De Anima: Chapter One

A small gray bunny sat under a bush, its nose twitching nervously. A pest. Bunnies kept eating Adam’s plants before they had a chance to flower. Vermin. But they were so adorable, he couldn’t bring himself to bring any harm to them.

Which was why he was taking time away from his gardening. Crouched by the bush with a chunk of vegetable, he was trying to entice the bunny to eat from his hand. Bunnies not being known for their boldness, the little creature was of course very suspicious of this offer. But Adam felt like he was making real headway in his relationship with the bunny. Any day now, he expected it might actually be able to muster the trust to snatch food from his hand.

But today was not to be that day. From behind him, Adam heard an unfamiliar young woman’s voice observing, “You’ll have an infestation. Rabbits’ll eat all your veggies.” The bunny heard it too; startled, it scampered away.

Adam, sighing, dropped the chunk of vegetable and stood up, brushing dirt and grass smudges from his simple clothes. He eyed his visitors warily.

Standing just beyond the white picket fence that marked the perimeter of Adam’s property: two women. A pretty girl who looked to be in her late teens, only a few years younger than Adam; the other in maybe her early 40s. Similar dark skin tones and thick eyebrows; Adam speculated that they might be a mother and daughter. They didn’t look like they were from around here. The older one wore a long, heavy leather coat in a foreign style. It looked somewhat incongruous in the bright, sunny weather. The girl was sensible enough to carry her similar coat folded over their arm.

Adam was suspicious. He had no reason to expect visitors, and nothing good had ever come of unexpected visitors. But that didn’t override his instinct to be at least a little polite, so he responded only with a, “That may be so.” He was well aware of the danger to his vegetables, but he didn’t consider it too high a price to pay for the adorableness the bunnies brought to his yard. “What can I do for you?”

Dispensing with small talk, the elder of his two visitors announced, “I’m Helen, this is Kate. You’re Adam Grigori, right? Can we talk inside?”

Adam tried to think of good reasons strangers might have for wanting to speak with him. He hadn’t entered any contests or lotteries. He hadn’t, so far as he knew, broken any laws, and he didn’t think any of his neighbors had, either. These two didn’t look like lawyers, and he couldn’t think of anybody who would want to serve him papers, anyway. Nor did they appear to be tax auditors, and besides, he always double-checked his taxes to make sure he paid exactly as much as he owed. He didn’t advertise in any papers or magazines; he already knew anybody in town who might need a handyman, and besides, these people weren’t from town. Maybe their vehicle had broken down and they needed it fixed. Automobile repair wasn’t Adam’s strongest suit, but he knew enough to get by, so he ventured, “Car trouble?”

Helen shook her head impatiently, “No. Inside, please?”

With a sinking feeling, Adam realized he couldn’t think of any other good reasons to have unknown visitors. He began to suspect bad reasons. Foremost among them: “You from the Resistance? I’m a law-abiding citizen, I don’t want any trouble.”

Helen was insistent, “We’ve gotta talk to you. Somewhere safe – hold on.” She listened intently for a moment. Adam heard marching, which was not unusual at all. But Helen hissed quietly, “Wights.”

Adam tamped down rising panic. The only people who would needed to be careful about the wights were the Resistance or other criminals. He could get in trouble just for associating with them. And here they were, at his garden, asking for him by name, undoubtedly here to rope him into some nefarious scheme.

The girl, Kate, was suddenly casual and deliberately banal, returning conversationally to the observation, “Rabbits’ll eat you out of house and home if you let them.”

The wights rounded the street corner and came into view. There were a dozen, marching briskly in formation. You could easily have thought each one was human if you didn’t know better, though completely covered in glossy black plates of metal armor, heaviest around the neck and shoulders. Every inch was completely covered with armor; even their eye slits were opaque black glass. Exactly like every other wight in the world.

Adam wasn’t lying when he said he didn’t want any trouble, so he was disinclined to wave the wights over to arrest his visitors for their suspect behavior. He just wanted to be left in peace. If he was very lucky, maybe he could make these two go away if he humored them for a few minutes. So, ambling to the fence where the two women stood, he joined in the casual conversation, “I know, but they’re so adorable. How could I resist?”

As they marched down the street past Adam’s garden, they came within ten feet of Kate and Helen without paying them any mind. Adam reflected, as he always did when he saw one, that the wights must be unnaturally thin under the armor. Their presence made him uncomfortable: it was only subtle, but every move they made felt jarringly wrong, like no living human would ever move. He did not welcome their presence, but at least they usually ignored common folk like him, as long as he was careful not to do anything worthy of their attention.

Helen and Kate carefully didn’t look at the wights. Kate was continuing, “You’d risk your livelihood for an adorable pest?”

Adam looked at Kate, realizing resentfully that he was going to wind up letting these two into his house. He could see in their eyes that they wouldn’t go until he’d heard them out. At least he could console himself with the fact that the younger one was cute. “You have no idea.”

The squad of wights never paused, and marched rapidly on down the peaceful, elm-lined street, out of earshot. Helen leaned towards Adam, whispering in a tone that brooked no further debate, “Inside. Now.”

Adam’s one-story cottage felt small and lived-in. It had only a narrow hallway and four rooms. The was dim; no sense wasting gas keeping the lamps lit during the day.

Adam tried his best to be polite, offering. He began to offer, “Would you like to hang up your…”, but trailed off as Helen wandered away down the hall.

Kate handed Adam her coat with a, “Thank you”, then followed her mother.

As Adam hung Kate’s coat on the coat rack, Helen walked down the hallway, opening each door and peering inside, before deciding on the bathroom and walking in. “In here, this is probably the most secure room.”

Adam walked over and stared disbelievingly. The windowless bathroom was barely large enough for one person to stand. And he hadn’t really bleached the bathroom as recently as he’d have liked if they were going to try to crowd three people into it for a chat.

Luckily, Kate, rolling her eyes, walked right past her mother, saying, “The kitchen will do fine.” Adam, relieved, followed her into the kitchen. After a few moments, Helen, defeated, followed as well.

The kitchen had perhaps the largest windows of the house, which let in plenty of light. And the cottage’s back door was right there! They couldn’t have picked a less secure room if they’d tried. Leaning on the doorjamb, Helen glared reproachfully at her daughter, but didn’t force the issue.

Kate made herself at home, sitting at the kitchen table. Adam, still not sure what to make of the situation, offered, “Would you like a snack? Sandwiches?”

Overriding her mother’s paranoid objections (before Helen even had a chance to finish vocalizing a “No –”), Kate said, “That would be lovely, thank you.”

Then there was an awkward silence as the two women silently watched Adam as he retrieved a loaf of bread from the breadbox and began to slice some slices off. The only noise was the chirping of birds from outside the windows.

After a long minute of this, Helen abruptly cut into the silence with a non-question: “You are Adam Grigori, son of Arthur Grigori, son of Marion Grigori, née Sankari, daughter of Beorn Sankari, son of –”

Adam, taken aback by this stranger’s detailed (and, so far as he could tell, not knowing anything about his great-grandparents, accurate) knowledge of his genealogical history, interrupted, “Hold on. How do you know –”

Helen was satisfied. “You are. Excellent.”

Kate cut in, “Adam. This is very important. You’re the last known descendant of the Caluthian royal family.”

Adam was bewildered and at this point had no idea what was going on, so he turned back to preparing the sandwiches, mumbling, “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

Helen erupted, gesticulating wildly, “Only that you’re the key to the freedom of the world! We’ve been looking for you for the past fifteen years! You’re the one who can undo the ragnarok and restore liberty to everyone!”

Adam whirled back to the women, pointing the bread knife accusatorily at Helen. “So you are from the Resistance! Look, I told you, I don’t want any part of your rebellion. I don’t care if I’m your ‘chosen one’ or whatever, I don’t want any trouble. I’ve…” He glanced around, worried that somebody might hear people conspiring against the government in his house, in his kitchen. With emphasis, “I’ve got no problem with the rule of Julian Malachi. I’ll finish your sandwiches, then you’d better go.”

Adam’s worries were not entirely unreasonable. A wight crouched by the house, in inhuman silence, peering into the kitchen from behind some bushes.

Julian Malachi watched the screen impassively. The view from the wight’s eyes, in black and white, slightly distorted. The muffled sound from its ears. This screen was only one of many, of course. Dozens of such screens were mounted on the wall, each showing the view from the eyes of a different wight.

 

The sidelines of a parade in Kehushide. A string of people carrying a dragon puppet. Everyone carrying sparklers. Muffled cheering, miscellaneous sounds of celebration.

A view of the street from the front gates of the palace. Overcast. People bustling by in overcoats and hats.

A hectic battle against the Resistance inside an opulent mansion. Screaming, the rat-a-tat of gunfire. A bloody Resistance guy staggering up to the view and hacking at it with a sword. The screen goes black, then begins showing a different view, from the eyes of a different wight, on the same scene. Julian hoped that brave man at least got a relatively quick death.

A wildly burning farmhouse. One wight operates the mechanism of a steam-powered fire truck. Two more direct water from the hose onto the fire. A fourth carries an unconscious woman – a survivor, hopefully, not just a body – from the house. The viewpoint wight unhesitatingly plunges into the burning building to search for more survivors.

A city flooded several feet deep with water. Wights pile sandbags to stem the flood.

A foreign embassy. Diplomats from various nations bow to one another and exchange pleasantries as wight guards look on. Julian recognized dignitaries from Tokoztess and Lawoskkods – maybe the peace between those two unreasonable belligerents was finally holding, with wights holding both their leashes.

Most of the other screens showed various fairly uniform military installations, guarded by wights. As usual.

And then there was Adam’s kitchen. Adam, Kate, and Helen still talking, but their voices are almost too muffled to decipher now.

 

That was fine; Julian had heard enough. He turned away from the screens, adjusting the sword and revolver on his belt.

In the center of the hexagonal room sat a stone pedestal. The perfectly spherical Artifact sat in a depression on the pedestal, glowing malevolently bluish. Radiating out from the pedestal were five stone biers, to lay bodies upon for resurrection.

He had seen the procedure countless times. Wights would carry in a dead man and lay him on one of the biers. A few seconds later, the dead man would rise, his expression still dull and lifeless. Then the dead man would be escorted out the door to be fitted with armor and become a wight, a soldier in Julian’s faceless army.

He mused, mostly to himself, “Impressive. She found a prince. And it only took her, what, fifteen years? Ah, well. I suppose I’d better nip it in the bud.” He turned and addressed the Artifact authoritatively: “Bring Helen Arkas to me. Alive; try not to hurt her too badly. Don’t even touch the other two.”

Adam sat across the table from Kate; they were eating their sandwiches. Helen, still leaning against the doorjamb, hadn’t touched hers. Adam was only beginning to get the gist of what was going on.

Helen, impatient, asked, “How much do you know about the Caluthian War?”

Adam had heard of it; it had been touched upon in history class, with very little detail. “Didn’t Caluthi almost conquer the world? What, three hundred years ago?”

This was close enough for Helen. “Give or take.”

Her daughter was more specific: “Three hundred twenty-seven years, reckoned from the day Taitale built the Artifact.”

They had lost Adam again, “Who built the what?”

Kate explained patiently, “Taitale, chief engineer in the service of the royal family of Caluthi.”

Helen interrupted, “The Artifact that lets a person raise and control the dead.”

Adam was not entirely incapable of putting two and two together. “Oh. The wights.”

Helen nodded. “The very same.” Adam looked contemplative as he took another bite of his sandwich and let Helen continue to explain, “After Caluthi was defeated by the Coalition of All Nations, the Artifact was hidden away in a tomb. Fifteen years ago, during the darkest days of the ragnarok, Julian Malachi broke into the Artifact’s tomb and – wait.” She canted her head, listening.

In the silence, faintly, the marching of wights could be heard.

Helen was suddenly a blur of movement, striding across the room and barking, “They’re coming for us. Quick, out the back door.”

Kate, acting on instinct, abandoned her sandwich and hauled Adam to his feet. Adam, also acting on instinct, took another bite of his sandwich. There’s nothing more soothing than a good sandwich in a time of crisis.

Helen moved to open the door, but it burst inwards before she reached the handle.

A wight, rifle at the ready, stepped into the kitchen. With a sudden surge of adrenaline, Helen unflinchingly drew a cavalry sabre that had previously been concealed under her long coat. With three hurried strokes, Helen hacked the wight’s arms off at the elbows. With a great clanging and the sound of shearing metal, her sword cut through its cheap, mass-produced armor. The wight’s arms and gun clattered to the floor, but it showed no signs of pain, and it didn’t bleed.

Helen yelled to Adam and Kate, “Run! I’ll hold them off!” and unhesitatingly rammed her shoulder into the chest of the disarmed wight, bowling it backwards into the two other wights that had been advancing to the door behind it. Helen and the three wights tumbled onto the grassy ground in the yard behind the cottage, she grunting with exertion, they in eerie silence aside from the clattering of their armor.

Kate, almost dragging Adam by the hand, ran past the kerfuffle, towards a thinly wooded area across the yard, at the edge of Adam’s property. Coming to his senses, he disentangled his wrist from her grasp and made a beeline for where he’d been building a simple table out here earlier (with no room inside his cottage, he worked in the largest empty area he owned). He stumbled over a sawhorse, then located exactly the solid four-foot length of two-by-four he was thinking of. Hardly a cavalry sabre, but it would have to do.

Helen had bounded to her feet and was hacking with her sword at the pile of three wights as they tried to stand up, producing various ­clangs. Then several more wights charged around from the front of the house.

Brandishing the two-by-four, Adam made to advance upon these new undead arrivals, but Kate grabbed his arm, yelling in his ear, “We need to run!” Baffled, Adam allowed Kate to drag him away. After a few steps, they both started running for the treeline. The wights, busy with Helen, did not pursue.

Helen turned to face the oncoming wights, but one of the wights in the heap swiped unexpectedly at her legs, tripping her up. She barely managed to keep her footing, but it was all the opportunity the wights needed: one of them grabbed the blade of her sword in two gauntleted fists, and effortlessly snapped it in two. So she smashed the hilt of her broken sword into the glass of the creature’s helmet, smashing it to reveal dead, decayed, expressionless eyes.

But she was surrounded. Another wight bludgeoned the back of Helen’s neck with the butt of its rifle, and she collapsed. Several more encircled her, beating and kicking her for good measure.

The wights, one of them carrying Helen, tromped through the garden to the street, where an open truck waited, sputtering loudly and belching black smoke. The wights loaded Helen onto the back of the truck, then climbed on themselves and drove away. They paid no attention to the innocuous-looking civilians ambling casually by.

Adam led Kate to old Marlow’s barn. The old man was sick with the flu, and nobody would be about to notice intruders. Especially because the one the old man had hired Adam to tend to his chickens while he was bedridden.

Adam threw his shoulder against the big barn door, pushing it closed behind them. Then, panting, the two staggered behind a particularly large stack of hay, collapsing behind and partially in it.

Adam whispered, “I think we lost them.” He had read enough books to be aware of the cliché, but he honestly couldn’t think of anything better to say.

Kate frowned. “Nah. They let us go.” Kate was unaware of the cliché, or was too distracted to notice it. “They didn’t even chase us. I think they were after my mother.”

Adam had decided that the prevailing mood of the day was ‘confusion’. “Why would they go after her, when y’all had just revealed that I’m the last Caluthian king or whatever. Right?”

Kate shrugged noncommittally, “You are. So I don’t know why they wanted her.”

Adam had decided that the prevailing mood of the day was turning out to be ‘bewilderment’. So, for a few moments, he gave up on trying to understand, and concentrated on recovering his breath.

Then something occurred to him. Something about the whole story struck him as a bit off. “If she’s really your mother, why’d you just abandon her to the –”

Cutting him off, Kate snapped, “If they wanted us dead, they would have used bullets. They wanted her alive. We – we can always go rescue her later. And we couldn’t have beat them all, not – not without weapons.”

Adam raised a finger, about to point out that he did, in fact, have a length of two-by-four, but Kate looked murderous, interrupting with a, “Have you ever tried hitting an armored dead man with a wooden board? They’d’ve snapped you in half.”

Adam felt mutinous, but fell silent, unable (or unwilling) to muster any further objection to Kate’s reasoning. She looked miserable, the coldly pragmatic decision to abandon her mother visibly eating at her. She obviously felt the need to justify herself, so she continued, almost rambling, “We can’t – can’t do anything now, anyway. The whole area’s still swarming with wights. We should be relatively safe here, I guess. Wights don’t usually enter privately-owned buildings without a good reason. I guess we rest, then we see about finding real weapons when night falls. Yes.”

Adam let Kate trail off of her own accord, then interjected, “Then we go rescue her.”

Kate nodded with agreement, “Yes, of course.” Then, a second later, “Wait. ‘We’? Since when do you care, mister ‘I don’t want any trouble’, ‘I don’t want any part of your rebellion’?”

This question threw Adam. His word choice hadn’t been a deliberate choice, it had just slipped out like that. But now that she brought it up, he thought about it for a few seconds, and eventually realized that his instinct was right. It was the right thing to do. “She’s in trouble because of me, isn’t she?”

Kate apparently didn’t see it the same way. “Mom and I got you into this. We got ourselves into it. If you help us, we want it to be because you’re committed to it, not because you feel some misguided sense of obligation.”

“I’m not saying I’ll help with your rebellion or whatever. Whatever kind of chosen one you think I am, last prince of the Caluthian royal family or whatever… kind of sounds like you’re counting on me to be a hero, and I dunno, I’m no hero. But I feel like I owe you a rescue, so we’ll do a rescue. Then I’m out.”

Kate didn’t quite follow Adam’s reasoning, but didn’t have the energy to argue. She just shrugged and mumbled, “Oh. That almost made sense.” Adam beamed proudly.

De Anima
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De Anima: Prologue

An ambient haze of drizzling rain and clouds of yellowish chemical weapons pervaded the battlefield.  The countryside was riddled with trenches marking the lines of the war. In between, no man’s land strewn with barbed wire and bodies. Mud-caked soldiers surged over the walls of the trenches and were mown down by gunfire before getting halfway across. The rumble of artillery fire rolled like thunder over the sharper rat-a-tat of machine guns; a shell exploded in the trenches; burning men screamed.

The newspapers were reporting that the death toll had reached five million. Nobody quite remembered why the fighting had begun[1]. It had taken only a few years for most of the world to get roped into the war. By this late stage, all involved agreed that the war could not end until all their enemies had been soundly defeated.

This particular border was, to a casual observer, largely unremarkable. Several hundred miles long, largely farms and grassland, a few scattered tree groves. It was significant for only two things: first, the nations on either side of the border happened to be on opposing sides of the war; second, (and, as it happened to transpire, much more importantly,) it was scattered with ancient ruins. Three hundred years previously, the mighty Caluthian Empire had been crushed, its holdings divided, its cities burned. Nothing was left of the old Caluthian capital but these ruins.

Tutosa and Etovraan had no particular quarrel with one another, really. Indeed, relations had been strong before the war. The wool of Tutosan alpacas was prized worldwide, and Etovraan imported more Tutosan wool than any other nation, to supply its famed garment factories. Unfortunately, Tutosa happened to have a mutual defense pact with another neighboring kingdom, so when hostilities began to flare, Tutosa was forced to decide between two old allies.

Similarly, the Republic of Mundus only joined the war in response to a seemingly unprovoked surprise attack by another third party altogether. But, almost as soon as the war began, a newly minted Mundi colonel persuaded his superiors to send him and the 5^th Infantry Regiment to the Tutosan-Etovraanian border.

So it was that most of the ruins of the old Caluthian capital began the war under Tutosan control, but a concerted, sustained effort by the Mundi 5^th Infantry had pushed the battle lines slowly west.

The ruins had already been ravaged by time, neglect, and long-ago wars. This long battle had been no kinder. Those few pillars that had survived the three hundred years since the glory days of Caluthi had been blown flat by artillery fire from both sides.

The colonel had found it challenging, but not impossible, to orchestrate an archaeological excavation in the middle of a bloody trench war. Luckily, the most important parts of the ruins were buried deep underground, relatively safe from the war. With solid enough reinforcement for the tunnels, the dig could proceed with only minimal danger.

In the midst of a particularly dense bit of ruin, there was an entrance to an ancient building, partially collapsed, the rubble only recently cleared away. Two Mundi soldiers bearing rifles and nervous expressions flanked the entrance. Their post was a little too far from the front to worry about stray bullets, but shells from the sky were an omnipresent danger.

Beyond the half-collapsed entrance, old, crumbling, damp stairs descended about a hundred feet down, into the dig site proper, a maze of tunnels, strewn with stones and rubble, lit by kerosene lanterns hanging from the walls every thirty feet or so. Soldiers worked efficiently at gathering stones and stacking them neatly out of the way. Down here, the sounds of rain, machine guns and artillery faded to an occasional dull rumble; the world shook slightly and dust sifted from the ceiling whenever a shell exploded too close, but other than that, there was only the noise of soldiers moving rock.

Down several maze-like passageways, at the end of a newly-excavated tunnel, there was an old bronze door. The door was engraved with warnings in the language of Old Caluthi and half a dozen other languages, most of them long dead. The colonel had already translated most of them: warnings like “beware”, “turn back”, “a curse shall befall who enter here” – standard fare. Two Mundi soldiers swung a portable battering ram against the door, the repeated slams echoing down the narrow tunnels. The colonel regretted the senseless destruction of valuable old Caluthian works, but they didn’t have infinite time, and the door was sealed, welded to its frame at the time of its creation – which he saw as a promising development, all things considered.

As far as Colonel Julian Malachi was concerned, all the fighting on the Tutosan front had been dedicated ultimately to this one purpose – for that matter, not just the war, but his entire career, even his entire life since he was a boy reading old Caluthian stories in his uncle’s study. And they were close to his goal. He felt it in his bones, he tasted it in the back of his mouth, the hair on the nape of his neck stood on end with the feeling of impending success.

As far as Helen was concerned, the whole thing was a pointless waste of time. She didn’t care about the war or the colonel’s grandiose stories about Old Caluthi and what he would do when he uncovered its ancient power. She was content to indulge the colonel in chasing after myths and legends as long as his money was good – which it very much was. She had a family back in Tutosa, and they would be the richest family in town once the war wrapped up.

With a sudden deafening, creaking crash of metal and stone, the old door surrendered to the battering ram, breaking loose from its moorings and raising a huge cloud of gray dust as it landed in the room beyond. Helen and the two soldiers backed away, coughing.

Visibility within the dense cloud of dust was approximately zero, but that didn’t stop the colonel. He just produced a handkerchief and held it to his face, raising his lantern high to illuminate a few feet of dust-cloud as he ventured through the doorway. The dust stung his eyes, but this close to his goal, he refused to let himself be put off or delayed by such trivial matters. His manner was as one entering the gaping maw of some huge, defeated beast to plunder its gullet, almost completely confident that it’s actually dead.

The door was lying at a slant on top of a heap of fallen dirt and stone blocks. Julian stepped over it, barely managing to avoid stumbling over the heap. Then, just above the faint rumbling aftermath of the falling door, he heard a click and whirr of some long-disused mechanism. He froze, wincing at his own foolishness, suddenly realizing that yes, of course this place would be trapped. The men who built it had judged the object lying entombed within it to be the gravest existential threat to all of humanity – they wouldn’t rely on a mere sealed door carved with warnings to protect it.

But nothing happened. No swinging blade fell from the ceiling, no poison darts shot from the walls, no trap door opened up beneath his feet to dump him in a pit of spikes. The walls and ceiling entirely failed to begin closing in, deadly neurotoxic gas didn’t fill the room, and nobody would have to outrun any giant boulders. Only one thing of note happened: the dust cloud slowly cleared.

Helen saw Colonel Malachi frozen in place, and stepped up to shove him bodily aside. Kneeling where he had been standing, she pried the pressure plate from the floor with a penknife retrieved from one of her many pockets. Several vital bits of the trap’s mechanism were corroded through or broken by simple entropy. Laughing, she said, “I’ve seen scores of these, and every one was busted all to hell. Nothing to worry about. You can get on with your looting, boss.”

The colonel was not entirely reassured. Hopefully the thing he was after, the grave existential threat, was more sturdily built than the traps meant to keep people away from it. But he didn’t dwell on this thought for long, because the settling dust was revealing more of the room. It was round, with no markings on the walls. Aside from rubble and ruin, there was nothing to distract from the old bronze box perched innocuously on a low stone pedestal in the middle of the room. The box appeared to be approximately a one-foot cube, and Colonel Malachi was absolutely certain that this was what he was after. Helen hung back, and the soldiers took up positions by the door, but the colonel had no such reluctance; he approached the pedestal.

His manner almost worshipful, he used his handkerchief to brush centuries of dust from the top of the box. Tucking the handkerchief into a front pocket of his uniform, he began to stalk slowly around the pedestal, his gaze never leaving the box, taking it in from all angles. “It’s over. This is it.”

Helen stepped up beside him to examine the box, saying, “If the search is over, you’ll be paying me and sending me on my way, yeah?”

The colonel scarcely paid her any attention, pushing her aside. “You’re thinking much too small. It’s all over. The search, the war, everything. This Artifact is the key to total, crushing victory.” Grasping the lid of the box, he tried to open it, and found it still firmly locked, even after three centuries.

Helen’s skepticism must have been evident on her face, because Colonel Malachi gave her a disapproving look and continued, “The histories are very clear on the Artifact’s power. And the histories have led us straight so far; after all, here we are.”

Pushing the colonel aside, Helen jammed the tip of her penknife into the lock and proceeded to jimmy it, objecting, “Still sounds like mumb-jumbo to me. I mean, zombies? What’s next, a loudhailer that controls dragons? A magic lamp that conjures fairies?” When the blade of her penknife broke off with an unceremonious snap, she blinked in confusion. “Huh.”

The colonel gestured for Helen to get out of his way, his tone suddenly brusque as he said, “Thank you, you’ve been more than helpful. That will be all. Collect your pay from the quartermaster on your way –”

He was interrupted by the explosion of an artillery shell on the surface directly above them. The earth rumbled and shook as huge stone blocks tumbled from the ceiling, kicking up another huge cloud of gray dust. Helen yelled as she fell to the ground. The colonel threw himself across the old metal box, shielding it from harm from his body. The colonel’s lantern, thrown across the room, went out.

In the darkness, the air was choked with dust. Everyone was coughing uncontrollably and intermittently as the rumbling aftershocks faded away.

Eventually, fumbling with his pockets in the darkness, the colonel located a match and struck it. With its light, he found his lantern and lit it, illuminating the room and surveying the damage.

Everything was caked and occluded by white dust. The ceiling had completely fallen in near the doorway, blocking the way out. One soldier was buried under the rubble. At a gesture from the colonel, the other soldier, who had managed to get out of the way in time, began shifting rocks away from the rubble heap.

The colonel reached up to set his lantern on top of the box on the pedestal, then clambered to his feet, coughing. He felt a stinging in the palms of his hands, and noticed that they had been scraped bloody in the fall. Using his handkerchief to wipe blood from his hand, he looked around.

Helen, meanwhile, examined her leg. Her grubby civilian khakis had been torn and were turning slowly dark red with blood. Her leg hurt immensely, especially when she poked at it. She concluded that it had been broken by falling stones. She mustered the energy for the single expletive, “Balls.”

The colonel was affected an unconcerned air as he inspected the fallen rubble. “It would appear we’re somewhat trapped.”

Helen tried to draw attention to her bleeding leg with a, “Julian.”

The colonel ignored her, and continued, “No matter.” Limping to the pile of rubble, he selected a softball-sized rock, and returned to the pedestal.

“Julian.”

The colonel took a solid whack at the box’s lock with the rock.

“Julian.”

Another whack, and the lid of the box popped ajar.

“Julian!”

Dropping the rock on the ground, the colonel lifted the box’s lid and peered inside. Inside, he saw a perfect black sphere, which glowed faintly with a pale blue light. The room suddenly felt colder. “I told you, it’s all over now.” He lifted the sphere from its resting place and looked into it. Its glass exterior was a nearly opaque black, but he could just make out the faint outlines of complex mechanisms inside, clicking and whispering softly away.

Everyone stared in silence. Eventually, Helen managed to ask, “How much d’you figure that’s worth?”

Colonel Malachi, finally noticing Helen, turned to stare incredulously at her. “Worth? You would put a price on the future? An end to war, to violence, to crime and terror? Peace and prosperity for everyone? All in the palm of my hand!” He held the orb aloft above his head, his injured hands leaving a smear of blood on its perfectly smooth surface.

Helen was unperturbed by the colonel’s suddenly megalomaniacal display. For a moment, all was silence.

Then stone blocks began to tumble from the pile of rubble blocking the door. The surviving soldier backed away nervously. A hand punched out from the pile and began scrabbling around, dislodging more blocks.

Then, with superhuman strength, the fallen soldier burst from the pile, scattering stone blocks like styrofoam such that they crashed against the walls. He staggered away from the debris pile, then slowly straightened. His head flopped limply against his shoulder, his neck twisted at a crazy, unnatural angle. His eyes were dull, his face slack and lifeless. This soldier, despite moving about under his own power, was clearly dead.

The colonel breathed, triumphant, “It’s over.”

Standing on a high point of the partially-collapsed ruins, Colonel Julian Malachi surveyed the battlefield. Darkness had fallen, but he held the Artifact aloft, and the ruins were bathed in its blue light. There was a bit of a lull in the fighting. The only sound was the drumming of rain.

After a few seconds, corpses lying in the no man’s land between the trenches, several hundred yards away, began to shift and stir. One by one – first those closest to the colonel, then those further away – the corpses slowly rose to their feet, and begin to shuffle lifelessly away from the colonel, towards the far trenches. Dead soldiers from both armies marched, most of them carrying the guns they bore in life.

The soldiers in the far trenches started pointing and yelling in their native tongue. They roused themselves quickly, firing machine guns on the corpses in no man’s land. But for each dead soldier that took a lucky shot to the head and collapsed, a dozen more kept coming, bullet-riddled but uninjured.

When the shambling corpses reached the far trenches, most of the Tutosan soldiers panicked and broke, running before their suddenly unbeatable foes. Many were killed when the shambling corpses started firing their weapons.

One Tutosan soldier threw down his weapon, knelt in the mud, and began to pray with a small holy symbol on a chain around his neck. He was shot in the back by a dead soldier from his own army, who didn’t even break stride.

An artillery crew landed a shell in the ruins several yards from Colonel Malachi. He barely managed to keep his balance when it exploded. His ears ringing, he wisely began to make his way down from the ruins.

A Tutosan soldier in a gun nest turned his machine gun on the undead soldiers in the trenches, the rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat constant and ineffective. The magazine ran out and the gun’s barking was reduced to a quiet whirr. The soldier drew a small pistol and fired it at the oncoming corpses; one of them shot him almost casually before moving on.

                Soon, the corpses were beyond the trenches, and still inexorably advancing.

---

[1] Later historians would say it was precipitated by a minor skirmish over the shifting of a river defining the border between Qejj and Etovraan, an assassination in Mundus, a not unusual flareup of hostilities between North and South Kehushide, the kidnapping of a mob boss’s daughter in Izkazka, or a freak hurricane which the sorcerers who ruled Tokoztess blamed on their neighbors across the water in Lawoskkods. In truth, all of these events individually marked the earliest stages of the larger war.

De Anima

First - Next

Kade and the Skeleton King

Kade was a great stage magician.

Kade performed tricks and illusions for an audience and at birthday parties.

Kade's magic was sleight of hand and misdirection.

Sleight of hand meant her hands moved too fast to follow.

Misdirection meant you looked where she wanted you to look.

She did tricks with coins, ropes, or bits of colored cloth.

She always knew which was your card and could make dice come up any number she wanted.

One day, Kade performed at the court of the Skeleton King.

She wowed the spooks with her best card tricks.

She amused the werewolves by vanishing and reappearing coins.

Even the witches were impressed when she conjured pigeons from a hat.

The zombies were just confused.

Kade impressed the Skeleton King so much that when the time came for her to leave, he imprisoned her instead of paying her.

The Skeleton King insisted she stay and perform for his court every day forever.

She had no choice.

If Kade tried to leave, the Skeleton King’s minions would grab her.

Kade had a plan, though.

She convinced the Skeleton King to allow her one hobby: whittling, carving small bits of wood.

On the first day she was imprisoned, Kade whittled a stick into the shape of a small finger-bone – a phalanx.

While performing for the Skeleton King's court that night, she did a card trick.

While she asked the Skeleton King if the ace of spades was his card (it was), she cleverly swapped the wooden finger-bone for one of his real fingerbones.

After the performance, she went back to her cell and hid the real finger-bone in a box under her cot.

The next day, Kade whittled a stick into the shape of a rib, a chest-bone.

Performing for the court that night, she “found” a coin in the Skeleton King’s ribcage.

When she did, she swapped the wooden rib for one of his real ribs.

Afterwards, she returned to her cell and hid the real rib with the real finger-bone.

The next day, Kade whittled a branch into a femur – that’s a leg-bone.

At the performance, she sawed the Skeleton King in half.

When she put him back together, she had replaced one of his femurs with the wooden one.

She hid the real leg-bone with the finger-bone and the rib.

And so Kade kept going, whittling a bone from wood every day.

Performing for the Skeleton King’s court every night.

Swapping the wooden bone for one of the Skeleton King’s real bones.

Hiding the real bone in the box under her cot.

Kade swapped one of the Skeleton King’s toe-bones in a dice trick.

She swapped his humerus – that’s an arm-bone – in some funny business where she released a flock of pigeons from her hat.

She swapped a vertebra – that’s a bone in the spine, in the back – when she tied the Skeleton King up with rope for a trick.

Eventually, on the 206th day – for that is how many bones there are – Kade whittled a skull from a thick chunk of wood.

That night, at her performance at the Skeleton King’s court, she pulled a long colorful scarf from the Skeleton King’s ear-hole.

While pulling the scarf, she swapped the wooden skull for the Skeleton King’s real skull.

This was the last bone to swap.

That night, she returned to her cell, and pulled out the box of the Skeleton King’s original bones.

But this time, instead of putting the skull in the box, Kade did something new.

She took all the bones she had taken from the Skeleton King and reassembled them together into a complete skeleton.

The skeleton sat up and frowned.

The skeleton marched straight to the court of the Skeleton King.

There were two Skeleton Kings: one made of whittled wood, one made of original bone.

The two Skeleton Kings got into an argument.

Each one thought he was the real Skeleton King.

The Skeleton King made of wood argued that he had never stopped being the Skeleton King.

His bones were swapped out for wood one at a time, so gradually he never noticed.

The Skeleton King made of bone argued that he was the real one because he was made of all the original Skeleton King bones.

Each Skeleton King instructed his minions to grab and imprison the other.

The Skeleton King’s minions did not know which Skeleton King to grab.

While they were all distracted with this problem, they did not notice Kade sneaking out of the court.

Kade ran far away, never coming within a hundred miles of the Skeleton King’s court again.

Legend has it that the two Skeleton Kings are still arguing about which is the real one to this day.

Fear Not

In the long ago, in time that was, before the quarrels and strife of recent centuries:

The new Archbishop of Banor had been raised to her position through promising a tremendous plan to defeat Calabia. Seven times in the centuries Banor had tried righteously to conquer Calabia; seven times the bloodlords’ military superiority and judicious political alliances had rebuffed the crusades. Eight is not an auspicious number to the Numielites of Banor, but the Archbishop made grand promises, much grander than any portents allowed for.

The Archbishop’s tremendous plan was this: she prayed to Numiel to send angels to free all the food from the stockpens of Calabia, so that the food might rise in revolt and Banor might sweep in as conquering heroes.

And so the Archbishop’s prayer went up the celestial bureaucracy of Numiel’s demesne. It may actually have reached Numiel, or it may have been intercepted by an archangel, saving Numiel’s attention for more important matters – it is difficult to imagine what might have been more important to our god’s attention than this, but little do we know of the bureaucracy.

It is known that someone at or near the top received the prayer, and answered it by delegating, sending an order back down the celestial bureaucracy. It is not known why the order was passed on by all the ranks of angels – perhaps the might of Calabia was respected even in the heavens, perhaps the bloodlords’ intertangled political alliances extended even there, perhaps the difficulty of the task was generally recognized by the host, perhaps Numiel’s ineffable designs simply called for it to be so.

Eventually, the order wended its way to an inexperienced junior angel. His complete true name is not known – it may even have been erased from reality as a consequence of his actions – but history knows the angel in question as Arossiel. Arossiel had little experience with humans, but he was eager to prove himself to his superiors, and so he volunteered to take on the task of freeing all the food of Calabia as Banor’s army approached, rather than passing it on as all above him had done.

In the stockpens of Calabia, there was a food who was a human woman. Her hair was black and short, and her skin was pale as teeth, and the name that she was called by her friends, and that we call her today, was Lily – the overseers had a different name for her, or more precisely an alphanumeric code, the specifics of which are of little importance and have been lost to us.

It came to pass that, as Lily was getting ready for sleep in the stockpen, this celestial angel Arossiel came to her, a frightful whirlwind of wings and eyes, shining hot and brilliant like the midday desert sun, intoning in a terrible and awful voice, “FEAR NOT”.

Utterly disregarding Arossiel’s perfectly clear instruction, Lily gave a terrified squeak and dropped her hairbrush.

The angel had little understanding of mortals, but it was quickly becoming clear they cannot follow simple instructions, so he pondered for a moment, then did his best to tone down his terrifying affect somewhat by mimicking Lily’s humanity, folding in wings over eyes and shining less radiantly.

He was between Lily and the door, and there were no windows in the stockpens that one might dive out of, so she could not flee; she could only cower in terror.

Arossiel began apologizing and begging Lily’s forgiveness, “Terribly sorry, please forgive me; I did mean it genuinely: fear not.” He began to sense that his holy mission to free the food and raise them up in revolt was already going poorly, barely having started at all. He shrunk down further, modulated his voice and his apologies, trying to calm and soothe this petrified human.

After many long minutes of his apologies, Lily came to more thoroughly grasp that this unfamiliar creature was not there to hurt her. She grew less terrified and more curious, eventually opening a dialogue with a befuddled, “What…?”

Just the same while, Arossiel began to panic about how far behind he was already running on his mission. The armies of Banor were thundering towards Calabia, and he hadn’t even freed a single food. It was taking this long to get her mood barely back to where it started before he showed up. Still, he tried, “It is very important: I need to rescue you, and you need to rise up against your overseers. You and all your friends.”

A dozen problems with this request flashed instantly through Lily’s mind, and she protested, “I have three friends. Together, we have…” She looked around for an example, then picked the hairbrush off the floor and brandished it like a weapon, “Not much more than this. The overseers have… even if they didn’t have swords, which they do, they’re a lot stronger than any of us.”

“You outnumber the overseers ten to one!”

“Yeah, and they could take ten of us each even unarmed. We’d be torn to shreds.”

Arossiel examined Lily’s human arms and legs, consciously recognizing for the first time that she was, unlike an angel – or for that matter a vampire like the Calabian overseers and ruling class – not equipped with much in the way of natural weapons, defenses, or abilities. He grew crestfallen; he had been so confident that he could pull this off, but his unfamiliarity with human anatomy was proving to be his undoing. It was far too late in the mission to requisition incandescent holy arms and armor with which to equip a myriad of humans. “Oh.” His light grew dim and his many wings drooped.

Lily, native to the stockpens, was intimately familiar with despair; she could recognize it easily, even in an angel. She sat by Arossiel and reached out to touch him. Where some of us might have criticized, might have scolded him for not thinking his plan through, Lily had more kindness in her heart than we do. She was still not clear on the exact nature of Arossiel’s mistake or the extent of his inexperience, but she intuited the general shape of the error and said, “It’s a mistake anyone could have made.”

Arossiel remained filled with doubt and despair, but Lily gradually calmed him with soothing words and gentle touch. At this point, he fell in love with this individual human, and with humanity itself, seeing here the best of it in her. Still, he realized that he would not be able to convince a myriad of food to rise up in revolt if he could not even persuade one that it was possible. So it was that Arossiel stayed with Lily that night instead, a more pleasant experience all around, and she taught him much about humans and what he would need to know to actually help them.

Battle was soon joined in the fields of Calabia, and the Archbishop’s armies soon lay derelict and ruined. The fate of the eighth Banor invasion of Calabia had been decided before it began.

Arossiel the angel fled Calabia with Lily. He fled from his duties and from Numiel’s service; he fell from grace and lost his wings – though it’s unclear just how literal the histories are on the point of the angel’s wings and the loss thereof. The two wandered the world together for at least some decades.

After Lily’s death, Arossiel continued to wander, now alone. More learned and exalted theologians than I have debated important questions about Arossiel’s angelhood, his true name, and his place in history. However, I insist that he never truly escaped his nature or his love of humanity, because it is known that he helped to solve mortal problems wherever he went, helping humans without the direction or blessing of his celestial former superiors. We have records of good works perpetrated by Arossiel dating at least a century from the day he met Lily in the stockpens of Calabia, before he falls from the pages of history.

Today, Arossiel is generally reckoned among the saints, though he has long been deemed ineligible for official ecclesiastical recognition.

From the Hagioigraphy, chronicle of the lives of Numielite saints by Dord the Tall, Archbishop of Shell, written some eight hundred years after the events described.