There is no light but that which comes from the master.
There is no will but what is gifted to us by the master.
There is no life but what is allowed by the master.
By the act of the Godbreaker, we were damned.
Abandoned to the darkness of the old world, we were lost.
With the shrouding of the sun, existence ceased to shine, and the sea that was night swallowed the world entire.
Damnation was our fate.
But salvation was his offering.
From beyond the darkness, he came!
Yakozitrin, Lightbearer, Godborn, Master of the Remnants!
Salvation for us, the unwanted, the alone, the abandoned.
Through the master''s infinite mercy alone are we able to continue. By his light are we able to live. By his will are we able to find purpose.
Praise be Yakozitrin.
Praise by the last true god in darkness.
For through his blessing, the dawn rises still.
-Enclaver Prayer
20-9
A Playground for Tyrants (II)
“The pools shine! The master lives! The master returns! Hold true! The dawn rises still!”
“The dawn rises still!”
The words left Aladon’s lip without thought, and what remained of his cohort chorused after, as if possessed themselves. Aches and bruises lined every inch of his torso. His arms were blocks of leaden fire, but his fingers remained fused tight to his shield and fang-axe. He broke his spear against the hardened shell of a gastavoid the transgressors used to shield their frontline, serving as a weaponized mount against the honor guard.
Slow though the gas slugs were, they still loomed over even the tallest of men, and the heated gases they spewed from the vents along their carapace inflicted lightness upon one’s skull.
Of course, this was secondary to their true purpose in combat: to be detonated upon reaching shield walls, breaking formations by force, fire, and shrapnel.
A series of cracks sounded from above. Another dozen gleaming bolts–each as long as Aladon was tall–punched into what few gastavoids the attackers had left. Blasts tore gaps in the pale masonry lining the Second Junction. Down the flame-lit paths, limbs and burning viscera joined howling screams, the noise long sounding as if ambiance in Aladon’s ears.
Bodies lay strewn along the second rung of the city–the last true city, by Yakozitrin’s grace. Writhing figures lay sprawled amidst the sea of dead and dying. Bodies of all shapes and sizes lay scattered. Red bled into fabrics of white and teal. As Aladon swept the streets for additional signs of movement, he felt bile lick at the roof of his mouth before he forced the sickness back down.
His faith in the master was absolute. Unquestionable. But he himself was not. He was flesh-in-passing and mind-in-diminishing. Loyalty notwithstanding, killing one’s own people by the scores left wounds within just as without. His heart felt scarred and moist with tears to come, but that was for tomorrow.
That was for if he could survive this at all.
For now, the banner of Hand Urrins flapped still along the second rung, and the esteemed Pearlguard stood defiant. But though they were the master’s chosen, though they represented the lightmost caste, the masses gathered under the false prophet named “Dogmother” seemed endless in their number. Worse yet, they filled with ranks of the night-touched–the toilers of groundmost–and the sin-bearers–breeders meant to produce children worthy of rising the rungs.
Children bearing the master’s visage in every respect. Light of hair. Light of eyes. Light of skin.
To see them turned from divinely ordained purpose was sickening in of itself. But that was nothing compared to the act of actively cutting them down or ordering his gas-throwers to light their bodies aflame.
In the shadows of his mind, he could still see her, the breeder among the heretical vanguard. She held her half-light child aloft as if the wailing babe would prove a talisman from fire or blade. She learned of her mistake when Aladon called his gas throwers to ignite their tubes and see the rabble purged.
In the moment of her burning, both she and her child were closer to their master than they had ever been. It was a good death, to be clothed in dancing bright, and an eternal condemnation to be charred by the stain of black.
Aladon briefly surveyed his remaining forces and shot another look upward. The darkness of despair was parting with the shimmering of the pools. Dappled lights danced the vastness of the city, unmistakable even through columns of rising smoke.
The towers were alive again–resurrected by the master''s shine. The dark was parting. The long night was approaching its end. And deliverance would soon follow. A prickling sensation played at his skin. Horror. Elation. Exhaustion. Desperation. There was no end to how many emotions could burn inside a man at once.
Gasps and sobs escaped from his fellow Pearlguard. Of the twelve legions he was granted to hold the Second Junction thoroughfare from the Dogmother’s masses, only half were still capable of fighting. The way ahead of them stood a narrow channel and their gas throwers held firm from atop the edges of the first rung.
Over the month of fighting, they had conducted an in-depth defense, layering their fortifications across the second rung. The Distributors’ Crescent and the various theaters had been pre-emptively trapped with spark-triggered explosives to deny the heretics their much-loved tactic of taking light-blessed hostages and whittling the Pearlguard down in brutal room-to-room engagements.
Rivers of running blood marked every inch of giving in the battles that followed. But ground was given. Pearlguards fell. And after a month of continuous battle and no relief dispatched to their section, Aladon found himself forced back between the jaws leading up to the final rung of the holy city, and spent his nights steeling himself to give the order to blow the channels and cut the heretics from final ascent.
Now, however, it seemed like there wouldn’t be the need. Soon, the master would arrive, and all would be made just.
The wind whistled down the narrow confines of the Second Junction. Faintly, Aladon could hear the cries sounding out from the distance. Cheers as well.
“The dawn rises still!”
“The dawn rises still!”
“The master returns!”
“The dawn rises still!”
Aladon clenched his teeth with practiced effort, hissing out wind to halt himself from the forbidden expression.
“Fucking shadow-touched,” Kaiss, Aladon’s blade-bearer, said. The hulking second spat through the thin crevice offered by his carapace helmet and sneered. “That Dogmother bitch has them dreaming the wrong shades. They think they’re the righteous ones in this. They think the master will favor them instead. Think of it. The master, choosing the night-touched over us.”
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More cheers rose from all around the city, above and below. It was a dissonant thing how both sides in this civil war shared much of the same practices, same battle cries, same beliefs, but how was it to be any different?
They were the last true chosen people left, and all who dwelled in this city of light existed by the master’s blessing.
The master, who was now soon to return.
But how long? When previously the master’s touch made brightened waters dance, it took fourteen shifts in the tides of night before he arrived.
It would be hell to endure that long. But no longer hopeless.
Looking to his left and right, Aladon filled himself with resolve as he took in the remnants of his forces. Each man was encased in their blessed shells, lit eternally by the master''s blessings as if shimmering pearls beneath the waves of yore. Even the blood drenching the gambesons they wore beneath could not diminish the luster. Even cracked and chipped, their armor still shone.
To win the right to wear the carapace was an honor beyond honor. But even so, they were as mortal as the master was divine.
Though the heretics broke blades, fists, teeth, and seeds against their armor, what did not pierce became blows of bluntness. Exhaustion, more than any other thing, was the downfall of countless among their number.
Flashes of prior days passed through Aladon again. Cries of terror as flagging members fighting in their lines were pried away from the formation by the masses, dragged into snarling mobs of humanity to be desecrated before their fellows prior to death. More than a few blade-bearers followed their shield-firsts into death in these moments, unable to stand witness.
More than once did Kaiss sever scores of groping limbs trying to pull Aladon free from his line.
And judging from the heavy footfalls shaking the ground beneath their feet, such moments were soon to be commonplace again.
“Re-ady!” Aladon choked, his voice hoarse and cracked from days of shouting. A series of wheezes escaped the men beside him, each of them clenching their jaws to halt the expression as he did. He took a moment to take inventory of his forces again while his throat recovered.
Three thousand were in the frontline, holding the lip of the thoroughfare via a line of constructed battlements while five times that number formed the rear behind, firing, supporting. They were out of grease and half their seedshooters were dry of shot, causing them to join the line as auxiliaries and runners. The dozen or so gas-throwers remained fueled. Small miracles there. Without the flames, they would have likely been overrun days ago.
“Ready legions!” he cried again, his throat dry with pain.
The First cohort across from him repeated and so on. Aladon checked his armor and gave Kaiss a look. “Runner?”
“Don’t see nobody,” Kaiss sighed. “Rumors are flying. Legions of the Fifth Junction counterattacking to save the Fourth. Third might’ve already blown their channels. Second’s holding. Like us.”
“For now,” Aladon said. The sound of river rapids roared, causing Aladon to look over his shoulder. Along the steep marble ramp leading up to the first rung, grand platforms the size of an entire section of the city screamed down, their momentum powered by water, their position kept in place by sparking rails. Crates and boxes were stacked high, but reinforcements remained few.
Such was the continuing narrative of this struggle: they had all the material, and the enemy had all the manpower.
“Think dark thoughts, brother,” Kaiss muttered. “If we collapse, we might just be gifting the Dogmother enough supplies to arm her ascent. Wouldn’t want that now, would we.”
Aladon scoffed. “The rearguard knows their duty. As we do ours. The enemy is flagging. We will endure.”
The towering blade-bearer shuffled uncomfortably. “Seems to me like we all got a hit of morale. For the same reason.” Kaiss squinted at dancing pools of water splashing in the master’s atrium above the city. “Explaining this will be an ugly thing.”
In response to this, Aladon cracked and turned low, hiding his transgression from his comrades. They all had their lots in life, some more miserable than others. Yet, for the first time in his life, Aladon found himself unable to envy Hand Urrins’ fortunes.
“Movement!”
The cry came from the far left of the line. Immediately, Kaiss stepped to the left and readied his blade. Aladon drew up his shield and ignored the cracks sounding from his left shoulder. Squinting out into the haze, he saw naught but hills of rolling corpses, still burning from the gas throwers’ kiss.
Mutters and barks for clarification followed, but Aladon staggered as he felt his insides quiver, the blood in his veins jolt as if they were strings strummed by clawed fingers.
Behind him, Kaiss whimpered–a sound Aladon had never heard him make. A series of gasps and the jingling of armor followed. Bodies swayed and battled to remain still. Pressure prodded at Aladon’s insides, and spots formed in his vision.
For a moment, he thought he saw a series of cracks travel along the marble walls lining the sides to the channel–arteries fissuring through the coral-made battlements he stood on. But the moment was gone in a flash, streaking out of his sight, there and then not.
The sensations passed. Aladon mastered himself.
“I’m going to find whoever made those rations and kill them,” Kaiss said, announcing his own recovery with a quip of dry wit.
Aladon remained silent, however. Though the unnatural left his flesh, his heart was flooded with building dread.
He had felt the master’s touch before once. Stood in his presence. The way light and life bent to him was perfection. Absolute. Irresistible. The weight that emanated from his being ineffable in sensation.
There was something about this that felt the same but…
Greater.
Impossibly greater. Deeper too.
Aladon swallowed and barely heard the following cry.
“Movement! One heretic rising. Third mound beside the lip.”
His eyes snapped to place almost immediately, for he had been among those to stack those bodies, building them high during the lulls between so the heretics would have to crawl between the narrow channel of their dead if they wanted to process.
The emerging threat, however, did not come from the lip of the thoroughfare. No. Instead, bodies rolled down the mound of corpses as a shuffling form pushed free.
A unified expulsion of disbelieving breaths escaped from the Pearlguard.
“Fuck me,” Kaiss said. “We have ourselves a hard ‘un–what in the master’s will…”
Aladon saw it too: towering of crackling fire, both brilliant and uncanny as if the union between a raging inferno and coiling mist. It climbed forth from a translucent halo slipping out from the bodies, and a landslide of corpses toppled free, Aladon struggled not to recoil at the sight.
There, on the few bodies that remained, stood the breeder he ordered burned. Pockets of boiled fat still dripped from her heat-melted skin. Her skin, once divine, was raw red and midnight black, and her meat clung to her bones in hives of melted flesh. As every inch of the city was imbued by the master’s light, shadows could not shroud her, and so Aladon witnessed her in detail.
He saw cooked tension struggling to tighten beneath patches of skin burned away. He saw the open socket of her eye with embers still sizzling from what remained of her eyebrows, cord hanging free. And worst of all, he saw the child he ordered to be burned along with her flame-fused and sunken into her chest, its flayed face half-exposed in a perpetual scream,
“Impossible,” Aladon choked. He bounced off Kaiss, and only then did he realize he was backpedaling.
“Aladon?” Kaiss said, eyes alight with a rare expression of concern. “What? What’s wrong?”
But the large man could not see. He hadn’t the eyes.
And such was a blessing, for what followed next undid Aladon completely.
From across the sixty meters of space, she gestured at the burning halo surrounding her and summoned what looked like an apparition of her own form shaped from the flames themselves. Then, her ghostly twin–unblemished in flesh and naked in her sorrow–wept as pointed at the battlements, and him in particular.
A moment thereafter, the ghost faded, and the burned breeder’s ruined flesh began to peel.
It happened in an instant, and Aladon felt the weight of divinity pass through him again. A tide of blood rose from bodies below, drenching the woman in crimson. With a casual shrug thereafter, the blood then flung itself from her body, and she stood naked.
And unburned.
“Yako-Yakozitrin,” Aladon sobbed. The resolve within him was beginning to crumble. Beginning to break. Kaiss was holding from behind, whispering worried words while the rest of his cohort paled, never expecting to see him like this.
The woman took a step forward and looked down at her chest. Her infant was still boiled into her body. She tilted her head as if it were a curiosity rather than a dead babe. With a casual motion, she tore the conjoined infant free from her bosom and held it high for Aladon–and all the legions to see.
Cries of dismay and horror erupted from all who held the walls.
But night’s disfavor was not done visiting Aladon, for then the woman flung the child out at them, and it sailed out across an impossible distance, at impossible speeds. It came to an impaled halt torso-first against the jutting parapet. Several members of the cohort flinched back. A scream came from the left, followed by the crash of a falling body.
Through it all, cold terror just continued to flood Aladon’s stomach. Shivering, he looked at the slumped body of the baby, his mind unable to comprehend what had just happened.
This was when the infant lifted its head up and fucking smiled at him.
The sickness exploded within Aladon. His will gave.
He threw up all over Kaiss’ boots.
***
{Avo,} Calvino said, disappointment arriving in the form of a long, drawn-out sigh. {Was any of that necessary?}
The ghoul nested in the sheath of an almost-dead woman grinned and savored the flavors of minds breaking, morales shattering. +For my entertainment? Absolutely.+