(THOB) Chapter 153: Urden- Interlude (Patreon)

Ezril blinked the darkness away, but he might as well have waved away the air. Unable to see, he sat up with ease. The floor was covered in grass and served as a soft bed to his rump, so much so that he hesitated to rise to his feet. But he did.

Around him was overshadowed in a familiar darkness, and when he took a step forward he frowned at the sight before him.

A rubble of stones stood before him, rising like a flight of stairs leading to the top of a grand palace. However, no palace stood at its summit. He frowned at the familiar throne of stone shattered at its back and elevated on a pile of stones he now knew to have come from the broken back rest and the walls of the throne room.

But what threatened to turn his frown into a scowl was the significant difference now. He wasn’t the only one alive in this failure of a throne room. Upon the shattered throne sat a figure, as if watching with concealed perplexity, as if waiting for him to take a knee.

“What is this?” he asked.

“You didn’t expect to get away without any consequence now, did you?” the figure said. There was a slight humor in its voice as if it were talking to a child who’d done something stupid and didn’t know, when he clearly should have. “What did you think was going to happen when you kill a god.”

“The vessel is simply dead.” Ezril spat. “He will return in another. And when he does, I will kill it again.”

The man snorted. “The vessel is dead, child. But one truth remains. You killed a god. Vayla will mourn.” The figure stood up. “And you are here because someone doesn’t want you to suffer the punishment that comes with the action.”

For everything he had learned, Ezril couldn’t help but find nothing but truth in the words. He didn’t recognize the voice nor the figure but there was no doubt the words were true. In a moment he realized he was climbing the rubble, using the stones as stairs. All the while, the figure stood before the throne, watching him rise.

With each step, the figure’s features became apparent. It was a man with short grey hair, a sharp face with a mouth accentuated by the grey and black beards shaped around it. A weathered face and wrinkled eyes that spoke of a man no younger than fifty. Each time his steps drew him closer, each time with every certainty that he’d never seen the face or heard the voice came a certainty of who stood before him. At first he thought the man an intruder. But now he knew himself to be the one intruding. It was ironic. He hadn’t believed in gods until recently, only to kill one—for there was no doubt Berlak was truly dead—then come here and meet this man.

Standing before the throne Ezril stood toe to toe with the man, looking into the steely black eyes of a man who was three inches shorter than him. When he spoke again there was an accusation in his voice.

“What is the meaning of this?” he said. His next words he uttered with certainty. “Why am I here, Cyrinth?”

When the answer came, Cyrinth’s mouth didn’t moved nor did his eyes shift from Ezril’s. The voice was a rumble and asexual tone that reverberated within him, and he knew the words came from within him as much as it did without.

“I have a use for you.”

As Cyrinth returned easily and regally to seat upon his throne Ezril was left with only one thought as the darkness demanded nothing from him…

Amnifat.

........

Urden opened his eyes from his slumber, instinct propelled to reach across him to ensure he bow still lay where he’d left it last night when he’d bedded down for the night. The bow was the livelihood of his people. A man with no knowledge of where his bow lay at all times was a failure of a man. Assured it was where he’d left it, he rose from the ground to a sitting position and watched the man who sat on the log on the other side of a fire that was nothing but ash. No doubt it had fizzled out sometime during the night, considering no one had paid it any attention.

He watched the sleeping man, wondering for a countless time how the man was capable of spending every night sleeping in such a position without complaint. At thirty he often complained of aches when he woke up. How could a man who was no less than his fiftieth winter sleep while sitting and wake with no complaint for at least three complete moon spans. That was how long he’d known him.

He’d met him in the Urnish jungle south of where they were only to follow him at the request of his people in chase of a man who wrought more havoc than any upon Vayla. His chief had said the man asked for him specifically after they had returned together from the forest where he had hunted down a large elk only to be save from a behemoth lion the size of three elephants.

AgfeCyrinthalnic, the man had addressed himself as. It was a strange name the likes of which he had never heard before, but the village chief had assured him it was the name of a lost people who no longer existed as a tribe over sixty years ago.

The man had promised him an adventure, and in the time they’d traveled together he had given him more adventure than he could have ever imagined in his life time.

Just eighteen days ago they had fought against the infamous yet mythical sea god, Raconia. A sea serpent as long as the sea and as endless as the ocean. When he said they fought it he truly meant Cyrinth—for it was the name he called the man now—had fought it while he provided support with his bow and arrow. No doubt that was the reason the man had come to his lands. The Urnish people where famed for their unparalleled way with the bow. The fight had been shorter than expected and waged as night fell before the sea god succumbed to death in the embers of black flame invoked from the blades the man carried.

Once, he’d asked what they were made of. All Cyrinth had offered was a shrug before telling a ludicrous tale of how Vayla had offered them to him.

Cyrinth got up, rising to his full height, twisting his body in a morning stretch. The endless twists and turns of black burn marks that adorned almost every inch of his body like tattoos flexed with each movement.

“I hope you are ready, child,” the man said. “Tonight we face him.”

Urden ignored his anger at being called a child. He was well past his thirtieth year, yet Cyrinth had a habit of talking to him as if he was barely past his tenth. There was no space for anger because if the man was being truthful, which he always was, then tonight they would face the incarnate. A man so great Cyrinth claimed he had given life to the sea god, one of three beasts grander even than the behemoths, to which he held the title of being their only masters.

Rising to his feet he looked down at his travel companion. The man barely came up to his chest. It wasn’t that he was short. No. Urden was simply tall. In his village his people had always referred to him as a behemoth of a man. He was easily twice the size of most men and, because of that, so was his bow. The arrows he tended to carry into the few battles his people had had no choice but to engage in had been large enough to take off a man’s head. Amongst other things

“Where will we find him?” he asked.

Cyrinth shrugged. “I don’t know yet.”

Urden knew the man had an idea but he let the matter rest. Being kept in the dark was one thing he hated and it was one of the things Cyrinth loved to do.

Normally, he would’ve left him for it long ago. But he knew the necessity of what they had to do, so he stayed. Ten days into their time together, he had gotten angry enough to put the old man in his place.

Cyrinth on the other hand had proceeded to beat him like a child and return him to his place without breaking a sweat. A man gifted a strength and speed above his peers by the soil of Vayla and his mother’s blood at child birth, attached to his size, it was not a feat ten gifted men could achieve with ease. He had learned to swallow his pride ever since.

Following Cyrinth, they hunted the forests throughout the day and when the sun began its descent into the evening Cyrinth gave him free reign to pick anywhere he felt comfortable amongst the trees that served to surround a patch of level grassland where a man as old as him sat waiting.

While he perched atop a branch, Cyrinth approached the man and words were exchanged before an inevitable fight began in a burst of strength and speed the likes of which he had never seen Cyrinth display, not even when facing Raconia. Each time he saw an opening, he loosed and arrow at the enemy. After the first arrow had taken the man in the head, he’d all but rejoiced before he realized Cyrinth still crossed his blade against the hands of his opponent.

By the time his third arrow had shattered itself against the man’s head without as much as drawing blood, only then did he appreciate the gravity of the fight that played out almost three hundred yards away from him.

But not only did the man seem to surpass Cyrinth in strength, he did things Urden had never thought possible of any man. And though he had seen a few people display some unnatural things during their travels there had been none so unnatural and diverse as the man’s. He would scatter like the dust from an abandoned totem pole just dusted only to appear behind Cyrinth. Each time, Cyrinth would riposte or his arrow would take the man as he appeared. Other times he would call down light from the sky or release a flash of blinding light or take upon the form of an animal. At one point he had moved the floor beneath their feet, forcing a tremor of his own and shaking the trees in their roots. But each time Cyrinth somehow survived and attacked. Then his blades had shattered like a rotten wood shattered across a man’s back.

In a panic, he’d ignored Cyrinth’s warnings and stepped onto the clearing releasing one arrow after the other until what was left of all eight quivers was empty. The enemy had spared him but a moment of his time. A simple glance before light fell from the sky in the last embers of the descending sun. He’d barely escaped the attack but was left unmoving on the floor, doomed to watch the rest of the fight as he died slowly from the burns that encompassed every inch of his skin. Even his eyes were as dry as the deserts. And left without lids with which to blink, he knew he would go blind long before death would take him.

Then Cyrinth had displayed his own level of abomination.

From his hands fire, black as night, spewed, and where they burned, blades grew. The battle changed after that. Night fell, and in the darkness the incarnate evaded each blow as if he feared one strike would kill him. But it took more strikes than he could count before Cyrinth’s victory came within grasp.

Then the Incarnate spilled blood from his mouth. At first, Urden felt himself rejoice at the sight of victory, then he saw the smirk on the man’s face and knew in that moment that they had failed. As Cyrinth rushed him, he turned his gaze to regard Urden with full sight of his visage, the blood, the smirk, the promise in his eyes. Never had he seen a man so assured of his victory than any in that moment. And with it came an imprint the likes of which he had never felt. Never in his life had fear borne down on him with so much strength. Never had he wished to die rather than look upon the face of a man. Paralyzed, he watched Cyrinth run him through with burning sword as black as the flames upon which they were covered.

As the Incarnate burned with an unspoken promise Cyrinth ran to him fretting and lost in what could be done, all the while Urden watched a man who was not a man burn in the colors of night, visited upon by shadows, and lost to the embrace of fire.

“He will return,” someone was saying. “And when he does, Vayla will need someone to protect her. I may not be there, but you will. You must.”

And when he thought it was over, he felt the cold creep into his soul, strangling it with a ferocity. He fought to wriggle through it, and when cold hands burned into his soul as if over the imprint of fear, he begged to at least be granted the freedom to writhe in pain. He watched Cyrinth in his last moments as the man he’d spent the last ninety days traversing the lands and seas of Vayla burnt him in darkness, never as much as seeking his forgiveness.

“By your fear you shall know him.”