozen at a time in hopes of tasting his blood. They leapt upon him like wild dogs, biting and clawing as he stomped, pummeled, and slashed the apparently unending wave of demonic enemies. He could not believe the relentlessness of the creatures, so driven by their need to kill they did not give up no matter how many of their kind he slaughtered. After some time they came from everywhere, swarming from all sides and even raining down from above on occasion.
Though he felt as if he had been in constant motion for several hours, cutting and slashing at his enemies he turned to see the wall of the city only a few yards behind him. The twisted men, infected by the unholy disease carried by his brother’s wife, were a difficult breed to kill. Even with crushed bones or removed limbs they thrashed upon the ground or rose again to fight with unnatural desire to kill. Perhaps it was the killing that made them stronger. Garret had no real way of knowing. What he did know was that if they did not die, the demonic enemy would mean the end of Valdadore.
No matter how resilient the enemy was, Garret was the better, and with the hours of constant butchery in such a small area the bodies began to pile up. When the change came, he stood upon a mound of the dead, seemingly telling the enemy that he would remain king even if he had to kill them all himself.
One moment the creatures were behaving as they had from the beginning, the next they did something beyond peculiar. As if Garret was suddenly forgotten by the enemy, they suddenly shifted their attention and turned on members of their own kind. Around him, more than a dozen men screamed in horror as they were beset upon by their allies. The sound was blood-curdling, and Garret stood frozen as the men were fed upon by their own. Then, as if the incident had not happened at all, the creatures turned their focus back on the king of Valdadore, which was no disappointment to the king. Chuckling and hurling insults, Garret resumed his slaughter once more.
The odd alteration of behavior would happen several times within the next half of an hour, but Garret rolled with the punches and was only slightly caught off guard when the second wave of creatures arrived at the walls to his city.