Paladin of the Sword: Chapter 1 (Patreon)

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Someone asked for a preview of this novel, so I'm going to post the first few chapters here. My current draft is available for beta reading for anyone interested in providing early feedback. I'm hoping to have this revised and launched by September, just prior to the launch of Spellheart 7.

15 Years Ago

Smoky clouds wafted up from the mouth of the yawning cave. Darren knew he wasn’t supposed to enter there. Demons lurked past that entrance, and more than one child had gone missing after playing too close to the cave.

“You must stay close to me,” Darren’s mother told him. “And we must hurry. They won’t be far behind.”

Next to the five-year-old boy was his mother, who was leading him by the hand to the entrance of the den of demons, where they planned to take refuge.

“It’s dangerous in there, Mama,” Darren said to his mother.

“Yes, son. But it will be less dangerous down there than it is up here,” Darren’s mother said. She shifted her arm, wincing as the broken bones rubbed against each other. The wound on her stomach likely felt even worse. Blood stained her bandages, sickly purple as it coursed through her. She looked back at her son and forced a smile onto her face. “Everything is going to be fine.”

Darren looked at his mother. She didn’t look fine. Darren was five years old now, which was old enough to know when something was wrong.

Those people chasing them wore bright gold-gilded armor. Darren was certain they were paladins. They were supposed to fight demons, the same as Mama. So why did they hurt her?

Darren pondered these profound questions while his little feet carried him as fast as they could. Darren’s mother was hobbling on her good leg, with an arrow still sticking out of her other thigh.

“This way, Mama, we have to hurry!” Darren said as he grabbed his flagging mother’s wrist and tugged her through the safest path past the mouth of the cave. His mother snapped her fingers and a small ball of glowing golden light sprung into existence next to both of them, illuminating the way through the dark and dreary cavern. Moments later, the two of them plunged into the tunnel to the first hell.

Darren felt the icy embrace of fear nibbling at his heart. Something bad was happening, and it was happening because they were here, in this cave. Darren didn’t like the feeling at all, and he didn’t understand it. But his mother thought they could get away from them here, so this must have been the right place to be.

“Thank you for being strong for me, Darren.” Darren’s mother sighed before pointing to a small alcove in the cave’s side. “Rest over there. I want to lay a false trail before we continue onward. In my current state, even ordinary demons of the First Layer are a threat to us.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she reached for the belt on her waist and withdrew a slender silver dagger. She passed that dagger to Darren, and he wrapped his free hand around it. His other hand was still wrapped tightly around his mother’s hand.

“If a demon shows up, you can use that to protect yourself,” Darren’s mother closed her son’s fingers around the hilt of the dagger and pressed it close to his chest.

Darren nodded, though he hated the thought of letting go of his mother’s hand. She seemed to need his support as much as he needed hers. As she left, the spinning sphere of golden light followed his mother, trailing behind her and leaving Darren with his back pressed against the stone of a chamber cloaked in total darkness. He wrapped both hands around the dagger his mother had given him, holding it like a more fortunate child might cling to a pillow or stuffed bear.

As soon as Darren’s mother stepped away, Darren felt the cold and gloom pressing in on him. Murky clouds of energy wafted around him, no longer repelled by his mother’s own magic. He couldn’t see them without light, but he could feel them rubbing against his skin, caressing his cheek like the point of a knife. This was demonic power, and if Darren let it, this energy would tear him apart from the inside.

And so Darren focused what will he could muster. Squinting his eyes and scrunching his face, he thought of order. He thought of bullies getting their comeuppance, and the righteous receiving rewards of candy and pastries. Most of all, he remembered his mother’s touch.

The gloom receded, finding Darren’s will too strong a foe for the meager concentration of Demonic Aura present in the cave. But it stayed there, on the edge of Darren’s awareness. It was ready to pounce, should it ever sense a moment of weakness.

Darren resolved to be strong. His mother had been protecting both of them until now, but she wasn’t in any condition to be worrying over her son. Darren needed to stand on his own.

Darren’s mother returned a minute later, hovering off the ground to avoid leaving prints in the mud on the cave floor, an ability granted to her by the Seraph for the many quests she had completed in their name.

Upon seeing her son’s expression, Darren’s mother waved her hand across from him. The gloomy Demonic Aura crowding around Darren fled from her gesture, and a smile touched the corners of her lips when she saw how well her son had fended off the demonic energy.

“I did it, Mama! I held back the Demonic Aura!” Darren said.

“Well done. Now take my hand. We need to go deeper,” Darren’s mother replied as she wrapped Darren’s hand in her own. Her magic enveloped her son and the two of them hovered just off the ground, traveling about as fast as they’d been walking before. They left no marks to show for their passage, and anyone trying to follow them would have to resort to something far more elaborate than looking for footprints.

Darren watched his mother’s brows squeeze together, and he knew this spell was taking its toll on her. She’d used this ability often enough in the past, but Darren had never seen her hold it for this long.

The cave went downward the further they traveled. Darren knew they were deep beneath the earth now, which was a dangerous prospect. The outermost layer of Hell lurked in wait beneath the earth, and that was where his mother intended to take them.

“They didn’t take the bait,” Darren’s mother said as she twisted her head to the side. “We’ll have to descend into the First Layer.”

Darren braced himself, and that gloomy, oppressive feeling he’d only just learned to keep at bay grew ten times as great in force. The murky motes of Demonic Aura hovering in the air were so thick it looked like demons would jump out of them and devour them both.

Darren’s mother must have been worried about something similar because as she scanned the area ahead of them, she pointed a finger. A ray of golden light shot out of her fingertip and pierced a thick congregation of aura, which dispersed into a few smaller clouds.

“Remember to stay close to me,” she reminded her son. “We’re nearing the First Layer, and things will only get more dangerous from here.”

Darren’s mother’s hovering spell wore off, and the two of them had to resume walking. They traveled on foot further downward, and the slope grew steeper until Darren was doing more sliding than walking. Before long, Darren realized the cavern ahead of them was illuminated by more than the light of his mother’s orb. There were strange glowing plants down here, flickering with dull crimson light.

At first glance, the plants looked like mushrooms. Darren reached out to touch one of them, but he jerked his hands back as the plant twitched in anticipation of his touch, jagged teeth lining a small hole in the center of its mushroom head.

Darren placed his tiny dagger between him and the plant monster, but before the plant could do anything more than look threatening, Darren’s mother pointed a finger at it and shot a ray of golden light. It was scarcely bigger than a thread, but it cut through the demonic plant in two like a wire passing through cheese.

“Touch nothing,” Darren’s mother warned him. She was looking beyond exhausted now, and Darren was worried she’d collapse at any moment. “We need to find a place for me to recover. The Order of the Rod won’t dare follow us into Hell itself.”

As they walked, the cave opened to a wider cavern, which eventually opened to a wide and expansive landscape. Darren couldn’t see much with just the light of his mother’s orb, but dark and sinister trees towered over his head, speckled with diseased fungus and long vines that wriggled as he watched them.

The ground was muddy, but as Darren examined his shoes, he found them stained red. A few droplets raining down from above told Darren that what was dripping down was not water. It was blood. It collected in thick, inky puddles pooled in the leaves hanging down from the trees, fulfilling who knew what purpose in this land without light.

“Are we in Hell, Mama?” Darren asked his mother.

She nodded silently. “Remember to stay close. We don’t want to be here too long. We need to find a place where I can recover. Once I’m better, we’ll look for another exit.”

Darren looked around again and shivered. He hoped they could leave soon. This place was scary.

Blood dribbled off a branch overhead, and Darren wiped the gooey stuff off his cheek. He and his mother spent the next few minutes walking in silence. They stopped several times when some of the demonic grass rustled or branches swayed, creaked. Every crunched leaf and broken stick sent images of fearsome demons shooting through Darren’s mind, and he wondered what was lurking in the shadows beyond the reach of his mother’s light orb.

“There.” Darren’s mother pointed. “That looks like enough of a cave for us to close off the entrance and hole up for a month. By then I’ll have gotten rid of this poison and be back in fighting shape. Stay here. I want to scout it before I take you in. There might be something already living inside it.”

Darren’s mother left his side for the second time that night, and Darren felt the surrounding gloom press all the harder for her absence. It tried to needle and probe him, searching for weaknesses. But Darren held strong. His mind was a fortress; he merely needed to keep the gates closed and hold the walls.

But down here, in the First Layer of Hell, Demonic Aura was more than just a cloud of mist. The mist congregated in billowing waves. Darren’s mother had left him with a small light to see by, conjured from a tiny vial of blue potion in his hands. The flickering images in the mist cast showed Darren pictures of human skulls and fields of blood. Darren felt an incredible malevolence coming from each of them.

And then the mist parted to reveal a creature only slightly smaller than the five-year-old Darren himself. It had gnashing teeth and stood upright like a small human. A pair of bat-like wings stretched over the creature’s back, flapping back and forth as it trod closer to Darren, with saliva and spittle dripping from its mouth.

“Arrrrrm... humiezzz...” The imp smacked its lips.

“Stay back!” Darren warned it, putting his dagger between him and the demon.

The imp hesitated for a moment. The minor demon looked Darren and his weapon over, as though trying to decide if taking a bite of him would be worth getting stabbed.

Darren knew this creature was an imp. His mother had told him about them before. Despite being lower-order demons, some of them could become quite intelligent. There were even rumors they could evolve into the higher-order fiends if given enough energy.

That energy could come from absorbing the Demonic Aura of the lesser hells for centuries. Or it could come from sucking down the soul of one child like Darren.

Just as Darren was certain the imp was going to back away, he felt a terrible premonition running down his spine. He turned just in time to see a second imp lunging for his back. The minor demon had sharp and savage claws, and they raked across Darren’s bare back, leaving deep gouges there.

But Darren was fast, and he swept his dagger around, sinking into the imp’s outstretched arm even as it tried to lick Darren’s blood off its fingers.

The handle of the silver dagger lit with bright white light, and the demon blinked in surprise as energy poured from the demon into the dagger. The weapon grew hot in Darren’s hand, and in mere moments the imp turned to ashes. Its body drifted away on the winds, rejoining the oppressive gloom that had spawned it.

The other imp recoiled at the sight of its comrade being slain, and now it seemed like it planned to retreat for real.

Darren didn’t intend to let it flee. Despite his wounds, his blood ran hot through his veins. He knew letting this imp escape now might mean getting ambushed again or letting this imp lure something bigger toward him and his mother. Darren didn’t intend to let that happen.

So he sprang into action, launching himself at the imp with all the speed and power his little form could muster.

He tackled the imp to the ground, ignoring the demon as its claws tore into his own face. Darren brought his dagger down. Despite being a little smaller, the imp was stronger than Darren. But Darren had gravity on his side, and he drove the dagger down towards the imp’s wide eye, skewering it on his long silver dagger.

Like the first imp, this one turned to ashes and blew away like clouds on the wind.

Only when it was dead did Darren feel the pain of his wounds. His back arched, and there was blood dripping off his face.

“Darren!” shouted Darren’s mother. A beam of golden light blasted the pile of ashes that had been an imp mere moments ago.

“Shh,” Darren whispered to quiet his mother. “Could be more of them.”

Darren’s mother held a hand over her mouth as Darren wiped away his own blood from the dagger in his hands. Enough of it had dripped from his wounds to trickle down his arm. “I... I’m so sorry.”

Darren’s mother embraced her son, and the golden light Darren had seen his mother use before wrapped around him like a warm embrace. When it left, his wounds were scabbed over as though he’d gotten them weeks ago instead of moments ago.

The two of them scaled the cliff with the help of a little magic. Darren’s mother wasn’t ready for another flight spell, but she could use just enough of it to cut their weight to a quarter of normal, which made scaling even a near-vertical stone cliff easy.

After scaling the side of the cliff, Darren saw a demon corpse the size of an enormous bear by the entrance of the cave. It had horns as long as Darren was tall, and even in death, its eyes were filled with hatred. In its torso, there was a hole the size of a fist, where the creature had been burned through by a ray of golden light.

“You killed this?” Darren asked his mother in awe.

“It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did,” Darren’s mother said. “If I wasn’t wounded, I would have killed it and been back at your side in the blink of an eye. But here, let me show you something special about that dagger.”

Darren’s mother guided Darren’s hand towards the dead monster. Using the dagger and his hand, she pricked the demon corpse, which turned to ashes like the imps. The energy traveled into the dagger in great billowing waves, carrying far more power with it than the imps had.

When the flow of energy abated, Darren’s mother led them both to the cave she’d cleared mere moments ago.

“Inside, quickly,” Darren’s mother said as she pulled a potion out of a pouch on her waist. The tiny pouch shouldn’t have been able to hold a full bottle of pale liquid, let alone the water canteen she pulled out after it. But the pouch did just that. She passed the water canteen to her Darren, who drank deeply of it without fear of draining it dry. Darren had tried to find the bottom of this water canteen before, but somehow, it always had plenty more water in it.

Darren’s mother poured the potion on the ground at the mouth of the cave, and the stone there bubbled and roiled like soup over the fire. When the bubbling subsided, the stone had risen out of the ground and narrowed the entrance just a little. After doing this a few more times, Darren’s mother left a few tiny holes just big enough to let air in before sealing them inside the tiny and cramped chamber.

“I know this is a tight fit,” Darren’s mother explained. “But you’ll have to get cozy. We’ll be here a while.”

Darren nodded silently, then took a seat on the floor, curling in on himself as he held his legs close to his chest. Just this morning he’d been playing with his friends. He’d gotten a wooden sword just the other day, and he’d wanted to show it to them. He was going to pretend to be a paladin with them.

The wooden sword was nothing but ashes now. It would have burned with the rest of the house by the same paladins he’d aspired to be like.

Darren felt tears welling up in his eyes.

This isn’t fair! Why did this happen to us?

Darren blinked his eyes clear, worried his mother might see and fret over him when she had enough problems of her own. But Darren needn’t have bothered. His mother was deep in meditation, with all her focus on repairing her own injuries. Golden light covered her skin, just like the light of the orb that illuminated their tiny cavern.

Darren realized he needed to do something useful to keep his mind off what was happening, so he grabbed the potion bottle his mother had been using earlier and started using it to smooth out the rough walls of the cave. Then he made coverings for the holes in the cave’s entrance so the light from his mother’s magic wouldn’t shine outside their hiding place and attract demons to them.

Time passed, and Darren was certain it had been hours. At some point he’d taken a break and took a nap, but when he woke up his mother was still enveloped in that golden light of hers. He silenced his growling stomach with another long sip from the water canteen and used the last of the potion to fix up the cavern.

He was tempted to find another in his mother’s bag, but that was when she opened her eyes.

“How long has it been?” she asked wearily.

Darren shrugged. “I fell asleep.”

“Perhaps a little over a day then,” Darren’s mother said as she produced some food for him to eat. “Here, eat. Take it all yourself. Given where I was stabbed, I’m going to need to sustain myself on magic alone for a few weeks. Eating food will just complicate my healing.”

Darren nodded and accepted the loaf of bread and wedge of cheese his mother passed him. It wasn’t the most filling meal, but right now he was hungry enough to eat anything.

After a bit of thought, Darren’s mother produced a book from her bag and dropped it on the ground in front of Darren.

“Darren, this is a skill book. You can’t use it yet, but you can still learn its contents by reading it. I’d hoped I could give you a few more years to mature before we started your training, but it looks like we won’t have that. This book is a basic tome for using Divine Aura, which is the basis of my powers. Read the book a few times. When I finish my next meditation session, I’m going to give you a quiz.”

And so Darren read. Divine Aura was the opposite of the oppressive Demonic Aura that surrounded them. They were opposites, with one nurturing the power of Demons, and the other the power of the Seraph.

Many years ago, the Lord of Light, King of the Seraph and Master of the Highest Heavens, created the sigils. Humans could wear these marks of faith to facilitate a connection between themselves and the Divine Aura around them, granting them fantastic powers in the form of skills and bodily enhancements that would otherwise be far beyond what their frail mortal forms could otherwise possess. Darren’s mother had demonstrated her skills to their fullest when the paladins attacked their home.

The knowledge that he would need to be strong spurred Darren on more than the thought that his mother expected him to learn. He read the book from one cover to the next, and as he did so, he felt Divine Aura seeping from the book’s pages into him.

Darren read the book over ten more times before his mother awoke from her meditation. He wasn’t sure if that meant he’d studied harder or his mother’s meditation went longer, but when she quizzed him on the book’s contents, she couldn’t come up with a question that he didn’t know the answer to.

“You’re ready for the next step,” Darren’s mother said, reaching into her bag again. This time, she withdrew an object Darren had seen illustrated many times in the book he’d just read. A pendant in the shape of a sun. This was a sigil, but it was more than just any sigil. This had belonged to Darren’s father. Though Darren had never met the man, his mother had told him the story before.

“Your father’s sigil. He would have wanted you to have it,” Darren’s mother said, running her fingers against the pendant. It wasn’t as shiny as the silver tiara his mother wore on her head. The material the sigil was made of looked more like cheap brass than gold. But it was a powerful token of magic. A holy covenant between an adept and the Lord of Light himself.

She seemed reluctant to release the sigil, even into the hands of her own son. But her fingers slipped from a strand of rough twine looped through the hole towards the top of the sigil. Though sigils came in all shapes and sizes, this one was clearly meant to be worn around the neck.

Slowly and gingerly, Darren put the sigil around his neck.

“W-what do I do?” Darren asked. But his mother smiled silently in reply. The next voice Darren heard spoke into his mind.

New user identified.

• Now Initializing Paladin Training System...
  
• This process may induce some discomfort. Please stand by.
  

A sharp pain shot through Darren’s skull like someone had just bashed him in the head with a sledgehammer. He collapsed to the ground in a boneless heap.

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