That One Time I Went on a Quest
Ironclad

Everything’s…spinning. Turning upside down. Stuff coming out of my mouth. I need a napkin – how embarrassing, with all these people watching…

She’s running towards me. Why? I’m quite alright. Just a little…stuffy…

So hot…also cold. Numb. Must be the poison. Kind of redundant, to be poisoned with a slit throat.

Talu has pushed me aside; the world is turning upside down. Light. So much of it. That took no time at all. Light, heat, coming close. Closer.

Wait a minute. That’s…

That’s Kaishen.

It’s flying at me hilt-first. Hilt-first. She threw it. Tossed it at me.

But wasn’t she about to fight? Talukiel is two steps in front of her. Why did she throw her weapon at me?

Never mind that. Have to catch it first.

My arm rises all by itself…then falls back down. The muscles, can’t feel them. No blood to drive them – obviously, since the blood is pooling on my chest. Oo…flashing pictures! What…?

In the King’s gazebo, looking up with a smile.

Three travellers, galloping across the prairies under a fiery sunset.

Ashen rain, arms wrapped around me. No words.

Top of a broken carriage, dragons circling overhead. Her voice, saying…saying…‘Come, my esquire, let us stand against the enemy together. And after our foes are no more, I shall tell you the tale of a stubborn little girl who wanted to save the world.’

Together, she said.

My arm is moving again. Rain slips through my fingers, cold, fleeting. Then a heavy impact, like the strike of a red-hot hammer.

The grip.

Hot. The fire has returned, but this time with an urgency driven by a foreign yet intimate rage. Kathanhiel’s rage, must be: transplanted as the sword was torn from her grip in the middle of its surge. But it’s only the surface, ocean waves in a storm. There is something underneath…

A dark room, lit by a single lantern in the corner, its sputtering light painting shadows upon the litter of corpses strewn across the floor. The walls, the curtains, the shattered mahogany bed by the steel-barred window, the white smock of the girl standing in the middle of the carnage, holding a jewel-encrusted sword – all painted red.

Footsteps are coming up the stairs, but the girl doesn’t react. Looking out the window she sees the streets far below, choked full with content people going about their content lives. An alien world.

The door breaks open, the four locks upon it shattering to pieces. The glowing sword in the intruder’s hand catches her eye, but only briefly. Her own sword, so heavy and covered in so many useless diamonds, rises easily. Never thought it would be this easy, this dispensing of death. Should have done it sooner.

She points her sword at the intruder, holding it steady with one arm.

‘I’m not going back.’

The intruder, a young man with a sickly, wheezing voice, raises his own. ‘Over there. Is that the Prince of Lucia?’

‘You’re all the same to me,’ she says quietly.

‘“You”? What do you think I am?’

‘Dead, if you don’t leave me alone.’

He strikes without warning, lightning fast. One blink and the glowing sword has severed a third of her blade. Undaunted, she spins around the next blow like a dancer, her broken hilt rearing towards his face. Hands move in a blur; the intruder catches her wrist just as the jagged edge scratches his chin, drawing blood.

With a twist he throws away the sword of jewels and, with a sleight of hand, shoves the glowing one into her hand.

Great is the fiery pain that ensues…but not that great. This must be some abstract torture, another miserable game. Biting down on her lips, she tries to throw it away, but the hilt of the strange sword is somehow stuck to her fingers. At first the metal seared into her flesh, but then...the heat…began crawling into her blood…

So warm.

‘What is this?’ she asks, surprised at her own surprise.

‘It likes you.’

The intruder hunkers down so they are face to face. He is not very tall at all, his cheeks so sickly pale. There is a river of sweat running down his forehead, into the grey folds of his skin.

She couldn’t help herself. ‘Are you…are you ill?’

‘Tell me, little hero,’ he asks, ‘do you wish to die?’

Timidly, and hating herself for being timid, she nods.

His eyes are swirling. ‘Are you going to die here, in this filth, having done nothing, angry at all that had come to pass?’

She looks down at the sword. So brightly it glows.

‘Soon I will die,’ he says casually, ‘and that sword there will be needing a new master. It’ll give you the strength to remember, and to forget. I can show you how…unless you’re scared?’

She looks up at that, her eyes on fire.

‘I’m not afraid,’ she says.

He laughs. ‘And you never will be.’

A crimson light washes over the scene, brightening until there is nothing else.

There is lava pouring from my throat, there has to be; don’t think there is enough blood left to make it pour like that.

In my hand, the grip. Kaishen.

Close by yet so far away, the courtyard is shrouded in a red mist. Two figures are dancing.

Kathanhiel, no sword. In her hand the black pick is a desperate whirlwind. Her shirt is in shreds, her right sleeve gone entirely. The puddling rain beneath her feet is turning red.

Talu’s dark sabre flies by her left ear, slicing her earlobe in half. Her pick pushes it off, but the blade is already at her shoulder. She drops, spinning low with the momentum and swipes at Talu’s feet. No one could’ve seen that coming, yet somehow Talu manages to put his foot forward with impeccable timing, wedging out her knee. In a blink his dagger is at her throat. Rolling into a puddle she avoids it just in time, a swath of her hair cut loose like so many leaves.

A duellist more skilled than Kathanhiel.

She needs her weapon. Got to throw the sword.

Getting up has never been so hard. It feels as if a metal cast is cooling under my skin, making all the muscles rigid. An ocean is beating in my eardrums – can’t hear anything else.

Alright, kneeling – good enough. Now throw the sword.

Heave, two, three –

Of course. Kaishen is welded onto my fingers.

With the Thralls gone, soldiers are rushing into the courtyard from all sides, weapons drawn. Kathanhiel stops them all with a feral scream.

’BACK! HE IS MINE!’

Two try to throw their weapons at her, but Talu’s sabre intercepts them, cutting them in half with ease. ’The grand finale!’ He too screams, half-delirious. ‘Come, everyone! Let us wake the night!’

His shrill voice carries above the storm like a demented bugle. Two seconds later –

The western tower explodes in a fury of white light. Amidst the hail of mortar chaos breaks out on the walls, the courtyard, the cliff-side corridors, everywhere and all at once. Ranks are breaking left and right; shouting, exploding powder, ballistae bolts tearing through the inner ramparts, sending dozens flying. White flame spills from the slit-like windows on the inner gatehouse, and the iron portcullis comes crashing down with a speed that could only mean the severing of its counterweight.

The soldiers around us implode. A blast of dry powder sends bodies flying. Bolts are loosed every which way, giant bolts meant for dragons. One zooms by so close the tailwind rips three red streaks on my cheek.

How many cultists there?!

No. Don’t panic. There is an order of priority here: first you have to –

I try to throw the sword again. Nope. The handle still wouldn’t come off. Two more seconds and Kathanhiel will be out of throwing distance. Has to be now.

My voice sounds hollow and tinny, as if spoken through a metal tube, rising and falling with each pulse:

‘Thank you, but she needs you more than I do, so please let go.’

The fire departs abruptly, and suddenly my insides are empty. Falling…legs can’t hold on…

But that’s alright. The job’s done.

Kaishen sails through the air. Talu raises his sabre in an attempt to intercept but Kathanhiel’s pick is in the way, latching onto its hilt and refusing to let go. In doing so, she has left her body exposed. With terrifying speed Talu sends his dagger flying over her outstretched arm and that insidious, puny blade, unfit for even the dirtiest of deeds, eviscerates her from shoulder to waist.

A horrific tearing, of flesh parting bone.

Talu’s cry is one of ecstasy.

‘I WIN!!’

As the pick falls from her hand, Kaishen takes its place.

A ring of fire. Soldiers and cultists alike scatter every which way, their struggles utterly dwarfed before the fiery cataclysm of Kaishen’s light. Before the torrent of dragon fire fountaining from her wound there remains only Talukiel and I, one unable to move, the other…looks to be unwilling to.

‘Yes, yes! Lose yourself!’ Raising his dark sabre in defiance, Talu yells with mad glee. ‘Too bad the Scouring doesn’t make you forget – if only it did!’

Fire drips from the gash on her chest like molten metal. Her eyes are golden, her words droplets of magma:

‘Your judgement is nigh.’

She lunges. Air spirals in a blistering tornado in her wake, the blasted dirt cooked to a solid shell before they could even begin to fall. Steam shrouds her no longer; rain is vaporising five feet above her head and trailing in a wispy cloud.

Cackling, without hesitation, Talu dashes forward to meet her. Ten thousand sparks fly as the dark sabre strikes solid fire and yields not an inch. Kathanhiel’s momentum shoves them both twenty feet along the ground, a scorching fissure marking their wake.

Cross-cut – left, then right. The earth erupts in two blazing fissures as Kaishen’s heat turns rock into lava. Molten chunks rain upon Talu, charring his skin, yet still he laughs, his dark sabre deflecting her sundering strikes with inhuman dexterity.

‘Slow! Weak! Is this the best you can do?!’

An underhand sweep sends him flying. Kathanhiel turns her sword like a key, and a phantom dragon spawns from its tip, jaws and all, devouring him from head to tall. Talu briefly disappears under the fiery torrent, but as soon as he hits the ground he’s up again, on fire yet seemingly unhurt. That should have incinerated him a hundred times over and yet –

‘Now you’ve done it!’ Talukiel screams. ‘They heard you! Your fire has drawn the flock!’

As Kathanhiel readies another lunge, bells – great bronze ones, installed in all the towers and cliff-side lookouts – begin to clamour. Those only ring for one reason.

The dragons have returned.

The winged horde shreds the storm clouds to pieces. At the fore, three Apex candidates descend like living meteors upon the battlements, their throats filled with fire beaten back by the merciless wind. Behind them dragons of all sizes swarm like a great locust, screeching, tearing at each other to get to the front.

‘To the Mirrors! Raise the engines!’

Arkai’s commands thin into nothing as the first great dragon crashes into the outer gatehouse, shattering five feet of masonry with sheer momentum. Bodies and mortar alike rain onto the courtyard as the Apex candidate lets out a painful roar. Its forelegs are all mangled and broken by the impact yet still it thrashes with obsessive violence, tearing at the wall until its bloated torso carved out a gaping hole fit for a stampede.

Outside, on the plains, shadows writhe like the coming tide.

‘Fly!’ shouts a hundred voices on the outer wall, and a volley of serrated bolts whistle through the air, tearing the wings of the Apex candidate to shreds and yanking back its neck until it fell face-frst into the rubble.

Then the second and the third land beside it, and the soldiers could not withstand them. They leap from the battlements screaming as molten death inundates the outer ramparts.

The cultists are screaming with glee.

A loud bang. The portcullis over the inner gate tumbles twenty feet into the courtyard as a column of little giants come charging out, each of them carrying baskets of what looks like balls of glass and huge slingshots made out of steel chains. The leading giant, holding a massive hammer with a crooked haft, shoves them into position along the inner wall and starts waving a pair of black flags. A volley of glass balls soar into the night sky.

From the squat towers, the cliffs, and the bastions by the waterfall, the Mirrors come to life, beaming lances of yellow light. They turn upon the sky and the Apex candidates perched on the outer wall, and it’s as they are unravelling the canvas of night at the seams. Streaks of white light pierce through the oncoming horde, diffusing out in every direction. Then a great hiss, like the boiling of the world’s biggest kettle, and every shadow between heaven and earth disappear.

Cold. So very cold. How long have I been lying here, unable to move?

My hand finally does what it had been told to do for the last two minutes and reaches out to touch the gaping hole on my throat, if only to make sure that I’m really dying…but there’s no hole, only a wriggling puddle, like…like jelly that refuses to come out of a cup.

As the white light recedes, a shadow falls over Iborus. The shouting has grown louder.

I look up. Doesn’t take much effort, since I’m already on the ground.

Oh…that looks pretty bad.

Dipping out of the clouds, in the clutches of hundreds of little dragons like a juicy worm ferried by an army of ants, is the ironclad that had set off from Iborus not a week ago. Its great paddle-wheels are all blasted and broken, its invincible hull riddled with jagged holes. Me, Talukiel, Kathanhiel, the inner gate, and a couple thousand soldiers – the ironclad’s shadow falls upon us all. Kathanhiel, caught up in her fight, has to have noticed it by now, but she’s still immersed in the duel. Talukiel too.

Another barrage of white light, burning a hole in the sky…but the ironclad isn’t stopping; a rain of little dragons fall from its hull only for another flock to take their place. It’s close now. Wind from its lumbering descent cuts into my face like hundreds of little knives.

Can I move yet? The leaden ache in all over my body gives a surly response: no.

Well, this sucks.

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