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Dannel ached. The pounding, all-over ache assaulted his
senses with shrieks from every muscle and nerve in his battered frame. Blood?
No, he decided, not his own but sticky on his skin and clothes just the same.
“How long?” his groggy mind asked.
The floor was hard and cold beneath him and a dim light
- Marrik’s? -- shone at an eerie angle, rising from the floor a few feet to
his left to cast surreal shadows on the walls. Why so dark in here? His weapon
lay on the floor to his right and instinctively his hand groped for it. Gaining
purchase, he dragged it closed with a rasping sound that echoed in the silence.
The feel of the stark, cool metal offered him some primal comfort.
He struggled to a sitting position and bone-jarring
pain surged up Dannel’s spine dashing itself like a wave on the back of his
skull. He winced and sardonically acknowledged to himself that the battle must
have gone well if he could accomplish so much. The surrounding carnage and the
fact that he seemed intact told him it could easily have been much worse. “How
much worse?” he thought with a start.
There were bodies and parts of bodies everywhere. His
eyes sought familiar shapes among the dead. The light - Marrik’s! The dim
light escaping from beneath his crumpled body shone an ugly red. Dead. Very much
so. No doubts -- torn nearly in half.
There… some ten feet away… Lirra. Slumped against
the wall, bloody, a gash in her face running from her forehead down her right
cheek nearly to her chin. Her weapon was still in her hand. Well, she never was
one to retreat.
Dannel revised his initial assumption. The battle had
not gone well at all. He crawled across the gore-strewn floor to Lirra. Maybe,
just maybe…
Like nothing his hardened body had ever felt before,
pain shot though him, consuming his bones and muscles with its razor tendrils.
But even that was drowned out by the pain in his soul. His sister was dead. The
magician was dead. He was alive. It was all happening like Marrik had said; as
the prophecy had said. And there was nothing he could do about it, nothing he
could do about anything. Ignoring the pain that welled inside, his cheeks soaked
with tears and blood, Dannel hurled his magical weapon, the Kishan, from him. He
wished it didn’t exist, he wished he’d never found it. A dramatic “ching”
echoed round the room as the tri-bladed, circular contraption struck a wall and
rebounded back towards Dannel, stopping at his feet with a clatter. He couldn’t
bare it any longer. He sank to his knees and wept.
How long he stayed there he did not know, he only knew
that it was a long time before he could look up once again at the broken body of
his sister. Her immobile eyes were open and staring from a blood-splattered
face. He threw up on the stony ground, before he reached out a shaking hand and
closed her eyes. The harsh taste of vomit was a blessing, for it disguised the
taste of blood.
Then he turned his scarred face, wet with tears, blood,
and bile, towards the darkening light that shone from Marrik's body. The
magician had been right. He had tried to ignore it, to deny it, to run from it;
but the end was fated. And his sister had to die for him to accept the truth.
Marrik had tried so hard, and he'd done nothing but fight him. Marrik had known
he would die today; it was in the prophecy that the wizard had given his living
years to studying and following.
"I'm sorry" Dannel whispered, his vision
blurred with tears. "I'm so sorry" but it was too late for the
magician to hear him.
He knew now that he no longer had a choice, he must
fight Rarvic, and he must kill him, there was no one else who could. He would do
this. He would fulfil Marrik's life's work. He would avenge his sister's death!
He picked up the Kishan and gripped the cursed weapon tightly in his crimson
hand. Sharp blades flashed in the dying light, anticipating the next taking of
life, as if it looked forward to sliding its razor edge through flesh. Dannel
couldn't look at it.
But he was resolved. He climbed to his feet
purposefully. The rising was slow but seemed unstoppable, as if no force in the
world could have prevented the shadowy figure from finding its feet. Once
upright he studied the cold ground strewn with body parts- there was so much
blood that it seemed that it oozed from the stone floor itself, as if the whole
building bled because of him.
The pain seared through his body in protest to his
recent movement, but he felt it as if from a distance. He felt alive! When
everyone else he'd ever known was dead, he was alive, and only he could stop the
death. Marrik had tried to tell him, and now he knew.
He lifted his head, and his eyes glinted behind strands
of soaked hair. He would die before the end of the next day, the prophecy
decreed it to be so, but he would take Rarvic with him!
The prophecy was strange in its detail. It was well
known that prophecies were vague, not worth paying attention to; they could all
be interpreted in many diverse ways. But this one was different. There weren't
many places where the words could be played with, there wasn't much left out.
The recent battle had been written in the prophecy. It included the death of the
wizard, and clearly stated that the one who fought with the Kishan would die
before the end of the next day. It didn't say when or how, in the day that was
allotted to him, that he would die; only that he would. He had to reach Rarvic,
alive, before then, and kill him. He was no longer afraid of death. But he was
tired, oh so tired. As the pain dulled, so the weariness set in- it invaded his
limbs and permeated through to his once quick mind. Of a sudden his purposeful
strides faltered, his unbreakable resolve smothered, he fell to the ground,
unable to prevent a fitful sleep from claiming him, wasting his limited time.
*
Vivid images- dreams- assailed him, but they were not
'nightmarish' visions of the future, nor calming fantasies, but memories. They
say that before you die, your life flashes before your eyes. If Dannel had been
able to think, he would have recognised some truth to this.
He had found the thing when he was but ten years old,
the symbol, the weapon, that Marrik had been searching for, for most of his
magically lengthened life. But Marrik would go on searching for another fifteen
years, for Dannel had not known of the Kishan, nor had he ever met the wizard.
He had discovered his talent at handling the weapon the
very same day.
As was the case with most children his age, he had had
his tormentors and bullies, who were heavy built but severely lacking in
intelligence. Then there had been Kristen. The term 'bully' did not suit him: he
had been too smart, and too quick with a blade to be a bully, and he had seemed
to gain great pleasure from picking on Dannel, who had never picked up a weapon
before in his life.
*
He was returning home through the dark back streets of
the city when Kristen and his gang spotted him. Their excitement at this chance
meeting with such an entertaining victim was evident and they crowded round him,
each wanting to be the first to fling a criticism or deal a blow, but not daring
to do anything but glare until Kristen had had his say.
The torment that ensued was mostly forgotten, blurred
by the years. But one memory remained as vivid as the moment it was created was
that of his breaking.
Every blow that the gang dealt him, both physical and
verbal, was like a torrent of rain that built up behind the dam of his fear as
he cowered from them. The pressure of the acid waters built up behind the dam,
increasing with every meeting between him and Kristen, but the dam was not
indestructible, and it was then that, with one sudden cracking of the walls in
his mind, the torrent was let loose. A madness possessed Dannel: his anger could
no longer be controlled or smothered by his fear. From pure instinct he lashed
out with the weapon he had found.
From the moment the bladed thing left his hand all eyes
followed it. All tongues were stilled as it sailed through the air, spinning,
cutting the darkness. But for Kristen’s quick dive out of the way, an action
that was the result of his training, it would surely have slit his throat; he
got away with a deep gash in his shoulder.
As if in slow motion, the Kishan carried on in a
glittering arc that swung back round towards the crazed Dannel.
He had caught the thing as if it was something he had
done all his life. He stood there holding it in his ten-year-old hands, for a
moment wishing that it had sliced through his tormenter's scrawny neck, but
then, in the silence that followed the event, which had been completed in the
time it took to blink, his senses returned. His anger turned to fear that was
even greater than that which reflected from the staring eyes of the gang. Then
he turned and fled through the streets, feeling no satisfaction at having drawn
the blood of his enemy.
*
The memory faded from Dannel's sleeping mind and
another gradually came into focus. This one was of his sister. She was sixteen:
five years older than him. In the year that had passed since the finding of the
Kishan, he had become distanced from everyone, even his sister, who had once
been his closest companion. It had not taken her long to work out that he was
hiding something: she knew long before his parents did, but he had not told her.
Something had compelled him to keep it a secret, which, more than anything,
drove him into walling himself up behind shields of silence. He had been a
chatterbox even before he had learnt to talk, but after his wounding of Kristen
he had hardly spoken at all.
A vision of the Kishan rose before his eyes. The light
glinted off its evil edges. He had kept it locked in a box hidden beneath the
floorboards in his room. He could not rid himself of it: he could not bring
himself to dispose of such a perfectly formed object. Almost once every day he
would return to his room and extract if from its resting place, just to look at
it, and feel its sharpness. More than once he had cut himself on its razor edge.
However, every time he held it he longed to use it, to prove to himself that he
could: to show that that one time had not been a fluke.
Inside he had known that it was wrong, that he should
rid himself of it, and that was all that kept the need at bay, until one day he
hadn't been able to prevent it any longer. With one decisive movement he had
scooped it up and ran outside, where he had thrown it at the apple tree that
grew in his garden. On the first throw it had cut smoothly though a branch as
thick as his arm, and returned to him where he caught it easily. He laughed in
irrational glee as he threw the Kishan again and again, each time he had known
exactly what it was capable of, and exactly how to make it do it. Never once did
he miss his target, or fail to catch it. Never once did it glace off a tree or a
stone at an odd angle. For the next few days he carried out this ritual, always
becoming more skilled in his judgement at what could be done with this
miraculous device. In a way he felt fulfilled: he felt like he had something
that no one else had, a talent that was unique, yet at the same time he felt
afraid and sad. He missed his sister.
It was at one of these sessions that Lirra finally
discovered him. Sharing his secret made him feel like he was committing a crime,
yet deep down he had been glad that she had found out, glad that he was no
longer so alone in the world.
He had made his sister swear to hold her silence, and
he had trusted her completely, and so it had remained for many years.
Then the killing began.
Dannel's mind flickered to the next major event of his
life. He stood, now twenty five, at the edge of the twisted wood that rolled out
in waves, like foam on a stormy sea, to the north of the city that had been his
home for all his life. Tears ran down his face and his strong hand clenched that
of his sister's. In his moist eyes were reflected the burning flames that
completely engulfed the city.
They had always been aware of the uprising of Rarvic in
the east, but it had always seemed distant, something that happened far away and
was only connected to them via the newspapers. But the reality had been brought
home to all those that made their homes in the City of Tayab in one cruel blow
of pain and destruction. Dannel and Lirra were one of the few to have escaped
with their lives. Their parents hadn't been so fortunate, and the mourning of
their loss was all that occupied Dannel's mind for many days later. He had come
close to suicide, and might have gone through with it if it hadn't been for
Lirra. The sharing of his secret had brought them closer than ever. The vision
of him crying into his sister's shoulder was swiftly replaced by a new one, as
his mind raced on.
Marrik stood before him. To begin with he had thought
he was a mad man, raving incoherently about prophecies and weapons. He had tried
to ignore him and shake him off, but always he dogged his tracks. Then it became
clear that the man was a wizard, and that had made things worse: the idea of a
crazy man that commanded such power was unsettling. But there were some things
that the old wizard said that did make a strange kind of sense. He swore many
times to be Dannel's protector, and begged him to listen, but he did not listen.
With hindsight it is easy to see how things could have been done differently,
but to Dannel's mind, he had no need of a protector. That was until Rarvic
started going out of his way to kill him. That was when the uncertainty and fear
set in. He caught himself beginning to believe the insane things the wizard
said, and that he did not like. And so he set his mind against that of Marrik's,
determined to find some other explanation, a logical one: one that could not be
argued with.
His mind flickered forwards in time again, and he began
so envisage how the battle had begun. The three of them...
*
Breath was thrown from his body and a wave of pain
flashed through his bones simultaneously; both of which were caused by a severe
blow to his ribs by a heavy boot. The owner of the boot, and of the foot within
it, gave voice to his discovery
"'Ere, this un aint dead, ee's..." but
whatever he was, was not to be known, because the owner of the boot no longer
had a throat to speak with.
As the body slumped to the ground, Dannel remained on
his feet. He held the Kishan in his hand like a knife, and as such it was as
deadly as any dagger. The comrades of the fallen man numbered two, both of whom
had stopped their plundering and were no longer in the room, which showed the
full extent of their loyalty to their companion.
Fresh blood trickled down Dannel's arm, while the
Kishan was strangely devoid of it, as if it had absorbed the redness that clung
so sickly onto him.
Now that he was awake, what he must do was clear: he
must now turn his mind to working out how to do it. The question of where to
find Rarvic, however, was not going to be as difficult as he thought, for as he
entered the autumn air, with the sun halfway between it's zenith and the eastern
horizon from which it had arisen, he came face to face with the seven Xenths,
the warriors resurrected with the power that was invested by the Gods into the
one known as Rarvic. In front of this impenetrable black wall that rode silent
black steeds, and in stark contrast to it was their resurrector, who sat upon a
brilliantly white stallion.
Dannel froze, in awe and fear as he set eyes, for the
first time, upon the full might of Rarvic. What use was a circular piece of
metal against such power?
His eyes finally settled on the face of the mighty Rarvic, and stared in absolute surprise and bewilderment.
Rarvic. The man who
commanded a thousand armies, who was given a power more mighty than any sorcerer
or wizard, the man who swept his mind through the land with an unstoppable force
and took possession of all it passed, was only a boy. He could hardly be half
Dannel's age, maybe sixteen. He sought the boy’s eyes questioningly, but his
eyes gazed out, unblinking, from an expressionless face, a window to emptiness,
into a shell, as if there was no person behind those eyes. The gaze was so
intense, yet so dead, that Dannel could not hold it, and was forced to look
away.
Rarvic never moved, but the glow-eyed Xenths
dismounted, flowing across the parched ground towards him as if they were made
of black fog. He flung the Kishan into the air, and it soared, glittering,
towards the wraiths, and through them as if they were made of the smoke that
clung to them like a shield. They continued on unaffected. Behind them the boy
sat astride his white horse, but his stare was broken, instead he was looking to
his left, to where a an unnatural shimmering of the air unveiled a grey,
ghostlike figure. Dannel backed away from the slow, unstoppable approach of the
Xenths, but his eyes remained on the two figures behind them. A shimmering arm
rested on the boy's knee, and an indistinct face smiled at him menacingly.
The first of the blows fell, and he brought the Kishan
up to block the strike. The shock of the clash resounded like thunder, and sent
Dannel stumbling backwards against a wall. The tall figure seemed unaffected
until Dannel realised his sword was broken, cut cleanly across the middle.
Despite their appearance, the wraiths were solid. He held on to that thought as
all others fled from his mind; that glimmer of hope that he could win this last
battle; it gave him strength to carry out a counter attack. The change of mood,
from fear to fighting, was as sudden as his breaking all those years ago, so
sudden it caught the leading Xenth unawares. It toppled to the floor then
dissolved into dust, causing the others to hesitate, though only to reorganise
their thoughts. In that hesitation Dannel sought out the boy and the mysterious
grey figure, which was still watching him with a crooked smile on its
expression. Suddenly the hazy face snapped to the side, as if something in the
east had surprised it. The surprise turned to annoyance, then to anger, before
it vanished.
The boy looked up, and for the second time their eyes
met, but this time there was no emptiness, there was a presence behind them,
they were sad, and regretful. It was now Rarvic's turn to look away, yet he
caused the Xenths to advance once again, to finish what they had started. Dannel
faced them stolidly, his teeth clenched as he thought about how much rested on
him at this moment. He had killed one hadn't he? He would kill the rest!
But the remaining six black phantoms came at him
together, each move complimenting another, as if they were one unit, as if one
mind drove them all.
Two more of them fell to dust before Dannel finally
lost his feet, and he was pinned down. A Xenth raised its sword, pointing it at
his heaving chest. Dannel twisted his head so that he could see the boy. "Rarvic!"
he cried in desperation, and the boy's head turned back to him as the Xenth
hesitated, and stepped aside. They stared at each other, trying to comprehend
something that did not make sense, but finally the boy lowered his eyes and
shook his head. Once more the Xenth approached him, and he struggled with all
his might to slip free of their grip. Managing to retrieve his arm from their
claw-like hands, he scratched with animal ferocity at anything he could touch,
but then something cold and hard connected with the back of his skull and turned
off the light
*
On a cold floor, propped up against a hard, stone wall,
Dannel's first waking vision was that of a barred window, through which the sun
was low in the sky. There wasn't much time left! But he was alive for now... why
was he alive? Not that he was complaining, but by rights he should be dead! He
lifted his head to examine his darkened cell, and his eyes finally settled on
the guard by the door, who by now had noticed his awakening, and had sent a
message to his master, Rarvic.
Before Dannel could organise his thoughts beyond
realising that he no longer possessed his Kishan, the door opened, and it was
indicated that he should follow the guard. He meditated on many methods of
escape: jumping down a side passage, or suddenly turning round and punching the
guard in the face, but before he could implement any such plan, he had reached
the grand chambers of Lord Rarvic.
Immediately the door was shut behind him with a bow
from the guard, a question was flung at him.
"Who are you?" Rarvic demanded with more
authority in his voice than could be found in any other boy's of his age.
"Well, er..." Dannel stuttered, but Rarvic
cut in.
"What's so special about you? Why is it so
important that I kill you? Why didn't I kill you? What's so different about you?
Why won't anyone explain anything to me?" Although his voice was hard and
angry, it had a winging edge to it that betrayed its age.
Thoughts were forming and breaking up inside Dannel's
confused brain, but one thought finally managed to push its way to the front and
let itself be heard.
"So, none of this is your doing?"
Rarvic froze "Do you think I want all those people
to die?"
"Why don't you stop it?"
"I can't stop it. I can't do anything. Don't you
see? She controls me, I don't have any choice!" Rarvic turned back towards
a highly polished table in the middle of the room, and picked something up.
"It's something to do with this isn't it?" He asked, holding it up. It
was the Kishan.
Dannel didn't reply as the teenager turned it over in
his hands.
Abruptly Rarvic was catapulted backwards as a shockwave
pulsed outwards from the Kishan, which rebelled against the touch of its enemy,
and fell from his limp hand as his head struck the solid, exquisitely carved
table. In the silence that followed, Dannel remained frozen to the spot.
Slowly his thumping heart quietened, and he cautiously
crept over towards the unconscious youth. He picked up the glimmering weapon in
trembling hands, and stood looking down at Rarvic, his fated enemy. This was the
moment he had been heading towards all his life; the sun was just a hair's
breath above the horizon. It was his destiny to kill him now, in order to put an
end to the killing. Kneeling down beside Rarvic, he raised the Kishan above his
head, aiming it at the boy's neck.
But how could he? To kill this innocent boy would go
against the very grain of his morality. Yet, as the prophecy said, to take this
one life now would prevent the deaths of millions. Surely that was justifiable?
There was no other way: the world was not perfect. It
had to be done. Without Rarvic's power, the armies would fall apart.
He closed his eyes and brought the weapon down, and
with one clean stroke he severed his neck. Rarvic wouldn't have felt a thing;
but someone else had. The ghostlike figure suddenly appeared, and eyes looked at
him in disbelief. Then she, for it was indeed a woman, let out a howl as
chilling as ice down his back, and her form began to fade as if blown away by a
wind.
Instantly the guards burst into the room, but it was
too late. Dannel didn't put up much of a fight, the sun was already below the
horizon, and he felt like he didn’t deserve his life any more. He wanted to
die, to be with his sister. Would she offer him sympathy? The guards slashed at
him, too numerous for him, wounded and fatigued as he was, to defend himself
adequately. His last living thought was to think of himself, who had killed an
innocent child, and of Rarvic, who had caused uncountable deaths, and to wonder
who was more evil |
