Paul Kemp - The Godborn

For a moment, Telemont said nothing, then, “You lie.”

“No,” Magadon said, simply, and sadness filled his voice. “I wish I did. But it’s dying. Check if you wish.”

Telemont’s eyes narrowed. His fingers traced arcane symbols in the air as he cast a divination. When he sensed the spell’s result, he gasped.

“You see?” Brennus said.

“You can’t save it,” Magadon said. “There’s nothing to be done. Sakkors will fall.”

Still Telemont said nothing, and Brennus imagined the thoughts roiling in his father’s mind.

“Father?” Brennus said.

Staring at Magadon, the Most High said, “We’ll get everyone off of Sakkors. But I won’t help you kill my son.”

“Even after what you saw?” Brennus asked, incredulous.

The Most High hung his head. “Even after that.”

Shadows swirled around Brennus, mirroring his anger.

Magadon said, “Go. You have little time.”

After they’d gone, Magadon returned to his place under the Source and kept deathwatch. He reached out first to Riven, through the mind link between them.

If you can perceive this, I’m on my way, and I’m bringing Sakkors with me.

With the power of the Source at his command, he’d be near a godling himself.

Assuming, of course, that the Source stayed alive long enough for him to make use of it.

He reached out with his mind from time to time to check on the progress of Brennus and Telemont. Augmented by the power of the Source, he was able to feel it as Sakkors emptied. Shadovar soldiers fled on veserabs. Those who had them fled on magical transport or via spell. Those who had no other way were transported to earth by Brennus and Telemont, by way of spell, by way of the shadows. They moved rapidly, efficiently, and within an hour the entire populace of Sakkors was gone. All but one.

Brennus Tanthul remained, a solitary figure standing at the edge of the plateau on which the abandoned city stood, the figurehead affixed to the prow of the ship-city. Magadon imagined Brennus looking east toward Ordulin, toward the maelstrom of shadows that darkened the sky, all the while sharpening his anger on the whetstone of his hate.

Magadon reached out for Brennus’s mind. You’ll remain, then?

I can’t leave , Brennus said. I must see him pay .

Magadon had felt the depths of Brennus’s hate for his brother. He did not feel like he could deny the Shadovar what he asked.

Don’t interfere with anything , Magadon said.

To that, Brennus said nothing.

The wraiths and specters of lost Elgrin Fau blanketed the battlefield in a cloud of darkness. The undead native to the Shadowfell joined them, flowing forward like a dark tide around the towers and walls of the Citadel of Shadow.

Cania’s armies stood arranged in precise formations, units of scaled and hulking horned devils, lithe, crouching bearded devils clutching glaives, buzzing wasp devils, a horde of spined devils, their bodies covered in a thick coat of long quills, and all the larger, more powerful armed and armored devils who commanded them. Pennons and oriflammes announced the units and their pedigree, and tens of thousands of weapons and horns and scales and fangs made a forest of sharp edges and points against which the cloud of incorporeal undead and Riven threw themselves.

As the forces collided, the moans of the undead vied with the roar of the devils, the beat of their drums, and the blare of hundreds of horns. Columns of hellfire flew in all directions, beams of baleful energy, clouds of poison. Missiles of bone and steel and magic from fiendish archers rose in shimmering clouds and fell in a dark rain on the undead army.

With each step Riven moved through the shadows, covering a spear cast of distance with each stride, appearing and disappearing with the rapidity and rhythm of a heartbeat. He appeared amid a squad of horned devils, a whirlwind of steel and darkness, beheaded six of them, and stepped through the dark. He materialized behind a towering, insectoid gelugon, and drove his sabers into the crease in its white carapace between its neck and the base of its skull. Dark ichor flowed as the devil spasmed, fell, and died. He stepped through the shadows and into the center of a horned devil regiment. With a thought he covered all of them in a cloud of swirling, deep darkness in which not even their fiendish blood allowed them to see. But he could. And he dashed up and down their ranks slashing, cutting, stabbing, leaving scores of dead devils in his wake.

He rode a column of shadow into the sky and from there took a moment to assess the battlefield.

Undead vied with devils for as far as he could see, their lifeless touch pulling the otherwise immortal life from the fiends. But the devils, powerful, organized, and well-led, held ranks and responded with barrages of hellfire, beams of magical energy, and organized charges of their ranks. The undead fell by the score, dissipating with a moan into dark, stinking mist. A nightwalker, a faceless undead, humanoid in shape, as black as a moonless night and taller than a castle tower, strode among a regiment of horned devils, crushing the devils in pairs and trios with the weight of its tread. Wasp devils swarmed it from above while a unit of flaming, armored devils on burning horses charged it from below. It fell, moaning, and the fiends cut it to pieces before it dissipated to nothingness. But still the undead came on, fearless, heedless, their numbers beyond count, and fiends fell to the dark earth, their bodies withering as the undead pulled out their life force. Thousands of fiendish corpses dotted the field.

A flight of shock troop devils-huge, blocky winged devils covered in red scales and dull iron armor, wheeled toward him. Each bore a huge sword and shield in its muscular arms. Riven hung there on his column of shadows and let them close in.

When they drew near he extended a hand and a wide net of sticky shadows shot from his fingers. The devils, too big to maneuver deftly, could not avoid the dark strands. It caught up all of them, wrapping their bodies and wings in sticky fibers of reified shadow.

Wings fouled, the devils roared and fell out of the sky. As they plummeted, Riven stepped through the darkness and onto one of the devil’s backs. He drove his sabers into the base of the devil’s skull, silencing its roars, then stepped to another, did the same, stepped to another, killed again. He killed six and stepped away before they hit the ground, their huge forms crushing lesser devils and throwing up clods of soil and grass.

Around him the battle raged. Devils and the dark hordes of the Shadowfell moaned, shouted, and died. Shadows spun around Riven. A green beam of energy and a column of hellfire shot out at him from his left, struck the shadows that shrouded him, and died in their darkness. He pointed a hand, loosed a line of life-draining energy from his palm, and withered an entire line of flaming devils and their mounts. They squirmed and shrieked and slowly imploded as his power stripped them of animus.

He’d killed dozens of devils and done nothing to cloak his power, but still Mephistopheles had not shown.

“Let’s try this, then,” Riven said.

Spinning and whirling his way through a score of gelugons, his sabers leaving a flotsam of insectoid limbs and heads behind him, he scanned the field for his target. He spotted him in moments, a pit fiend named Belagon, one of Mephistopheles’s most powerful generals. Flames and smoke sheathed the heavily armored pit fiend the same way shadows shrouded Riven. The devil stood several times the height of a man, and his blazing sword and flaming whip slew undead by twos and threes with each blow.

Riven stepped through the shadows to stand before him.