Interlude 5: The Dawn Breaks |
"Where is the king?" Alessandro shouted. "Where is the king?"
Despite the troops milling about, despite the soldiers, mages, clerics, paladins, and more who moved with desperate vigour to man the city's walls, none could tell him the fate of the king.
"You, there!" He shoved his way through a terrified group of militia and seized a royal knight by the arm. "Where is the king?"
"The king is dead!" the knight cried, trying and failing to break free of his grip. "We told him to retreat. We told him that we had to leave, but he insisted on stopping to evacuate the villages along the way. We were overrun. There was nothing we could do."
Alessandro shoved the knight against the wall. "Nothing you could do? How is it that you still live while the king is dead?" He looked around. "Where are your brother knights? Why do you alone remain? Coward!" He spat. "You abandoned the king, didn't you?"
"You don't understand!" the knight wailed. "You weren't there! I had to run! There was no point. The king… the king knew what we were up against. He should have fled as we advised." He tried to break free, and Alessandro snarled and pressed a dagger to his throat. "You…" The knight stared into Alessandro's eyes. "You have to see it for yourself. Go up onto the walls, paladin. Go, you will understand why I fled when you see them."
"Get this coward out of here," Alessandro hissed, all but throwing the knight at a pair of nearby guardsman. His gaze hardened, and he turned to the mage who had watched the entire confrontation without saying a word. "Sofia, send word to the palace. The king is lost."
The mage grimaced. "What of the queen and the royal children?"
"Let us see what we are up against before we decide. If the enemy can be dealt with, then it will be better for them to stay in the palace. If things are as bad as that coward said, then we may need to evacuate them to a safer location." Alessandro shook his head. "Ancestors willing, it will not come to that."
Murata would face this new enemy and it would stand firm as it always had, and then Alessandro, the leader of the city's legendary paladins, would turn his attention to the royal knights. Their standards must have grown lax, for their duty was, above all things, the safety of the king and his family. If the king had refused to see sense, then they were to take him and flee, regardless of his protests. If such actions later cost them their lives to the king's wrath, then so be it. Their oaths were clear. Death before dishonour, and the royal family's safety above all. Better an angry king than a dead one.
As he reached the top of the walls, he realised that something was wrong. The men and women here should have been rowdy, filled with the nervous energy that only approaching battle could bring. He should have been forced to shout for calm before bellowing his orders. Instead, there was only a terrible, terrible silence.
And looking to the west, he could not blame them.
At first he thought it a trick of the eye, some strange shadow cast by a low-lying cloud. But it was no cloud, for no cloud ever moved so swiftly or with such horrible purpose. No. It was a verminous tide of rotting flesh and mangled bodies, a seemingly endless swarm of undead that seemed to span the horizon.
"Ancestors…" Sofia whispered, the normally calm mage's voice now filled with fear that would have already become terror if not for her renowned composure. "This… there must be millions of them."
Alessandro swallowed thickly. Millions? There might well be tens of millions, for there seemed to be no end to the zombies as they drew closer and closer, their footsteps churning the ground and sending up plumes of dust. The earth shook as they approached, and his horror only grew as he raised a spyglass to his eye and saw the true nature of their enemy.
Orcs, goblins, beast-people, elves, dwarves, and humans… and in such numbers he could not help but wonder if all of their neighbours had been slain and turned into these abominations. He had not believed the rumours – no one had – but there was no denying them now. A necromancer had risen, one far beyond the lesser wakers of the dead they had encountered over the years.
But worse than the shambling dead drawn from neighbouring lands were the nightmarish zombies that towered over them or soared through the skies above them. Zombie hydras lumbered alongside their lesser fellows, along with zombie monsters of all kinds, from giant wolves to basilisks and gorgons. A handful of zombie dragons ruled the skies while clouds of zombie drakes, zombie wyverns, and zombie birds filled the air.
But even the zombie monsters could not compare to the unspeakable horrors that could only have been created by the maddest of minds. They were… conglomerations of undead flesh, hideous abominations that combined the body parts of different creatures into a single, horrific whole. Largest of them all was a zombie dragon with the heads of a hydra protruding from its shoulders, the tails of many manticores, and the heads of dozens of gorgons attached to its body.
"Ancestors…" Alessandro forced himself to put on a brave face. If the others saw him panic, then they were lost. "Sofia," he said quietly. "Send word to the palace. Tell the queen that she and the royal children need to flee. They need to leave now before the horde can reach us, and they are to tell no one else, lest morale collapse." He paused. "Not in one group either. She should take the two youngest with her and flee east. Her brother is king there. He can take her and the youngest in."
"And the three older children?" Sofia asked.
"North-east, south-east, and north. We cannot afford to have the royal family in one place, not with that… that horde headed this way." He lowered his voice. "If this city falls, the east will not be far behind. Those three are old enough to know what they must do if that happens. Our neighbours in those directions are friendly with us. They will take them in, if only because supporting us in our hour of need will allow them to win concessions later." Assuming they survived, but he would not risk saying that where others might here.
"Very well." Sofia's magic crackled to life as she sent word to the palace via communication magic. "What now?"
"We fight," Alessandro said grimly. "And if we are lucky, we survive." He cleared his throat and then raised his voice. "Brothers and sisters, take heart. For two thousand years, Murata's walls have stood unbroken. Do you think some shambling corpses fresh from the grave will be the ones to breach it?" There was a bit of nervous laughter at his words, and he drew his sword with a flourish. It was a relic from a bygone Age, forged by dwarves who had once soared through the clouds. He let his magic flow through it, and the holy blade lit up in response, the lines of dwarven script that ran the length of the blade gleaming with pale blue light. It had been found by the first paladin of the city, and it had been passed down for two thousand years, going from one leader of the paladins to the next. "Let these monsters come. They will die like all the others!"
Alessandro stumbled. His ears rang, and blood coursed down his face. He would normally have healed the wound, but he no longer had the magic to do that. "Sofia!" he shouted. "Sofia, where are you?" Men in armour ran past, some called out to him whilst others stared and then fled. He paid them no mind. "Sofia, where are you?"
The woman was at his side a moment later. She could barely stand, and she sagged wearily against him. Her fine robes were covered in soot, blood, and the mangled remains of the undead. "Alessandro, your head…"
"It matters not," he growled. "The city is lost. Get to the temple. There is a passageway behind the main altar. It will take you out of the city and into the foothills behind us. With any luck, the undead will be too busy killing the rest of us to go after you." He pressed a potion into her hand. It was the last he had. "Take it. It will heal enough of your injuries to let you move freely."
Her eyes widened and she tugged on his arm. "Come with me."
He shook his head. "No. Someone has to continue to lead, and I cannot abandon our people." He bit back a wince as pain from dozens of wounds cut through his exhaustion. "The walls are lost and the gates broken, but we can still make our stand in the streets. If we can hold on then perhaps…"
"Perhaps what?" she asked harshly. "What help can we expect?"
None. That was the cruel answer.
And the battle had started so well too. The horde had broken on the walls like a wave against the shore. Their spells, siege weaponry, and archers had slain thousands of zombies. But there had been more zombies to replace the ones that fell – and more to replace those… and more to replace those.
They had run out of arrows, and their mages had exhausted their magic. And the piles of slain undead had grown so tall that their fellows had been able to climb them to reach the top of the wall to attack the defenders.
Worse, the monstrous undead had unleashed their wrath. Volleys of acid from zombie hydras had melted chunks of the wall while zombie basilisks flung their giant bodies against the gates, heedless of the wounds they took, their petrifying gaze turning defenders to stone as they broke through one gate after another. The zombie fliers had tormented them from the skies, swooping down to seize defenders or simply landing within the city and causing chaos. The zombie dragons and the… twisted abomination that seemed to command them had unleashed waves of fire that left entire districts in flames and blew great holes in the walls. Even now, long after night had fallen, the battlefield continued to be lit by periodic bursts of dragon fire, each blast signifying the deaths of dozens, perhaps hundreds of people.
Who could help them now, and what hope did any of their neighbours have of surviving? The city was lost, and he was smart enough to know that there was no saving it or any of its inhabitants. That was why he was asking Sofia to run. Yet he was a paladin, and paladins did not flee in the face of the enemy.
"Sofia," he said. "Go. Head… head north and catch a ship across the sea. I fear this whole continent is lost to us, but you can still warn the kingdom across the sea. There may still be hope." The words tasted like ashes in his mouth, for no kingdom he could think of could stand against the forces that had broken Murata in less than a day. But she needed hope. She needed to believe there was a way to survive.
"I…" She lingered for a moment and was about to speak when suddenly her eyes looked past him, past even the horrors going on around them, to the eastern sky. "Is… is that dawn?"
He followed her gaze. The eastern horizon was brightening, but… it was too early for dawn, wasn't it? Or had his injuries robbed him of the ability to judge the passing of time. But as the light grew closer and brighter, he realised that it was not the dawn drawing near… it was a dragon.
"The Dawnbringer," he murmured. It was said that the very first paladin of the city had been taught the holy arts by a dragon he had proven his worth to. Dawnbringer, he had called her, for where she went the dawn followed. Alessandro had never been sure if those stories were simply myths told to explain the powerful magics that he and his fellow paladins wielded, but although he had seen dozens of dragons over the years, he had never seen one that matched the descriptions passed down by the first paladin. Until now.
"With scales of light," he said, the familiar words falling from his lips and spreading through the panicked crowd like spring rain on parched desert earth. "And wings of dawn. Her breath harms only the wicked, and her eyes shine like the moon."
And then she was there, a dragon larger than any he had ever seen but swifter too, so graceful in the air that she might have been dancing. And where she went, the undead died. In their scores, in their hundreds, in their thousands, in their millions, they died.
Light burst from her scales, so bright it should have blinded him, and yet his eyes were unharmed. White flame poured from her mouth, and though the undead around them were burnt to ash, not a single living person was harmed. Instead, their wounds were healed and their spirits restored.
Each beat of her wings sent a wave of light and radiance outward, and the undead were felled where they stood, crumbling away, their tormented souls sent straight to the hereafter. Only the mightiest of the zombies remained, the undead dragons and the twisted abomination, and they soared up to meet her.
The Dawnbringer laughed, a sound full of contempt that they – these twisted aberrations, these vile undead, these corrupted corpses – would dare to challenge her in the air. She banked to meet them, and the zombie dragons were dead within moments, the bladed leading edges of her wings shining like dawn-wrought scythes as they cut through them. The last to fall was the amalgamation, the hydras heads braying, the gorgon heads sobbing, and its dragon head weeping as it was put out of its misery, blasted from the sky by a beam of coruscating radiance that would have put the sun to shame.
And then the Dawnbringer was floating above the city, her wings no longer beating, held aloft solely by the pure force of her power. Her silver gaze stared down at them, and Alessandro nearly wept at the compassion he saw there. She was so mighty, and yet she grieved for the losses they had suffered. No more undead remained. They had been cleansed, destroyed utterly by her might.
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"Dawnbringer!" he shouted, kneeling, as did the others around him, a tide of obeisance that ended with the whole city on its knees. "We thank you for your aid!"
"Dawnbringer?" she murmured, though her voice carried clearly to all of them. "Is that what you call me?"
He looked up. "That is the name given for you in the writings of the paladin who founded my order. He called you Dawnbringer."
"Dawnbringer is a title, one of several I possess." The dragon looked westward. "My name is Dawnscale, and I have unfinished business to the west." She cast magic upon the city, and a glowing barrier appeared around it. "You should be safe here. See to your city and its people. I will return when the threat has been dealt with."
And then she was gone, soaring west at a speed even a falling star would have envied.
Dawnscale fought the urge to scowl as she flew west. She had not arrived in time to intercept the zombie army before it had reached the city. Thankfully, she had arrived before it had been completely destroyed, but the loss of so many lives within it still rankled her. Worse, she knew that the horde that had attacked the city had contained only the very weakest of the mad vampire's forces. A zombie dragon might look imposing to a human, but a zombie made out of a dragon who had not even reached its Third Awakening was no danger to her.
But there were rumours that the mad vampire had been able to slay multiple dragons who had undergone their Third Awakening and perhaps even a few who had undergone a Fourth Awakening. At least none of her fellow primordial dragons had perished, or so Doomwing believed. The other dragon was still preparing his own countermeasures and trying to contact their fellows, but he would have told her if he so much as suspected a primordial dragon had been turned into a zombie. That was a threat that even she would not have been able to take lightly.
What drew her west was a colossal well of necromantic energy. She could sense it from thousands of miles away, and she knew that whatever that energy was being used for, it had to be stopped. To think that an ancient vampire would have been able to do this! It should have been impossible. Not even the Progenitor, the oldest and mightiest of vampires, had possessed power like this. There must be an explanation. Hopefully, Doomwing would be able to unravel the mystery because that would make killing the mad vampire much easier.
West she flew as fast, as her wings could carry her. Half a continent passed by, stripped of all life. Not even the beasts of the fields and forests had been spared. All had been slain and either used to fuel dark sorcery or turned into zombies.
At last, she neared the well of necromantic power, and she slowed, caution coming to the fore as she realised the full scale of the danger in front of her. The amount of necromantic power in this area was orders of magnitude beyond what she'd sensed coming from the entire horde of undead she'd destroyed earlier.
Magic and light at the ready, she drew closer… and a combination of horror and pure, undiluted raged filled her.
"This…" she snarled. "This is… there are no words!"
The well of necromantic power was a lake of putrid black foulness that resembled a combination of blood and tar. It was hundreds of miles across, and there were countless bodies floating within it. Largest of all were the bodies of several ancient dragons. The souls of millions filled the air around the morass, bound there by unholy sorcery. Floating above the centre of the lake was the mad vampire.
No. Her eyes narrowed. He was not the mad vampire. He was some sort of blood doppelganger but far more advanced than anything she'd ever seen.
"I was wondering when you'd show up," the doppelganger said, smiling. "You handled my army quite easily, not that I expected them to accomplish much against you. But this?" He gestured vaguely at the lake of charnel madness. "This might be a little different."
"Be silent," she snapped. "You die here."
And she lashed out with a combination of her cleansing fire and ancient runes. It should have been enough. But the sheer quantity of necromantic energy here, drawing upon the magic of an entire continent and the souls of millions of slaughter innocents, stood firm against the assault.
To her disbelief, the lake of horror began to rise, enveloping the doppelganger and taking on the twisted form of a titanic dragon made of blood and rotting flesh. The bodies that had been floating in the lake forced their way to the surface of the monstrosity, their dead mouths opening to sing hymns of mocking praise to the mad vampire and his schemes. Power began to build, an unstoppable tide of raw death, and then she was tumbling backward, end over end, crashing through a mountain and then a lake before instinctively taking wing and trying to understand what had happened to her.
That… thing had just blasted her hundreds of miles with a single attack. She shook her head to clear it and turned to find the abomination approaching her at high speed. There was nothing graceful about its flight. If anything, its flight was tortured, accompanied by the wailing of the damned souls that powered it.
She gathered her power again and then surged forward to meet the creature.
She lost track of time after that.
The battle was fierce beyond anything she'd experienced since the last Catastrophe. Her power should have been a perfect counter to this creature, yet the sheer amount of energy it possessed meant that it could restore itself even faster than she could damage it. She was effectively fighting an entire continent, for the mad vampire had found a way to bind this abomination to the currents of magic that flowed through the land, to say nothing of the millions of souls that had gone into creating it.
Onward they fought, racing back and forth across the land. Beams of searing light and blasts of white flame were met by bolts of pure death and swarms of lesser zombies bursting from the body of the foul creature. They met in mid-air – a mistake on her part – and she found herself barely holding it at bay as claws wrought of thousands of corpses sought to tear her limbs off whilst the bodies of thousands more clambered onto her, full to bursting with foul magic. They detonated, and that foul magic seared her scales and burned at her soul. All the while, the bodies within the creature screamed their hate, cursed her inability to save them, and begged for mercy.
But she was winning. Somehow, slowly but surely, she was winning. A tide of death washed outward, and she dodged before her answering beam of pure radiance severed one of the creature's limbs. The severed limb crashed to the ground, instantly corrupting the land it touched, and verminous zombies sprang from the ruined limb, taking to the air to pursue her as others scampered across the land in search of the living.
Another exchange saw the creature lose a wing and go tumbling to the ground. She stayed aloft, blasting it with magic over and over and over again. The connection it had to the currents of magic was fraying, and she pushed herself harder, willing her light to burn brighter as she tried to erase this misbegotten creature from the world.
Her reserves were growing low, and still the creature tried to rise, to take to the air and strike her down. She hissed. She couldn't keep this up much longer. As titanic as her reserves of magic were, they were not infinite, and she and this creature had been fighting for what felt like hours. Why couldn't it just die? She had already tried multiple ancient runes of true death, but the creature had shrugged them off somehow. It seemed the only way to kill it was to destroy its body and then to keep on destroying it until there was nothing left and its connection to the currents of magic was completely severed.
The creature had abandoned its draconic shape. Now, it was little more than a twisted mass of writhing undead flesh straining desperately up at the sky in a bid to reach her. Higher that twisted spire went, fighting through her unrelenting barrage, and she saw the mangled jaws of a dragon emerge from the corrupted, patchwork aggregation –
BOOM.
An ancient rune of fire combined with an ancient rune of amplification and several other ancient runes turned the area below her into a cloud of heat so intense that even she had to retreat to feel comfortable. She breathed a sigh of relief and drew on her dwindling reserves to form ancient runes of purification, extirpation, and light. More ancient runes formed around hers, amplifying their effects, increasing their ability to penetrate the enemy's defences, and turning them from momentary attacks into lingering changes in reality.
Only one person in the world knew her well enough to mix their ancient runes with hers, and she allowed herself a momentary smile before unleashing the combined attack on the horror that had somehow managed to survive even the earlier fiery barrage.
"Just die!" she snarled. "Just die already!"
This time, her foe had the decency to comply, and she finally turned to greet Doomwing. The other dragon took note of her exhaustion, and she felt a combination of healing magic and restorative magic wash over her. Healing her own injuries was one thing, but restoring her reserves of magic was more difficult. That, however, was something Doomwing could do.
"Thank you," she said.
The other dragon studied the massive crater below them with a clinical eye. "That thing… it was far more durable than I expected."
"It was more durable than I expected too," she murmured before briefly explaining what had happened before his arrival.
"Hmm…" Doomwing drifted closer, and she felt his gaze sweep over her, checking for any injuries that remained unhealed, as well as any other, less obvious, forms of damage. "This vampire… I hate to admit it, but he is a true genius. To create something like that… there is no other way to describe him."
"Were you able to learn anything from observing it?" Dawnscale asked, knowing that as briefly as Doomwing had seen it, his extremely powerful scrying, divination, and analytical magic could provide him with great insight.
"Yes. I believe I understand how he was able to link it to the currents of magic that flow through this continent – which we will most likely have to fix once we kill him."
"How was it able to resist so many ancient runes?" she asked.
"His blood doppelgangers are special. They can use ancient runes. Moreover, he has… a lot of them. I would estimate thousands with the ability to make more. If he was willing to sacrifice enough of those doppelgangers, he would be able to layer his greatest creations in enough ancient runes backed by enough power to withstand attacks from even you or I." Doomwing gave a low rumble of anger. "But we were fortunate. I believe this was a trap."
"A trap?" Dawnscale's eyes widened. "You mean for me?"
"Yes. You are a celestial dragon and therefore a natural counter to the undead. You had every reason to be confident that you would be able to defeat whatever foe you encountered here. If he knew that you'd be coming, he could have prepared ancient runes specifically to combat your abilities. By catching you off guard, he most likely hoped to kill you before help arrived."
"But help did arrive," she said, smiling at him. Doomwing could be awkward at times, but he was utterly reliable when it mattered.
"You had the situation in hand," he replied. "You would have won although it would have taken longer, and you would have exhausted almost all of your magic. He underestimated you. I doubt he will make that mistake again."
"Hmm…" Dawnscale nodded. "Yes. We'll have to be better prepared. Who else is nearby?"
"Ashheart should be here soon, along with Stormbringer. However, the others are dealing with undead in their own areas. This vampire seems to be quite adept at multi-tasking. Once they've beaten back the undead on their doorsteps, we can try to divine the vampire's actual location. So far, he has managed to evade detection by my magic, but I have found several key locations that we should attack as soon as possible."
"Good. The sooner we deal with this…" Dawnscale trailed off. She hadn't noticed it during the fight because she'd been so focused on keeping herself alive and killing that thing, but the magic she'd put on the city was no longer active. Had it been cancelled due to her dwindling reserves, or had… her eyes widened. "Doomwing, use memory magic on me. I need to recall the fight in perfect detail."
She could use memory magic, but Doomwing had always been better at it than her.
"What?"
"Please," she said. "Use memory magic on me. I need to remember the fight."
"As you wish."
A few moments later, she was racing through the sky toward the city.
"No," she murmured to herself. "No, no, no, no…"
She was barely aware of Doomwing rushing to keep up with her – as fast as he was, she was faster still – and then she stopped. She had reached the city. Or where the city had been.
During the fight, she had dodged one of the creature's blasts of raw necromantic energy. It had contained enough power to seriously wound, if not outright kill her, and blocking the attack would have consumed power she hadn't been able to spare, so she'd dodged.
She'd dodged – and the blast had struck the city instead.
The barrier she'd put around the city had been designed to ward off the kind of undead she'd faced earlier, not a full-strength attack from a being that could kill her if she got careless.
The city was gone. In its place was a lake of slowly dwindling necromantic energy… and the shambling forms of thousands upon thousands of newly created undead.
Wordlessly, she lashed out with her magic. A beam of light descended from the sky.