The Storm King

With eyes narrowed with determination, Leon glared at Yu Nok Tor.

He was trapped on Arkhnavi. The darkness magic that inundated the plane interfered with the silver twig’s creation of a spatial portal. Without the twig, he couldn’t return home. The only hope he possibly had to survive Arkhnavi’s destruction if he wasn’t able to report back to Ambrose lay in Tell Kirin, the seat of Qo Weylekh. So, he had to get to Tell Kirin. He just had to get through Tell Kirin first, and any more cultist strongholds in his way.

He and Tiraeses had spent several hours planning out what they could from the limited information they had. They couldn’t get too detailed since they didn’t have complete information on what was going on in the city, but thanks to Xaphan, they at least had a target: whatever was generating the purple light deep in the city’s heart.

Once the old monk was finished, he walked over and asked, “Has Valiant Ashatar filled your heart with iron?”

“If you’re asking if I’m ready, then yes, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Leon flatly responded, his eyes not wavering from Yu Nok Tor. He was scanning the outskirts for any sign that the cultists or husks they’d fought earlier were still around. He also kept his eyes open for anything else that may show itself. Xaphan and the Thunderbird had both warned him that Primal Gods and Devils liked to twist creatures into unnatural monsters, and while the husks were certainly terrifying on a visceral level, Leon had yet to see anything that could qualify as a ‘twisted monster’.

He was hoping he wouldn’t see anything like that. If Xaphan was right and the Primal Devil poisoning Arkhnavi was still imprisoned, then it would need all the power it could siphon away, and might not reserve too much power for anything else.

Even that hope had a glaring problem with it, though: Leon had seen four cultists clad in darkness when retreating from Yu Nok Tor, and he refused to believe they were alone in the city. There would have to be more, and if they were all similarly garbed in Devilish power, then it would raise the question: if the Primal Devil had enough spare power to give its cultists, then might it not also spare some to creature monsters?

Iron Pride was reassuringly sheathed at his waist, his power already flowing through the weapon as freely as it would his own arm.

“Let’s go,” Leon growled, his patience running out. Tiraeses didn’t verbally respond as Leon leaped off the hill and down to the barren wasteland that had once been fertile fields surrounding the city. Hardly any remnant of those farms and ranches remained, however, leaving little else other than a flat, empty plain to get across before the city.

There was no cover, but Leon had expected that and prepared accordingly. The enchantments on his armor activated, shrouding him in magical darkness. Tiraeses was similarly obscured as he channeled his power. The two then invisibly sprinted for the city’s outskirts, hoping to reach some cover before anything potentially revealed them. Fortunately, Leon whipped together a pair of steel rings that when worn allowed him and Tiraeses to keep track of each other’s position. They’d need it if they were to remain invisible.

Unfortunately, it seemed that such preparations were in vain, as they’d barely crossed a single mile of the twenty between them and Yu Nok Tor before something in the city pulsed with magic, sending a ripple of darkness rushing over the plains. Leon’s shroud of invisibility was sundered almost on contact. Tiraeses’ invisibility lasted only a moment longer before he, too, was rendered visible.

“Keep moving!” Leon shouted, though a moment later he noted that the four darkness-clad humanoid figures had reappeared in various places around the city’s outskirts, all watching them approaching the city. The single red eye in each of their heads tracked them unerringly, but rather disturbingly, nothing happened for several more miles.

Leon was quite put off by this and was preparing to attack when another pulse of magic roiled across the plain. Just as he’d begun pushing magic into Iron Pride, the blackened dirt beneath his boots darkened even further, making even running difficult as his feet sank into the darkness like tar. Tiraeses not too far away was similarly hampered.

Leon had no interest in seeing what would happen should they sink fully beneath the surface of this darkness, as this power seemed keen on facilitating, and shouted in defiance as he let loose with a storm of power. He put his tenth-tier power on display as, with a single swing of Iron Pride, silver-blue lightning erupted from him and arced down upon the field.

The ground shook from the thunder as the air filled with the comforting stench of lightning. The darkness surrounding Leon and Tiraeses shrank back like the sea at low tide and then dissipated as Leon’s power almost literally erased it.

Leon didn’t stop with this success, though, and swung his blade again. He could sense a buildup of power in Yu Nok Tor and wasn’t interested in seeing the next move of whatever was coordinating its defense. Instead, he fired off another dozen lightning bolts targeting the four cultists he could see.

The darkness surrounding the cultists expanded like clouds just as Leon’s lightning bolts struck their targets. The darkness was torn away, giving glimpses beneath that were as disturbing as they were brief—Leon was emaciated bodies wearing elaborate black robes, while the heads of the cultists were entirely missing, replaced by a hovering orb of red light. Only a moment later, the cultists’ dark shrouds enclosed them again, with only the red eye, now revealed to be that orb, visible.

Leon shouted again in frustration but was gratified to see all four cultists disappear by melting away into the shadows. He’d never gotten that particular power to work with his armor, but he wasn’t keen on trying again while he was on Arkhnavi.

Tiraeses, who’d taken Leon’s retaliation against the cultists to pull ahead of him a bit, drew Leon’s attention to another problem as bright white light streamed behind him like he was wearing a cloak of stars. This light rose about thirty or forty feet into the air and then shot at the city. The streets of the city that opened onto the plain had been filled with charred, emaciated husks while Leon had been attacking the cultists, and Tiraeses’ light sliced and cleaved into them like falling stars. The husks were torn and ripped asunder, but their sheer numbers were so great that it hardly seemed to matter.Follow current ɴᴏᴠᴇʟs on Novᴇ(l)Fɪre .ɴᴇt

The air began to fill with the shrieking of the husks, and even Tiraeses wasn’t able to keep them from spilling out onto the plain. Leon added his lightning to the mix, blasting and incinerating hundreds of the dark creatures with every swing of his blade, the rate of his advance slowing only marginally.

They’d cut their way through the horde and to the center of the city. Now that they were prepared for this, even seeing the horde rushing out to meet them didn’t deter them from this task.

However, as they reached the halfway point, only ten miles from the city’s outskirts, the source of power in the city’s heart, the focus of Yu Nok Tor’s Devilish power, pulsed again, and this time with much greater power.

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The wave of darkness washed over Yu Nok Tor like a tsunami, dark purple lightning flashing within as the only source of light that could be seen beyond the black curtain. In barely more than a moment, it blew past the city’s outskirts and bore down on Leon and Tiraeses.

“HOLD!” Leon roared, and Tiraeses halted. “BRACE!” Leon added as he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the orange-skinned monk.

Tiraeses projected a shield of light, which Leon did his best to reinforce with Clear Day’s pearl set in his armor. The power of the tau seemed to be drawn to Tiraeses’ power, as if it picked up on Leon’s desperation and intent. The shield protecting them grew powerful and almost opaque, shining like a tiny sun had fallen to the plain. But it shone only for a moment before the wave of darkness hit them.

The shield shook terribly, and Tiraeses was thrown to the ground while Leon squeezed Iron Pride and called upon the strength of the Iron Needle. At the same time, he summoned his anti-darkness gem into his gauntlet and attempted to use it, but the sheer overwhelming strength of the Devilish power outside of the shield was simply too much for the gem to affect. Instead, silver-blue lightning exploded outward, banishing darkness everywhere it went, but there was so much that it simply crashed back inward as Leon’s lightning dissipated.

Under this pressure, the shield cracked, then shattered, and the darkness bore down upon Leon and Tiraeses. Leon felt the enchantments in his armor that protected his mind activate, while the silver-blue lightning in his body kept the darkness from penetrating beyond the surface of his armor. However, dark purple lightning began striking all around them, but he could feel it and found it much easier to redirect this lightning away than the darkness.

Beside him, Tiraeses went still, though Leon could still feel the light magic in his body resisting the darkness. Unfortunately, it seemed that the old monk was out of commission, too busy dealing with the darkness that pressed into his body to do anything else.

He raised Iron Pride and let loose with a storm of power. He held nothing back, forcing away the darkness with all of his strength. Lightning poured from him while the air whipped around faster than a tornado. The darkness was pushed back somewhat, but not nearly far enough for Leon to feel comfortable.

Fortunately, it was enough to relieve the pressure on Tiraeses, and the old monk banished the darkness assaulting his body and shot back to his feet.

“To the city!” he shouted.

Leon redirected his power, carving a path through the darkness with enormous bolts of lightning. The dark purple bolts that filled the vast black cloud lit their way, giving brief glimpses of the horde of husks charging toward them. Tiraeses, as Leon took the lead, summoned a dense field of motes of light that spun around them.

In only a matter of seconds, they met the horde head-on. Leon became a whirlwind of death, lightning carving deep fissures into the horde’s ranks. Tiraeses’ nebula ripped apart any husks that Leon missed, letting them keep going unimpeded.

Thousands of husks were destroyed in their mad dash for the city’s outskirts, now only five miles away. However, the purple lightning flashed again in the city’s heart, and Leon thought he saw shadows of something in the air. He couldn’t be sure with the cloud of darkness surrounding them, but he directed a few lightning bolts that way.

These bolts struck new horrors: reptilian creatures with narrow, elongated skulls and burning red eyes. They had a single pair of arms, legs, and wings, but the wings appeared to be covered in leathery skin, while the wing membranes were made entirely of opaque darkness. Their elongated jaws were filled with razor-sharp teeth, their arms ended in vicious claws, and the scales covering their bodies were blackened and peeling, leaving the creatures to bleed endlessly. In these ‘wounds’, Leon could see countless eyes peering through the blood and the scales, all swiveling around as if unable to focus on anything.

All of these eyes were of a size and color that he thought them human.

Perhaps even more disturbing than that, he could tell that these weren’t the creatures he could hear roaring above even the screeching of the husk horde that continued to press against them.

But Leon didn’t let any of this slow his feet down at all. He kept moving, more lightning bolts erupting from his body than drops of sweat, carving his way through the apparently endless horde.

And finally, the outskirts of the city drew near. The hordes couldn’t stop him and Tiraeses, and they managed to cleave their way into the sparse outskirts of the city. At the same time, the flying many-eyed reptilian creatures finally drew close and began diving at Leon and Tiraeses, completely ignoring those of their fellows that Leon blasted to ash in their attempt.

“HOLD!” Leon shouted again as he and Tiraeses crossed into a large, paved area—he figured it might’ve been a small forum or some other gathering place at one point.

Amidst the pressure of fending off the husks, the flying creatures, and the darkness that continued to try and press down upon them, Leon spared a few strokes of his blade to cut deep furrows into the stone.

“FILL WITH LIGHT!” Leon ordered, and Tiraeses, to his relief, didn’t need any more instruction. As the old monk continued to fill the air with white motes of incinerating light, he also stomped his foot and conjured light to fill the furrows Leon carved.

In a matter of moments, a glowing rune had been carved into the pavers, a large ancient rune identical to the core rune of the enchantment Leon had made to push back some of the darkness in the environment during the past week and which had protected Tiraeses’ monastery from being filled with that same power. Without hesitation, Leon used his magic to reinforce Tiraeses’, and to his immense relief, the rune activated. Even under this pressure, he’d carved it well.

The darkness around them for almost a mile dissipated, leaving Leon and Tiraeses relatively free to focus on the horde and the flying creatures. Now that he was able to see the revolting things, Leon was more able to blast them out of the sky—fortunately, they appeared in vastly inferior numbers compared to the effectively limitless husks.

Light and lightning blasted outward in almost equal measure, and soon enough, the horde pulled back. Leon was almost surprised until he looked around and saw miles away, standing atop the largest towers in the city, a dozen darkness-clad cultists, staring at him and Tiraeses with their glowing red eyes. As soon as he saw them, however, they vanished into darkness, though that didn’t stop him from swinging Iron Pride a few more times to strike those buildings with powerful silver-blue bolts.

And then, it seemed almost over. Leon and Tiraeses were left panting in the center of the carved rune, surrounded on all sides by the rapidly disintegrating remains of thousands of husks, while thousands more had turned to dust along their path into the city.

The darkness emanating from the city center was still pressing against them, however, only held at bay by the power of the ancient rune. And while the screeching of the husks died away, the roaring of more creatures in the dark only intensified. They’d cut their way to the outskirts of the city, but they still had a long way to go to reach the Devilish focus…

---

From the safety of her thirty-foot-tall armor, the young girl stared at what was happening before her. The sheer mass of husks had almost forced her to retreat from the hills before she could be seen, but as the second wave of darkness hit, she found herself transfixed.

Two men, both obviously spectacularly powerful, cutting their way toward Yu Nok Tor with a savage determination she’d never seen before. The husks terrified her, let alone everything else in the city, but the way those two had slaughtered their way through had been both horrifying and mesmerizing in equal measure.

The thought of that much power directed toward her had her legs trembling, which in turn caused her armor to shake.

She quickly forced herself back under control, then checked that her systems were still functioning well enough to keep her massive war frame from being seen. When everything seemed all right, she relaxed a minute amount.

With terrible fascination, she watched using her armor’s magic sensors the progress of the two she’d been trying to track for the past several hours enter the city, weather the dark storm called upon them, and then quite literally cut a place of safety into existence.

It was inspiring. She’d been intending to seek their aid in retreating further away from the center of the plane, reasoning that moving in numbers would only increase their chances of survival. She certainly didn’t want anything to do with the interior of the plane—she shuddered again as images of the past few months ran through her head, made all the worse from the hope she’d felt in the beginning, and the hopelessness she’d felt when running away—but seeing those two keep going despite all that was thrown against them…

She couldn’t help but feel some slight stirring in her heart, Valiant Ashatar lending her a few specks of iron. She grimaced, she silently cursed herself, she glared at the light screen giving her this information, but her enormous suit of armor began to move back toward Yu Nok Tor.

Whatever those two were doing, they were going to need her help.