Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial-Chapter 13Arc 7: : An Angel’s Grave

Despite the cold, despite the late hour, Tol still seemed alive. Where they hadn’t found room in taverns and inns, the disparate bands of soldiers sheltering in the town’s walls made rudimentary little camps on the streets. They huddled around bonfires, chatting, individuals and groups crossing from fire to fire here and there to speak with their fellows.

It wasn’t like any army of regulars I’d seen before. The handsomely equipped retinues of knights rubbed elbows with dusty mercenaries and mismatched militia who’d scavenged or forged their own arms in sleepy villages. I saw many bearing the symbol of the Auremark proudly, emblazoning it on armor or stitching it into clothing, It dangled from the necks of preosters, who walked among the soldiers and blessed them.

Even with the cold of a winter night, I felt a shiver of warmth in the air. All living things have aura, and the souls of humans grow more potent when focused to a singular will. I felt that will burning from the smithies that clanged even as dusk melted into night, felt it as keenly as the warmth of bonfires where soldiers gathered and listened to holy men give them impromptu sermons. I felt it like a warm summer wind curling through the streets, settling into the stones of recently erected shrines and the metalwork of arms being crafted for this same purpose.

The faith of the gathering army provided the power, the prayers of the priests wove its narrative and provided life to the idea, and the toiling smiths shaped it into its deadly culmination. There would be magicked blades in the hands of these would-be warriors of God when they marched eastward.

It had little in common with the armies I’d previously witnessed in action. During the war in the Karledale we’d fought for nebulous loyalties to individuals and families, each hewing to the House of their choice and shifting as the winds did. There’d been a sense of righteous defiance against the pretenders for some, but I wasn’t a Karledaler by birth. I’d fought for Rosanna and for Lias, was loyal to them personally.

Later, during the Fall, everything had come undone. There were half a hundred sides before Markham and his allies managed to form the Ardent Bough, and that war had been tinged with a desperate nihilism, a sense that all in the world had unraveled and only by losing oneself to the blood fever could any meaning be found in it.

Not here in this sleepy, small country tucked away in the heartlands. Here I felt a sense of unified purpose. People from a score of lands, who spoke in different dialects — some so insular I could barely understand them — and from various origins in wealth and social standing all broke bread and heeded the clerics like one congregation.

It invigorated something in me, even as a more cynical part of my soul warned against it. Who would these devout warriors turn their blessed steel against? Against an Abyssal Lord? Against a Faerie Queen? Would they see twisted forms in the cracks of civilization like Parn and his people, who lived within the great drains of Garihelm, and call them demon.

There were monsters in the world. I’d seen them, fought them, but there were also plenty who looked like monsters and were in fact very human in their core. I felt a scar on my chest itch, itself a contradiction and a reminder.

For the first time I almost felt glad that Catrin had left when she could. This thought came in a moment of intense whiplash, as I paused to listen to a young soldier with a beautiful voice strum a lute for a small crowd, and also wished she was there at my side so we could listen arm in arm.

The young man laid back against a huge chimera with a long, furry neck like some mix of bovine and dragon. It laid behind him with its eyes closed and listened as contentedly as the gathered throng. I stood at the back of the crowd and listened a while before moving on.

I missed her. At some point I’d realized that even before we’d been lovers, Catrin’s irregular companionship healed something in me. If she hadn’t stubbornly bulled past my walls, been there to show me sympathy and lighten my heart with her easy humor, I think a very different man would have emerged from the past two years of battles and intrigues. Even if we hadn’t complicated things with romance, I knew she would have remained a loyal friend. Vicar was no replacement, with his calculating eyes and malicious observations.

She would have hated this. She would have seen these Aureates and slunk back into the shadows, wary that they might catch the hint of red in her eyes and the cold she exuded. Or she would have laughed with them and found some handsome young mark, flirted with him a while before leading him off for a night of frightening pleasure, pleased with herself for confusing one of the God-Queen’s own soldiers.

Hard to say, but the thought made me smile. She’d done the same to me after all, and I’d only changed in ways I felt were for the better.

I wondered the town this way for most of an hour, not sure what I searched for. It had often been like this before Garihelm. I would wander, stray from well trod roads, wait for signs and subtle impressions from my senses to guide me until the will of the Choir became clear. I’d bullied my way into their attention during my ill-fated interview with Umareon, and wouldn’t do that again unless desperate.

They wanted me here, in this town. I just needed to wait for them to tell me why.

The churches were all occupied despite the settling night, and my steps strayed from the crowds, the camps, the well lit and welcoming faces of Tol’s taverns and its halls of worship. There were some patrols of the local guard, but when they saw my armor — still glamoured to look dun and battered — they let me be with respectful nods and murmurs of “Aureate.” Warriors were welcome to walk as they would in Tol, it seemed.

And almost like waking up from a dream I hadn’t realized I’d slipped into, I found myself once more in the shadow of the cathedral at the center of town. It looked no less eerie cast in night shadows. The melted angel statues looked even more sinister with more minute details obscured. No one made camp near the Church of Saint Lyda. The square beneath its front steps was empty.

I stared up at the cathedral’s high towers. Its walls loomed over me, silent, inert. I took one step forward and paused, feeling an unnamed trepidation. Some warning from my powers, or my instincts? They could be so hard to disentangle from each other.

Vicar’s words about this being a grave came back. Contacting the Onsolain where one of their own had been defiled felt uncomfortably close to blasphemy.

So did taking a vampire as your lover, an inner voice commented sardonically. I scoffed and turned my back on the cathedral. There were other places I could perform communion.

And as I turned, I saw it. It lurked behind a leafless tree set along the edges of the square, a shape only barely distinguishable from the night as a cloud rolled over and a beam of moonlight hit the spot.

I glared at it. With my glamour on, my eyes were a more ordinary golden-brown and produced no light to give me a piercing gaze. It didn’t shy away like the ghosts tended to do when I directed my attention on them. It was difficult to make out; vaguely humanoid, with poorly formed features save for slender fingers that curled along the tree’s trunk, a blank face, the impression of two small horns.

The Scadudemon stared at me, its eyes pinpricks of white. My hand itched for my axe.

“I won’t take you back,” I told it. “You were a poison, and I don’t need help remembering my sins.”

It didn’t respond. Another cloud started to pass over, diminishing the light. I closed my eyes and let out a plume of frost. Idiot. Talking to them only makes them stronger.

Yet, I couldn’t help but want some understanding, even closure. “I still don’t know if she sent to torture me, or because she still thinks she can get something from me. Either way, I’ve moved on. I have more companionship now than the memory of a fake priestess who tried to use me as a tool in a rivalry with other monsters. We’re done. I’m over it.”

I felt a painful prickling along my tongue, a sudden dryness in my throat, and had to suppress a cough. Now the magic punished me?

I looked at the spirit again, expecting it to be gone, but it wasn’t. It still lurked behind the tree, watching, tiny eyes gleaming in the night. My hand came up to thumb at the scars on my face.

“You said you loved me? That you needed me?” My lip curled into a sneer. “She said the same thing right before she tried to throw me at Reynard. If you’re going to play the same game, you should at least try using different moves.”

And I was arguing with a ghost of a ghost. Irritated, mostly at myself, I spun away from the thing. I had more important things to do. Once again my gaze went up to the front steps of the cathedral. My intuition had led me to it.

Steeling myself, I started walking up the steps.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The front doors of the church were sealed. I circled the building until I found one of the side entrances, which I had to break into. All the doors were boarded up, but my axe made quick work of it. Once I’d cleared the boards, the door swung inward with a hollow groan and keening hinges, stale air billowing forth from the widening gap.

Even as the hallway beyond revealed itself, I hesitated to walk inside. My instincts screamed at me to turn back, to not take another step. Something about that quiet passage made my legs feel heavy.

You’re the Headsman of Seydis and an Alder Knight. People across the land talk about you like you’re the Devil Himself. You’re past being tripped up by a dark hallway and a bad feeling, Al.

Even still, every hair on my body stood on end. I wasn’t beyond fear, and this desecrated fane did not welcome me. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and concentrated inward.

I am the sword in the darkness. I am the torch on the roads of Night. The flame is mine aegis. I kindle it so the faithful may know its warmth.

The words of my oath echoed in my thoughts, even as I silently mouthed them. They were a mantra that had thrummed through my soul since the day I first spoke them, as constant and as essential as my own heartbeat. Over the years I’d sometimes lost track of that rhythm, felt like I strayed from the vow even as it shied from me. Lately I had to make myself remember, a sensation not unlike needing to deliberately focus on breathing.

I focused that inner warmth into my eyes, causing my glamour to burn away so they shone a metallic gold. The shadows retreated enough for me to see. I walked forward, and after navigating the halls for some time I found myself in a grand nave.

Some older churches preferred a circular design, the altar set in the very middle of a round chamber, while most newer ones set their pulpit at the back of the hall with the seats arrayed in long rows before it. Saint Lyda’s temple cut the difference. The room was a long oval, its ceiling high and vaulted, its columns set near the smooth arcs of the outer walls. The altar basin lay at the far end from the main doors, which I noted from this side were barred by heavy beams.

I stepped out from between the columns to the left of the main doors and turned to the altar. The stone bowl lay between two narrow pillars from which the carved figures of winged seraphs emerged to welcome supplicants forward. The pulpit stood behind it, a wooden platform with a stair high as a man. Niches in the walls and columns would have once glowed with hundreds of candles, but now lay dark.

My metal sabatons echoed through the space with each step, intruding on the quiet. I did not rush, but soon found myself standing at the altar. A stone basin, just like every church, shrine, and temple across the land. Foggy moonlight shone through the narrow windows along the room’s outer walls. The basin itself had an edge high as my waist, the bowl within recessed into the ground.

My gaze went up to the wall behind the altar. The Holy Auremark, the personal sigil of the God-Queen, showed prominently on the mural there, a seal of gold surrounded by cold blue stone.

Auremark. Aureate. Aureflame. Aura. That same word repeated over and over in my world. Gold, gold, gold. Even God’s true name held it. Wealth and plenty, nobility and might, beauty and strength unfaded.

And yet the world was faded, the golden blessings tarnished, the rot creeping in. I felt it here, smelled it. In this place, even one of the Saints Immortal had fallen sick.

“Why did you guide me here?” I asked aloud in a bare whisper. Had I been guided here? Ghosts and devils had as much influence over me as angels these days.

The thought gave me a moment of intense paranoia. What if I hadn’t seen Donnelly? He’d acted strangely. What if it hadn’t been him?

Is this a trick? A trap? I was very good at walking into those.

In a flash, I realized that it was quiet. There were no ghosts, no ambiance of unsettling whispers and half-seen movement in my surroundings. The dead had not followed me inside. They wouldn’t have if this was still hallowed ground.

Was it? My eyes went down into the basin. It had water in it. Brackish, stale, murky liquid like something I’d expect in a swamp or still pond. It smelled bad.

Lyda had not been a demon. No chorn or incubus had corrupted this place. What had happened? Was it as Vicar said? He hadn’t been here, for all his confident speculation.

Without taking my eyes off the water, I drew my dagger and ran it along my palm before squeezing the blood into the stagnant pool. The ritual offering done, I sheathed the blade and summoned my axe again before kneeling, resting the head of the weapon on the dusty floor.

I bowed my head and waited. I waited a long time.

“I’m here,” I whispered into the bowl. “Tell me why.”

Above me, from the pulpit, I heard the rustling of feathered wings.

I lifted my head, and there above the altar stood Chamael.

He balanced atop the wooden railing of the pulpit, his single foot barely brushing the stone. He seemed stone himself in that moment, an alabaster idol that emitted its own awry light, three faces serenely set in expressions of contemplative sorrow.

I don’t know who moved first. Did I begin to stand, to lift my axe? Did his four wings flex?

It all happened too fast to be certain. One moment we stood there, the humble knight kneeling before the holy altar and the angelic messenger poised above, then I was flying back in a torrent of rushing wind and momentum. I struck the ground once, twice, the impacts echoing around the nave, my armor screeching against tone, cloak flapping as though desperately trying to grab onto something.

I stopped nearly forty feet from the altar, lying face up between the rotted and broken pews. Chamael still stood above me. His single leg, which ended not in a human foot but in something more like a bird’s, pinned me against the floor. Glass-like talons long as small swords sunk into solid stone, effectively trapping me in a cage.

My vision reeled, the vertigo of moving so far so fast catching up to me even as I instinctively tried to get my weapon up. Dagger. Get your dagger out, hamstring him, then—

The angel’s ornate polearm came down, sinking into the tiles right next to my head so the sickle-like blade below the point pressed against my neck. If not for my gorget, it would have choked me. Or sliced my head clean off. I grasped at it, grunting, but my struggles were useless. It was like a hill crouched on top of me.

The angel’s front most face, so like an innocent youth’s, lowered at a dramatic angle to regard me. I saw it as my vision cleared and the ringing in my ears faded. I groaned, disoriented and struggling to breathe. Chamael’s main eyes were closed, but those on his other faces were wide open and rolled sideways to glare at me.

“Headsman.” The youthful face’s eyes cracked open, revealing something like liquid silver within.

It took me a moment to find words. The fact he gave me a chance to speak at all surprised me, and I didn’t waste it. “Chamael. I think we got off on the wrong foot. There’s been a misunderstanding.”

The seraph’s unsettling head tilted. This close, I realized that he had a grotesquely thick neck, a mound of muscle and sinew connecting the three faces to the torso. “You were allied with that aberration. It attacked me to defend you.”

“Allied is a strong word.” The staff dug down harder. I heard metal groan, and in a moment of terror thought he’d suffocate me with my own armor. “Wait! I was sent here!”

“By the Herald, yes. What remains of her. Why were you sent? Do not lie. I will know.”

“I don’t know. I was just given the name of this town, that’s it.”

“You still lie.” The stone beneath me cracked as the seraph pressed down harder.

Fine. I wasn’t going to die for it. “There’s something else!”

“Speak.”

“Donnelly… the Herald told me Heavensreach was attacked.”

There was a long pause. Then, ripping his staff out of the floor, Chamael grabbed me around the neck and held me up with one hand. The seraph was over nine feet tall, making me seem a child, and lifted me with no apparent effort.

“What else did the Herald say?” His soft voice, which hadn’t been raised in anger or impatience once since he’d appeared, took on a crystal hard edge.

“Nothing,” I hissed through my teeth. I’d dropped my axe, and clutched at the seraph’s wrist with both hands. His skin felt like solid marble. “He just told me to come here, and that I’d be given more orders when I arrived. He said Heavensreach was attacked, but didn’t elaborate. I’ve been traveling for weeks. I was at that inn you chased Vicar to so I could get more information, that’s all.”

I would avoid telling him that I’d come to the town with Vicar if I could. He might already know, but I didn’t want to make the situation worse.

Chamael didn’t say anything for almost an entire minute. His quicksilver eyes turned away from me. I saw the womanly face on the right side of his head whispering, but couldn’t make out the words.

Staring at him then, an intuition came to me and I acted on it. “You… you think I’m here for you, don’t you?”

Chamael returned his attention to me. His face was cold, impassive, giving nothing away. And yet, I felt more certain of myself as I considered the situation.

“The Choir isn’t in on your alliance with the Priory, is it? They don’t know you’ve been working with Vicar and his fellow crowfriars. You’re acting alone, and you’re just as in the dark about what’s going on with your brethren as me.”

My thought, rambling as I articulated it, came to its inevitable conclusion. “You think they’ve found out, and sent me to kill you.”

The hand around my neck squeezed, and I felt my armor compress as metal squealed. It pressed in against my throat, making me gasp.

“You can not kill me,” Chamael said in a very quiet, very dangerous voice. “I have counted my time in the birth and death of stars. I was there when Azoth was cast down, when the towers of Onsolem were raised, when Creation itself was forged from the chaos of Old Night. I have seen God upon His throne, and I have sworn to see His rightful heir claim it. Three rulers of all existence I have laid eyes on, mortal. I am of the blood of Heaven, immortal, imperishable, and you believe I fear you?”

“No.” I made myself look into the angel’s face. “You don’t want to know why I was sent because you’re afraid of me. You want to know why because you’re afraid of the same thing I am.”

Chamael brought me closer. “And what is that?”

“Being cast out. Being alone.”

He studied me, not saying anything for some time. I waited to die. It would be fast, I expected. Probably immolated in the grip of his hand, turned to dust. Part of me had always expected that kind of death.

“Your words weave truth and lies so thickly I can barely disentangle them from one another,” Chamael finally said. “But I will know the truth soon enough.”

I felt a different kind of fear then. This Saint had made himself a patron of the Inquisition, and I knew there were worse fates than death. “What are you going to do?”

“You were sent here, as you said. You were performing a rite of communion when I found you just now and waiting to hear an answer from the others.”

Chamael turned, still holding me aloft, to face the altar. “Another Saint will be here soon. I shall hear the truth from them. You had best pray, mortal. Few have the opportunity to be heard by two of the Onsolain at once.”