A Giant's Heart: Chapter 16 (Patreon)

Blood.  So much blood.  Crimson spatters painted in long arcs across cavern walls.  Dark stains creeping like treacle puddles across the dirt and the muck.  Growing scarlet blotches seeping through clothes and armor.  Great gouts from freshly severed arteries.  Dripping guts and viscera hanging from creatures still clinging to life.  A warm spray across my face.  Hands sticky wet with it.  That unmistakable metallic smell filling my senses along with the screams, screams, screams!  Bold battle songs turned to desperate prayers.  Snarls of aggression transformed into pleas for mercy.  Bloodlust and naive bravery so quickly melding into terror.  Among the chaotic brutality of the bloodshed all around the moans of the dying calling out to gods and loved ones, mothers mostly.

One foul monster after another falls to my gleaming blade.  Each swing and thrust another vanquished foe.  But they just kept coming.  No matter how many I killed, no matter how hard I fought, I could not stop them from killing the men and women who fought with me.  With a sickening crunch the skull of the warrior to my left is smashed, bits of the man’s brain sticking to my armor, as I take down the orc who had done it a second too late.  Always too late.  I fight on even more ferociously.  Never tiring, never wavering, an angel of death to this horde of ghastly monsters.  I slay ten of them to their one yet still I cannot stop them from claiming the lives of my people.  Good men, brave women, noble people brought down in defense of a cause I could not recall.

I sense I had experienced this many, many times before.  I sense this is all I had ever experienced.  My memories only of this long unbroken chain of violence and killing.  Is this Hell?

“Caspian!”  I hear a familiar voice call out.

NO!  NO!  Not them.  Please, gods, anything but them.  Yet in my heart I knew they’d be coming.  They were always here.  They would always be here.

I turn to see my adventuring party and dearest friends.  The clear light of Lymandri’s Sun Staff a beacon warm radiance in this dark cavern, her flowing silver hair glimmering like a vein of mithril among the blood and filth around her.  To her side the wily Zayne dodged and weaved and struck back against the enemy with flawless precision, his fierce blue eyes shone out in contrast with his mahogany brown skin and dark tattoos.  Behind them the lanky frame and unmistakable lavender skin of Arjan the wizard, as always bedecked in plain tan robes more befitting an ascetic monk than an arcane hero of his ability.  Between his hands, held high above his head, a crackling mote of energy that incinerated any enemy creature fool enough to get close in shark snapping arcs of electricity.

My focus snaps to lock onto Lymandri and my beating heart nearly seizes to a stop as an overwhelming feeling of dread washes over me.

“Lym!  No!”  I shout, my voice swallowed by the din of battle.

Between my friends and I were dozens of monsters from this faceless throng.  I begin to fight my way in their direction.  I hack and hew with wild fury, slaying them two at a time…but I am not fast enough.

A darkness so deep even the goddess’ light could not hold it back descends on my friends.  Within the dark eyes and teeth and inky tendrils begin to move.  The Simbraug!

“LYM!”  I cry out.  “RUN!”

Her scream cuts through everything to freeze my very soul.  The look of awestruck terror on her face shaking me to the core.  And then she was gone.  Just like that.  In an instant.  Her precious light snuffed out forever.

“NO!!!”  I kill, kill, kill, KILL and still I was getting no closer to them.

My gaze now finds Arjan.  He was next.  Somehow I knew what came next.

“Don’t listen to her!  Arjan, please!”  My voice could not reach his ears.

From out of the mob comes a limping goblin.  Something wasn’t right, she did not belong here.  She wore dirty rags, her movements not that of a warrior but an innocent.  She looked young, barely out of childhood.  How did such a tiny feeble creature find itself in the center of this battle of titanic proportions?  Her left hand holds to a wound at her side, but there was no injury.  Her right hand, unseen by my friend, holding a poisoned dagger behind her.  I see their lips move though cannot hear their conversation, but I knew the goblin’s words dripped with more venom than the wicked weapon in her hand.  She was no ordinary goblin.  As the deadliest assassin of her race she had researched her quarry and knew his weaknesses well.  Arjan’s open mind and kind heart.  Her big eyes full of false fear and innocence peer up at him as her mewling pleads for mercy find a receptive ear.  Closer and closer she creeps.  Closer and closer I get, slaughtering everything in my path.  But not close enough.

“ARJAN!”

I can read his lips as he speaks his last words.  “Stay behind me child.  I’ll keep you safe.”

Arjan, you fool!  The moment his back is turned the dagger finds his liver.  Pain flashes across his face, pain and betrayal but not surprise.  He looks back down to the grinning assassin as she fades back and disappears into the surging crowd.  A few beats of his heart later and I see the black necrotic poison snake out through his hands and up his neck.  In his final moments his fading eyes find me.  He wants to say something but the pain is too great.  An instant later he is skewered by the spear of an ogre.

“NOOOO!!!”  Hot tears flow down my cheeks.

The next thing I knew Zayne and I were back to back.  We fought on.  We stand upon a mountain of dozens, hundreds, of the bodies of monsters of all type.  The cavern filling up with twitching severed limbs and motionless lifeless cadavers.  Still they came.  The fighting force we had brought with us was gone.  Corpses of human, elf, dwarf, gnome and halfling scattered among the countless dead of the monstrous horde.  It was just Zayne and I now.

Why were we fighting?  Why couldn’t we stop?  Why did they keep coming?  When was it enough?

The longer I fought the more I found myself wishing that my muscles would tire.  That in my fatigue one my enemies could find a weakness and let me rest.  I began to look upon the dead bodies of my allies with jealousy.  At least they were free from it now.  Free from it…because I wasn’t strong enough or fast enough or good enough.  My fault, my sin, my burden, but at least they were free.  My body is inexhaustible though.  The killing only got easier.  Blood, screams, and death until the end of time.  I knew it all so well.  There was not enough blood in all of the monsters of the multiverse to quench my terrible gods given talent for killing.  I had to fight the good fight, though damned if I could remember the reasons for it.

Why me?  Why do they always die and I survive?  Why!?

It is then I hear something new.  An intruder into this grim blood soaked reality.  A loud booming feminine voice that didn’t belong here calling me by name.

“Drake.”

I spin, sword at the ready, to find myself squared off against an enormous hill giantess in simple furs, thick black curly hair and eyes of burning amber.  She towered over me with a great club held tight in both her thick hands.  This one was different.  Something about the eyes.  Though just a common hill giant I sense in my bones that she might just be the greatest threat I had ever faced.  Knowing Zayne was at my back I spring forward to gut the foul giant only to watch my indestructible magical sword shatter into a million pieces as it hits her.  Everything goes quiet except for the tinkling of the star metal showering down to the ground, twinkling like stars in the night sky.

I look at my hilt in disbelief then slowly up to the giant…just in time to watch her mighty club come down on my head.

Chapter 17