Chapter 219: Doom

Chapter 219: Doom

“Brigade one halt! Brigade two fire!” a nameless soldier yelled.

“Brigade one halt! Brigade two fire!” the Palemarrow army repeated.

The wave of attacks were weaker than the first brigade, at least at the start. They ran, all melee forces as well as adventurers and guards. Glenny and Jude were among this force, as well as their parents. Carmon, Diana, and Roy darted in and out of the action, each making use of their steep power to do what they did best.

Devastating echoed blows came from Carmon. Roy took the brunt of the Sightless King’s regulations, blocking every searing attack like it was little more than hot water. And lastly, Diana moved at a speed most regular soldiers couldn’t see, striking the massive eyeball from angles least expected.

They were winning, something that rang like a gong inside of Glenny’s mind. They were pushing the Sightless King back, they were inflicting horrid damage to its hellish body. He added to the assault, stabbing two long crimson daggers into the monster. He twisted them, sundering gore and a wash of blood just as Jude hammered down with his red stained axe.

A portal opened below both of their feet, and suddenly the two friends were meters back, the place they were just standing a pillar of pure anger. Primordial magic rose from the charred ground, striking at even intervals like lightning on a storming night.

Jude and Glenny easily danced backward, the telegraphed attacks simple. At least while the Sightless King defended, that was.

Yelling sounded from the soldiers, a cry escaped those closest to the great beast, a painful, chilling scream. Some died instantly, the sound of mangled bodies slamming into pavement ever familiar for the people in this line of work. Next came the painful sobs, those with suddenly missing arms or gored stomachs.

Glenny eyed the mess, finding spikes of hardened blood jutting from the fresh wounds on the Sightless King like a hedgehog. Portals appeared below the survivors, taking them to somewhere serene and, hopefully, full of medical Legacies. Those who were already dead, Spencer couldn’t help.

Just then, a portal over the Sightless King opened. Like a barrage of artillery fire, seven lightning bolts the thickness of trees came crashing down. Appearing in an instant, the monster hardly had time to react. But react he did. Shields of red, both blood and primordial crimson, sprung to action, some failing to appear in time.

The smell of burnt skin wafted through the battlefield, the Sightless King the source. A groan slipped out, an anguish leagues above the petty wounds of earlier. He wasn’t healing, his wounds bloodied and raw.

It was in that minute, second, that thin fragment of a moment, the Sightless King became. Shifting in his own skin, power, malevolent and hungry, radiated. It pulled at the open air and the stone that made up the ground. Vileness, the power of taking, the sin of greed, sowed the fields and ate the crops of man. What remained was only corruption, a corruption of vigilant ferocity.

The dead bodies disappeared, taken by the Sightless King and repurposed.

Eyes appeared, each the size of a window, and each a beacon to look into another world. Domains of doom opened to darkness, hatred spilled forth for blood, muscle, and bone. The Sightless King relished the revolution, the time for him to take was here. Ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred, one thousand.

Countless eyes appeared, each taken from his most loyal of followers. They were dead now, each left to rot while what made them them was taken. Greed. It was simple and elegant, he didn’t even need to beg. Being powerful, the weak give themselves.

The Sightless Cult, reduced to ammunition for Lordship. The taste, the hunger, the Sightless King felt it. He claimed it. He was it. One step, one more step, and he would carve his own name into the heavens.

The evaporated blood, the blood the city’s defenders thought they boiled, gushed like an ocean. A tide came, a tide that destroyed even the most ancient of civilizations.

He was Primordial, he was—

A flash. A flicker. A glancing thought. Something stray, something foreign. Alien. It blanked out his thoughts, his expressions of godship. His future.

It was bland. Blank, even. A tightness made eternal. A false land, set in the boundary. The Void, he recognized, the place everything was.

White, black, white, black.

It sung to him, it sung to them. The Sightless King, Glenny Red. Monster, hero. Taker, stealer. Eye, chameleon. Powerful, adaptive.

And it was that last one the Sightless King held on to. It was what he noticed from the song. Distant, harmonious. The hum of a clarinet, the whistle of a flute, the triumph of a trumpet, the beat of a drum, the strum of a guitar, the roar of a harmonic.

He turned, every one of his countless eyes finding the source. It was a tunnel, a hidden connection in the sand. He had already used it to go after the one who stole from him, the one named Glenny. But now it was being used against him.

Honestly, Jude frankly had no idea what had just happened. One minute they were battling, the next he was suddenly playing the harmonica while his mirage was playing the guitar. It was almost like time had skipped.

And how did Glenny open that tunnel!? Jude had clearly felt it, the Sightless King’s presence in his mind!

“Was that what you’ve been living with all this time?” Jude whispered to himself. “That thing in your mind?”

He shuddered as his parents stepped up beside him. Diana and Roy Brown, his mother and father smiled triumphantly. A few steps away, his uncle appeared from the crowd coming over as well.

“Uncle Ray!” Jude screeched, bear hugging the man. “When did you get here!?”

A bloody cut crested the man’s face. “As soon as I could...”

The implication was obvious. Jude looked around, finding many, many dead bodies. It had been a well fought hard battle, but ultimately they had won.

Carmon appeared as well, as well as the two Royal Inquisitors who had started the battle. Glenny’s father was limping badly, but a quick gulp of one of those stolen healing potions fixed that right up.

“Spencer?” Carmon asked the open air. “Take me to Glenny, please?”

But the portal didn’t come. At least not for him.

Dozens of portals opened, hundreds over the span of a minute or two. The weak, wounded, or those wailing over the corpses of the dead were moved. Even Jude was eaten by a portal, thrust somewhere safer by Spencer.

But one never appeared for Carmon. A small portal opened beside his ear. “Ashford is—”

Spencer’s voice cut off, a figure emerging from the smoke and dust. He walked patiently, each footstep nipping at reality like waves eroding a beach. Every step, every chilling step, cloaked the army in a veil of ethereal light. Green, sickly green, pools of infinite hallowed aura wound through the men and women vowed to defend their city.

Through the transcendent second, no one moved, no one breathed. The man only walked, his aura casting not only a large shadow on the death and decay, but on the celestial naivete of the Lords who oversaw this battle.

The man looked hurt, but not because he was in pain. He was tired of it. Following the scripture, the will of his Lord, the confusion of misadventure and failed clutches at freedom.

But for now, he was nothing but a slave to those far more powerful than him.

He appeared beside the dying corpse of the Sightless King, shoving his arm into the mangled coffin of flesh and doom. With a lurching rip, Harbinger Ashford yanked out what made his temporary ally an ally to begin with.

The greedy essence of someone who knocked upon the doors of divinity.

He was glad.

Despite the death, this plan allowed for one more survivor. Princess, or rather, Queen Sybil Palemarrow was no longer needed. The essence that had befallen her was no longer part of the plan. No longer needed by the Undying Lord.

It may have been a key, but forging a new one wasn’t a big deal. Not when you had a blank mold.

And Ashford had all of that.

It was finally time to free himself, and his Lord in the process.