Chapter XL

In Leti Academy, where the witches and warlocks of Nihilus were trained, there was no professor more respected than Professor Caiaphas. Professor Caiaphas was well-known for being exceedingly knowledgeable, very powerful, and just overall a very great teacher. Students often talked about how after even just one session with him they could understand complex doctrines and spells that they never thought they'd be able to grasp.

A courier had delivered him a letter recently, claiming that the letter came all the way from King Therion's castle. Caiaphas scoffed at the courier's claim. He told him not to make up such wild stories again, but when he broke the seal and opened the letter he was surprised, to say the very least, at what the letter said.

“Professor Caiaphas,

It seems like ages since we watched you instruct our vessel, Deidra, in the matters of magic and astrology. Your skills as an instructor were great, and because of that we have a job for you. You will go to the location marked on the enclosed map and meet Deidra there. She is pregnant with King Therion's twin heirs, two children who will be born Aeons, daemons clad in human flesh. You will raise these Aeons and instruct them, help them to achieve their true destiny. If you do we will bless you with eternal youth and beauty, which we know is the one thing you desire above all things. If you do not we will reveal to the headmistress of Leti all of the sexual affairs you have been having with your older students, both female and male. These affairs make little difference to us, but we know that they make a difference to you because if the headmistress were to learn about them you would lose your job and the reputations of all of your bedfellows would be ruined. We think the honor of raising the Aeons should be enough to convince you to cooperate, but if it is not we offer this reward and this threat. Show us that you are a faithful warlock, as always.

-Zu, Wormwood, Asb'el, Belphegor, Allocer, Culsu, Marduk, Chax, and Zagan”

Caiaphas recognized all of these names as those of powerful and influential daemons. Furthermore he had heard that Deidra was discovered to be a soothsayer, so it actually made sense for them to be writing to him through her. At the same time, though, he had to wonder if this was some sort of hoax, some upstart playing him for a fool to see what he would do. Still, even if it wasn't from the daemons mentioned it was from someone who knew all about his affairs, and he would certainly want to keep them quiet. Meeting whomever this prankster was, if this was a prank, was his best chance at being able to silence them. So, after he'd finished teaching all of his classes for the day, Caiaphas slipped out of Leti Academy to go to the location marked on the map, leaving no note or explanation as to where he had gone or why.

. . .

Deidra plotted her escape with the daemons very carefully. They had told her nothing of the consequences of her actions, only that she was to sneak out of the castle at night, that Therion was not to know what she was doing, and that she was to give birth to his twins some place south, in the country of Subra. She pointed out that a girl as pale as she was would stand out in Subra, but the daemons reassured her that they had everything already planned out, and that she should focus on one step at a time. In order for her to sneak out of her and Therion's bed he would need to be sound asleep, so much so that he'd not even notice her leaving.

So she convinced him to drink a toast to their union, “I'm eating for three now, you can at least drink for us both,” and then convinced him to keep drinking, before enticing him to make love to her one last time. Afterward he fell into such a deep sleep that she may as well have yelled “I'm leaving now!” as she headed out, he would not have awakened.

The daemons' powerful magic redirected all of the guards as Deidra walked by, or blacked out their memories so that in the morning they'd have no recollection of her having passed them. Deidra stole a white horse from the stables and rode off to the place where the daemons told her she would meet her caretaker and guide, one who would be by her side until the day that she delivered the twins.

. . .

In the morning Therion awoke with a terrible head-ache and a dry throat. He could barely remember the events of the previous night, except that he must have been drinking a lot to be in so much pain. His hang-over was so disorienting that it took him several minutes to even notice that Deidra wasn't even there, but even then he wasn't alarmed. “Probably went to breakfast...or off playing 'Count the Tapestries.'” Therion chuckled.

Therion dressed himself and staggered down the stairs. He felt like his eyes were under attack by every window facing the rising sun. One of his servants approached him and said, “Good morning, Sire! What would you like the cook to make you for...”

“Stop shouting!” Therion groaned, holding his head.

“I'm not shouting, Sire...”

Therion grabbed the servant by the throat, in such pain he had no patience at all. “I said shut yer damn mouth!”

The noise that the servant made was nothing compared to the noise Therion would soon find himself barely able to endure, however. Kalvyn Silverlocke's army had chosen that particular morning for their siege, meaning that the daemons had gotten Deidra out barely in the nick of time. Upon seeing Kalvyn's army, both of the living and of the dead, the guards in the castle sounded the alarm. They blew trumpets, beat drums, and banged gongs. The entire castle echoed with noise that would give even the most sober person severe head-aches. Therion felt like he was going to die, and actually felt like he wanted to.

Therion's castle was not made of stone like the castles in Arx. No fortress in all of Nihilus was made of stone since the days of King Sulaiman, because of the superstition that the Agalmite God existed in all stone. Building a castle out of it was just begging for him to smite you, if you were not faithful to him. Often architects who suggested building anything out of stone bricks, even houses, were accused of heresy and beheaded. Instead castles in Nihilus were made of lignum vitae, the strongest wood in the world, coated in a chemical substance that made them nigh impervious to fire, and then reinforced with iron plates. Strong as these fortresses were, they still did not compare with the stone fortresses made in Arx, so when Kalvyn's men launched boulders at the castle from their catapults, the whole castle began to shake and sway. Splinters filled the air, some of them so sharp and so hard that they pierced the armor of Therion's guards.

“King Therion!” A soldier shouted at him, causing his ears to ring. “What should we do? We're under attack?”

Therion hadn't even heard this young man's words. To him it was just more indiscernible noise, splitting his skull open. It felt like someone had a hack-saw at his forehead and was slowly cutting through, separating the lobes of his brain. In spite of all the pain and disorientation, Therion's adrenaline kicked in and managed to form two coherent, driving thoughts in his mind; the castle was under attack and he needed to do something about it. Without a word he rushed off to his private armory to dress and arm himself.

The bridge-keepers immediately retracted each section of the long drawbridge leading to the castle, but Kalvyn was determined not to let this slow him down. At his signal, his soldiers carried over the portable bridges that they'd stolen from factories all over Nihilus. The soldiers defending Therion's castle fell back to the keep and closed the portcullis. Archers rose up on the battlements and rained arrows down on Kalvyn's men from above. As Kalvyn's soldiers drew close the Nihilite soldiers poured oil down on them and dropped torches to light them on fire and send them running and screaming into the moat.

This was all too typical for a siege. Kalvyn had fought in enough of them to know this sort of thing would happen, that was why the soldiers he sent towards the main gate were the dead bodies inhabited by the spirits of his ancestors. Those soldiers could not truly die, for as his men killed more of Therion's soldiers Kalvyn's ancestors would gain more bodies to inhabit. His undead soldiers returned fire with their crossbows, up at the archers on the battlements. They killed only a few of them, but a few was enough. Just as those archers died, their bodies rose again and killed their former comrades before they raised the portcullis.

The soldiers Kalvyn had recruited in Nihilus were needed for a different tactic. While the undead attacked the main gate and drew most of the castle guards' attention, Kalvyn's living soldiers, clad in no armor at all, swam the moat in the back. The waters of the moat were far hotter than they'd expected, but this did not slow them down. Once they'd crossed the moat they climbed the walls from the outside, using metal claws they had forged for this very occasion. With the catapults constantly breaking holes in the walls of the castle, it wasn't hard for them to climb in and attack Therion's soldiers by surprise.

Therion came out of his armory, his adrenaline just starting to overcome his hangover, and saw Kalvyn's soldiers in his very castle, killing his men. Therion would have none of this. He swung out with his great-sword and cut them down. The force of his every swing was so great that even those whose armor saved their lives were knocked onto the stone floor.

All the while the catapults continued to bombard the castle, shaking and breaking it apart. Kalvyn and his army of the dead stormed the main gate and massacred all of the surprised guards in their way. The people of Nihilus, eager to free their land from Therion's tyranny, stormed in from all sides. The walls of the castle began to act less like protection for those living inside and more like prison bars that kept them from escaping the onslaught.

The catapults constantly bombarding the castle kept all of those fighting inside from noticing the first of the many warning signs of the disaster that was about to befall that castle, a disaster that would catch both sides in its fury. Even the steam rising from the now boiling moat didn't serve as enough warning for what was to come.

The Nihilites didn't fully understand geology, what reason would they have to study things like plate tectonics or vulcanism? They had long thought that it was never winter around the castle and the moat was filled with warm, mineral water with strong medicinal properties because the ground had been blessed there. It never occurred to the Nihilites that the castle had been built over a dormant volcano. Nihilites would call what happened next the wrath of the Agalmite God, poured out on their king because he was a threat to that God's most loyal followers. But if it was the wrath of their God that God had certainly provided more than enough warning signs for those wise enough to heed them.

In those moments before the eruption no one realized what was about to happen. Boanne had locked herself in her room and barricaded the door out of fear of Kalvyn's invading army. Kalvyn's soldiers, both living and dead, fought with the ferocity of men and women who had been pushed too far. They desperately wanted to be free of the shackles that had been placed upon them. Therion and Kalvyn met in the foyer of the castle, and as the two of them fought the ground shook stronger still, as if these two men would tear the ground itself apart with their strength.

Well, the ground did tear apart under their feet, but it was not their doing. As the ground under them split apart poisonous gases and lava were spewed into the air with such force that they tore through the roof. The heat was so intense that even the treated wood that the castle was made of caught fire, and the iron reinforcements melted like butter. The soldiers' clothes caught fire just from the heat in the air, and their skin burned, even melted right off their bones. A few were fortunate enough to die quickly and relatively painlessly from the poisonous gases released in the eruption, such a fate even befell Boanne, but most died in agony. Therion, staggered around, his skin nearly burned off and his hair completely singed. He stumbled into the open fissures in the ground and fell into the lava below, swallowed up by the earth. In the last moments his eyes tried to cry tears of pain, but they had already turned to ash. His bony fingers grasped at the edges of the pit, but the muscles that gave his once sinewy hands their strength had been burned away, and he could not gain a good grip on the edge. More lava shot into the air and caught Kalvyn. He caught fire and burned so badly that he was sent to join his ancestors. All of this was just before the final explosion that violently smashed and destroyed everything on that hill. The explosion of the once-dormant volcano sent rocks, lava, ashes, and gas hundreds of feet into the air.

The whole castle was soon reduced to ash and cinders, buried under layers of lava that eventually cooled back into rock. No traces of the once proud castle remained, only traces of the volcanic eruption that had taken place there.