Demon Core - Chapter 37:

~ [Orson] ~

Human | ♂ | Knight Errant LOCATION: The Western Pass LEVEL: 100

Hands run over his body, passing as they move. One by one, the people of the city and the region run across the bridge. As they go, one after the other, their palms swipe over the body of the old bridge-guard, the knight-errant Orson. He serves no master, no lord, having only found a quiet contentment in this strange position he had stumbled into decades ago — as the sole guard for a lonely bridge, road, and region on the side roads of the region that had, decades ago, been plagued by banditry and monsters that the capital city neglected to the plight of those living here.

He wandered in by sheer happenstance, or maybe fate, and took care of the problem. For all of those years since, he has remained here, guarding the roads, guarding the bridge, and guarding the people who live not in the heart of the world but just a little off center and to the left of it.

It makes little sense from an outside perspective; however, his life led him here, and he has been here since, finding contentment and purpose in the simplicity of his task in a way he had never managed to find in any court of king or queen.

“Orson!” yells a girl, pulling on his other arm as best she can while her own mother yanks her away as they flee.

A hand runs over his back.

“Go!” screams the man as loud as he can, his voice carrying through the night as the carts and carriages roll, their axles screaming as they veer, almost falling off of the bridge in their uncontrolled escape. The girl’s hand slips free from the sternness of his voice and face. Soldiers and the people of the villages run, scrambling. Thousands of people, survivors of the region, are evacuating after the unexpected and sudden destruction of the bastille to the south. Even if it was the Demon-King… the fortress has been there for so long and has always been seen as the steel shield that guards the beating heart of the nation that its loss is surreal in a manner that they can’t quite grasp, even after everything that has happened to the world.

Two women, the seamstresses from the village across the off-corner from here, graze his shoulder as they run with the crowd.

“Orson, you idiot!” barks a man’s voice to his face from up close, which is reasonable given that he’s yanked the man towards him by his tunic.

— It’s all coming close to home now.

Knight Errant Orson lets go of the fabric of the other man’s top. “Get out of here!” he barks at him. “Fool.” He looks past the man as people stream down the bridge in a caravan into a deep ravine below.

Power…

The ground resonates with it, rumbling and shaking. The air is thick and heavy with a miasma that could choke a beast, crushing its lungs from the weight of it. The steam raindrops seem to shudder, vibrating as they fall down toward the ground in a rhythmic cascade, sounding to his ears like the endless steps of a skittering thing with more legs than there are stars in the night — so many of which gleam and shine, watching the world down below, despite the danger to them being present and unhidden by the thick clouds.

“Why are you still here?!” barks Orson, looking back at the man who is standing in front of him. He shoves him back with both hands, but the other man grabs Orson’s wrists and presses his palms against his own chest rather than being offended.

“Just giving you something back,” he says.

An old woman hurries past as best she can, carrying an infant that can’t be her own. She stops, grabbing its small hand and pressing it against Orson’s shoulder.

Everyone runs and everyone leaves, but everyone touches Orson as they go, apart from the man standing apart from him. The man nods and lets go. Orson nods back, watching as the familiar stranger runs off with the crowd.

The laying of hands.

It is a ritual of the Holy-Church — the laying of hands. A person who is meant to be blessed is touched, embraced, and felt, by the hands of those who are there. It is meant to signify the fact that a person is not alone, meant to reinforce this feeling of community, of togetherness, by the act of touch rather than just pure words. It is meant to signify to a person that they belong to a collective in a deeper, more true way than just words and promises could hold. In theory, it imbues the blessed individual with the magical residue of everyone involved.

And while this region here is not too deeply religious in the traditional sense, they are indeed superstitious, and old Orson has become sort of a local legend, almost a good-luck charm, that people would always touch as they passed. When they went to the city and crossed the bridge while he was there, they would stop for him. When they go down the roads that had once been eyed by bandits and find him clearing the way from fallen branches, they would stop for him. When they go through the forests, once plagued by goblins and monsters while foraging and hunting, they would stop for him.

It’s one of those obscure traditions that only really makes sense when you grow up and develop in them. A man from the high-court would hardly understand.

In fact, old Orson hardly understands it himself. But he doesn’t mind, as odd as it might be to have others touch you all day, because these people are his.

He turns to look back toward the distance, toward the looming danger that is coming closer and closer — The Demon-King, whose presence is undeniable beneath the deeply crimson, ruby sky in which the clouds burn and the stars shine with a screaming intensity, as if in anguish themselves.

A ‘knight-errant’ is a wandering knight, a knight who serves no master or lord, a knight who is looking for quest and purpose. It would perhaps not be correct to call him such anymore, as he has long since found his place in the world — here between the forest and the trees.

Hands run over his body as he stands on the crest of the tide of movement, breaking the flow of people who are running to his left and to his right, and soon, the tide ebbs. Fewer and fewer people come, the flow trickling as the majority of them begin or have already crossed.

The Demon-Tide draws closer as well, the horizon itself seeming to move closer and closer toward him, as if a rushing surge, a tidal wave of flames, were cresting and devouring all that there is to see, all of the world in its entirety.

Old Knight Errant Orson stands there, his hands resting on the hilt of a sword that shares his years, his feet planted firmly in the muddy ground that he has tended to himself for years now.

Everything around him is withered. The leaves have already fallen from the long-since drowned trees. The grass is withered where it remains in the few high places, and the low places are brackish and swampy. The river down below the bridge has grown to an uncontrollable size and is full of dead wood and debris. The villages visible from the top of the slope all burn. Shadows walk the landscape as reavers, their silhouettes visible only against the fire that takes everything that remains.

This place that he has tended to, this beautiful garden that he has loved, dies before his eyes as horror approaches.

However, he is well at heart and in soul because the fruits, the joys, and the precious things he has let flower in this garden have already been picked, plucked, and experienced.

— A last villager runs out of the underbrush, tripping over herself and scrambling in fear, looking over her shoulder in terror as she runs past him, not stopping, but her fingers gracing his side as she hurries down and across the bridge.

Old Orson stands there now. It’s become quiet.

The rain patters on. The river roars with its constant drone. The heat crackles and pops, steam hissing wherever it begins to form from the boiling pools.

And then, the horizon becomes black as things emerge out of the firescape — demons, ghosts, hounds, and beasts. Great monsters the size of towers walk among shrieking armies of ghouls and legions of howling spirits. Fire trails along with them like a scavenger, following in the steps of a great predator. The countless hordes of the Demon-King shriek and cry as they maraude, ravaging the lands that remain, and within their midst, within the great formation of the screaming damned, rattles a procession of carriages and carts, covered in almost mockingly bright colors, banners, and displays — like those of a carnival.

Things that crawl, and things that bite, and things that lash, and things that swipe — all of them rush in their bloodlust onward, toward the road to the destruction of humanity, toward the heart of the nation and the world, toward the final collection of souls that the Demon-Core needs to finally erupt, to finally break the barrier between the physical and the spiritual worlds once and for all. Something that he can’t identify lunges out of the shadows toward him.

— Old Orson twists the handle of his sword, pulling it free.

Thousands of indescribable creatures lunge, each vying to find a rare bite of fresh flesh. The carriages of the Demon-Carnival, however, sharply careen over their sides, making emergency breaks and sharp turns, many of them tumbling over sideways and skidding through masses of the bodies of their own legions, having noticed something that the drooling, screaming masses did not.

Metal clicks, and then the world becomes something else.

A blinding flash erupts through the sky, a vivid light arcing all around them at once in the shape of a grand cross that stretches from one end of the horizon to the other, from the ground up to the sky, as if the sun had broken into four and were trying to reconnect exactly where he stood.

Power radiates through the air, through countless heaps of bones and flesh, through gnawing teeth, and through snatching jaws. Power leaks through greedy eyes and selfish, sharp fingers.

Ten-thousand demons die at once, ten-thousand ghosts and spirits, ten-thousand goblins and ghouls, shrieking undead, banshees, and obscure beasts from forgotten regions and lands, ten-thousand things that crawl and snatch, as well as ten-thousand things that stalk and grab — so many different things were and then were not.

The flashing light pulsates in and out, the reclamation of fire coming back over the landscape as the scene returns to what it was, with old Orson standing there in the darkness by a bridge that no one is allowed to cross anymore.

The smoke fades, and the light fades. He stands there, his sword drawn, as ash rains down around him, along with so many bones.

The Demon-Carnival has halted where it was, several carriages having crashed over sideways in their emergency stops, the undead birds pulling them squawking and shrieking in their usual way — unbothered entirely by their crushed torsos and necks, as they keep trying to kick off the ground that their feet no longer touch.

And then come the voices from around him, whispering things, curious things. The voices of witches in the night, skulking around the crib of a sleeping infant that they want to steal.

“What is it?” asks one of them, taking the shape of a soul that floats around Orson. “Powerful,” she says.

Another orb floats to his side, a pale face growing out of the shape in a grotesque manner, smelling him as she floats past. “A great king?”

“No,” replies another. “A hero?” she asks, curiously examining him.

The spirits bicker and observe, examining Orson as he resumes his footing and returns his sword to where it rested. “No,” they agree. “They smell different.”

“He smells… bad…” remarks one of them.

“Stinks!” says another, floating away a little further.

A foggy hand reaches out toward him from the front, spinning a finger in the air. A strand of white, wispy substance pulls out of Orson’s chest. “His soul…” He lifts a hand, swiping the spirit away. The string pulls back into himself. “— Mundane. But…”

“The smell…”

They nod to each other in agreement, floating back toward the recuperating mass of demons. The hole, pressed into the army of the Demon-King, is filled as bodies flood in from all sides like blood filling an open wound. Thousands of twisted, rotting faces turn his way, the horde looking at the sole man who is blocking the path of his most wretched highness — the Demon-King.

Orson just shrugs and nods his head to the side. “You’re going to have to leave,” says the old man rather dryly, his voice carrying across the swarm, their cackling voices interwoven with the crackling of the great burning, as if the fire were laughing too.

But all of their voices, all of these noises, are overpowered as a growl fills the air, a crushing note that causes the swarm to cease their undulations and causes the flames of the endless fire themselves to lower their burn, as if cowering. “And why is that?” it asks, amused.

The ground around Orson’s feet shake as the power of the presence and of the voice that can only belong to the master of the endless night, the Demon-King, washes over the land. Limbs break off of dead trees. Stones fall into the ravine. The clouds fray and tear.

“Bridge is out,” replies Orson dryly, nodding back behind himself to the bridge that is, very clearly, still there. “What can ya do?” he asks, shaking his head.

The quaking stops, coming to a slow pace. “You would be surprised,” replies the heavy voice, surrounding him from all sides as if he were fully immersed in it, like he were underwater in a glass tank, and being spoken to from above.

The heat of the world intensifies. Sweat mattes his hair and brow, the quivering air doing little to take it away as it is so thickly humid from weeks of endless rain and fire, that breathing itself feels like an almost useless effort.

And Orson stands there, amidst that deep laughter that envelops him.

“What do you think you are?” asks the voice, as the carriages of the Demon-Carnival right themselves up again by an unseen force. The broken undead all around them pull back together, thousands of twisted, rotted bones reconnecting loosely to recreate the shapes that they once held.

It can sense something around him — a familiar feeling that lingers, that floats in the air like so much wafting smoke from the wildfires. How does this man have so much power in him? He is not a man of rare blood or ancient courage, a man of legend or renown. He is simply a man, alone, with a smell about him that is… distinct.

The flames of a thousand burn-sites pull in, press in, and shape in together — they move deeply unnaturally, enveloping hordes of screaming monsters that are in the wrong place at the wrong time in a conflagration as the fires come together into a shape, into a whole mass that slowly, thunderously, walks toward him. Its steps shake the world.

Knight errant Orson stares at the Demon-King, who is walking toward him, looking almost curious.

There is something residual about this man — something familiar. It is something that the beast had once known and felt. It had sensed it once before too, on a man it killed long ago who was preventing him from entering a city — a mayor. This fellow feeling here is akin to that one — that emotion the man had kept secret from him to his grave.

“In your way, I suppose,” replies Orson, finally.

The Demon-King, pressed free from his foul castle, looks at the man that he wants something from; he wants his secret, a thing he had been denied before.

“Tell me,” starts the Demon-King, his voice carrying back and causing the legions of the damned to cower. “What are you?” he asks, lifting a great, massive hand. “Tell me, and you will be spared,” it promises, wanting the beautiful thing that it can sense, smell, and taste but never quite touch.

Orson stands there, looking back over his shoulder for a second at the bridge, which is now long since cleared, and then back at the world-eating beast standing seconds from him, towering above him.

He straightens himself up, his hand grabbing the hilt of his sword. “Like I said,” replies the man, looking at the Demon-King. “I’m in your way,” he says, pulling the blade free again a second time — everything cascades with white, a raging energy pressing against everything all around at the same time as a red tyrant simply barrels toward him, waves of power blasting off of its exterior as it walks through the tsunami of energy, trailing smoke and souls drifting out and away, its massive claw pressing forward and reaching him, clutching the blade of the sword as it strikes.

“Is that so?” asks the Demon-King, looking down at the man in rage at being denied, the world rupturing between them. “YOU WILL TELL ME!” roars Swain, the Demon-King. The swordsman pulls his blade free as the two of them collide, a burst of light blasting into the air like a beacon that shines over the world as they fight.