Matt Forbeck - Marked for Death

“You surprise me,” the elder knight said. “I didn’t think you were a believer.”

Kandler brushed the man’s hand away and stood up. “I’m not,” he said. His eyes burned red with suppressed grief, but his face remained grim. “Before we put up the monument, some of us searched the battlefield for our friends.”

Kandler strode over to the wider end of the stone and knelt down to examine the break. “I buried my wife here,” he said.

Sallah gasped. “Here, among all this death? Why did you not take her from this place and give her a proper burial?”

Kandler shook his head. “This is the way she would have wanted it. Out there… that’s not her homeland. For better or for worse, right where we’re standing, this is Cyre.” Kandler bit the side of his thumb until the urge to weep went away. “This was her home. She belongs here. Someday, maybe it will belong to her again.”

Everyone lapsed into a respectful silence, and Kandler turned back to examining the damaged monument.

“It wasn’t lightning,” Burch said. He had come up behind Kandler to peer at the broken end of the obelisk too. “No scorch marks.”

Kandler nodded, ignoring the confused looks from the others. “See the marks here near the break?” he said. The place where he pointed was covered with the marks of dozens of tiny chips smashed off the obelisk. “Looks like a warhammer or mace.”

“Maybe both.”

“Maybe lots of them.”

“Whoever it was, they wanted this thing down bad.”

“Who?” asked Deothen. “More importantly, why?”

“Does it really matter?” Sallah asked.

Kandler stood up. Before he could speak, Burch cut him off.

“Hostiles! All around!”

Kandler glanced at Burch, but before he could ask what his friend meant, bodies on either side of the path around them erupted. The horses screamed and bolted.

The hunters drew their weapons. A score of armored creatures stood up from underneath the corpses arranged near the river and staggered toward them. “Zombies!” Levritt shouted, his voice shredded by panic.

“We can handle this,” Brendis said, clapping the youngest knight on the shoulder as he spoke. He looked back at Deothen and said, “Stay back and witness the power of our faith.” He, Gweir, and Levritt stepped forward, leaving Deothen and Sallah behind with Kandler and Burch.

As the creatures stomped closer, their armor clanking all about them, the knights raised high their silvery swords, which burst into sparkling flame. “We are the defenders of the weak and foes of the darkness!” Brendis shouted. “Your kind cannot stand before our righteous light!”

The creatures halted for a moment just outside of the swords’ reach. They gazed up at the blazing blades in what the young knights could only believe was awe.

And then the creatures laughed.

It was a hollow, tinny laugh, as if the suits of armor were empty and the sound echoed inside their breastplates before making its way out.

The three young knights glanced at each other, confused and filled with a doubt they’d rarely known. While their blades were still held high, the creatures leaped forward and stabbed at the knights’ exposed middles.

One of the creatures ran Gweir clean through. The knight fell over the sword and coughed up blood onto his attacker’s arm. He tried to scream, but he just spurted more crimson from his mouth instead.

Brendis managed to bring his sword back down in time to offer some defense, but two of the creatures bowled into him and knocked him over. They kept on him, pinning him to the ground, and began poking at his defenseless form with their blades. He screamed as he was stabbed again and again.

Levritt stumbled backward and fell. As he went down, Burch’s crossbow twanged, and the creature about to drive his blade down through the young knight’s heart fell over dead.

Kandler and Sallah dashed forward. Deothen held his blade before him and called on the Silver Flame to protect the knights from these creatures.

“It’s not working!” Kandler said to the senior knight. “We’re on our own here!” He cut down one of the creatures with a single blow then parried attacks from two others. They were fast but unimaginative in their savagery. Kandler could almost predict exactly where their blows would be aimed each moment, and this gave him the kind of advantage he needed over their superior numbers.

“Does the Silver Flame’s light not reach into this damned land?” Sallah asked as she stepped into the fray, swinging her sword left and right.

“Blasphemy, daughter!” Deothen said, staring at the flames dancing on his sword. “I can feel the Flame’s power coursing through me and my blade.”

Kandler kicked one of the creatures off of Brendis, then decapitated the other with a single, well-placed blow.

The severed cranium sailed through the air and bounced off Levritt’s head, knocking him back to the ground and conveniently out of the way of a slashing sword. As he scrambled to his feet again, he looked down at the thing’s face. It was made of cast metal bolted to a skull, and all over it was carved intricate runes, the color of which faded from red to black as he watched. The thing’s jaw flapped loosely from a pair of rivets as its leathery tongue lolled out of its mouth. Its blank, obsidian eyes stared back at the young knight like those of a statue, with as little life left in them.

“By the Silver Flame!” Levritt squealed. “What is that?” The knight stumbled backward away from the skull, waving his sword recklessly before him.

Kandler stepped in front of the downed Brendis. As he did, another of the creatures stepped up to face him. Its body looked more like that of a living statue than a man. Plates of metal and disks of stone overlaid muscular fibers flexing beneath. The creature stood as tall as a man, had the same shape, but it fought with the tireless fury of the undead.

Kandler recognized what the creature was. He’d fought against some of them in the Last War, both in Breland and abroad. “Warforged!” Kandler shouted. He continued to hack away at the creatures, peeling their armored skin from them with his blade, then taking them apart a piece at a time. “They fight like animals but die like men! Keep at them!”

The warforged were the monstrous creations of wizards who served kings that were running out of warm bodies to place into a soldier’s garb in the final decades of the Last War. They were constructs somehow gifted with humanoid sentience, creatures like the unliving golems that served in many a wizard’s tower, but imbued with the power to reason, as well as what could only be called a soul.

Deothen stepped into the fray, standing back to back with Sallah as the creatures surrounded them. As each of the warforged stepped forward to brave an attack, the knights made them pay. Soon, the ground around them lay covered in pieces of these strange constructs.

Using his clawed hands and feet, Burch scaled the obelisk and stood atop its broken shaft. From the safety of this vantage, he rained bolt after bolt down on the creatures. Many fell with the shifter’s steel-tipped missiles jutting from the spaces between their metallic plates.

Brendis struggled to his feet and stood with his back to Kandler. His left arm was hurt, and he held it close to his side as he blocked blow after blow from the warforged. The justicar rolled around to the knight’s left side to protect the young man from attacks from that direction.

With Kandler’s flank protected, he lay into the warforged who came at him, weaving a steely net of death with his blade. They fell before him, one by one, and it was not long before only three of the creatures were left.