ARC 7: CHAPTER 32: RITE

The great tree made its plodding way towards our destination. I didn’t want to be inside with the monstrous witch and my dying friend, so I sat outside on one of the branches, cleaning and preparing my gear. The branches were large enough to have small fields of moss growing on them, and I sat in the middle of one of these.

An amber moon shone down from the Wend’s alien sky, giving light to my work. I had my crossbow in my lap as I fit a fresh string Lisette had reinforced with her Art before I’d left. It looked like a line of spun gold, and was warm in my hand. The pieces of my black armor were laid out and ready to be fit together. I’d even taken the time to shave and cut my hair. Best to keep myself sharp and focused.

The door to the Onsolain’s home opened and shut, and the rustle of skirts let me know that Delphine approached. I didn’t acknowledge her at first, keeping my attention on my work.

“She asked me to help you,” she said without preamble as she drew up next to me. “She said you would know with what.”

I set my crossbow down on the moss and sighed. “Yeah, I suppose I do. I need a priest. Best to do this properly.”

She thought about it a moment, and when she understood she said, “That bitch.”

I laughed softly. “They seem like demons sometimes, don’t they? And Urddha has nothing on Nath, who was apparently one of the God-Queen’s handmaidens. Makes you wonder.”

The former cleric adjusted her skirts and sat down next to me. “What do you need me to do?”

I thought about it a while. “To be honest, I’m not sure. But if I do this, it has to be done properly. I’m going to perform a ritual. If I do it alone, something can go wrong. A regular clericon would refuse, but you—“

“—Are a heretic and a diabolist.” She sighed. “The clergy does have necromantic rites, but my training was never complete. I can’t make any promises.”

“It will be similar to a baptism, I think. Last time I did this, it was just by instinct, there were no safeguards involved. This will change me, there’s no avoiding that, but I’m not going to let myself become possessed by a host of mad ghosts. Urddha might say I’m taking half measures again, but I’m not going to stop placing limits on myself. It’s the only way to…”

I trailed off, unsure of my words. Delphine helped. “It’s the only way to stay you. To recognize yourself.”

I nodded.

“A baptism, you say? Well, I don’t have much material left. I definitely don’t have enough oil or gold dust… and no blessed water.”

“Urddha is Onsolain. Just have her give you some, I bet anything she spits in will become sacred.”

That made the woman laugh, which made me feel better. She had a good laugh.

I took off my shirt. Delphine vanished a while, then reappeared with an assortment of materials.

“I’d rather do this in a church or shrine,” she said. “This environment is too uncontrolled.”

“This tree belongs to a member of the Choir of God. It may as well be a cathedral.”

Delphine nodded, then started the long and laborious process of painting my body with sacred symbols. She used a mix of gold dust and clay wet with sacred water, along with a mix of oils and unguents of dubious origin. She held a candle in her off hand as she worked, muttering on occasion. I couldn’t tell if she was praying or doing calculations.

“I was interrupted earlier,” I said as she worked. “When I said I’ve been thinking about the conversation we had after you got that demon out of me.”

Delphine kept painting a while in silence. I knew something of what she did, because I’d watched priests work before and because Lisette had become my personal cleric and she was a prodigy. These weren’t just holy scribbles, but mathematical formula mixing prayer and hermetical knowledge, very in keeping with the complicated history of the Aureate Church. They were designed to shape aura into a particular configuration, and like with the goetic diagrams alchemists use to summon demons, even a small mistake could be disastrous.

I felt a small thrill of panic in my chest when Delphine’s silence lingered. Is this a mistake? I’d been indecisive about saying anything, and then just blurted it out, and now…

“We don’t have to talk about it,” I said hastily.

Delphine’s voice was almost a whisper. “Go on. I want to hear it.”

And before I could stop myself, I said the words I’d been holding onto.

“I do feel guilty for it.”

The finger on my back stopped. I couldn’t see her face to judge her reaction, but there was suddenly tension in Delphine’s hand. The admission felt like prying a barbed thorn out of my flesh. It hurt, but I felt less pressure in my chest all the sudden. I kept talking, my words coming out faster. Part of me felt afraid that if I stopped, I’d never drain this poison out of me.

“The problem is, that scares me. I shouldn’t feel guilt for it. Any sane person would tell me I did the right thing, the knightly thing. I punished the deceiver, banished a monster, but there’s this voice in the back of my head that keeps telling me I made a terrible mistake, and I just can’t quiet it. It keeps telling me that…”

I realized I was shaking.

“That she didn’t feel like a monster,” Delphine finished for me. “That she wasn’t lying.”

I played through that last encounter again. I’d been doing it frequently of late, miring myself in the pain because I felt like it mattered, like there was something important there. Delphine had made me start doing that, after years of cringing from it.

“She did seem like a monster at the end,” I said. “And very human, too.”

“I’ll never forgive you,” Delphine said without emotion.

I nodded. “I know.”

“But…” She sighed and started painting my back again. “I understand, I think. If I hadn’t been who I was, if I wasn’t so eager to find a fault in the sisterhood’s dogma, I think it might have terrified me too. I was so arrogant.”

And I had been so afraid.

“Do you think we were the monsters, Alken?” Delphine’s voice was choked all the sudden. “I can’t stop thinking about it. Was she really everything we were warned about? Was she evil? Truly evil, the way we’re taught about the Adversary? Or was it us? Was she something new, something different, and it was we who were bad for her?”

“Every other demon I’ve encountered has been a nightmare,” I said. “It’s hard to believe. Lias collected research on her, you know, on… Shyora. She’s done terrible things.”

Delphine wiped her eyes and nodded. “I know. But… So have we? And even demons can think. They can feel, and they can reason. Perhaps most of them are so old and so twisted that it doesn’t matter, that they’ll always choose to be vile, but what if it’s just that? A choice? We’ve seen wicked angels, so why can there not be virtuous demons?”

It was a scary thought. It made me question everything. “All I know is that the ones I keep meeting are crooked. I’m not going to try to redeem each of them, I’m not cut out for that. I’m just a soldier.”

“That’s fair. But… perhaps that should be my goal, rather than trying to get my name in books. Lias has shown us just how small we are in all of this. I’d like to believe our world isn’t made of absolutes.”

“The virtuous diabolist?” I laughed softly. “You’ll be dead or worse within a year.”

Delphine shrugged. “Maybe. And you didn’t answer my original question, you know.”

“About what to do with Lias, I know. I’m still thinking about it. Maybe it would be easier to just let him die, but it feels cowardly.”

She moved around to my front, knelt, then used her forefinger to draw an auremark on my forehead. The classical one, no complex additions, just a long line of oil from my forehead to the tip of my nose, crossed above my eyebrows with a rising arc. It stung, I hoped only because of the material she used and not anything about me.

Wishful thinking, I knew.

Delphine, who had been Sister Vera, took my large hands in her thin ones and pressed something into them. In my palm lay a small silver bell.

“Silver for the dead,” Delphine reminded me. “I know it’s folk magic, not priestly, but…” She shrugged.

“No. This is good.” I closed my burnt fist around the little bell. “Let’s call the dead.”

And so I did.

I rang the bell, closed my eyes, and waited. After minutes had passed, I rang it again. And again. Each time it produced a clean sound, a silver whisper that tittered through the boughs.

I expected it to be quick. Weren’t they always just on my heels, pressing in from every crooked angle of the world to leer and whisper? Perhaps it was where I sat, but the dead didn’t flood in this time. I rang the bell, and I waited.

And waited.

I realized the wind had gone quiet after a time, and that I couldn’t hear the groaning, whistling noises of the walking tree beneath me anymore. Nor I could feel the sway of its movement. Opening my eyes, I saw that I wasn’t on Urddha’s tree anymore. I sat in the midst of a ruined church, the roof collapsed to reveal a foggy, indistinct sky. Shattered pillars and statues strangled by creeper vines populated the space.

No, I realized as I studied the architecture. This wasn’t a church, at least not the kind I’d been thinking about. The walls would have soared to dizzying heights before they’d come down, and what remained of the masonry gleamed in shades of yellow, blue, and red, colors that would have blazed like fire under the sunlight but now looked like a petrified mass of bruises in this gray pallor. What I’d taken to be the rotten remnants of pews were in fact high backed wooden chairs, each one beautifully made and akin to a throne.

They were arrayed in a great circle, and in the middle of that circle was a table. It had been fashioned from the trunk of a mighty golden tree, larger than anything else I’d ever seen. It dominated the center of the structure, spanning a hundred feet or more from end to end, with lines of green vines crossing along its surface like veins. Beneath those vines I could make out the telltale hint of images carved into the surface of the wood.

I didn’t need to move the vines to know what was there. It would show ranks of knights in armor arrayed in concentric circles, guarded by angels and capering elves. The outer ring would show the ancient Edaean kings who’d first made this compact, and at the very center would be him.

I looked for him, not on the Table but where I’d last seen him. And there he was, at the bottom of the steps leading outside to a bridge. With the walls broken, I could see that walkway arcing upwards at a curving angle to meet a high astrologer’s tower, where he’d once communed with the stars.

The king was just bones now, an almost fully intact skeleton in the rags of what had been white robes now gone gray from ash. The eleven swords of the captains who’d murdered him were still stuck into the cadaver. Each sword had been the treasure of a kingdom, and I could still see the molten glow of aura beating off them. Or was that him?

“Tuvon,” I whispered. My eyes traced to the long, jagged scar in the Alder Table. It’d cracked down the center when Ser Grendowe took his hammer to it.

“Not a pretty sight, is it??” A gentle voice said. “I knew I shouldn’t have worn white that day.”

I looked to my left and found a lithe figure standing there. He looked young, barely more than a youth, and if he’d been human I’d have guessed him to be nineteen at most. But he wasn’t human, something apparent by the subtle gleam of aura that hung around him like a shroud of light and by the pointed ears emerging from a blazing mane of bright red hair. He stood much shorter than me, yet his presence seemed enormous, like the air itself leaned towards him. When he glanced my way, it was almost like looking into my own reflection — his eyes were a burning gold, and those were not young at all.

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“Your Majesty.” I turned and almost fell to a knee on pure reflex, but stopped myself and grit my teeth. Had that been my training that compelled me, or the damned will they sewed up into my essence whispering at me again?

The elf saw my struggle and sighed. “You really have become tangled up, haven’t you? You want to kneel, to play the role you chose, but you can’t tell if you actually want it or have been made to want it. Is that not so? It must be so disorienting.”

I took several deep breaths before responding. “It is.” I looked at him, then at the regal corpse and the ruined hall. “Is this real?”

“Do you mean, are you actually here? That is a very good question.”

He didn’t answer it. My jaw clenched. “Are you real? Or are you just my ghosts trying to torment me again?”

“Do you feel tormented by my death, Ser Knight?” He asked me.

“I…” I was at a loss for words for a moment. “I have been often, yes.”

“Because the abgrüdai warned you of it…” Tuvon, Archon of Seydis and King of All Elvendom, placed a golden hand to his chin and rubbed it thoughtfully. “But demons are malicious, so what if by preventing my death you’d caused more evil? A conundrum, for certain.”

God. He really was him, or a very close approximation. “Why am I here?”

“Because you rang the bell,” the Elf King said, as though it were obvious. “You called the dead.”

When he lifted his eyebrows, as though compelling me to understand something obvious, I nodded slowly. “And you are dead.”

“Exactly!”

“…But elves don’t die.”

“…No, we’re not supposed to. Our spirits are imperishable, but Alicia made a solid go at it.”

He began to walk, white robes far too long for his small frame trailing behind him like the slithering tail of a dragon. I thought a dragon, because he seemed so much larger than his body. That hadn’t changed, either. He was covered in wounds, and left a trail of blood behind him almost like some kind of regal slug. The hem of his long robes were frayed and sticky.

I followed him as he began to make a slow circuit around the table. “You became a ghost? But elves become wraiths.”

“Only very angry ones. I’ve been trapped here. This is my tree, and my spirit is tied to it.” He waved a lazy hand towards the broken Table. “I guess I’m like a dryad now? But more like a revenant, because this place is a grave?”

Before he could get lost in reflection again, I interjected. “If I called the dead, then why did I come here?”

“Well, isn’t it obvious? Because I can’t go where you are. I’m stuck here.” Tuvon glanced at me with child-like annoyance and gestured insistently at the ruins. “And what you mean to do woke the Table, and it brought you here. In spirit at least.”

As a spirit? I glanced down at my hand. It was encased in brass colored armor, the kind I’d warn during my tenure in Seydis. I glowed like a soft ray of sunlight, and looked just as substantial.

The table had brought me here?

“This is… mad.”

“Why?” Tuvon blinked his golden eyes at me. “You are bonded to the Alder. Your spirit is tied to it, it has been all along.”

“It dragged my soul out of my body?” I asked in disbelief. “But… I’m still alive, that isn’t—”

“Of course it’s possible. People do this all the time, when they come near death, when they perform spiritual acts, when they dream. Or, they did before we started teaching them how to guard their dreams, and before I set my people to doing it. The Adversary is all too happy to prey on unguarded souls.”

He cast a sad look around the broken hall. “You remember this day?”

I nodded, still grappling with this unexpected situation and unsure why I felt so calm about it. “I walked in right after they killed him… you.”

Fidei’s black blood still drenched my armor. The melted remnant of the sword I’d used to kill her was still clutched in my acid-scorched hand. I’d needed the king’s help, his advice, and then I’d walked in and everything she’d been warning me about…

A nightmare. An endless nightmare.

“I don’t want to be here,” I said, feeling fear creeping in on me. “I don’t want to remember this.”

“I’m sorry,” Tuvon said with genuine feeling. “But you must. It is important. You are the last to witness the death of my body who was not complicit in it.”

Gritting my teeth, I squeezed my eyelids shut and for a moment fought against the images playing out behind them. But after I moment I gave up the fight, and let the memory flow.

Grendowe had stepped forward to kill me after I’d stumbled in. Ghislain tried to stop him, told the others I would understand. Danteleon was laughing, just laughing, like some kind of deranged madman. Without thinking I’d raised my sword to fight, and then—

“Can you feel it?” Alicia asked just before she’d become a living torch. “Can you feel the barbed wire on your soul unraveling? Rejoice, brother.”

The world came undone. I remembered fleeing the longhouse, stumbling through the streets. Someone had opened the gates for the Recusants, and they were flooding the city. There were demons and Woed things everywhere, most of them unleashed by what the other knights had done. The other paladins, the ones who hadn’t been with the Archon, were being consumed by their own magic everywhere across the city, adding to the chaos. I’d been able to feel it happening to me too, and I’d waited for a fiery, terrible death.

It hadn’t come. Most of the pain came from the fresh claw wounds on my face. She’d gouged her nails through my flesh as we stood locked together, my sword sinking through her heart and her burning eyes lancing into my memory.

They will not have you. You are mine.

“You said the Table brought me here because of what I intend to do,” I said, pulling myself out of the past. “Do you know, Your Majesty?”

Tuvon nodded gravely. “I imagine it has something to do with them.”

He pointed his shining finger, and when I turned I saw them gathering on the fringes of the despoiled hall. The ghosts who haunted me. The enemies I’d slain, the innocents I’d failed, and others as well. Rows of ghastly faces, more solid than I’d seen most of them before, arrayed together in a ghoulish congregation. Some were soldiers, some were commoners, some were nobles. Rhan Harrower, lionish in death, stood amongst them. Leonis Chancer and Horace Laudner were there in all their priestly finery. Emery Planter, the necromancer of Strekke, was clad in armor with his owl helm on his head. The helm looked far more realistic than in life. It blinked at me.

I recognized most of them, but not all. Not all were the Headsman’s victims. Some were just lost souls who’d been drawn to the torch I carried. A family who’d died of starvation watched me with hollow faces, the father and mother standing on either side of a young girl with sad eyes. The ones I had killed all wore their heads loosely on bleeding necks. Not far from the peasant family, the ghost of the mad teenage countess Irene grinned at me with eyes the color of blood. She held the souls of her many victims on leashes. Ser Rubek, an Alder Knight I’d put out of his misery long after the death of this city, watched me with eyes that’d been burnt out and left as blackened pits.

Orson Falconer was there, his skull visible through foggy flesh. Still arrayed like some kind of dark emperor, he watched me with hungry, empty eyes and waited with the rest of the whispering ghosts.

“They were pulled here with you,” Tuvon said. “They are waiting for you.”

“I know what they want,” I said darkly.

“Most of them are indeed hungry jackals,” Tuvon agreed. “Others are just tired of being cold. Some are lost, they can see nothing but you because of the flame I gifted you.”

“I do not wish to offend you, lord, but it often feels like a burden more than a gift.” Then, because I’d resented it ever since and because this might be my only chance to voice that resentment I said, “It hurt someone I cared about.”

“The dhampir, yes.” Tuvon lowered his face, his expression pensive. “Does it change anything to tell you that she is a great rarity? That when I stoked that fire, it was not with hatred but with an intent to protect my own people and to help yours protect itself? Does it appease the anger in you if I say that I have lived ten thousand years, and seen no such union bring happiness?”

I spoke with curt surety. “It does not.”

“I see. Then I simply say that the Alder’s fire has a will to attack predators, those who hunger for blood and for souls. It senses the darkness within those of darkest nature, and acts against such malign intent.”

“Respectfully, that’s shit.”

Tuvon lifted a red eyebrow at me. I waited a beat before continuing. “You trained this magic against your enemies. Against the dead, devils, malcathe, demons, and everything else the Seydii have been waging war with over the ages. You’re the one who decided who has darkest nature. I’ve seen plenty of elves act just as monstrous as Catrin ever did. Your people can gain a taste for blood, too, but my powers don’t bite them.”

I couldn’t tell the elf’s emotion as he studied me. “I can see that nothing will put you at peace with what happened.”

“I agreed to take up a weapon to serve my queen and protect the land we all share,” I told him. “I did not agree to having a second will sharing soul space with me, always pushing me to smite monsters whether I think they’re really monsters or not. How many of the knights became consumed by their oath? How many of them have murdered those who don’t deserve it because your gift clouded their thoughts? You turned us into puppets for your people’s war against your enemies.”

I glanced at the Archon’s corpse with all its blades. They’d all gone into his back. “I wouldn’t have joined them, but I think I’m starting to understand why they turned on you.”

“That was definitely part of it.”

His ready agreement shocked me. “Then you admit to all of it?”

Tuvon walked to his own corpse and studied it critically, like it were a flawed art piece he’d given up on. “My people have been waging war against the abgrüdai since this planet was still just water and rock. We hunted one another across the Roads of Night, and I will not deny that my kind has reveled in that rivalry. Yet, the demons of the Abyss have become bloated and mighty and countless in number, while my kind have only diminished over the eons. It was a long time before powers like the Onsolain and the Zosite started to realize the threat our foes posed to them as well.”

He met my gaze. “So yes, we made a weapon of you. There were other reasons. We didn’t want to be destroyed, and you humans would have destroyed us. You had a god behind you, after all.”

I looked down at my own glowing hand. “I can appreciate that there’s history to all of this, but it doesn’t make me feel good about carrying your people’s hatred with me. It isn’t always my own.”

Tuvon spread his hands out. “We all carry burdens that are not entirely our own. You are here because you must take on another one, isn’t that right?”

There was a sound in the sky then as leathery wings cracked the air. In the far distance of the blasted city, I could something howling like a wolf, only it wasn’t a wolf.

“They don’t enter this room,” the undead elf said. “They fear it like they fear hallowed ground. But you have a brought them a feast, and I cannot promise your safety.”

I had more questions, but he was right. There was no time. “You know what I’m doing?”

“You intend to kindle the Alder’s fire with these shades.”

“Do you intend to stop me?” I asked.

“Do you want me to?”

I shook my head, more in frustration than affirmation. “I wish you immortals would just answer my fucking questions.”

“I cannot stop you,” the elf said. “But I will give you this warning; Urddha has not told you of the full consequences of this act, and as a member of the Choir — even if the others have forsaken me in this place — I feel I must. This will give you strength. You express resentment over the Alder’s will acting on you, but if you stoke it with these restless spirits then it is their will that will act on you. Their rage will become yours, their hunger your own. If you cannot endure the burden, then they will make you as an empty cup, and you will become something worse than any demon.”

“Urddha implied the Choir wanted this,” I admitted.

“Perhaps some of them. Others would see you destroyed. Their disunity gives you some peace, but make no mistake; you shall face danger from some among the Onsolain.”

“Even so, I need strength. Even if it damns me further, countless others will be damned if I do nothing. If the worst happens, then I’ll hope someone does stop me.”

Tuvon nodded, his ancient eyes impossible to read.

“You did this, didn’t you?” I asked him. “With the original knights. You created this power from their ghosts.”

“I did. Urn was beset by darkness then, much as it is now. Your people wanted the power to defend themselves, and that desire has burned hot in this place for centuries. But it has cooled down to ashes now.”

He gestured towards the ghosts then, and I turned to face them.

“We’ve been waiting,” Orson hissed through skull teeth. “You cannot beat the devils of Hell without us. You know what we want.”

“I do, and you won’t have it.”

That elicited a chorus of angry muttering from the congregation of the damned. I took a steadying breath and spoke over the noise.

“You want me. You want a warm body, revenge, an escape from this fate. I won’t give you that. I won’t give you my flesh or my soul… but I’m willing to share a bit of both, if you’ll lend me some strength in turn.”

I glanced back at the Alder Table, and understood why it had summoned me in that moment. It was broken, ruined, stranded in a land infested with evil and death. It was angry.

It was just like the rest of the ghosts, and its sullen presence had been with me all this time just like them. Looking at the vines and the cracks in the wood, I could perceive the rot inside.

Orson’s voice was almost a purr when he spoke again. “Even a little will make you a devil in the eyes of these sad kingdoms. That crooked hag doesn’t care if you destroy yourself, so long as you are a useful tool.”

Urddha had said it herself. The Choir wasn’t speaking with one voice, and her manipulations were largely her own initiative. She would happily damn me if she felt it served some greater good. Other immortals might not be so unscrupulous.

I placed a hand on the surface of the Table, brushing some of the ash from it. I could feel a slight warmth in it, but it was barely anything compared to what I remembered it feeling like. Once, sitting here had made me feel as though I sat by the side of a warming flame.

The Knights of the Alder Table weren’t just men and women with fancy titles. They’d been tied to something of real weight, of real power. Seydis was burned now, dead or dying. I could see the glow of distant fires. The sounds of wings in the yellow clouds were growing more frequent, more numerous. Whatever was out in the city drew closer.

And more dead were gathering. The dead of this place. They were maimed, burnt, eaten. All prey for the wicked things that now ruled this land.

I was the Headsman of Seydis. The Choir and the kingdoms of Urn gave me that name, but it had never really been official, had it? Just a name.

Time to change that.

“I won’t feed myself to you,” I told the dead. “But I will fight for you, if you give me the strength.”

“Do you swear it?” Orson’s ghost hissed.

“I will swear no oath to you, Falconer. Not to any of the traitors or murderers amongst you.”

No more making the same mistake. I would fight. I would do what I felt to be right.

But no more binding myself.

Concentrating on the subtle warmth inside the broken Table, I used the vestiges of it within myself to coax that heat forth. It happened quickly, eagerly. It caught on my fingertips, and it hurt — but not so badly I couldn’t endure it. Within moments my whole body crawled with crackling golden flames. Tuvon watched me with sad eyes, and did nothing to interfere.

Turning to the gathered spirits, I lifted my burning hand in offering. Beneath the flames, my golden armor had turned soot black.

“Come and warm yourselves, if you wish to go to war.”

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