Chapter Eleven, Domain of Despair

Within the bowels of the labyrinth gaol

After breathless eons suspended in slumbering limbo Drakkon’s soul stirred to hoist his eyelids open. His mental fabric frayed, stamina sapped from his muscle, nothing of him was left untampered with by bedeviled elixir. This realm of shade pinned him beneath walls of bleak obsidian, under pillars of the deepest hells. In the drab chamber his eyes judged little difference from having them sealed shut. Am I but a shade of the underworld? Am I damned to eternal nihil? Hath Malderath finally claimed me, pulled me neath the earth I stained? Unless those cursed fiends of Dahlia’s coven stole my sight? Am I yet a prisoner?

Questions poised to deaf walls and without any answer. An interlude of silence, drifting by river of nebulous memories and dimmed dream. Then came the remembrance of Dahlia’s words and of the terrible visions of haunting ritual. Every sight, every sensation, and every notion shuddered against stasis shot by grave eyes all abound. The grasp of the nether all about his tendons. His skin, the drooping parchment upon which scrawled moldy sin.

Other shades pass through the miasma emanating from the strange walls. Unearthly in their essence, reflect images on floor surface without natural light. An obsidian glass of perdition’s depth cast below them, and yet it was translucent. Showing the approach of transient daemons. That alien foundation absorbs his fancies, projects his wraiths. These phantoms would slither past without ever fully forming. Others would hover and glare into his marrow, the unsettling eyes moving without life.

One of these nether worldly things came before him in the form of a pale banshee. Her siren’s skin sang impossible smoothness. Ageless death-mask given an alluring serenity in stoicism of countenance. Hair flowed the course of her shoulders, revealing the glow of life in crimson sheen, so unlike the glum of underworld cell. She hums sanguine mantra as she wove through the air towards him, in bewitching trance. Entwining her spider-nymph limbs about the bewildered prisoner, luring spindles and delicately throbbing wobble of her voice cast the line.

“Drink… The essence of Life’s Well is pooled here for you to partake…” The enigmatic entity presented him with a chalice, brimming with some unknowable and shifting potion emitting a faint, but noxious, trace of harm. Dumbly he fumbled to receive the blessed wine from her. Hexed by her entrancing movements and how she drew sulfur from his sweat and stitched sensuous oaths into his skin. “Peer long into my windows. Sink into elysian fields of our dreaming pleasure while we await the journey to where we belong.”

At the peripheral of this witch-wraith the mother of phantoms appears. A woman of wan with orbs burning emerald & azure under wreath of gilt & grey. Glaring into the fading prisoner, this gaoler smirks glee to see him encased in the depths and stripped of all power and might with which he could’ve threatened her with. A liberated shine looking over his shackles; to be freed of fetters to his fate. Under the glow of misbegotten light, coming closer to survey this humbled sovereign, illumes a seared orange hue in shape of triangular scar across her throat. Lines of cauterization trace wound, having stolen speech but sealed her vitae from seeping, yet her accusations against him find voice in her stare & her follower’s cords. The silent matriarch signs the seasons’ turn as tides of blood’s blooming pull the lunar crest.

After several listless gulps Drakkon caves into cloaked clasp, clamping tighter about him. The density of the empty spaces between the labyrinthine walls presses his chest. As Azarra’s apprentice adjoins ardor in her caress and carousing of carmine sap. Wrapped in their weavings, mangling the world to wind it whole in unintelligible web. Levitating expressions, their unreadable maps, cast no mark of his whereabout as he drifts into the dare. Awareness droops into unconscious chasm. Mind and matter mauled by banshee’s talons and supped of the sorceresses.

Flight from the Depths

Chimerian Gaol, weeks later

Eyelids flickered up, broaching exit from Dreamless slumber. Drakkon knew not the orbit of time nor place around him. Nothing, save this surreal blackness cradling his existence. Remembrance stripped away. Only a faint melody drew through dull synapses. The rest drank up by chalice, his spirit swallowed by forgetfulness. Yet twisted shapes emerge in half-nightmare.

The prisoner awakes to spectral mesh of incense smoke clinging ahead. Tendrils of ash from burnt sacrifices reach out to choke him. Cloaked figures float on smoky carriage, carrying candles & lanterns that lit lurid faces borne from the ghoulish body of the mist. The miasma harbors stitched sculptures of living flesh: an amalgam of bodies sewn through the sinews of binding ritual of lust & greater union. Their passing, no portrait of beauty but a heaving mass of frenzied tissue & acolytes of aberration. But they just as swiftly dissipate, bulging & barreling through the corridors on their way to gestate further orgiastic epiphanies.

An arctic touch chills the prisoner to awake. An elongated and mangled hand, half-charred & necrotic in aspect, reaches to unchain the prisoner. The arm attached to less of a body and more of wriggling shape; a wraith of shadow & gray mist as cloak; the hood about its head towering taller than a human neck should. This Night-Gaunt groans icy chattering chimes and beckons him drink of golden-wheat fount leaking from its overlong second beak. Pouring sustenance evermore, it then guides him on with ectoplasmic wave behind vanishing trail.

The dream he trudged spiraled along insanity with each winding step. Trapped in arcane maze in the belly of a nether palace. Shades levitated over the frigid floor, floating by wordlessly. Seaming shadows into themselves, chanting sunless litanies and summoning shapes from sinuous air. Luminous print of glowing sigils imbued sight to the dreamer & ethereal hum along the winding walls wound about the serpentine sepulcher. In that chasm between exhaustion of body and flight of spirit the symbols sang to him, whispering secrets through their canopied corners.

He heard the cry of his oldest friend – though he could not grasp the name – and felt simmer feelings seep out in her song. His mind’s eye then spied the visage of Love. A vision of heaven in the form of woman. Graceful with her pale skin and autumn eve hair cascading about her shoulders; statuesque singer, emitting so immaculate a melody. This remembrance pulsed in his heart coursing rejuvenating drive through his veins to drive out the dour fog which had invaded him. He searched the mire of his brain for that name, knowing that to even whisper it might evoke her empyrean aid.

“Corinna…” Guilt and self-directed enmity traced its utterance. Her full relation garbed in dusk, he knew her still the reason his heart thundered. Corinna called him. From the otherworld? He could not pursue her to far earth or the next plane, when his sins weighted him, dragged to perdition. Yet this muse burning in his cage etched into his will the drive to redeem himself from this haunted Hel-realm. To earn the privilege, the destiny, of her embrace once more.

With Corinna’s return to mind so too did her enchanting song, weaving glorious threads into his ears and spinning around his heart. The labyrinth branched off into impossibly many directions, but the lost shade followed where the song sent him. Where it grew fainter, he’d turn heel and tread another path until the ethereal chanting became blaring, close. The warbling of Corinna’s immaterial refrain rose in pitch & volume. Her call culminated in a caterwaul that resounded pointedly in his ears as if threatening to burst the drums therein but then ceased forthwith. Leaving him a hollowed silence that was heart-rending in the absentia of Love. The reticence was disconcerting as if to suggest approaching calamity. Without her aspect the green & sapphire flambeaus of fyre didn’t light the way but mar his sight.

His path halted at an insurmountable wall, hulking frame sealing his path. He stooped low, in momentary defeat, cheeks soaked by eruption of fear & loss. Yet even blocked in by impregnable fence there blew winds from where there were no drafts. Gales brushed him from nowhere, whipping unseen cords of unborn radiance everywhere. Behind that night shade bulwark some stillborn sun mocked with maddening rays.

It was then the monstrous & lupine figure of Fenrik emerged from shadowy aisle behind him. The silhouette morphed into a wolf of war & terror and lunged with indignant furor. The alacrity with which the lycanthrope attacked kept him limping back. If this was truly his offspring, a rabid pup, the boy showed similarity in height (soon to overpass his accidental father even) yet twisted to such eldritch degree as to be nothing knowable as a man. And with none of those simple predicators, movements, and motives the brute lashed a feral frenzy.

Drakkon kicks the wolf-thing down and topples a fyre urn. This beacon blazing with hue of witch pyres scorches the scourge-beast. It whimpers the befouled whine of a feral dog. The werewolf, showered in cinders, thrashes inanely. Claws cut the black cloth of the labyrinth, aiming for sacrificial throat. It’s would-be victim wrestles with dagger hooked hand, but blasted by another torch-flare, the claw sinks into its wielder’s own thigh. In pain the thing wrenches away after tearing at the poultices on its sire’s side.

The fleeting victor fell backwards in dismay, stumbling over pangs from the lesion. Unconsciously his hand touched the splattered mess of his side, where Fenrik renewed the wound. Crimson gushed out, dotting his flesh. Lifting his sight, he caught the wolf-man scamper away. Scraping at the walls the wretch wriggled into a gap between the black walls.

Drakkon limped desperately after the crazed hunter. Always ahead of him, the diluted shadow of a wolf darted further into the tunnel. The stairs lead up & down at once, spiraling toward the center of this maddening temple. Another song billowed to counter the constant howling echo. Not Corinna’s enchanting call but the bygone song of his mother. That same one which would seep from Azarra’s gorge to his ear almost every evening of his early life. An invocation of the Living Light, yet it’s sound rang now as perverse & pervasive.

The path curved, arriving at the nexus of this nether realm. He came into a vast, open room with a high dome casting winking mirror of distant moonlight. A cauldron sat, bubbling in the center, surrounded by three crones who gaping at his arrival in shock. Behind them seated by an array of colourful elixirs Dahlia held her son, chanting Azarra’s hymn. When her fiery green orbs beheld him, she released her hands from her beloved boy and stood with defiant wrath. “Look what you did to our son!!” Wailed the matriarch in shrill key of enmity. “How can you be so cruel as to maim the face of your own blood?! The son you forgot!”

While Drakkon understood instinctively the power of her emotions, her words stunned him with confusion. He studied Dahlia’s bastard, stitched in ragged furs & wolfskin. Son? What nightmare did I hide from memory? What hath I feigned ignorance from? Then Azarra voiced curse in his thought: “May your own son come to be such a villain against ye! Cut the cord of blighted birth & sever the line!”

“Oh, how much hath you already forgot?” Dahlia managed to cackle & cry simultaneously. A ghastly sound & worse look. “How cruel and how forgetful! You would treat your son, my sun, the Lord of Wolves, so harshly?! What, when we will soon be with more children?! Maybe you are but meant to be the flesh we feast on to take the Divine within us!”

The wolf-mother wove herself across the altar, elegant even in her anger. Stopping before the witches’ cauldron, Drakkon swiped at her but grasped naught. Even with her flowing dress she seemed an ephemeral mist. The witch re-emerged from the infinitude of opaque corridors and living shades. “Ah, but the freshness of our destiny shall be all the sweeter. To taste that blood as ours and bask in that Living Light as the Chosen Children. Yet I struggle to absolve you for what my fearsome Fenrik hath suffered, even at the hand of his holy Father!”

As she spoke Drakkon’s eyes grazed the hall for some fortunate sign. He found one in his iconic arms adorning the wall. His black blade shining back the blue light around it. He lunged for it, although the pain in his body caused him to falter. Numbed in mind but not to leaking red.

Dahlia, with hawkish stare, glides to the lure of his glare. A ritual dagger smiles beneath her regal raiment. She unveils her silky dress, outstretching threaded wings. Revealing, with unashamed pride, her pale chest beneath. Dire lust pumps for another blood sample. “You chose to forget and how rueful that is. Alas, I can help ye remember more of the past. That those fruits of the future shall gleam from thy scalp to thy loins, o Lordly guest in passing! This hurt shall be fleeting, but pleasure immense, as passing tribute for our circle’s healing!”

Then she vanishes in foul mist. Her face shines next to her feral cub’s with talons clasping golden-green elixir, in ornate crescent bottle. Caressing as one would trace a lover’s back, her nostrils snort delight as she uncorks the potion. Frees rejuvenating magick, in melted liquid, through to her son’s quivering lip. “Let Light heal your scars.”

Drakkon slams into the cauldron’s side. Though his husk had been drained of its great bulk, his force lurches the pool of sorcery over to gravity’s sway. The seething contents flood the trio of crones. Scorches the feet of one temperature to bite into bone. Another takes shameful flight while the other hag struggles to drag her crippled sister from the toxic spill to a corner where they cowered in awe. Then, as his head swims in distress, veering on hysteria of ghosts borne from evaporating mist of cauldron’s demise, he rushes to that relic of his bygone might. He heaves the blade towards the sorceress. But fatigued and swounded, it missed its course to her head. Instead crashing into the lantern orb beside Dahlia’s throne. Raining sparks around the space where she held the bottle to her pup’s mouth.

Fenrik pounces from his mother’s fold. Fleeing from the fire - his face & fear too freshly disfigured to brave its source. Aghast and awkwardly brandishing elixir, Dahlia gapes as Drakkon retrieves his wand of war. Its tip threatens her throat, yet she laughs. Looking back at the bounding lycanthrope, whatever foul mixture imbued its gullet miraculously aided the monster’s regeneration. It snatches up a stalking pose yet again, its hind leg mended swiftly.

“That thing is not my son. I renounce my blood. I decant my divinity into abyss! He is but the seed of your wicked deeds, borne of delusions which will lead you to destruction. Just as mine hath led me to Hel-shackles. You shall never taste immortality, nor shall you taste life again for your aberrant crimes. But I shall taste of that elixir, else I will make this throne your tomb.” No hint of mercy in Drakkon’s gleam, poking ire into her as he steals the potion from her.

But Dahlia, refusing any petulant plea of mercy, heaves with excitement. She feigns a kiss to edge of the blade, then sings a soft laugh. “I hath never been unfaithful in my service to the signs, and to your blood which I hath given blooming life. Ah, but that is not the way it is meant to be! Act not as the Bear. Forgo any more kin-slaying along our entwined trail. For though, estranged, we are both to be strangled of all other breath by tides of the moon.”

As Drakkon waving the blade in direction of the scampering blight-hound, Dahlia winds herself up in his arm. She licks at his ear, misty frame brushing him. “Will you not share your flesh with me in worship? Why not absolve & adjoin?!”

He repels her hex. Wrestling with wrathful urge to slay her, he lashes her left hand to sacrificial clasps to the right of the altar. Half-chained to the wall, her laugh mixes moans & whimpers. Tracking the wolven fiend, Drakkon barters its mother as hostage, a lever to pry escape. “Let your service be to show me the way beyond! Or remain here, a corpse-matron, and rot beneath the world beside bed of beasts!”

Astonishingly, Dahlia surrenders. Not to Drakkon but to a phantom foresight which drapes her eyes with serrated gauze. From the shivering gray a towering Sight, a glowering premonition, arrests her. Her right hand drops hidden dagger to point distantly to a jarred path across the ceremonial throne. Only omens pry her lips from sting of stasis. “Our fates shall meet over yonder. Darkness & flame await us, in terror. Yet the blessing of blood shall allow us live on. Know this: the Hels & the Fates are one.”

Grace flushes from the apostle’s face, the taste of failure too bitter to bear with poise. As her fount of holy blood takes flight from her, she collapses in her ebony fetters. Resting her denial in faint moonlight stretching down over her face which still seethed from cauldron burns. Abandoned in her unholy court, but for her suckling, wolfen cub. Left to darkness of doubt. Yet Azarra’s aria returns, sung by another. Tilting somber verse from echoing rings above. Larking for a fatal end as Dahlia weeps, waiting in anxiety for the Hels’ path to reunite them as promised.

“The Aegis ov the Wolf shall rule the Night.” The belting chords pursued the erstwhile lord and prisoner through the cavernous channel. “By blight of my scorn let them who pilfered rue the day!” A ghostly chorus wound alto harmonies beneath that near spectral opera, soaring along the exit. “Descend, thorned reed. Ascend, my light! Seed ov moonlit Dawn!”

Drakkon, funneling out, feels the swift swig of elixir streaming through his gullet. Warming his gut, it nigh instantly rallies acceleration of natural healing through his vessel. The wound clots but ache yet remains. He thusly limps on, driving towards escape. The emergent guidance of pursuant melody possesses him. Beckons flee with haste to a cavernous berth within the underground expanse. Obsidian dock halts before an ostensibly boundless course of water, teeming with mysterious sheen, reflective of alien essence. Restless waves of glimmering Night slink against a stone shrine by the brink. Exhausted and not yet recovered, he leans on the cairn to avoid tumbling from wincing numbness.

Across the waterway the outline of a ferryboat cut the surf with great haste. Sails over to the dock. At first no life nor figure appeared governing the boat. But, through his cringing, as the apparition drew near and planted itself before the rocky cairn, he perceived a ferryman maneuvering the small, ghostly vessel. A boatman, with a hunched over chassis and tall neck, veiled in translucent mantle. This captain’s cloak emits a starry sheen, as if garbed in a blanket carved from the night sky itself. Nowhere else to pass but through his tributary tribute.

His hood concealed much of his face. What could be gleaned was pale and wilted, with almost leathery skin that gave the inkling of never having been exposed to solar light. With one vertical mouth draped open on the one side, replete with jagged teeth, and another concaved with odd indenture where many tiny eyes lay under stitched tips. Just below the cowl a pair of murky eyes, with another lit shut above their brow, focused on the distance even as they held straight at the pilgrim, Drakkon. The boatman extended his long arm. Offering up a vestigial a claw appendage to pull upon for passage. With unnatural tenacity it pulled the forlorn prisoner into the vessel before departing from the cairn dock.

Traversing the dreary waters, a glowing miasma emerged from the black depths as the paddle stirred beneath the surface to propel the pair. They flew forward in uncanny flight. The ferry’s velocity raging a course to compete with restless water. And then the paddle stirred air, lifted them. Without breaking the waves their vessel hovered over sightless tides and ragged rocks lurking under. Swept past upraised stalagmites, emanating exotic glisten.

Now and then, breaks in the ceiling shined the majesty of the nocturnal curtain & Saatharian rays down upon sections of the surge. But largely the journey led on in silent darkness. The patron of this spectral shuttle found his skull sundered by sleep. The potion working its way within him asking to perform its task on a lulled body. In that chasm stretching between states Drakkon glimpses the object of his inner eye’s inspiration: Corinna; her eye captured by a cask, living death leaking from it; cast in a casket, a wilting orchid in clutches of an arctic castle tomb.

Then his lids flap. Settling on his navigator, whose three gibbous eyes watch the way. Vaporous wings glide from his gray back; seven branches that, with its distended appendages, paddle through ether. Setting sail upon Helwinds into the unknown….

Back from Beyond and Towards the Brink

Windcrest Shore, Dirgenval 25th, 19 AD

An impenetrable embankment of fog cast its bulk, pregnant with grim mist, across the sea, concealing the shore the small boat approached. The boundless mist did not concern nor hinder the boat’s strange captain, silently steering their course to invisible shoreline. Their ship, a statue of unnerving stillness through breathing body of endless veil, undisturbed yet parting as vapor to allow their way through yet more purgatorial sprays over cloaked sea.

The boat froze and the winged wraith waved Drakkon forward. As he plunged from the packet the weight of his boots sunk firmly into the wintry soil of the land. Skipping over the misty waters, he assured he’d splash, as if docking in a parallel plane or levitated there by the long, manifold arms of the ferryman. Glancing back at his convoy, no trace of the vessel or its master remained. Now vanished in the incessant gloom.

The effects of witchery’s elixir waxed over his senses. Sharpened in awareness, the wall of murk diminished as he advanced. He shed all exhaustion treading hurried ground, over sand buried under waning carpet of cold. He tasted the locale, sensors on his tongue firing recognition of Windcrest’s frigid salt. He’d landed in the waxing heart of his ebbing empire, near his winter throne in the North. Intuition warned also of eyes upon him from the dew. As the Hel-mist departed for breaking of daylight’s abrupt return.

Ahead of him a series of flickering lights further disbanded the gray of the shore. The flurry of motion neared with breakneck haste, moving from the distance to him in a blur. Soon a contingent of horseback riders bearing torches and aching bows. The mounter warriors circle around, surveying him while ensuring no escape. Their intent, undeclared yet forcefully readied.

At the head of the formation Heron reigned. There rode Drakkon’s unaware Ferali half-brother, dressed in sign of Mordaunt’s service, his emblem displayed clearly on his tabard. Bowstrings were pointed at him while Heron dismounted and approached him with a sword in one hand and a fog burning torch in the other. Drakkon boldly presented himself before the assembly of warriors, all of whom were once members of his army; their mugs smeared in backdrop of memory.

Windcrest stretched bare & wild before him. He, solitary beacon, on the beach returns its embrace. Infusing his voice with declamatory assurance rejuvenated in fervor, he raised his arms to the sky and shouted: “It is I, Drakkon! If thou wish to take arms up against your emperor – who returns having shed his dark - then let loose thine arrows quick! Shoot! If thy hearts falter, let not thy bows! Strike true or stay thyself, as is thy want! Be not tentative if thou seek to reckon with me! Grant me the deaths thou would seek for thyself or fold into mine arms and grant me my hands again!”

“Hold men!” Heron commanded to his men, whose hands quivered with unease. Their eyes widened with frightened awe at the sight of their Lord thought deceased. “Can that, truly, be you? Or devilish portend disguised as the ghost of hope? My man saw you float through air to shore, but is this possible? Mordaunt declared you dead! Yet you appear at the edge of a shore which no ship docks in the wake of season’s storms?” He inquired, in distraught disbelief, as he came face to face with Drakkon, peering for piece of cheer and shred of fortune.

“In the living flesh,” He declared promptly. Pausing next to muster up convincing mystical explanation to relight the hope of the forlorn hearts. Relishing Delphine’s advice and not breaking these desperate men with the truth of his birth, too strange and bitter to confess, “I have not abandoned this world nor you. I did not descend into the soil as a corpse but ascended into astral form to view the prophetic tides of what shall come to pass and restore tapestry to true glory. I return from beyond the sea’s end, having seen what is needed to redeem our people and remake the realm. I come bearing the sword of righteous vengeance against Mordaunt, the craven traitor whose standards you, my people, are now draped in…How come you to this?”

“Forgive me, my lord.” Heron said, quickly bowing. Obsidian blade hung behind this odd passenger of spectral ferry. “I beseech you to think not of me nor any of us as blasphemers nor cowards. Mordaunt, he… proclaimed your death; presented your tattered banner as evidence of your demise alongside Baron’s band. Claiming he had crushed the insurrection valiantly after your fall… Any who did not renounce you and pledge to him were branded traitor and tortured in public exhibition. We had to supplicate ourselves before the ‘Lord of War’ or suffer his ire, he supplanted so much of our lives’ structure when it was already precariously straddled. We were all so confused so many of us felt betrayed having fallen Mordaunt’s deception.”

He breathed in somber fog and drooped his head in embarrassed admittance of his weakness. “I declared for Mordaunt, not wanting to die for what I – foolishly – thought was a lost cause. There have been imposters and charlatans posing in your likeness, disturbing my false master’s claim by stirring false hope in the populace still loyal to you in secret. The usurper has us scouring for more of these impersonators, ordered the execution of any encountered, hence why we motioned to attack you unwittingly. Once more I apologize, my Lord. My men and I begrudgingly served him. While our place is short in his upturned court, we are at least alive, and ready now to serve you and the right path again. But I swear by the blood of my ancestors and the fate of my progeny that I will not stray from your Eminent cause. My sword and those of my men will be once more your undying might.”

“Rise, Heron, and embrace me. This costume makes you no less of brother to me nor overshadows your vital service.” They clasped one another’s shoulders as longtime friends and meddlers of danger. “The clout of darkness is thorough but only in illusion. Mordaunt’s influence may be propped high above our few numbers, but the light of the high heavens shines on our souls. It propels our purpose to restore the fate of all our homeland to humanity. My communion with the spirits has made visible the strands of fate. If we are to triumph, we must find Corinna. God and Goddess conjoin in this midnight hour, that our unity will make our limbs indomitable.”

Heron ordered a spare horse to be given to their prodigal lord. Then declared they must move before other roaming battalions cross their meagre patrol, deciding to continue their discussion on the move. “Alas, I hath only espied the Lady once, from afar. The crazed warlord holds her at Windhand as a hostage. Doubtless he plans to coerce her into marriage to solidify his petty claim. He claims to have rescued her from the clutches of the same rebels that ‘humbled Drakkon and desecrated holy ground’ but I could smell deceit there. Our warlord has been overworked trying to tie up martial threads and amass his arms. Yet your empress is safe when surrounded in her chambers by sentinels sold to him. They should be too scared of their master to mar a woman he wishes to bind by marital tethers.”

“His grab for power has been by no means subtle, nor is ruling fist gentle to any but his own. He has lit signal pyres throughout the land and blown the Summit horns. That all tribes may answer the call and witness his ascension through ceremonial marriage.” Heron pressed on, illustrating daunting scope & faint hope. His lord’s face morphed into a tense and prickly ball of passion, straining the veins in his forehead to suppress his hatred at the mention of Mordaunt’s most personal of treacheries. “The red moon is imminent according to our seers. It shall arrive with fleeting Spring. Yet his stewardship holds no binding of law nor love. Especially now that you return to the fold for us. We can break his Hold and change the course aiming for dread peak.”

“Aye, and we bring a storm with us.” Drakkon answered him. “Thunder & rage forges our road! To strike as a trident against the corrupted court he amassed. ‘Demigod’ of War or degenerate thief, Mordaunt will be crushed beneath my boot!”

The mist thinned as they progressed through the mouth of the forest. Winter wisps danced about, their natural luminescence granting light through the dead husks of the ashen wood. The drifting lights highlighted the rim of beaten path, just enough to hint at devilish fiends stalking their way. In the middle of the path, at intersection of winding ways, Drakkon came upon the sight of several decomposing corpses strewn about the branches of the trees, dangling by rope in the stormy breeze. One of the bodies looked eerily like his own likeness, though deprived of eyes, with the word ‘pretender’ carved into its lifeless forehead. Another dangled under the sign of ‘craven’, beside a brother cadaver marked ‘thief’.

Heron observed Drakkon’s eyes darting across the deathly scene and addressed his thoughts aloud. “Behold the mark of Mordaunt’s ashen reign. Most of these people were simple villagers whose only crime was ‘hoarding’ enough food to nourish their families through the winter instead of giving it all up to the despot. Others were housing Drakoni loyalists who launch disjointed attacks in shambled militias.”

Our enemy does nothing in the name of power which I would not do in blind claim to my name. How many hath I quartered or set to stake for housing fondness for the ‘Protectorate’ - or refuting the holiness of my concaved crest? The brute is more honest than I. At least his ambitions are his own. The Lord soured.

“As terrible as it is to admit this cynicism of mine, most folk are all too content to hand over any of their kin who persist in their support for you. They would rather tolerate the ‘protection and peace’ Mordaunt offers when it seems all is plunged into pointless plight. People, of course, did not expect the new master to levy taxes for his efforts at astonishing expense. Just as I was foolish in thinking I could at the least find solace in protecting order in the land. That the people, our people, would not writhe blindly about in bedlam. But that law I sought to hold to becomes the hand that strangles mirth and marks service to a lord of confusion. That gloating ‘godly’ Aegis of War, Mardun, as he crowns himself in falsehood. The progenitor of the worst disease among men: That empty claim to rule and seek no greater god than mere self.”

Their passage through the forest enclosed the further they went. Thick dark branches of the winter pines condensed on their renegade patrol. The bulk of the wood muffled the chilling cry of the wind bringing night’s cold blanket and calling out on the breeze in a terrible wail that besieged the dead edges of the forest back where the trees were as pale corpses hollowed of their once vibrant colors and made thrall to relentless elements.

Sudden song sprang. Tunes of cheer & longings filled the way. The Windarian coast echoed chorus of tired throats, renewed in mirth. They sang tragic ballad. Retelling a battle where men fought and died for gods that seemed to forsake them only to be carried off by Valkyries to victory in the end. A song of how triumph brought ruin to that tribe. For they’d lost their best & bravest whose sons failed to match the tracks of their fathers, that when the Dread Serpent rose again, they shed tears for a valley their ancestors bled for but abandoned to scale & slime. That tale of old Beruvia, rewoven by Baron. But no dispute came from the rival of that song’s herald.

Yet though the voice of the wind had been muted enough to allow their warriors’ cheer, a new harrowing chorus of screeches and shrieks silenced their tune. Arrangement of chords, from inhuman gullets, struck echoes in the air. Some men trembled in the saddles of their mutually shaken steeds. The cadaverous coronach carried from nearby hills over the tree roofs. Froze icy rivers in its dirge. The cry of witches’ sabbath? Some demonic dance from another flailing limb of Dahlia’s sect? Or a tribal slaughter?

Heron signaled quiet caution as they advanced under darkening canopy. Drakkon rode along with him at the head of their war band wondering at blaspheming conjuration rising through crisp evenfall. The captain addressed his troubled lord in hushed whispers, barely reaching over the wind’s dissonant chanting. “Bizarre covens spread through the forests & dense these past few. Wytch cults seizing ancient mounds & druidic monuments, perverting them for their malefic purposes. We were sent as a troupe to investigate rumors from the townsfolk: unholy shrieks by night, blighted livestock and crops, children stolen from the cradles of midwives and sacrificed on secret altars in the darkest of the hillside thickets. All too true. These night-comers cannot be vanquished by valor or bound by bribes. They come as a cruel mist at the eleventh hour, then disperse before morn. To slay one is to summon a dozen more wraiths”

Drakkon’s glare glued forward, though his sight sent inward to the scenery there, more than the track ahead. “I hath seen these cultists through aspect of the netherworld. A black maiden and her cursed kin, wolves et witches, aim to stir confluence of all the winds. These vile sorceresses seek to drain lifeblood, to imbibe essence as nutrient. Absurdity and vacuous nonsense draped with seductive vanity that is almost sublime, yet wholly perverse. Their dance is that of frenzied lunacy, their woeful incantation is that of all our deaths, their delight is that of indiscriminate destruction. Pledged in service of an elder force that dwelt in the darkness before the rearing of first ever dawn’s light. Tis a force that is all consuming which possesses her, body & soul, by obsidian will.”

He leaned in carefully emitting a condensed explanation of that enigmatic cult, leaving out the feeling that he too was now sworn to a blood pact to the elder rites. As well to that the grim façade of that boatman who ferried him to this shore, still pressing into his face like a phantom death mask, clinging to his pores and reeking of coming gloom. “But my unbending faith tells me Corinna lives. Unbroken by her jailor. I must soon reunite with my heart’s other half, that the kingdom too can be whole again. Let not the madness of these vampyres stall us.”

“My lord, in your absence this land and its people whither beneath curse. One many blame on you, as a ‘pretender’. Even the faith of those who remain true is little Aegis against the tremors of doubt. There are tales of lupine abominations roaming the passes. Of Serpent chariots gaining ground daily. The general concession is that of the waning of the world is upon us but that you are now here proves true your claim and all our salvation by it. With your survival a world worth fighting for still exists. However, slight the sliver of hope seems, as shadows swirl about, I will charge forth with your name on my lips to fell the gathering dark. Aye, no matter how many your foes, we few are your friends. To burn away these hordes of gathering nightmare.”

“Aye the Waning of the World is nigh upon us. Though not as the sages of old once told it.” The Lord was pensive, piercing distant years in his oratory. As wan as his mortal vessel was from the thrashing journey, what waves (of stars & oceans) he coursed to get here, a mirthful flame – a pious purpose penetrating from his stare – had been rebirthed to pump through rhetoric’s poise. “The old-world claws at us in its death throes for its eleventh hour has come. By our triumph, the next Aeon will dawn over the horizon. One untouched by the corruption we have for too long permitted to taint this mortal plane with suffering. Though I wish I could lend you the mantle. Abandon any quest to rule and be rid of any cult or cause.”

“What hex hath that matron of werewolves & night-gaunts cast upon you? What madness from the nether that you’d forsake stable throne to let one so unfit as me sit upon it. Nay, humor not these thought-roads. I plead.” Spoke Heron.

“No hex but one of exhaustion. A weariness of spirit more than skin or spell.” Drakkon joked, trying to inject trace of lighter humor before dropping to consider more how to phrase his thought. “Let them howl away and keep their notice from us. The blood cults vie for a degenerate vision over which our will must prevail. They will feast on themselves. We cannot dither for their sake. We must walk through the flame to be remade. This chaos, this suffering set upon us is not purely a curse but a challenge and call to persist. We must all now more than ever be willing to shed our blood in the great work of letting a better world bloom.”

“We are all of us with you when the move must be made. We hath entered the final lap of this dread gauntlet and I know not what Light we might find without you. For you we will stand atop that Summit, unbending against the gales that blow towards that hill. The brazier of our hope still burns inside, and I would die to defend it should prove necessary on the day of our stake.” Added Heron with enthused inflection.

“You are brave for renouncing Mordaunt for me. I but wayward traveler, a lost pilgrim.”

“Nay.” Heron refused his Lord’s praise this round as enthusiasm faded. He shifted as a phantom of dejection: paralytic mirror of that shadow which seized him when looking o’er long. “Would that I were brave, but I am not. Long did I suffer in service to Kassan, a false father and brutal chief. And it was not courage that saved me from that path but your strength. Always I followed another, from Harmsburg to the Imperium’s crest, which lay now fallen. None of this borne of my willing, only gifted in how far the winds blew me. I countered not any consequence for service, obeyed order of anguish. For though I shook off some shackles more remained. Despite this outward nobility, my stubbornness in aiding you, I’ve only followed that same pattern of bearing grim service to terrible powers… Prove that guttural doubt so much fouler for its lie, its falseness, Drakkon. Let us not strike down Mordaunt only to put up more stakes and black pyres. Let us settle to not dig deeper ditches and pits for the collateral of more dark work.”

Drakkon let his dispute breathe, nodding to its plea rather than cursing him for voicing such doubts. In his windswept mind, the hurricane front of revelation ravaged much more than he could admit. It proved difficult for his shambling core to accept this fear and harder so to choose to overcome it. To prove those phantoms wrong, and to smith some fairer image of himself. To no longer be but puppeteer’s tyrant and pretentious performer; an actor in role of a shallow god. To be someone who truly deserved to be once more by Corinna’s side.

Returned a reverent glint to Heron, he addressed him. “Braver so to admit that failing. We all falter. Even the stars in the heavens stumble, can be swallowed by the dark. This mortal world only echoes the gods’ own follies. Mine own are many. Yet this time we must not stumble, die in doubt. Our stars will not be extinguished, doused by fears of what they could become, nor flare too brightly again to blind us deeper than this darkness abound. Our hearts have yet room to grow, more strength to nourish through the long witching hours. It will be different. It must be.”

They tread on in solemn reticence after this for many long miles. Wasting no breath to complain despite how arduous the nature and apparent impossibility of their endeavor. What they lacked in rations this motley number made up for in dire determination. An ardor ignited from within each, brighter than any coin bought zeal manufactured by Mordaunt’s bribes. Onward they traversed, compelled by glimpse of the morrow, until they came upon a sight that broke up the shadows and opened the space which was barren of trees. There stood before them the charred remains of a towering wood effigy, as tall as three men.

The surrounding wood, chopped in sacrifice to supply this smoldering statue. The burning of this wicker man, an intent of hate and cathartic destruction. The craftsmanship for such a simple structure seemed not the work of crazed witches of the wilds but of working men & women of the peasantry. The pyre lived on in dwindling pitch, licking at the face of this crude design. Slowly gnawing away to ash that fell around it. The pair approach, peer into the icon in fyre.

Gazing into the tarnished heap, Drakkon realized a crude depiction of himself. This, the effigy of the despot that he had become, burned ceremoniously by the common folk who he once called his to rule. He hadn’t recognized it quicker due to the horns they’d attached to his half-burnt but stubborn head, fitting for that heavy brow they shadowed, sitting upon malicious arch. Relief gasped as the orange glow gnawed the timber totem. He could feel the peasants’ stomachs lurch with mead; jumping joyously to be relieved, even symbolically, of the one who had rained so much darkness on them.

This destruction of his likeness, this revelry in his ruination: their liberation from the suppression he pressed long upon their lives. The glittering blaze cast a fascinating glaze over his sight & the hillside, unable to look away from the image of himself. Collapsing into simmering pit. How would it befoul their revelry, this tiny triumph, to learn that their insufferable Lord and kindling rite’s inspiration yet lived and neared their hearths? Would they just as swiftly tilt into a hysteric tango, happy to have the cinder king back just for some semblance of normality to return with him? Or would they throw him to join in the burning & let that culmination of his rule and their woes be centerpiece of that rising flame?

A tertiary aspect inside him announced baleful decree to his core. “Behold the Fates’ sign for my reign of thunder & flame! Let folk feast and find joy on the timber of this ashen cradle!”