Oathbreaker ch. 9.21 - Demon War (Patreon)

Years Later

Though time has little meaning in the Abyss

The demons of Enkarsura engaged their foe on the fringes of the Kenosian Steppes, which some call the Waste of Whist and which mortals know as the Ivorine Hell.

The Enkarsurites brought ships upriver on a tributary of the Drossian Sea. Seven hundred barges and half as many fast dromons filled the undead waters from bank to bank, each ship laden with a cargo of disquiet spirits starved for blood. Their howls carried across those hushed fields to herald their coming.

The drums of Enkarsura thundered into a devouring silence. The noise of the fleet’s approach seemed only to demonstrate the absolute quietude of those sepulchral plains. The steppes were covered in an endless litter of ash-white bones stretching as far as the eye could see. There were towering ribcages taller than the hills, and skulls that could have doubled as castles, their tusks the watchtowers framing their hollow gates. Bone splinters protruded from the hoary sands like trees, and teeth like the blocks of a crumbled city.

It was very like the graveyards of mammoths that marked ice ages in the mortal realms, only that waste seemed the very genesis of that image, a cemetery of titans.

The enemy came from the hills and ravines beyond the river’s banks, flooding the fields like an outpouring of ants spat forth by a thousand hives. What had been a land of deep, abiding silence became fractured by a rising bedlam.

Deep within ravines made from the bones of dead gods, the Beast of Bedlam let out a roar that shook the sky.

The first wave of defenders were the restless dead, skeletons led by pale commanders who carried bows of horn. Their darts would have formed black clouds over the sun, had that place had one. The ships nearest the bank returned fire, launching screeching bolts from trebuchets imported from the Iron Hell. The Cold Iron had been brought for the demon lord and those Abgrûdai who followed him, but proved hardly less effective against the native demons of the Whist.

As portions of the fleet winged off to deal with the enemy flooding the banks, the brunt of the ships hurtled on, rowing furiously for the shallower waters upriver where a feasible landing had been chosen in the weeks preceding the battle.

There’d been precious little time to prepare, and it was only thanks to the Margravine’s wide-cast net of spies and informants that a fleet could be assembled in such short order. Her scribes had worked their fingers to the marrow to sift for omens in the abyssal sand, and read the portents of Hell until their eyes wept red tears.

But this was enemy territory, and the Bedlam had prepared well. Some ships began to flounder, then break and sink. There was something in the river, a huge beast capable of cracking hulls with its jaws. Two dromons and a war barge were lost before enough cold iron could be brought to bear to repel the river beast, and even then it was only driven deeper underwater and not slain.

There were other traps in the river, including chains that spanned it bank to bank. The Prince of Ingres had opted to use Orkaelin weapons as well. The enemy employed necromancy, the premier power of the Ivorine, to animate the ancient bones of the steppe and send them into battle. Undead mammoths and centipedal amalgams of bone joined the defenders. Enough wreckage and bodies were made to form partial bridges over the water and allow the Bedlam’s hordes to reach the ships. The great fleet was overwhelmed before even the first barge dropped its ramp.

Of course, the fleet had always been a diversion.

There were many rumors about what began the War of the Kenosian Steppe, as it was later called. The Prince of Ingres had been treating with the Margravine of Enkarsura, had even been a guest in her Carnelian Palace. Some said that he coveted her realm and wished to take it as he’d taken the dread gates of Ingres from his previous master. Others said one or the other had given insult, or that the Beast of Bedlam was a mere mindless animal controlled by some greater will.

Few knew the truth — that the demon lord had seen the treasures of the Silver City of the Lost God in the Margravine’s halls, and was intent on eradicating every last one, until naught remained of God’s kingdom but dust and silence.

And the Margravine, though now Abgrûdai, had been born of that higher place and would not allow it.

That war was nothing less than a struggle between preservation and total destruction, between the memory of a paradise that was, though that memory be poison, and a hatred so deep that it would permit nothing.

The Margravine of Enkarsura opened the battle proper with a crimson thunderclap as she tore apart the threads between dimensions and made a portal in the very center of the plain. The scarlet rift belched forth a wavefront of heat in all directions, incinerating thousands, and then it began to spit out demons.

First came balor wielding spears of lightning, then a flood of cacodemons and dretches. The enemy rejoined, moving not as any disciplined legion in orderly ranks but as an amorphous flood, like a single great organism made all of teeth and claws and living fire. The Margravine’s army was little different. The meeting of those two rancorous tides could have been compared to two thunderheads slamming into eachother, only to then meld into one mindless, whirling storm and thrash as dueling bears with nails of raking lightning.

Flying demons struggled in the sky. Those of elemental shape fought like wavefronts of heat and cold, and made localized storms in the hills. The largest monsters slammed and stomped together like wrestlers, heedless of the ants they crushed by the hundred. When a behemoth fell, the hordes swarmed over them either to kill the enemy or feast, or both.

The battle had as much in common with a lunatic festival as with war. Atop the hills made from fallen champions, the creatures of Perdition held aloft their grisly trophies and danced in the light of the bleeding gate.

Then the Beast of Bedlam came. It began as a spreading silence, an inexplicable muting of the battle. That wavefront of quiet shifted into a steadily rising howl, a roar like to the greatest of tornadoes that trembled every loose bit of shale and every ribcage across the steppe for two hundred miles. A cyclone wind struck, carrying with it a billion cutting shards of bone and sand.

The shape within it struck with eight fists and used sound as its sword and terror as its shield.

The forces of Enkarsura balked. The enemy general did not command, simply advanced, and his slaves followed him as the rain follows the gale. The Demon Lord of the Gates of Ingres pushed towards the rift, until that beacon shone upon his horned head and lit his eight arachnid eyes to points of mad fire.

And there he stopped, for the Red Bloom came.

The Dark Lady of the Drossian Sea was heralded by her sons, the three drakes known as the Haboraym. The cambions surrounded the Prince of Ingres and halted his elemental advance. They drowned him in toxic fumes to sting his eyes and confuse him, and ignited it to burn him. The demon prince tried to break them, but they were the beloved children of the Red Bloom and were no fools. They harried their foe, enraging him, and when their mother finally struck it was to deliver a killing blow.

The First of the Succubi threw a single spear. It was a relic of the Heavens, that javelin, and though sullied by its long eons lost in Perdition, it retained a spark of the First Light. The spear was a black that shone, a burning void, and when its owner hurled it, it was like an echo of the very spear that slew Azoth and birthed the present cosmos.

It brought a single flash. Then a darkness.

The Prince of Ingres, known also as the Beast of Bedlam, who was one of the first Abgrûdai and among the greatest, had spent ten thousand years caged in silence. He had been so long trapped in the dark and the quiet, without voice and without hope, furthest of all spirits from the light which made him. Within himself he had built a roar fit to slay worlds.

He met his end feeling the warmth he longed for.

Some days after the War of the Kenosian Steppe, which many were already calling the Battle of Bedlam, I knelt on the hull of a broken ship. Little remained but a sloped platform of black wood floating on the water. The wrecked hulks of broken vessels filled the river far as I could see, another graveyard in this graveyard world.

A soldier was trying to crawl onto the hull. He was one of the mortal mercenaries employed by Enkarsura, a planar corsair whose homeland had been lost when the Silver City fell and the ensuing fires ruined whole worlds.

The Dross had not been kind to the man. His skin had sunken to the bone, his eyes melted down his cheeks and soul-maggots invading the hollow recesses left behind. Yet, he had a strong will to live. He’d managed to pull most of his upper body from the water, so the Dross only covered his waist and legs. Ink hands were grabbing at him and trying to pull him down, but his nearly skinless fingers refused to let go of the ship’s hull.

He mumbled incoherent words. The river had gotten into his mouth, and when he tried to speak only thin blue-gray liquid bubbled out. I watched him struggle, fascinated, until wingbeats heralded the arrival of another demon. I didn’t look up from the dying man as bare, feminine feet padded across the upturned belly of the ship.

“We’ve taken Balam’s Skull.” The lilting voice was weary and satisfied at once, very much like they might have sounded after good sex. “The fortress of the Beast of Bedlam is ours, as are the Gates of Ingres. I hear the Ivorine Council has already sent dignitaries to treat with us. Like they weren’t backing the Beast the whole while, the rotted cowards!”

“Hm.” I tilted my head at the corsair, who’d managed to scrabble out another inch from the river. A dead face had latched onto his back and begun gnawing at his gambeson. There were many corpses in the river, and the souls within were always eager for even the rudest vessels. Already the fields beyond the Dross were covered in thousands of new undead, shambling skeletons and withered zombies who would no doubt be corralled into the service of one demonic commander or another.

The water stirred and moaned, and the soldier let out a desperate, muted plea for help. He sensed me, though he could not see me. I could have reached out and touched him.

“Aren’t you going to go see the ambassadors?” The other succubus asked. Her voice held the thoughtless impatience of youth.

I made another noncommittal noise. I reached out a hand, thinking to brush the corsair’s hair from his face. It wouldn’t help him see, given his lack of eyes, but I wanted a better look at his face. I hesitated, not wanting to disturb the scene. Much like a child watching ants dismantle a grub, I had a keen desire to observe nature play itself out.

“I’ve never seen Ivorine,” the succubus continued. “I hear they’re strange. That they don’t have souls.”

We didn’t have souls either. We were just Dross-muck quickened by them. This whole reality was like a reservoir of amniotic fluid.

Bred in black cauldrons by wicked gods.

“Shyora!” The other demon whined. “I want to go see them!”

“Then go,” I said.

She did not. After several moments watching the struggling corsair with me she said, “The Margravine is going to choose someone to rule the Gate. Rumor is it will be Lady Eshirrie.”

“It won’t be Eshirrie,” I muttered distractedly. The part of my conscious always slithering its way through the angles of intrigue was almost automatic. “She’s the Margravine’s right hand, and too restless to be given a kingdom. She would turn rebel within the century out of boredom.”

“She’s too loyal!” The other demon protested, though she didn’t sound certain. After a pause she added, “She would do it, if the Margravine ordered.”

“She will not order it.”

The corsair lost ground as the hands on him jerked hard, finding enough sync to force him back. He heard us, and was trying to find us, his gaze moving between me and Nilmarin. That distraction had cost him focus, perhaps lost him the battle.

Irritated that she’d interfered, I turned my head enough to glance at the other succubus from the corner of my eye. Nilmarin was young, perhaps only a handful of centuries from the Dross as mortals measure time. She was still in her “first bloom,” as the Margravine’s following called it, having never stepped foot in the higher realms or needed to reincarnate following death. She had never seen a living human unmarked by the Hells, so her appearance was based on what she’d read in her favored books. Her “hair” was made from thin flaps of skin hung from her mottled scalp in red ribbons. Her eyes were too large and lacked delineation between the sclera and iris, so they were yellow orbs with dark points at the centers. Her skin was a pale, feverish shade of red, and the bones beneath were oddly shaped.

She’d done an excellent job on the wings. Many succubi — though not all — grew wings for themselves in mimicry of the original. Nilmarin’s were shaped to resemble skeletal hands with pink skin hung between the fingers. I still remembered when I’d helped her by pulling them part-grown from her back. Little grew cleanly in the Abyss, and the wing-buds had gotten trapped.

Like me, a mask fashioned from a skull was fixed over the upper half of her face, the bottom half cut so her nose and chin remained visible. We both wore the dark red robes and bore the sullen tattoos marking us as members of the Kandaric Orders. Also like me, her bare feet and hands were stained black by the Dross. Many of our sisters fluttered like crows about the battlefield, documenting everything, looking for omens and signs that would then be translated into the Margravine’s archives.

Anything in the spirit realms might be a sign of some greater movement. My attention went back to the corsair, who’d fallen back into the water nearly to his shoulders.

“It could be Eshirrie,” Nilmarin mused. “Or Gemory. Are you going to eat him, or is he for play?”

The corsair had stretched his right arm as far as he could, so his bloodied fingers came close to brushing my knee. I sighed.

“I’m certain he would be grateful if we pulled him out,” Nilmarin suggested. She spoke thoughtfully, though I knew she was just trying to hurry me along for the sake of seeing her Ivorine devils. “We could share him until he’s used up, though I don’t know how you plan to keep him alive or stop anyone else from poaching.”

I stood and turned to her. “Would you like to go see the Ivorine?”

“Yes!” Nilmarin said brightly, beaming at me as though it had been my idea all along.

Before we left, I glanced down at the mortal man one more time. His injuries should have already killed him, but his spirit was so stubborn that it clung to the body, animating its half-eaten limbs. There was nothing left of him from the waist down.

Strong indeed. He’d likely gone through many hells, both figurative and literal, only to meet his end in this dismal place. It seemed a dreary fate. His homeland lost to cosmic cataclysm, his people destroyed save for those who’d been cast into the strange roads beyond his earthly plane, made into wayward beggars seeking scraps from the tables of monsters they might have once considered mere myth.

I felt an idle, useless sympathy. If he managed to crawl out, he would become some demon’s toy and soon enough their meal. If he remained in the Dross, then he might eventually become Abgrûdai. I wasn’t sure which was the more terrible fate.

The soul beneath me was beyond salvaging in its present state, even had I cared to. My calling was to damn souls, not save them. It would need to be reforged, hammered and tempered into something unrecognizable, to stand any chance at dragging itself from this place. What emerged would be monstrous, but it might climb up and out.

If the lost wanderer wanted to climb out of these hells, then he was going the wrong way. As he raised his head to plead for help, I placed my foot on his skull and pushed him into the river.