Oathbreaker ch 9.26 - The Dark Lord Reigns In Antriss (Patreon)

Without fresh blood, I grew weaker. I refused to speak to the necromancer when he returned. He interrogated me from dusk to dawn, took a long breakfast, then resumed his questioning until nightfall.

I understood his tactic. He had me thoroughly trapped, so the only harm I could do him was with words. He knew I wanted to do him harm — all demons want to do all things harm — so he goaded and poked and prodded at me until I should have been hot enough to melt the menhirs to slag.

Only, I was too weak to. And he knew it.

When still I wouldn’t speak after near two days of questioning, the necromancer raised Ronan and the dead priests and set them to guard my prison. It was a year before his next visit. Without sustenance, my physical incarnation faded until I was little more than a ghost. There were no animals, not even insects or birds willing to fly overhead. The undead rocks that made my prison kept even the meanest dung eaters away, leaving the risen bodies to decay slowly, and me without any means to effect my escape.

I watched my gentle carpenter’s gray visage turn soft and melt off his bones in the summer heat. His soul was inside the stones, but it was too confused to heed me, and what could I say in any case? He’d been an amusement. A plaything. I’d enjoyed pretending to be his peasant bride for a while, but he would have gotten old and tired eventually, and my hunger would have compelled me to take him at the end.

And then what? Another widower? Some Abgrûdai had their choice meals and their preferred method to spice them. Would I have become like that, going from one lost soul to the next, filling in the gap where one truly loved used to be?

Perhaps I could play the daughter or the mother next time, switch it up to avoid tedium. Perhaps I could be the husband. There were many masks I’d not yet worn.

I grew bored. I negotiated with the menhirs. The seasons turned and I waited for something to change.

And change came.

Even locked inside my prison, I sensed the shadow fall on the world. It was like an invisible hand stretching out to cover the sun, like a distant titan stirring from sleep, like the held breath before the hurricane.

All across the lands of man and elf, from the deserts of Agharra to the shores of Urn, from most distant desert to most desolate sea, all the world felt him begin his war.

My hibernation ended, and not only mine. Prisons and burrows across Edaea opened. Ancient seals came undone, locks broke, and monsters that had been long asleep began to stir. Dread things from the blackest depths of cave and sea began to raise their heads. Dark wanderers turned their gazes westward.

Winter came early and lingered long.

Snow covered the menhirs when the necromancer returned. It hid the cracks in the stones and buried the motionless dead. I surprised my captor by speaking to him before he’d even gotten his first question out.

Something has changed.

My voice was intangible, a spiritual reverb born of no earthly source. The wizard shuddered and peered suspiciously into the circle as he replied.

“The king in Antriss has declared war on the Oroion Empire,” he said. “He is calling all dark things to him.”

Antriss lies in the Abyss and has no king. My brethren have been warring over it for millennia.

The necromancer began to pace around the circle, studying the menhirs with a trained eye as he inspected his wards. He would not be able to see me, though he sensed me in the gathering dusk. His boots crunched the snow as he spoke. “It’s what the lord of the western wastes has called his realm. You’ve become talkative, demon. Tired of sulking?”

I made my voice sweet, my manner pliant.

I’ve had time to think. You have the better of me, Magi.

He was no fool. Flattery did not work on him. He paused and glowered past the stones, perhaps sensing something amiss. “I was originally going to pry your name out of you, ask you a few questions, then raise a barrow here so you couldn’t cause trouble. But things have changed. The Oroion has grown weak. Its kings aren’t ready for war, and the emperor is no soldier. The Cambion will sweep over them. I’m hedging my bets.”

He was talking to himself more than to me. He produced something from his cloak. An iron flask.

The Almoner all over again, was it? He must have intended to trade me to this rising power, a gift to earn good will and perhaps even a place in the mongrel’s court. I had to respect his forethought, but I had no interest in being a bauble. Or a slave. Not again.

I dropped the act then and stopped pretending like I was still imprisoned inside the menhirs, who’d been dead for days. I took my time with my captor, most of the night, and only when I’d plucked the last note on his screams did I feel some measure of satisfaction for the past year of humiliation and doldrum.

You wish for specifics? Come now. Don’t be crass.

I am perfectly reasonable in my vengeances. I took Didikas’s eye for hurting my feelings, and I unspooled that necromancer’s capillaries for murdering my fling and putting me in a cage for a year. He’s lucky I didn’t make him Woed and have it last for weeks.

A strong talent was a rare and fulfilling meal, and it made up for much of the time I’d lost trapped inside the circle. Between the necromancer and the strength I’d stolen from the talking stones, I felt more potent than I had in centuries, stronger even than when I’d walked the streets of Rot Voraag.

Rot Voraag. That was where this cambion was. He’d renamed that city after the great seat in the depths of the subfabric. Had he raised its black towers into this world, or was the name merely aspirational?

I could find out. All I needed to do was heed the call I could still feel thrumming through the very bones of the earth and head west. Many of my kind, both demons and the spawn of demons, would be doing that very thing, migrating en masse to bask in the dark glory of this champion.

There was a war on the horizon. A great war, perhaps even more tumultuous than the siege on Heaven. I could feel it. Gods and demons would be struggle for dominance over Creation once again.

Would the Gatebreaker’s attention be pulled from the war in the Heavens? Would I see some of my old comrades there, perhaps even the Order of the Red Bloom? Should I kneel again and join the next leg of the war for dominance over this existence?

I sat on that decision for some days, resisting the gravity tugging at me. The earthly spirits felt the same thing I did, and rather than hunting me like after my manifestation, they retreated deep into their sanctums. Their power lay in the east, and was waning in these lands as a black sun rose over what had once been the Exalted’s throne.

Other powers besides the mongrel were stirring. I felt those too, how they turned their eyes westward and bared their fangs. Some were dark and some were bright, some reeking of blood and others of sunlight. Powerful mortals like that necromancer I’d eaten wove great spells, and faerie lords fashioned arrows of starlight and prepared for war.

Interesting. The world had become interesting again. Wandering into another Rot Voraag or another Enkarsura and repeating the same cycle seemed boring. I wanted to stretch my wings a bit, and I didn’t want to run into Eshirrie or any of her sisters.

If this Cambion King was truly the promised blight who would cover the stars, then the Abyss would devour this world soon enough and me along with it. I felt no great hurry to help it along.

Before he’d died, my carpenter had dreamed about traveling to the cities and taking up work far from bad memories and neighbors who resented him. He’d not been well enough to travel with his wounds, but he’d longed to.

I went north then, rather than west.

Later, history will speak of the Cambion as sweeping across the Oroion Kingdoms like some kind of tidal wave of blood.

It sounds riveting. Properly scary, apocalyptic even, like the temperamental imp was some kind of toothy weather pattern. But that’s not how wars are fought, even supernatural ones. When the legions of half a hundred afterlives, sixty-three continents, seven elemental planes, and the better part of a million demons besieged the Silver City, there’d been armies and strategies even then, a sequence of battles rather than some singular orgy of violence (though we did have our orgies).

The great war between Antriss and Oroion was no different. It ebbed and flowed, the violence waxing and waning across decades, and its early seasons were quieter than one might expect. There were battles. Mere skirmishes compared to what came later, and they were mostly confined to the empire’s hinterlands. Its neighbors — unconquered enemies — suffered the worst early on as the mongrel took nibbles before risking fuller bites. Skärdale and Dead Mediir bent the knee to the Dark Lord many years before Torslowe or Durranth did.

He hardly needed to waste his strength on the empire at first. It was already eating itself. The battle at Cortsmede, the very hemorrhage I’d slipped through, was but the latest example of its fracturing. The indolent King of Kings who came to power following that war might have been a good ruler in gentler times, but those were not gentle times, and Lorien Lupercal was more satyr than lycanthrope, at least in the beginning.

No, it was not the emperor in Nossus who made the king in Rot Voraag hesitate to release his hordes. The kings of Oroion had long been merely the patsies for the New Gods, and it was they that the Cambion, who was only half god, competed against. Their hands had been in Cortsmede, and in a thousand other battles across the centuries before one supplanted them and changed the course of time. They were paranoid, jealous, and mad, but they still had strength.

The King of Antriss knew this, so instead he sent out his ambassadors and used seduction where he could not bring the sword, dividing up the kingdoms of mankind and tricking them into calling forth the very agents of their doom. Demons walked freely across the earth in those days, taking the forms of capering jesters and savage warlords. These dark spirits guested in the halls of lords in various guises, whispering into the ears of the jealous and the fearful. The great palaces of Edaea became host to dreadful balls, the highborn drank the blood of their subjects, and the dead found fitful rest in shallow graves.

And the gods allowed it, for they kept their eyes on bloodstained Heaven, each eager to guard their charnel gardens, each coveting the empty throne that loomed above them all, a constant reminder of how small their own seats were. They all underestimated this new threat, save for one.

All of this was happening around me. That century saw the world broken and remade, gods slain and born, the gates of Heaven thrown open and all its demons released. It saw an empire laid low and drowned in water.

I recall some of it with bittersweet fondness. My carpenter. My time as a courtesan amongst the vampire aristocracy of Torslowe. My brief but interesting service to the witch-elf Daifalx, who’d been spurned by the God of Betrayal (she did not seem to find this as amusing as I did) and dedicated herself to earning His attention in any way she could.

There would be an age where I would attend the Prince of Darkness in his lightless court, but if we are still tallying my sins, then know that I never did this willingly or with an intent to hasten the death of your world. I have never served any master unless compelled to with my true name, which I have only ever given of my own free will to one alone.

But I am jumping far ahead. The Cambion left such a mark on your history, yet to my eyes he is of less consequence, even worth a measure of pity. After all, his godhood was stolen by the golden waif, the prophecies and apocalypses his birth promised left unfulfilled. He approached the Throne of God and returned to this earth empty handed.

He is old and bitter now, and he hates you, but your world is still here and my kind have not yet won.

Take solace in that, mortal. I will speak little of the King of Antriss from here, for I was never more than a mercenary in his wars, and I would rather speak of matters closer to the heart.

It is time to speak of the wizard.