Deus Necros

The guard’s eyes were wide and hard at once, ears flicking with the effort of listening past the crackle of the torches that were not torches. The forest night pressed in around them, resin-scented, damp underleaf breathing cool against boot soles, and inside that hush the howl of the Djinns twisted like wind in a bottle. She had her bow half raised without remembering drawing it. The wild light from the cave mouth found the flat of Ludwig’s blade and ran along it in a thin white vein.

“What did you just do?” the guard said as she looked at Ludwig with full surprise. After all from all the running he did and the main weapon he held, he was anything but a caster, but this type of magic, capable of forcing his enemies into a mental destabilization and a frenzy was more than enough to prove his attainment in the art of magic.

“A simple trick,” Ludwig said as he swung his sword in an arc at the crossed scissor like daggers of the assassin.

His arm moved with the calm ease of a man closing a door. Steel met steel and the kiss of it spat bright, brief sparks that fell and died in the moss. The assassin’s blades were hooked inward, meant to catch and shear, a trap made of edge; Ludwig’s cut turned that trap into a lever and fed the man’s own grip back into his wrists.

The contact sparked in the night of the forest as the man’s hands trembled from how powerful the blow was. Nerves jumped up the assassin’s forearms. The shock passed into his shoulders and made his breath grunt through clenched teeth. The scissored guard opened a fraction against his will, the sound a thin scrape swallowed by the greater dark.

A single handed swing was strong enough to break his guard and destabilize him several steps back. His heels dug twin furrows as he slid. He tried to ride the recoil and failed, boot skidding on wet bark. He caught himself against a trunk with the flat of one blade and hissed, the hiss more fear than pain.

“AT HIM!” the man howled, and immediately three others charged in at Ludwig, each of them coming from a different shade. Leaves shook in a sheet. Bark parted like a mouth to give birth to a thin shape in oiled cloth. The ground under Ludwig’s feet lifted a shallow dark as his own outline thickened and rose. Cold came with them, the cold of air that has not touched lungs in a long time. The guard’s breath hitched once; she measured angles, then froze, knowing she was late to every one of them.

The corner of Ludwig’s mouth ticked, not humor, the one that came out of his shadow was the least of his worries, because he wasn’t the only thing hiding there. Heat from the fake torches licked at his cheek. Behind the shine of the steel his eyes were very calm.

The darkness at Ludwig’s heels thickened like ink poured into water. A ring of teeth shaped itself in it with lazy inevitability, the glint a memory of stars drowned in deep wells. The assassin’s head lifted into that crescent as if bowing, and then the ring shut. There was no crunch, only the wet thud of absence. The shadow drank the sound, and the ground was flat again as if nothing had ever stood there. Salem had Ludwig’s back, quite literally as the assassin invited himself to the jaws of a beast willingly.

A faint tremor ran through the roots beneath Ludwig’s soles, the only sign that Salem had swallowed. The guard’s hand tightened on the string until the tips of her fingers went white. She had never seen something like that before, a beast within a beast.

The assassin dropped like a hawk, knees locked, both daggers crossed to stake Ludwig to the earth. Ludwig stepped under the line and turned his wrist. The parry was almost delicate. Edge met edge, met wrists, met the full weight of a man falling, and stopped it there, held as if the air itself had learned to be solid. The killer hung against his own momentum, boots scrabbling at nothing, muscles shaking with the insult of being held.

For the second one, Ludwig flexed his free hand. Black scorched wood coalesced into his palm with a sound like breath drawn in surprise. The jewel at its crown woke with a sickly inner light, a color that did not belong to leaves. He inclined it, a courtly nod given to the earth, and set its weight to soil. Power moved outward in a sheet so thin it felt like cold.

The moment the second assailant was within three steps of Ludwig. Rock erupted with the speed of regret, fingers as long as spears, the texture of ancient riverbed. They rose quietly, as if they had been there all along and only remembered their purpose now. The clap was intimate, no louder than two hands meeting. Between them the man became paste and bone fragments and a spray that painted the ferns, the trunks, the underside of leaves with warm wet. The arc went around Ludwig as if some polite wind had stepped in front of him and divided it, leaving his coat untouched, his boots clean.

That all happened while Ludwig felt like he was balancing the man on his sword in the air with one hand. The weight above his blade trembled and tried to become heavy again. Ludwig let it, then denied it, the way one holds a plank on fingertips for a child to see. The assassin’s eyes showed the moment he understood the hierarchy in the room.

“You like it up there?” Ludwig teased. His wrist turned and the air became a path. The crossed daggers made a single sound like a choked breath as they were driven against their owner’s chest and then into bark. The trunk gave with a drawn-out groan and split around the impact, fibers shearing like wet cloth. The assassin went through with the first half of the tree, the second half toppled in a slow, tired lean that ended with a shudder in the soil. Leaves fluttered down as if in lazy applause. Another assailant turned to paste.

The final one was rummaging through his pockets, the same pill that the other sand dwellers Ludwig met earlier was in his hands. His fingers shook with the speed of habit, not fear. The little object clicked against a tooth as he brought it up, slicked with the sweat of his palm. His eyes were already far away, fixed on whatever monster he imagined would save him.

But before he could even bite down on it the whiling sound of wind chimed once. The string’s song was short and dry. The shaft took him where a swallow begins and finished out the roof of his mouth, barbed head wearing a crown of dark spit and a shred of tongue. He blinked once with the stunned surprise of a man interrupted mid-prayer and folded at the knees like a puppet robbed of strings. The pill fell between his teeth and rolled into the leaf litter. The back of his head bleeding from the arrow that penetrated through the mouth.

Ludwig collected the Souls he obtained from the deaths of the assailants, and turned to the guard, “Good reaction,” He said as he went down to pick up the small pill.

The air thinned around him for the space of a heartbeat as the tally arrived and sank into him, cold and clean. He crouched, two fingers gentle for something so ugly, and lifted the pellet from the dirt. It was no bigger than a nail bed, varnished dark, dull rather than glossy, the sort of small, hateful thing that changes the course of a fight. And the fate of a man for something… less.

“What is that?” the guard asked. “Looks like bad news.”

She did not lower her bow. Her nose wrinkled as if the very nearness of it offended her.

“It’s a pill that they use to turn to a demonic entity, I don’t know how it functions, I should send this back to the empire for testing,” Ludwig said. He turned it in his palm and kept his face smooth. The memory of earlier corpses, of bones grown wrong in moments, of eyes filmed over from the inside, flickered behind his eyes and vanished.

“Ludwig,” he heard, this was from the Knight King.

The voice carried the steadiness of old iron polished by generations. It never had to raise itself to be obeyed.

“Do you not feel it? The heartbeat within it?” The suggestion dropped into his mind like a pebble into a well. He listened past his own blood, past the hiss of the false torches, past the curl of steam from the ruined tree.

Ludwig’s brows knitted together, for a second, he placed the pill closer to his ears. “I see, this isn’t a simple pill…” Ludwig’s face scrunched up from disgust.

There it was. A faint, wet tick. Not a beat, a crawl that tried to be one. The thing throbbed once against his skin in greeting or hunger. He let a breath out through his nose and did not drop it.

The elven guard’s ears twitched, she seemed to have heard it too, her hearing was after all far better than a humans, “That’s a living thing?” she asked.

Her voice thinned. She took a half-step back despite herself and then held her ground out of pride.

“Yes, parasitic in nature. A small demon egg? Or something like that.”