Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

And he used it.

The nest of passages he had conjured under his battlements now gave way under the great weight of the building. With a riotous crack and rumble of stone, the entire foundation of the castle crumpled. The whole fortress trembled and lurched and plunged thirty feet into the rubble of its lowest floors, crushing the Blind who had already ventured inside. Clouds of red dust erupted and rolled over the remaining demon hordes.

He has diminished himself.

Harper recognized an aura of astonishment in the lizard’s thoughts. What Hasp had just done was incomprehensible. He had destroyed a substantial part of his manifested soul. By doing so, he had crippled himself.

All this just to destroy a fraction of the demon horde? Hasp’s actions would only quicken his inevitable defeat. Perhaps Forgotten had been correct after all? The god had simply chosen to die.

The demons who had escaped this partial collapse now rushed forward with renewed vigor, as if they had suddenly tasted promised blood.

The castle changed again.

A second line of doorways appeared under the battlements, occupying what had formerly been the second storey of the building but had now sunk to ground level. He was trying the same trick twice.

Forgotten sent a warning vision to the horde. There was no need to sacrifice more of the Blind. They must ignore this trap and remain outside. The winged Iolite ordered his army to attack the facing wall directly, thus denying Hasp the oblivion he sought.

Harper stared at these new doorways. They were as numerous as the ones before, apparently identical, and yet there was something different about them-something odd about the shadows within.

Suddenly it dawned on her what the god had done, but by then it was too late.

This time Hasp had not simply conjured more passages into the heart of his fortress. He had willed away the bulk of the building’s remaining foundations. The facade had only appeared solid. In reality it had acted as a disguise to conceal what lay behind. Now the thin outer walls collapsed, revealing nothing but a vast cavern underneath the front of the castle. It looked as though a huge bite had been taken out of the lowest part of the building.

With fully half of its foundations gone the castle tilted, precariously, towards the attackers. It balanced there for two heartbeats, its vast shadow looming over the Legion of the Blind. And then the whole building fell forward like a toppled tree. It slammed into the army, crushing innumerable demons to dust.

Perhaps ten or twenty thousand of the Blind now lay beneath that rubble, while Hasp’s castle had received little damage beyond what the god had already done to it himself.

Forgotten’s glass wings clashed. Its breast blushed red. This god is killing himself, it said.

He would rather die by his own hand than let the Blind cut his soul out from within.

The dramatic changes Hasp had been making to his manifested soul required a lot of will, but by diminishing himself each time, he had conserved his energy for each attack. Each transformation reduced the size of Hasp’s fortress, and thereby reduced the amount of power he required to hold the remains of the structure together. But this tactic was self-defeating. Like the serpent who ate its own tail, Hasp was consuming himself.

To confuse his opponents? Or to delay them, to keep them here while the younger angel escapes?

Forgotten now rose into the air with a mighty swoop of its wings, its beak snapping at the scattering demons to maintain order. The Blind had lost some of their eyes in the collapse of the fortress, and now the survivors were fighting over those that remained. The toppled building in their midst had been temporarily forgotten.

The glass lizard reacted with fury, assaulting the horde with images of torture and punishment so savage that Harper recoiled and subconsciously raised her shield to ward them off. The terrible vision worked as intended, quelling the rebellion among the Blind.

Hasp would die now, Harper was sure. His castle lay on its side in ruins. Its spires had sheared off and crumbled to the ground; the very backbone of the building had snapped. The trapped god could not hope to instigate another successful collapse from these remains. To do so now would not postpone his inevitable death, for millions of the demons still waited behind the vanguard.

And yet the castle changed again.

More doorways appeared along its buckled walls, scores of them.

Was this simply arrogance or pride ? Or was this a final desperate attempt to diminish the last of his soul and thus end his life?

Destroy it! Forgotten raged. It showed Menoa’s army a vision of a single bloody heart, surrounded by a circle of teeth.

The Legion of the Blind responded with savage lust.

But this time they met resistance.

Harper hissed, “Oh, god.” From out of the castle doorways poured those demons who had been trapped by the building’s collapse. Somehow, Hasp had protected them within his castle walls. By enveloping these fallen creatures within his own soul, he had temporarily consumed them. Their simple minds had become a part of his mind, and therefore subject to his will. The god needed no power to create a legion of his own. He had simply stolen part of King Menoa’s army.

And now these briefly buried demons, compelled by the mind of a cunning god, set upon their simple-minded comrades. It was twenty thousand against a million-a battle Hasp could not win.

And yet he almost did. Those of the Blind under the god’s influence sought out the eyes of their former comrades. They attacked in organized packs while their opponents brawled for dominance among their own peers. Within moments Hasp’s demons had taken one eye, and then a second and a third. With each new acquisition their foes grew weaker and more disorganized. Soon they began to panic.

Forgotten flew overhead, flinging down desperate visions of furnaces and boiling lakes of poison at the Blind who fled, or turned in confusion to fight against their own side. But Hasp’s demons were immune to such onslaughts. The god’s sheer force of will kept them firmly bound to his desires. After all, they were now a part of his soul.

Twenty thousand against a million. They cut a path through Menoa’s army like a river of liquid obsidian across a field of cool rock. By now they had stolen almost all of the Blind’s eyes, and the bulk of the opposing army was in chaos.

Menoa was losing the fight.

Harper flexed her glass tail and slithered down into the quadrangle, using her shield to push her way through the panicked throng. Menoa had given her a spear, but she lacked the skill to use it. In Pandemeria she had served the Mesmerists as a metaphysical engineer. She had never been a warrior.

But she understood the Mesmerists’ arcane technology better than anyone except Menoa himself. To control his stolen legion, Hasp needed to maintain a psychic link with them. This required a great deal of concentration. If the link could be broken…

Her sceptre could be turned towards this purpose. The Mesmerists had developed Screamers, powerful psychic weapons designed to disrupt a soul’s grip of its manifested reality. Icarates sometimes used them to shatter Middens and reach powerful souls hiding inside. Such force would not be nearly enough to destroy an archon’s grip of his reality-she could not damage Hasp’s castle even in its current state-but she might be able to disrupt the link to his hijacked demons.

As Harper neared the fallen fortress, she raised her sceptre and let the device taste the souls around it. Crystal lights sparkled within the glass orb and she saw a vision of the god, deep in his castle.