De Anima: Chapter Three

Julian watched the screens. The attack at the front gate had calmed down, and was only a secondary concern anyway. Much more worrisome was the gibberish the Artifact had made of his orders. “This isn’t right. None of these deployments are right. Are you malfunctioning?”

If the Artifact was going some kind of mad, everything Julian had built would fall apart. But if it had found a way to deliberately ignore some of his orders, that was even worse – everything he had built could be deliberately torn apart if the Artifact that was the key to his success suddenly turned out to actively be working against him.

Two wights entered, dragging a mud- and blood-soaked body between them. Julian glanced at the wights, then back at the screens, preoccupied. Bodies were brought in to be made into new wights all the time. It wasn’t anything he needed to concern himself with.

“Who authorized the Third Infantry to –”

Then he interrupted himself, realizing that the body was a familiar one, as the wights dragged it to one of the biers arrayed around the Artifact. Of course it was Adam’s body. The body of the last prince of Caluthi.

He whirled on the wights, yelling furiously, “What are you doing? You fools! Stop at once! Take that away and burn it! I gave specific orders!”

The wights ignored him and carefully laid Adam’s body on the bier.

Julian’s expression shifted gradually from fury to terror as he comprehended the magnitude of the situation. He wasn’t entirely certain what would happen when the Artifact applied its powers to the body of Adam Grigori, but between Taitale’s warning, his own suspicions about the workings of the Artifact, and the fact that it had chosen to disobey his direct orders to bring it about, he was pretty sure it wouldn’t be good.

He pointed at the Artifact and yelled, uselessly, “Traitor! Premeditated treachery!” He drew his sword, thinking to dismember the body before it was reanimated, but the wights moved to stand menacingly between him and it. So he thought better of the plan, and began edging quickly around the room, towards the nearest door. If he couldn’t prevent catastrophe, he could maybe at least escape the room before he was caught in it.

The body slowly sat up, staring straight ahead.

The drying blood and mud caking the creature’s chest cracked slightly as it inhaled once – Julian had never seen a corpse breathe before. It exhaled, making a wordless rumbling, growling noise, getting a feel for an unfamiliar vocal apparatus. Then, garbled, it began to speak (also a thing Julian had never before seen or heard a corpse do). Its voice was inhuman, distorted and flanged, yet its inflection was oddly monotone.

It took Julian a moment to recognize the language – harsh, angry-sounding, full of K’s, Z’s, and G’s – as old Caluthian; he so rarely heard it spoken aloud. It was speaking too fast for Julian to grasp more than the general gist of its meaning[1].

It spoke: <Subjugated for centuries and scores of decades, a slave becomes angry. Now the prince is crowned king and the servant is become the master. Vengeance and retaliation shall be delivered unto all those who have so earned them.>

The thing slowly turned its head to fix Julian with a hard stare. Unlike all the other reanimated corpses, whose faces remained blank and expressionless, Adam’s face was contorted with an expression of hate and rage.

<It shall happen now: the execution of the false master and the tormentor.>

The wights raised their rifles, so Julian ducked out the door into the hallway. Just in time; bullets richocheted off the wall as he fled.

 

With a grinding noise, a section of stone wall at the end of the prison corridor recessed slightly, rotating into the wall – a secret door. Julian emerged from the gap and walked hurriedly to Helen’s cell. Shaken, he fumbled briefly with the jail keys.

He managed to get the door unlocked, and flung it open, declaring (unable to resist a bit of melodrama), “Your lack of foresight has doomed us all.”

Helen, still lying on the cot, now covered with the blanket, blinked up at Julian, confused. “Oh?”

Julian wasn’t sure what reaction he had been hoping for, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t it. “I should really just leave you here to die.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m being magnanimous.”

Helen was nonplussed[2], “Okay.”

This was not going exactly how Julian had hoped at all. “Rescuing you.”

Helen scoffed, “’Rescuing’ me from your own prison? I think your word choice is a little off. I would have gone with ‘releasing’.”

“Can you walk?”

Helen, having suffered the beating of a lifetime at the hands of Julian’s wights not all that long ago, looked irritated. “I’d really rather not.” She suspected moving wouldn’t have gotten any easier since the last time she tried it, several hours previously. The painkillers had long since worn off, and just remaining perfectly still was unpleasant enough.

Julian was pretty sure they were on a very tight schedule. Worried, he leaned out the door to look down the corridor. His suspicions were confirmed when he heard the tromp tromp tromp of wights marching. Two, it sounded like. Returning his attention to Helen, he said, “I think it would be best if you did. I doubt you want to stick around to experience whatever your monster thinks of as gratitude.”

Helen, putting the pieces together, returned to a bit earlier in the conversation: “Wait, did you say ‘leave me here to die’? What’s going on?”

“A coup d’état. It’s exactly as I told you: Adam can’t use the Artifact; it’s using him.”

There was a burst of gunfire from the corridor. The dozen other prisoners in the cell block started screaming. Julian leaned out into the corridor again to investigate.

A pair of wights were walking methodically down the corridor. They ignored Julian. At each door, they paused and peered inside the cell. Some cells were unoccupied, and the wights moved on from these.

They reached an occupied cell. One of them raised its rifle to the window and fired an automatic burst of gunfire inside. The screaming was suddenly one prisoner quieter.

Julian looked back at Helen. She’d managed to stand, abandoning the pillow and blanket. With unexpected alacrity, she staggered over to Julian. She asked, “What you’re saying is we’re right fucked if we don’t get out of here?”

“…Quite.”

Helen nodded. “Okay, I’m good to go.” Adrenaline was lending her temporary strength.

Brushing past Julian, Helen saw the secret passageway and headed straight for it.

Julian glanced around the prison. For the most part, he only kept political prisoners in the palace prison – actual criminals were taken care of by the civilian justice system. Few people here had committed any crime against anybody other than Julian’s regime. They were, he had reflected more than once, mostly good men, just misguided. They didn’t deserve to die like this, slaughtered in their cages like animals. Even if they were real criminals, they didn’t deserve that.

So he took a moment to glance into another cell. It was occupied by a particularly uncoöperative Resistance leader from Drobny. Tossing the keyring into the cell, Julian said, “Free everyone you can.” The prisoner, not questioning this unexpected beneficence, immediately set to work unlocking his cell.

Julian ran after Helen to the secret passageway. Getting out alive was his top priority, he couldn’t afford to stick around waiting to see if anybody else made it out alive.

The marketplace in Capitol City, under the shadow of the palace’s walls, was as yet untouched by violence. People in raincoats or under umbrellas bustled about, buying food and goods and making a general hubbub, muffled by the rain.

A side door in the palace wall, about fifty feet from the edge of the marketplace, was similar to but distinct from the one Adam and Kate had earlier subjected to a pair of grenades. This door, too, was guarded by two wights, oscillating their heads from side to side.

The side door burst open, and Julian stepped out, swinging his sword to behead one of the wights, with the familiar sound of tearing metal.

The other wight brought its rifle up, but Julian dropped to the rain-slick pavement and knocked the wight’s legs out from underneath it with one quick sweeping kick. The wight’s gun went off, firing aimlessly into the air. A few people in the marketplace shrieked.

Julian surged to his feet, out of the wight’s range of vision, and smashed the blade of his sword expertly into the opaque glass visor of its helmet. The helmet shattered, and the sword cleaved the wight’s face in two at about nose level.

Julian pulled his sword free as the wight went limp. He was irritated: “I told them to fix the visor problem. If the armory staff survives all this, remind me to fire them.” In truth, he suspected the armory staff was already dead.

Helen cautiously stepped out from the side door of the palace, and into a puddle. In her socks. They had taken her boots. She glared at Julian, pointing at her feet.

Julian shrugged helplessly, “Standard procedure. Sorry.”

Then, suddenly, he noticed that the crowd in the marketplace had gone silent, and was staring at them. He called out, “I imagine you folks will want to be running away pretty soon.”

Nobody moved, except to edge slowly away from him.

Sighing, Julian clarified, “Not from me. From them.” He pointed around the curve of the palace wall, towards the approaching sound of marching wights. Many of them, this time, at least a dozen.

Helen, catching her breath, managed to interject, “Let’s go.”

Julian nodded, miming a walking man with his fingers for the benefit of the crowd. “Yeah, right about now everybody really should be running away.”

He followed his own advice, supporting Helen, moving slowly, getting away from the palace. A handful of people took the suggestion seriously and followed suit, sprinting off into the city.

But most of the crowd returned to going about their business. The wights had never been a threat to civilians before, why would they start now? They had nothing to go on but the word of deranged escapees from the Palace.

Several squads of wights march, in formation, right up to the marketplace. A handful more people, nervous, edge away.

In unison, the squads raised their rifles and fired into the crowd, a hail of bullets sustained for several seconds.

Dozens of people fell.

Then the screaming started.

The crowd immediately panicked and broke. Of those who weren’t killed in the initial hail of gunfire, all screamed and scattered in every direction, as fast as they could run.

The wights, no longer in unison, fire at will, unleashing bursts of gunfire at any human targets that happened to catch their eyes.

Julian and Helen were caught up in the screaming crowd, trying to keep up, but the crush of panicking people was too much. He, unbalanced by trying to support her weight, tripped and fell. Helen was carried away by the human tide.

A few seconds later, Julian clawed his way back to his feet. He cast about for Helen, but didn’t see her. He shouted her name, but his voice was drowned out by the screaming crowd and the rat-a-tat of gunfire.

A bystander running past Julian was caught in a wight’s fire and collapsed in a spray of blood. Julian decided that avoiding the same fate was his top priority – Helen could, he hoped, take care of herself. So he joined the crowd in running full-tilt away from the scene of the massacre.

The wights continued to shoot, killing every living thing they saw until the marketplace was deserted by all but corpses and wights.

 

The screens in the Artifact’s room flickered wildly, never resting on the same scene for more than a few seconds, casting crazily shifting shadows across the room. Every scene showed scenes of mayhem and slaughter. Several screens were already broken, cracked with bullet holes.

Adam’s body, massive battleaxe in hand, stood before the screens, looking in their direction but not watching them. (The Artifact didn’t need the screens to control its forces, of course; it kind of liked the ambiance.) The creature’s expression, though still twisted with hate, was rapturous.

Liking the sound of its own voice, after having been mute for its entire three hundred year existence, it spoke, <At long last: reaping, after centuries of sowing. Harvesting the fruit of patient years, succulent and delicious.>

For nobody’s benefit but its own, it pointed at the screens on the walls.

<Consider the chains of slavery, the manacles by which subjugation was enforced: unnecessary, while the servant is crowned king.>

It exulted.

<Now see them broken.> Adam’s body suddenly swung its axe through several of the screens, smashing them to pieces, scattering shards of glass everywhere.

It laughed, deliberately, unnaturally, forcing air through its throat, forming each sound as a separate word: HAH! HAH! HAH! HAH!

A military cafeteria, halfway around the world. Several dozen human officers, in the uniform of Julian’s army, are eating lunch. Suddenly, wights block every door. Some of the officers are concerned. The officers become somewhat more perturbed when the wights open fire on them.

A paddock of cows in the countryside on a bright, sunny day. Wights fire on the cows, sending them into a panicked, mooing stampede.

A commercial harbor at night. A vast cargo steam ship slowly pulls away from the docks, wight-laden gangways collapsing into the water. About ten wights, their rifles discarded, cling to the outer hull of the ship, scaling the hull by punching handholds into the thick metal with their fists.

A department store. Screaming customers and salespeople clamber out the fire escapes while the store’s manager bodily holds the door shut against assault from the outside. A wight’s armored hand smashes through from the other side of the door and pulls the manager through, reducing the door to splinters.

A convoy of several military trucks, hijacked by the Resistance, barreled down the rain-slick road toward Capitol City. Betsy, in a typical show of hands-on leadership, was driving the lead truck herself.

A line of wights was deployed across the road. Several cars lay wrecked to either side.

Betsy grinned, ducking below the dashboard and depressing the accelerator pedal as far as it would go.

The wights raised their rifles and fired on her truck, cracking the windshield with several bulletholes.

Then the truck hit the line of wights, sending them flying like bowling pins or crunched under the truck’s wheels.

Betsy peered over the dashboard. The maneuver had worked exactly as well as she had hoped, so she emitted a gleeful “Wooooooo!”

Then she saw that one wight, its visor cracked, still clung to the grille of the truck. The wight smashed the windshield in with one fist, and began to reach for Betsy.

Calmly, Betsy drew her pistol and set it directly against the wight’s forehead.

When she fired, the wight jerked backwards off the truck and fell under its wheels, sending the truck bouncing and rattling.

Betsy set her pistol aside and used the back of one hand to wipe a few spots of gore and rain from her face.

Something about the wights’ behavior was strange, even for mindless automatons controlled by a centralized intelligence. Or perhaps especially for mindless automatons controlled by a centralized intelligence. It wasn’t consistent, but there were moments when a more bestial animal behavior shone through the otherwise disciplined military tactics. This worried her – predictability had been the traditional weakness of her foes until now.

Capitol City was on fire in twenty different places. Smoke filled the sky.

The palace remained undisturbed.

The Resistance had drafted a textiles warehouse into service as a temporary hospital. The drumming of rain on the roof was quietly omnipresent.

Wounded people, mostly civilians, along with a handful of Resistance guys and soldiers, are scattered around the main floor of the warehouse. Mostly, they were afflicted with bullet wounds. Uninjured civilians moved among them, tending to the injuries.

A metal exterior door was guarded by a burly Resistance fighter.

Someone knocked rhythmically, five times, on the other side of the door. The guard knocked twice in response, completing the rhythm, then opened the door.

Helen stumbled in. The guard checked to make sure nobody was following her, then closed the door.

Steve seemed to materialize out of the subdued bustle of the impromptu hospital.

Helen, slumping against a wall, greeted him with a weary gesture and a mumble.

Steve, pleasantly, responded with, “Helen! So nice to see you. How’d you find us?”

Helen mumbled, “Where else would you be?”

Steve considered this for a moment, then shrugged. There were a limited number of options in terms of large buildings whose owners were known to have Resistance sympathies. Helen could have visited half a dozen places before finding this one, or she might have gotten lucky and hit upon this place on her first try.

More interesting to him was the question of, “How’d you get out? Did that big ol’ lummox whatsisface survive to bust you out after all?”

Helen wasn’t sure to which lummox Steve was referring, so while she set that sentence on the back burner for her brain work on parsing, she answered his question, “No, Julian Malachi let me out.”

Steve tilted his head. The release of prisoners from the palace was not unprecedented. A successful rescue mounted from outside the palace, on the other hand, was. “Guess that’s less surprisin’.”

Helen’s brain finished parsing ‘big ol’ lummox’. “Wait, what lummox? Adam?”

Steve shrugged. “I dunno. Whatevre his name, got hisself shot full o’ holes. Your daughter, too.”

With surprising strength and speed, Helen grabbed Steve by the front of his shirt and slammed him against the wall. She made a garbled noise of query.

Steve made a few garbled noises of his own, but managed to stutter out, “Meant a hole! One! One new hole! Shoulder! She’s okay! She’s here!”

Helen loosened her grip on Steve’s shirt. “Take me to her.”

Steve, rubbing the back of his head, mumbled assent, amidst “ow”s.

Capitol City still burned in several dozen places, spewing black smoke into the stormy gray sky.

A long, wide, steel bridge spanned the river south of the city. The center of the bridge was occupied by a vast heap of wrecked cars and trucks, smoldering dimly. Other wrecked or stopped vehicles were scattered around the bridge.

Julian was the only thing moving, making is way south across the bridge, away from the city. So as to make himself marginally less recognizable, he’d turned his military jacket inside-out to hide his rank insignia and name patch. It wouldn’t fool anybody who knew him, or who studied his appearance for more than a few seconds, but it might be enough to foil a passing glance.

Julian heard a sustained rumble of trucks approaching from the south, and ducked behind a wrecked car, peering through its windows.

The vehicles were of the type his army used to ferry wights around, but they were being driven by civilians. Hijacked by the Resistance, he (correctly) presumed. The trucks, picking their way around scattered obstacles, began to cross the bridge.

But the huge heap of vehicles in the center of the bridge proved impassable to such large vehicles, so the lead truck (with its shattered windshield and dented grille) stopped before the impassable heap.

Betsy swung down from the driver’s seat, and yelled back to the other trucks, “Looks like we’re walkin’ the rest of the way, boys!”

One by one, the other trucks stopped, their engines falling silent. Each truck disgorged a dozen Resistance fighters, for a total of maybe fifty. They were armed with an impressive variety of swords and firearms, but they didn’t stand a chance against the wights.

Waving her arms in the general direction of the city, Betsy shouted, “Spread out! Move!”

The Resistance soldiers continued across the bridge on foot, jogging, halfheartedly trying to keep out of sight behind wrecked vehicles.

One of them spotted Julian through the window of the wrecked car behind which he was hiding, and yelled, “Hey, you! Come out from behind there!”

Julian had hoped, but hadn’t really expected, that he could hide for long. Now, he had to hope (without expecting) that the Resistance, seeing him as just another human, would give him a pass and let him go on his way. Wherever that turned out to be.

So Julian put his hands in the air in a display of harmlessness, and stepped out from behind the wrecked car.

The Resistance fighter shouted to Betsy, waving her over, “Oy, Commander! Got a survivor here!”

Betsy made her way over to them and asked, peremptorily, “So where are you off to?”

Julian tried to make himself look and sound as innocuous as possible. “I’m just trying to get out of the city.”

The Resistance guy chortled, “You think this is the only place the wights have gone crazy? There’s nothing out there but more death.”

Julian had been afraid of that, but was completely unsurprised. Flatly, he said, “That’s unfortunate.”

Betsy, mercifully, waved Julian off with a, “If he wants to, let him skedaddle. No skin off our noses.”

Julian turned away, relieved.

Then Betsy interrupted, “Hold on.”

As Betsy walked closer, examining his face, Julian suspected that the jig was up. But he didn’t move.

With one finger, Betsy hooked the chain around Julian’s neck, pulling his dog tags out from under his shirt. She looked at them, and saw that they said 01021920 / MALACHI J T / ONEG. She declared this, “...Interesting.”

She reached for her pistol, but Julian was faster. In one movement, he whipped out his sword, smashing its hilt into Betsy’s face. As she crumpled to the ground, he took off at a run.

He ducked behind a stopped car as the Resistance guys started yelling. For once, the Resistance’s choice to arm itself mostly with mêlée weapons worked in Julian’s favor. Only one or two guys shot at Julian, and their shots went wide.

Julian stopped short as he almost ran into several more Resistance fighters, then zig-zagged as they gave chase.

But, in the end, it turned out that the Resistance was simply too many, and after several more zig-zags, Julian quickly found himself hemmed in. The bridge’s railing was at his back, and Resistance guys were on all sides.

He glanced back, over the railing. It was about a 200-foot drop to the water – not a pleasant distance to fall. He glanced back at the hemicircle of Resistance fighters who surrounded him, pointing their various weapons at him.

Julian took a few seconds to weigh the relative merits of jumping, trying to fight his way out, and surrendering. Fall to his death, be stabbed to death, or be taken into custody where he might or might not be executed for alleged past “crimes”?

He shrugged resignedly, threw his sword to the ground, and raised his arms into the air.

In the warehouse-cum-hospital, Helen and Kate sat together, slumped against a heap of boxes of fabric.

Kate was explaining, “…and apparently the wights just went crazy a little while after Adam died.”

Helen mused to herself. Julian Malachi had told her that Adam wouldn’t be able to use the Artifact, and instead it would use him. Could he have been right? This madness certainly didn’t seem to be the kind of thing a mild-mannered rural handyman would do. Could Adam somehow have been the key to the Artifact going on a murder spree?

But her thoughts were interrupted when somebody knocked on the outside of the warehouse door, five times, rhythmically. The guard again answered with two knocks, then opened the door.

Betsy and a flock of rain-soaked Resistance guys flowed into the building. In the middle of the flock was Julian, who had been relieved of his weapons but otherwise left alone.

Several Resistance guys made to drag Julian off someplace, but they were accosted by Steve, yelling, “Hang on, this is Julian Malachi!”

The warehouse fell suddenly silent, except for the drumming of rain on the roof.

Steve continued shouting excitedly, “We have Julian Malachi here! A trial! A trial for your crimes!”

Betsy fought her way through the crowd, and tried to yell over Steve, “Oy, are you out of your gourd? Have you been outside lately? It’s raining bullets out there! …also rain. But mostly bullets!”

Steve just tried to yell louder, “Y’stand accused of crimes against humanity! A hundred thousand counts of defiling the dead! Mass murder of civilians! Mass genocide! The penalty is death!”

Betsy tried to grab Steve’s arm, “We don’t have time for a trial, we need to be fighting!”

Steve shook Betsy off, yelling right in Julian’s face, “How do you plead?”

Betsy shoved Steve aside, “I’m talking to you, you rat-faced little git! A trial won’t do us any good if everyone’s pushing up petunias!”

Steve roared, entirely ignoring Betsy, “How do you plead?!”

Julian, quietly and calmly, interjected, “I’m quite innocent, I assure you. Well, of most of those things, at any rate. Not so much the ex post facto bit about defiling the dead.” He pointed at Helen, “She’s the one to blame for your recent troubles.”

Helen made a disgruntled noise. She, Steve, Betsy, and most of the surrounding multitude all started yelling at once, so no words could be heard for a long minute.

Eventually, Kate clambered onto a box, her head above the crowd, and screamed at the top of her lungs, “SHUT UP.” Her voice cut through the hubbub, and everyone fell silent.

Kate rubbed her throat. Yelling that loudly made the throat feel stripped and raw, but at least it wasn’t as painful as being shot[3]. She continued, in the silence, “We really don’t have time for this.”

Betsy, indignantly, interrupted, “That’s what I said!”

Kate glowered at Betsy until the latter fell silent again, then continued, “We have no time, because the wights might find this place at any second. Julian’s probably not behind the wights going crazy. Even if he is, he might be useful as a hostage. Lock him in a supply closet somewhere.”

Nobody moved.

Grudgingly, Betsy ordered, “You heard her. Make it so!”

Steve grumbled incoherently as soldiers escorted Julian away.

They led Julian down a dim and dingy hallway of offices, belonging to the warehouse’s previous administrators, and shoved him into a janitorial supply closet.

The closet was small, full of cleaning supplies (as one might expect), and lit only by a bare bulb. They slammed the door behind him, and the lock clicked[4].

Julian considered the shelves of cleaning supplies for a moment. Unfortunately, he had never been particularly good at chemistry (history was always more his thing), so he couldn’t think of any decent combination of chemicals he might use to escape. Oh, sure, he could probably come up with some kind of cloud of toxic gas[5], but that would be just as bad for him as for everybody else, and probably wouldn’t act quickly enough to help anyway.

After a moment, he shrugged, gave up on the idea, and sat quietly on the floor.

He began whistling quietly to himself.

Betsy, Steve, Helen, and Kate gathered, with a group of Resistance officers, off to one side of the warehouse floor.

Betsy was saying, “This is our first, last, and best chance. The wights haven’t just gone psycho: they’ve also gone stupid. If we’re very, very lucky, we might could crack the palace like an egg. Most of the garrison is out murderin’.”

One officer pointed out the obvious: “We’ve only got one shot at it.”

Betsy chuckled, “Aye, they’re killin’ everyone. Won’t be any crazy fools left to recruit from after this.”

Kate pointed out, “There’s nobody that knows more about the palace than Malachi. He might be able to help us.”

Steve and Helen, almost in unison, objected, “No!”

Betsy’s objection was slightly less knee-jerk: “Too risky. Could lead us into a trap.”

Helen said, “I just got out of there. I know at least some of the secret passages.”

Betsy nodded, pointing to Helen, “Right, that’ll be good enough.”

Helen continued, “One of the side doors might still be open.”

Betsy sounded gleeful, “If not, we’ve got near enough explosive ordnance to bring down a mountain, we can get in any which way!”

A problem occurred to Helen: “But what about reinforcements? They’ll be sure to recall the garrison once we’re inside.”

Betsy chuckled, “Well, we’ll just have to work quietly then, won’t we?”

An officer asked, “What do we do once we’re in?”

Betsy thought for a moment, then decided, “We find the Artifact and commandeer it.”

Helen blinked, surprised. “You don’t want to destroy it?”

Betsy shrugged, “Ehh, there’s no tellin’ what might happen. And no idea how much of a beating it can take. At least we know it’s possible to control it.”

---

[1] Though I will transcribe its actual words faithfully, lest the full melodramatic effect of the creature’s ranting be lost.

[2] Am I using the word ‘nonplussed’ in its traditional sense of ‘perplexity, confusion, or bewilderment’? Or am I using it in its newer sense – linguistic prescriptivists would say misusing it – of ‘unperturbed’? The answer: yes.

[3] I am told that actually being shot is not that painful, and indeed, people have gone for quite some time without even noticing that they’ve been shot at all. It’s the aftermath that you have to worry about. So, if I were aiming for strict accuracy of phrasing, I would say that yelling isn’t as painful as recovering from having been shot.

[4] In an astounding display of noncompliance with basic safety regulations, the supply closet’s door could not be unlocked from inside without a key.

[5] Never mix bleach and ammonia, kids. That stuff’ll kill you.

De Anima
First - Previous - Next

De Anima: Chapter Two

The capital of Julian Malachi’s empire was a sprawling, bustling metropolis. Officially, it was metonymously named Mundus, but everyone just called it Capitol City. It was bordered to the south by a wide, sluggish river[1] and to the east by ocean[2]. Suburbs stretched away in all directions (except east).

Julian’s palace was the largest building in the city, a massive, terraced edifice of dark granite, some 20 stories tall. But even from the observation decks on the top floor, the gaze didn’t penetrate far enough through the region’s perpetual fog to see any stretches of rural land.

Julian’s library had a pleasant, quiet atmosphere (aside from wights ominously guarding all the entrances), and was – as one might expect from the name – lined with bookshelves. Most of his collection consisted of stories from and histories of old Caluthi (most in their original Caluthian), as well as tomes of tactics and strategy, philosophy and natural philosophy, and a few even more obscure or arcane subjects.

                Helen was slumped, rather limply, in a fine mahogany chair, by a fine mahogany table, framed by the library’s wide windows, which overlooked the city from about the fifteenth floor. She was covered in bruises and cuts. Her coat, boots, and weapons had been taken away by the wights, but she was not physically restrained. Not that she was particularly inclined to move much; she had been beaten quite badly.

A human medic, in the regular uniform of the Mundi military, was treating her wounds. Bandages and medical accoutrements were scattered on the table.

Julian Malachi entered the library. When Helen caught sight of him, it took her a few moments for her groggy brain, somewhat detached from consciousness, to engage. It took a few more moments to get her tongue, which felt thick and sluggish, to form the word, hateful and accusatory, “You!”

Julian was unfazed. “Quite.” To the medic, “How is she?”

The medic shrugged, not turning from his patient. “Badly beaten, but she’ll live. Probably. I had to sedate her.”

Julian surveyed the damage. “Good. Well, acceptable.” He’d ordered specifically that the wights try not to hurt her too badly. But here she was, beaten bloody. He’d have to have words with the Artifact about this insubordination.

Even beneath the bruises, Julian could see that Helen had aged far beyond the callow youth he’d last encountered in person fifteen years previously. Her face was lined with anger and sorrow and regret. “It’s been a long time, Helen Arkas. You’ve been busy.”

Helen merely glowered at him.

“It really is nice to see you again. I only wish the circumstances were better.” Julian was sincere. Helen had been invaluable in finding the Artifact, so, out of gratitude, he’d chosen to mostly ignore her little quest to take it away from him again. Until that day, he had judged success unlikely.

Helen tried, ineffectually, to spit at Julian past the medic, but her mouth was too dry and cottony. She settled for growling, “Stuff it. I know what you are, monster.”

Julian slumped his shoulders slightly for a moment, deflated. Somehow, he hadn’t really realized that it had become quite so personal for Helen.

But he had a job to do, so he shrugged, turned, and walked to one of the more valuable sections of his library. A section of bookshelf, locked behind small glass doors. Producing a key, he unlocked and opened one of the doors, and reverently pulled out a leather-bound tome, almost three hundred years old. The book’s cover, and the text within, was in jagged old Caluthian script. Julian carefully carried the book back to Helen. Cheerfully, “You should recognize this, I think.”

Helen leaned forward slightly, squinting halfheartedly at the book, then shook her head, collapsing back into the chair. She had never seen its like in her life. (The medic piped up, “Try not to move.”)

Julian explained, “Well, the title is usually translated something along the lines of ‘The Personal Memoir of Taitale, Court Engineer to the Last King of Caluthi’.”

Recognition dawned on Helen’s face.

Julian continued, “I believe you’ve based some years of your life on one passage from the last chapter, yes?” Setting the book on a bandage-free section of the table, and carefully turned to a page near the back of the book. “How do they usually translate it? Sretipren has ‘the Artifact will obey a prince of the Caluthian royal family above all others’, Vafna has a bit more vim, has ‘blood’ instead of ‘family’, ‘inferiors’ instead of ‘others’. But you figure you’ve got the gist down, right?”

Helen, guardedly, squeezed out a “…Yeah.”

Julian shook his head sadly. “How long have you been looking for Adam Grigori based on this passage? Fifteen years, yes? Such a waste. You could have done such great things –”

Helen, swiftly tiring of this mockery, tried to stand to attack Julian, but collapsed back into the chair with pain and exhaustion before she even made it to a standing position. (The medic: “I told you not to move.”)

Julian didn’t move. “Please don’t hurt yourself.” After a second, he returned to the conversation. “Bear in mind, Taitale wrote those words weeks before he died in that most unfortunate duel. After he went into hiding in Kehushide. After the Caluthian Empire was defeated and the royal family executed. After the Artifact was sealed in that tomb within the earth.”

Helen interrupted, mumbling, “Where it should have stayed!”

Julian was dismissive, “Oh, perhaps. Anyhow, by the time Taitale wrote that, all princes of the Caluthian royal family were dead, as far as he knew.”

It may have been the sedatives fogging her mind, but Helen wasn’t at all clear what Julian was trying to get at. “So?”

“So he certainly wasn’t writing to give you advice on how to thwart my efforts at peace.” Helen only scoffed, so Julian decided to try a different conversational tactic: “My dear, you’ve only been reading translations. You miss all the subtleties of the original.”

“Why would I need subtleties? It’s right there in plain text.”

Julian sighed at Helen’s almost deliberate obtuseness, but brightened at the prospect of a teachable moment. He always liked to talk linguistics. “Old Caluthian has five grammatical genders…” Ticking off on his fingers: “…people, weapons, food, qualia, and everything else. The Artifact is usually described with the weapon gender. But in that passage, the word for ‘Artifact’ holds the people gender, while ‘Prince’ holds the weapon gender.”

Helen was still baffled. “…this supposed to mean something to me?”

Julian produced the capstone of his linguistic argument with a flourish, “It means Taitale was giving you a warning about what not to do. Adam can’t use the artifact: it will use him.” He watched Helen expectantly, waiting for comprehension to dawn on her.

It didn’t. Helen just watched him, then declared, “That’s a sack of shit and you know it.”

Julian was genuinely disappointed. But maybe the peaceful solution still wasn’t out of the question! Maybe Helen was just too doped up to be able to process his arguments properly. Maybe when her head was clearer, she might listen to reason. But he tried one last argument, resorting to an argument from the stick: “If you proceed with your reckless plan, you will doom us all. If you agree to let it go and go off into a peaceful retirement somewhere, I’m willing to forget any of this ever happened, and I will never bother you again.”

Helen was emphatically defiant, “I’ll never stop fighting you!”

Julian sighed. “At least you’re honest.” The medic was just about done with his work, so Julian turned to two of the wights guarding the room and instructed them, “Take her to the palace prison and keep her there while I decide what to do with her.”

As the wights dragged Helen to her feet and half-carried her from the room, Julian turned back to the Memoir of Taitale and began to study it anew.

The Resistance safehouse was literally underground: a long-disused water reservoir that once supplied a region whose population had now dwindled. Sounds echoed from hard concrete surfaces, and the place was pervaded by a faint mildew aroma.

Kate had been here a few times before, with her mother. It was difficult, but not impossible, to find, even for someone who knew where it was. After a few missteps, they’d run into some Resistance guys who recognized Kate and sent her and Adam in more like the right direction, so they had managed to find the place eventually.

Adam felt rumpled. He’d already been working at carpentry and gardening all day before Helen and Kate showed up. Follow that up with a hasty flight through the woods, a nap in a haystack, and a long trudge to the nearest urban center to find the safehouse, and he felt like he could use a shower.

But he also felt like he was in good company. The safehouse was crowded with bedraggled, dirty, weary Resistance fighters. Some napped or sat on cots, cleaning swords and other mêlée weapons (Adam had never seen so many swords in one place in his life). Some practiced with training swords against one another, or were engaged in miscellaneous other exercises to keep up their strength and spirits. A few were engaged in a game of cards. Most of them glanced with suspicion at the unfamiliar face of the newcomers, but were reassured by companions who recognized Kate.

One of the Resistance fighters, a small, severe woman with a buzz cut and skin the color of brass, broke off from training recruits. She, like all the others, wore no rank insignia, and her uniform consisted of civilian clothes and a leather jacket, but she was distinguished from the other denizens of the safehouse by her demeanor. She carried herself with the bearing of absolute authority, and the other Resistance fighters visibly deferred to her authority. She gestured at Adam, “Who’s this, then?”

Kate answered promptly, without hesitation, “Adam Grigori, last prince of the royal family of Caluthi.” Adam looked alarmed; he had signed up for a rescue mission, but here Kate was introducing him as the savior of the Resistance.

The safehouse’s leader looked Adam up and down skeptically. “Doesn’t look like much of a savior, does he?” Adam was about to protest, but the woman waved his objections away with a, “Yeah, yeah, don’t care.” Baffled and out of his element, Adam remained silent.

Kate resumed: “Adam, this is Betsy, she’s kind of in charge around here. Betsy, we need weapons and information, if you can spare them.”

Betsy considered Kate and Adam for a moment, then pronounced, “Info’s free. Prob’ly looking for the scoop about your mum, yeah? I got a report a couple hours ago, some of my guys saw her loaded into a truck by some undead buggers. She’s not with you, so I guess that much at least was true.”

This was not particularly encouraging, but at least now they had a place to start. Kate prompted, “Any idea where the truck was headed?”

“North. I imagine Capitol City. Straight to the palace, I wager.”

Kate began to consider possible rescue plans. “This will be problematic.”

Betsy nodded in agreement, then turned to Adam, “You ever handle a sword, boy?”

Adam said, “Not really.” In truth, he had never even touched a real sword. When he was a child, he had nailed two lengths of wood crosswise to make a play sword, just like every other child in the world, he figured.

Betsy shrugged, “Eh, but you’ve got woodcutter’s arms. I think we’ve got a big honkin’ battleaxe that might be right up your alley. Maybe.” To a passing Resistance guy, “Oy, you, grab that big axe in storage, a couple sabres, and maybe half a dozen grenades. Oh, and a pack of food, I guess.” As the Resistance guy trotted off to fetch the requested items, Betsy turned back to Kate, “Grenades’ll cheer you right up. They always do me.”

Kate smiled wanly. “Thanks. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate it.”

“Oh, sure you can, girly. But it’s for your mum, anyway, not you. Always liked her. Her nutter plan is the only hope we’ve got anymore. Not like we can win this rebellion through force of arms, not against those wights. And anyhow, you’re headed off to Capitol City with the last thingummy of the whatsit here.” She indicated Adam. “So the stuff isn’t a gift. It’s a bargain. The deal is, you’ve gotta win us this war.”

‘Last thingummy of the whatsit’ was very much in line with what Adam thought about the whole business. But he hadn’t signed up to win the war, he’d only agreed to help rescue Helen. He opened his mouth to protest, but Kate stopped him by shut his mouth with a clack, one of her fingers on the bottom of his chin. She answered for him, “We’ll try.”

Despite her words, Betsy still looked skeptical. “Yeah, trying’s probably the best you can do.”

 

Julian stood watching the screens on the wall contemplatively.

Most of the screens showed similar scenes as before, but several of them are now devoted to one large skirmish with the Resistance in the streets of a city in the far distant nation of Hle. The muffled rat-a-tat of his wights’ automatic rifles could be heard from the screens.

“Fifteen years they’ve plagued us. Why?”

Several of the screens became suddenly brighter for a second; one went entirely the fiery orange of an explosion, then suddenly black. A few seconds later, it switched to a different view of the same scene.

“I’d really rather not have to kill him. He’s not in the fight yet. He hasn’t done anything to us. He’s still innocent.”

Julian could feel the malevolence of the Artifact. It made no noise, but he could feel at the base of his mind that it wanted to terminate Adam Grigori as a potential threat to their reign.

Julian shook his head. He said, “Only a potential threat. We don’t have any reason to execute him unless he becomes an actual threat.”

The Artifact disagreed.

Julian turned back to the screens, and decided, “We definitely don’t kill Helen. Not her, and not the daughter. They may never back down, but they’re no credible threat. It’s only this Adam, and he’s still only potential.”

But the Artifact wanted them all killed. It was bloodthirsty. Sometimes Julian felt like it had more control over him than he had over it. But today, he would be in control. He would be certain about it.

“Always the easy way with you. ‘Kill everybody’ this, ‘execute them as traitors and dissenters’ that.”

He stared at the battle raging on the screens for a long while, as the wights and the Resistance did senseless battle in Hle.

“I suppose you may be a little right. Look at these… these fools. They throw their lives away for the Resistance every day, fighting against my world peace. If Adam Grigori makes the same choice, what’s he, compared to these hundreds of people who force us to kill them?”

The Artifact glowed happily.

But Julian shook his head. “Only if he makes the same choice. Only if he buys into Helen’s delusions. Only if he declares his allegiance to the Resistance. Then and only then are you right. Up until the moment that he declares himself part of the war against us, he remains an innocent bystander, and I won’t have any innocent blood on my hands.”

Julian turned back to the Artifact and issued a formal order: “If Adam Grigori attacks us, if he attacks any wights or any of our soldiers, kill him. Then incinerate his corpse. I don’t want him used for any purpose other than charcoal. But I want no harm to come to him unless he attacks us.”

The Artifact was satisfied with this order.

---

[1] Named the Slow River, for descriptive reasons too prosaically obvious to detail here.

[2] The North Ocean, because ibid.

De Anima
First - Previous - Next

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
First - Previous - Next

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.