Demon Core - Chapter 36: An Army Against a King (2/2)

~ [Primavera Bastille] ~

Fire flies through the night, streaks of crimson tearing through the darkness like the color visible behind a ripping curtain that had been obscuring the day beyond. Screams fill the air as men fly across the landscape, charred armor and bones rattling as they strike against tower-shields, rolling and sinking into the mud. Half dead men scream, clawing at the surface, as they try to fight their way above the muck, to stop themselves from sinking as their scorched and battered bodies are unable to resist the pull of the ooze. Hundreds drown in ankle-high sludge, their screams vanishing below the brack before the splashing of their comrades’ boots even finishes, trampling over the wounded masses as they storm toward the Demon-King.

He stands there in the middle of the onslaught, surrounded by a swarm of thousands of blades, his silhouette entirely invisible beyond the great mass of explosions, blasts, and arrows that never stops, targeting him as he stands there in their midst. His form is entirely indistinguishable amidst the chaos. The mud all around them bubbles and boils, vapors of steam rising into the air like the souls of the departed. Ghosts howl, spin, and dance all around the battlefield, their voices and lights joining those of the spirits of the thousands of soldiers in the garrison.

Cadet Advanced Botticelli slips, falling down into the mud as the world explodes next to him, pieces of meat and metal flying in all directions past his blurred vision.

The spinning world is filled with a loud, high-pitched whining. In a daze, he sits there in the mass of soldiers, turning his head to look toward the blackened smoke. The area where the Demon-King had been is entirely charred, crusted over, and covered in soot from the countless explosions that had happened there. There is a deep, tense silence.

Someone yanks Botticelli below his arms, pulling him up to his feet from behind. Mud schlocks around his legs, as if desperate to swallow him down into it.

“Get the hell up to your feet, Cadet!” yells a voice in his ears, finally breaking through past the insect whining that had been ringing in his head. Botticelli turns his gaze, looking at the captain.

He closes his eyes for a second, trying to stop the spinning of his vision. Everything is quiet. “Did we…” Boticelli stops, holding his head, as the captain lets go of him. “Did we get him, Sir?” he asks, looking back toward the clearing smoke that endless ghosts drift through, flying over the landscape.

Everything is silent, apart from the schlocking of wet, thick mud.

“- Sir?” asks Boticelli, looking around himself in confusion. The battlefield has fallen silent, too much so. The men of the forward assault group have stopped screaming, stopped talking, stopped crying. The sounds of metal have come to an end. The sounds of screeching anqas have fallen still. All he can hear is the schlocking, the damp, pressing sounds of something moving, something writhing. Something… something is present all around the scene that he can’t quite make out. A squiggle, a line. There’s something…

… There’s something wrong.

Everything is too… still.

Boticelli’s eyes scan the smoke-covered battlefield as his head slowly turns back toward his captain, standing behind him. The old man’s hands are still below his shoulders, as they were when he helped him to his feet.

He screams, pulling away and dredging back, stepping through the mud in horror as he looks at the captain’s eyes, which are full of life but without the spark of possession, as his gaze lifts only an inch further to the long, tubular protrusion that presses in through his captain’s left temple and exits out of the opposite on the right side of his head, piercing it from side to side.

It’s a long, fleshy, tubular thing, like a rope or a… a string, a cord, perhaps. It has a softness to it, like such an object being let slack. Yet it now holds a tightness to it, as if something were pulling on the opposite end.

“Ca.. Captain…” mutters Boticelli, taking another step back as he looks around himself, his eyes following the elongation.

It presses in through the next man’s skull, always through the temples, and then moves on to the next, and the next, creating a daisy-chain that is as long as every face his eyes manage to move towards. Some of them try to move their mouths, but no words come out. It’s more of a spasming of their lips than a coherent movement, which would indicate intent, really. Yet the spasming indicates a signal being sent, a movement being commanded, that never arrives.

All around him, a great movement begins as a thousand not quite dead men and women slowly rise from the deep mud. Those who were trampled and drowned beneath it are spared not, being raised just the same as their compatriots with fewer shards of loose bones in their shins, jaws, and fingers.

“Give me a word,” says a voice from the distance behind him, a commanding voice, heavy in tone and so thick and coarse that it feels like someone is pushing sharpened rocks against his ears.

Boticelli looks toward the smoke, and as the elongation rises, a cord of a thousand strung bodies, all pierced through their temples and freely dangling, silhouettes the night. Their blank faces and expressions are only barely visible in the tense firelight, which now begins to drown within the rain and steam.

The smoke begins to dissipate, being overpowered by the heavy rain. The ground quakes, the thick, gore-stirred mud rippling towards him, splashing up toward his waist and stomach, sloshing around inside of his boots and trousers.

Within the gray cloud, hovering over the bog, towers an indistinct mass, and all along behind it slides a chain of bodies strung up in the air, suspended from one point to another — both of which he cannot see.

Boticelli screams as loud as he can and runs.

Bodies slide past him on all sides, stuck to the elongation. Their limp limbs, torsos, and legs dangle freely on necks that crack from the sharp, quick movements of the extension. Blank faces rush past him, together with hundreds of suits of armor over bodies, like clothes on a drying line being stretched out from tree to tree.

The man flails, swiping his arms around himself in terror as he goes, running toward the next regiment as the sole survivor.

“RUN!” screams Boticelli as loud as he can, as the second wave readies their bows, aiming hundreds of them up into the air toward the towering colossus that approaches. The scorching heat reaches them, reaching him. “RUN!” repeats the man, his voice carrying through the air as new screams arise, overpowering his tone.

Arrows hiss, the whistle of a swarm filling his ears as countless feathers shoot through the night that never ends, a flock of needles flying toward the enemy — half of them ignite in the air before even reaching their arc, their feathers igniting and causing them to fly wildly off course.

“FORWARD!” screams a commander as thousands of soldiers of the next wave press against him.

Boticelli runs in horror toward the wave, thousands of armored, heavy soldiers pressing forward. Support crews solidify their footing, casting magical barriers over the mud to make platforms for them to run over as they charge in the exact opposite direction of him. He covers his face as he runs, as the wave of bodies runs straight toward him, weapons drawn and heavy armor stampeding forward. Metal grazes his elbows, screams fill his ears, and the thudding of boots next to his own vibrates up his spine as he sprints.

By the time he opens his eyes in confusion, he realizes that he’s somehow run straight through the assault group, as if they had opened a channel of bodies for him to move through, as if not a single man in heavy armor had collided with him.

He watches in silent horror as they vanish into the night.

— A hand yanks him to the side.

“CADET!” screams a voice next to him. He turns to look, his wide eyes carrying the same terror as before as he looks at the commander.

“Sir!” says Boticelli. “We have to pull back!” he yells. “We have to retreat back to the Primavera!”

The commander of the legion narrows his eyes, pulling him in. “Do you know what the punishment for desertion is, Cadet?” asks the man. “I’ll put you in irons!”

“S- sir!” starts Boticelli. “We’re dead! Everyone’s dead!” he argues, pointing back toward the darkness from which he had come. Fires glow in it at a hauntingly far distance, off on the horizon. Yet none glow anymore in the span between here and there. It is as if the middle of the world had been consumed whole. “The Demon-King is too much!”

“Cadet!” barks the commander, Botticelli’s terrified gaze looking back his way, staring at the fiery eyes of a battle-hardened, world weary man who has seen everything there is to see — although one wouldn’t guess this, given the blankness on his pupils. A tendril presses in through the side of his skull, worming out through the other end. His feet slowly start to lift off the ground. “Do you have a word?” asks the commander in a voice that isn’t his. “I’m a little stuck, you see,” explains the corpse, as his neck cracks, as his hands, spasming, hold onto Botticelli and lift him into the air. The cadet advanced kicks and screams for his life, his sense and logic leaving him entirely as his animal overdrive to survive overtakes him.

He’s not sure how, but a second later he’s reached for the commander’s belt, taking off a knife, and the next moment he’s hacking at the other man’s wrists as they rise higher and higher into the fog, into the storm.

Blood sprays everywhere as he severs the tendons, the sinew, and the bone, and a second later he’s plummeting down again toward the world.

Everything goes black. He can’t breathe. His body feels like it’s being crushed from all sides.

Boticelli sinks deeply into the mud before he realizes it and fights against it, kicking his way up and scrambling toward more solid ground.

— A second later, a magical barrier is created over his head, just as his face presses up out from below the surface. His face presses against the glassy wall from below, smearing mud and grime all over it, as he has no room to hack out the wet soil from inside of his lungs, as he has no room to breathe with it inside of him. Hundreds of boots and bodies trample over the thin, magical floor above his face as if they were running over his grave. His chest burns, his lungs burn, and his body burns.

Between the boots, the legs, and the running soldiers, a face presses down onto the glass just above his own, the thin barrier separating them by a hair’s width. It floats impossibly out of place within the charging army, none of whom trample its owner, that belonging to a priestess of the Holy-Church.

“Just one,” explains the voice that doesn’t belong to her. Her face, skewered by the tendril through her temples, presses itself against the glass, her nose breaking flat from the pressure, squirting blood out between them like a mask. “Just a single word to help me figure it out.”

Boticelli kicks, trying to scramble away as he half drowns, coughing out the mud from his chest, but also not having enough room to breathe in fresh air as he slides between the overflowing ground and the glass floor crushing down on him from above. His fingers slide against the glass, as he worms his way forward like an animal frantically trying to leave a burrow. All the while, the face of the priestess smudges over above him, her body limply sliding along behind her as countless soldiers simply run straight past her and over him, as if neither of them were relevant.

Wildly, he claws and digs until he reaches the end, and by the time he does, and by the time he climbs out of the slime and looks up over the edge of the platform, the priestess, as well as the thousands of soldiers, are all gone.

— And there, in the distance, he continues on the loud, heavy, thunderous steps of a creature that he is spared the sight of.

Not sure how he’s still alive, Boticelli pulls himself out and runs, covered from head to toe in gore and grime, as he sprints back toward the Primavera — as the only man of the thousands who had just left.

He turns back to look over his shoulder as he reaches the gate, staring at the silhouettes suspended in the air and at the rope of decorations. Thousands of corpses hang there limply and loosely, with only a single thread running through each and every one of their heads connecting them.

All of them turn his way at once, each lifting, despite the mangling and brokenness of many of their limbs, one finger toward him as he scrambles into the fortress.

“Damn, what the hell happened to you?” asks a man next to him.

“CLOSE IT!” screams Boticelli, grabbing him. “CLOSE THE DAMN GATE!” shouts the cadet, the look on his face being enough to convince the guard to do so but also to throw him off of himself — to win safe distance from the man who looks to be on the very edge of sanity.

Metal slams against stone as the portcullis closes, Boticelli already having risen up to his feet by then, already on his way again.

Forget this. Forget all of this. Forget being a soldier, forget being anything. He wants to get the hell out of here, that’s it.

He runs toward the first place of safety his mind can think of, barreling past the open doors and into the keep of the fortress. The doors are unguarded, as all of the soldiers are in the fray now. The man sprints, turning to make as much distance as he can, barreling down a corridor into the chapel. His hands press the door open, looking inside. He’s not even sure why he’s here. It just felt like the place to go.

Red drips over the stones as the two attending priestesses, who are in charge of the chapel, sit on a church pew together. They’ve both slit each other’s wrists and are slumped over, dead. Their pale faces are devoid of blood.

— But that doesn’t stop one of them from turning his way, a hint of black near her temple.

He runs the other way, scrambling up the stairs toward the upper floors of the tower, running past the windows that look out over the walls and over into the battlefield. Arrows fly like raging swarms of fireflies from the archers on the walls, the projectiles lighting up in the night from the intense heat of the Demon-Core. The ballistae hammer away, the engineers manning them feverishly running back and forth, loading in great projectiles, each the size of a beast of burden.

The night is filled with movement and motion. It’s filled with dancing lights and shadows, both of fire and spectral glow, as countless ghosts spin through the air.

And there in the midst of it all is the silhouette of the creature. There, breaking the sight-line of the colorless horizon, which is made clear only by the endless fires raging on it, is the tyrant of the underworld — the beast of black jubilee.

Great knights charge toward it, men who have spent their whole lives being hardened by blood and steel, only to be tempered immediately by massive fists that barely swing, by its crushing indifference, simply stepping into and over them, and by its raw presence, which is enough to drive hundreds to madness and fear.

He watches as the engineers load a projectile and fire a ballista from the western tower. The great arrow flies with incredible speed straight toward the heart of the monster. However, any hope they might have had for their launch is lost immediately as he lifts a hand, catching the massive arrow the size of a fallen log and then violently skewering a half dozen men with it at once, lifting them up into the air like a grim banner — the arrow catching fire, the flames trailing up toward the impaled, screaming mess of bodies.

Boticelli runs up the stairs, pulling himself away from the window, he runs up the keep, past the many rooms and quarters, all the way toward the very top — if only because this is the further point he could run to from where he was.

The man presses open the door to the roof, the superheated air hitting his filth covered face as he re-enters the night.

But now there’s nowhere left to run except to the edge of the upper walls, which he grabs as he looks down toward the gate, where the fight should have moved to and where the remaining of the ten-thousand knights should be locked in mortal combat.

And he stares.

And he sees nothing there at all.

Everything below the keep is gone; the walls, the gate, the men, and the Demon-King. There’s only full, total blackness and the rain that falls from above, creating even more mud than there already was. Boticelli pants, his soaked hair stuck to his face, his ragged breath causing his chest to heave as he looks around in confusion.

Then he sees them.

The faces.

From below, ten-thousand faces have turned to look his way. All of them lining the keep, lining the walls, lining the night — strung from one to the next — all through their temples by a single, black elongation that has no end or beginning.

“Give me a hand here,” asks a voice from behind him.

Boticelli spins around, his back pressing against the edge. “I… I…” stammers the man, looking at the drowned, soggy faces that have come to surround him. “I…”

— A second later, a scream fills the night as the man throws himself over the edge.

~ [The Demon-King] ~

Swain looks down at the paper in his hands as he sits there in the ruins of the fortress, the sounds of jangling metal and grim laughter filling the air as the Demon-Carnival, which has always been closed, moves in toward the bastille.

He rests on the rubble of the thing, staring up toward the skies and toward the ghosts that continue to dance as contentedly now as they had been doing before the destruction. The white shadow, the shape, the… feeling that he had been chasing it gone. The goose and whatever it represented have fled from his heart and senses, leaving his mind only to teeter on the edge of knowing a word, but never quite finding it to deliver to the tip of his tongue.

Oh well.

It is no matter.

The Demon-King looks down at the poem that he had written and drops it down onto the rock as he steps toward the caravan. The carriage that is his own opens its side, the stage unfolding as his gallu and servants stand there to greet him and welcome him back to his castle.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” asks Cartouche as he walks past them all.

“No…” replies Swain. “But I’m not sure what I was looking for anyway,” explains the Demon-King, as he enters back into his domain.

The demons look at one another, confused, and shrug. The carriage closes itself, and the Demon-Carnival continues on toward the human capital, leaving behind a scene of destruction and grim horror — all painted under the glow of unexplainable pageantry — as ghosts waltz overhead and over the string of ten-thousand bodies that hangs in the air.

That single piece of paper he had dropped — a poem that was missing a word — lands on a burning stone and begins disintegrating into ash.

The Elongation

For I am there where you are not

And here within this tie of heart,

Is tied a knot, so tight and wound,

So that I may not see what I have had once found,

I think you are here, so close and abreast,

Yet when I try to understand the nature of this grace,

I find not, within my mind, the smell of your hair,

Or the touch of the sight of your face,

My memory stretches on to reach far and oh so wide,

So that I might find you,

– The one who there hides,

In a place that is dark.

I’ll stretch and I’ll reach, I’ll crawl and I’ll press,

Until I find where you went,

Until I find where you rest,

My days are now short,

The nights are now long,

And longer, longer, still longer I long,

— For you, the one I once knew,

Whose voice in siren song did once so strongly sing,

But a simple trick, to lure me in,

But a simple thing, a word, a sound,

A sound that went wrong

The poem ends there. The final word, ‘wrong’, is scribbled through, its creator having wanted something different, but having never found it.

And as for the ghosts that dance over the ashes, they do so only to celebrate their last moments before the end of all things, both living and dead, that is soon to come.