Shane Porteous - The Battle of Ebulon - A Shared Anthology

Once the dragons came the Orcs fell or ran away once they found out they couldn’t harm the creatures. By the time morning came, the air seemed just a little cleaner and Ebulon seemed just a little brighter. They were making some headway and it was comforting to know that Ebulon had a fighting chance. What seemed like a sea of dead Orcs lie before them and they knew they’d be off to the next battle. But before they could make their way they were relieved of their duty and sent back to their room for a little bit of rest.

The four were tired but they knew they would not only return home eventually, but they knew they would return to a home that was safe and free of Orcs. They went back to their room, Oren his back yard. They were dirty from their battle but they did not care. Before they slept they knew more Orcs would fall but they also knew more good men would fall as well. War wasn’t ideal for them, but they were happy to help and glad they had skills that were of some use. When they fell to sleep; they slept so deeply that their dreams of home seemed real, and despite the grim circumstances they all had a peaceful smile on their faces.

Andrew was in chains. Again.

And it had all been going so well , he thought. He inched one of his eyes open a quarter inch, the darkness of the cell doing little to impede his unnatural vision. What he saw was more encouraging than he had first expected, but still not as promising as he might have hoped.

The chamber was small and cramped, eight feet to a wall, with a sodden floor that — from the smell — was equal parts shit and mud. The walls themselves were weeping stone with trickles of foul water seeping through the cracks; it appeared to have been hewn with crude tools from a natural cave formation. Even with his enhanced abilities, Andrew was unable to detect a ceiling; he suspected it was likely some form of natural oubliette, too far down for even light to reach, assuming there was any to be found.

He was shackled to the back wall, allowing him to stare down the hallway that the room was attached to. Even if he had not been chained, however, such a view did him little good. Thick bars, pitted and flecked with reddish stains that might have been rust but that his nostrils claimed were more likely to be blood, blocked the path. Such would have meant little to him except for one crucial detail: he could smell the iron in their cores. His abilities would have no effect on such things, and to even touch them would bring immense pain and potential destruction.

He counted himself lucky that the shackles weren’t made of such material; from the feel of them against his wrists, and the moonglow shade of them, he guessed them to be silver or something akin to it. Those would pose no threat.

Allowing his eye to slip closed again, Andrew leaned forward, then jerked back, slamming his head against the wall. He paid no heed to the blood that trickled from the scrape he earned on his skull; instead he listened, straining his ears in an attempt to tell how thick the wall might be. No reverberation at all came back. Great. Solid.

Determining that there was little to do but wait — obviously his captors didn’t intend to leave him here forever, or they wouldn’t have bothered chaining him, leaving a door, and dressing the wounds he could still feel on his arms and chest — Andrew slouched against the wall again, thinking of how he’d come to be in such sorry circumstances.

When the woman had brained him, she had started a chain reaction of events that had led to his eventual incarceration in the closest thing to hell someone like Andrew could contemplate: Homeview Institution. A mental hospital, kept floating on a constant diet of dream suppressing pills and emotion dampening cocktails. Everything kept just so, perfectly sterile and placid.

It very nearly killed him. Each day that he had sat in his cell, awaiting his trail, Andrew had felt his dreamself — his real self — grow weaker, being starved and poisoned by the air of banality and conformity that surrounded the place and ran so counter to his own nature. He woke, he ate, he took his meds, he slept again.

The routine had nearly ground down the last of the being he truly was, the ancient spirit that some called Ulato; remembering that life rather than the lie he’d crafted for the friendless boy grew steadily more difficult. Finally, he had resigned himself to the little death, to life as an outcast from what he had been made to do; when he retired that night, he’d expected either to wake with no memories except those of his fleshself… or to not wake at all.

But then the voice had come. Echoing through every fiber of his dual natures, it was impossible to deny, pleading for aid and succor, claimed any price would be paid if only salvation and vengeance were delivered.

Andrew, being what he was, couldn’t resist. In his dreams he had seen wide mountain vistas that reminded him of his long-ago home, craggy aeries that called to mind his mother’s retreats and shrines. Best of all, he could hear them, the people who lived in that kingdom below. Could hear their cries, smell their pain and fear. A veritable feast for his true nature awaited.

How could he resist?

Andrew’s dreamself had tugged away from the flesh, abandoning it to whatever fate might be ahead and had plunged through that image.

He had found himself standing in the middle of a town square, gray cobbles arranged in a spiral design radiating out from a fountain made of marble. The fountain had apparently been made to commemorate some sort of battle, with a regal-looking man driving a sword through the chest of something that looked intimately familiar to Andrew.

The dying thing had a manlike shape — two arms, two legs, head and torso arranged symmetrically — but the facial structure was closer to that of a pig. Two jutting tusks thrust out from the lower lip, the left one cracked off halfway down. The jowls were thick and dangling, and the nose was a rounded snout with two slits instead of nostrils. The eyes — all three of them — were small and beady, but the artist had done well applying very human pain into the carving.

He glanced around himself, noting the people who were now backing away from him — he suspected it wasn’t every day that strangers suddenly just appeared in their square, let alone strangers wearing clothing that probably appeared freakish and strange to them — and their manner and bearing; all seemed to have dusky flesh, be taller than he — though at only five and a half feet tall, that wasn’t saying much — and have thick dark hair and green or brown eyes. Most were wearing expensive clothing cut in formal — though old, from his standpoint — style, heavy velvet and silk with fur trim and silver accessories. Reds and browns seemed to be the colors of the day, and he found himself laughing inside. Don’t imagine black jeans and purple t-shirts are too common around here , he thought. Not that he particularly cared.

Ignoring them — though the wave of curiosity, fear and hope that came from the crowd was tantalizing to his dreamself, the emotions dribbling out like honey beading on a bit of beeswax — Andrew stepped towards the stature, locking eyes with the porcine figure.

“Fomori,” he whispered. “Did me mother not see fit to wipe you out, eh?”

He extended a hand, running it along the side of the agonized face, then glanced up to the human figure and the blade he wielded. Giving a derisive snort, Andrew stepped back. As if humans could actually kill fomori. Give me a break.