Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial

Arc 5: Roar || Chapter 1: Beneath The Streets

When the elves gave me golden eyes to illuminate dark places, I am certain they saw it as a blessing. Too often, it has been a curse.

I’ve heard it said that ignorance is bliss. That, I do believe. Garihelm is a beautiful city, built upon the hundred craggy islands of a lagoon within a bay of the Riven Sea, ancient and elegant, a metropolis of many bridges and soaring cathedrals.

I could have lived a happier life having never seen the labyrinth of dank sewers and moldering catacombs beneath the proud capital of the Accorded Realms. Yet, they are there.

Apparently, the city’s ancient inhabitants had once used the canals for sewage, relying on the rain which fell over the coastlands year round and the deep waters beneath the high streets to process waste. More forward thinking minds had seen the long term problems with this as the city grew, or perhaps had just grown tired of the smell.

Either way, proper sewers had been built beneath the stacked avenues of Garihelm, with clever architecture to carry rain and sea water, sending the detritus of a hundred thousand people far out into the lashing Riven.

Never enough rain to truly clean those festering tunnels. Mud sticks. So does shit.

I stepped through reeking darkness, the coat of black iron rings I wore rattling softly with each step, forming a steady rhythm with my calm breaths. Though I held no torch, the aura in my eyes made them shine with a pale light, forming faint beams which cut the darkness, allowing me to see.

I held my axe in my right hand, the gnarled branch forming its handle grating against my palm as I squeezed it. Small burs and twigs grew from the dark oak, some of them wrapping around the weapon’s head. Alloyed from steel and faerie bronze, the hooked blade held a brassy sheen.

I didn’t wear my red cloak. It would have been a hinderance in these cramped tunnels, so I’d left it with my squire. My head bare, my short, shaggy copper hair matted with sweat and moisture from the damp air — I tried not to think too hard about what might be in that — I focused all my senses forward.

Am I the hunter? I wondered. Or the hunted?

Our roles could switch in an instant. If I was careless, no amount of faerie metal and sacred magic would save me. Plenty of paladins had died to ghouls, irks, shades, and other more common threats by being too careless, and too confident.

I couldn’t afford carelessness when hunting demons.

The tunnel curved to the left as I reached its end. Wary of ambush, I navigated the bend with a tense caution. Every muscle beneath my moisture beaded skin was flexed taut, ready to send my limbs into violent action in an instant. I rested my axe on my right shoulder, my left hand hovering near the gnarled roots splitting from the handle’s bottom.

The darkness beyond my sight seemed somehow a living thing. It breathed like a beast, each inhale a silent threat, each exhale sending a gust of fetid air through the corridor.

A draft blew in from somewhere. I went toward it, the lips on the edges of the tunnel just wide enough for me to navigate safely, the water in the trench between them too fouled to tell how deep it went. Hopefully, I wouldn’t get the chance to find out.

I sensed something directly ahead of me. Not with my powers. I could hear its breathing, feel its eyes. I slowly brought the axe on my shoulder back, letting the heavy blade tilt in expectation of levering it forward with all my weight.

I began to form an Auratic Art — an arcane technique which would alter the shape of my soul, sending it forth as a deadly burning phantasm.

Just before I released the magic, a silhouette appeared in the tunnel ahead. Huge, hulking, with a hunched shape that blended hillock shoulders with a relatively small head. Twin yellow eyes, ringed in furious red, flickered to life just beyond the illumination my eyes provided, glinting in the dark.

“It’s me,” a deep, guttural voice said. “Unless you wish to settle our score here, elf friend?”

I relaxed, cursed, and let the energy I’d begun to shape dissipate into harmless unreality all at once. “Karog. If you knew it was me, you could have said something. I almost smote you.”

The shape lumbered forward into my full vision. Over eight feet tall, made all of leathery muscle and angry sinew, with simian features and clothes mostly consisting of hardboiled leather and trophy bones, the war ogre let out a derisive snort.

“I did not know it was you,” Karog muttered, his slit nostrils flaring. “My eyes are not as keen as yours, elf friend, and this air irritates my sense of smell.”

I couldn’t argue with him there. “Did you manage to pick up the trail?” I asked.

Karog’s yellow eyes narrowed. “No. These tunnels are a labyrinth, and full of vermin. Our quarry is using beasts to mislead me.”

I nodded. Many demons could exert influence over animals, especially hungry and unhealthy ones like those which would likely dwell in these fetid tunnels. They were well populated with stunted chimera of various kinds, remnants of creatures wizards and alchemists had loosed into the world long ago and let breed into strange new shapes.

Many of them were man eaters. I had already spotted rats big as dogs, and I didn’t even want to think about what the dogs might have mutated into down here.

Sighing, I tapped my axe on one shoulder. “I think I’ve lost it, too. If it went into the Undercity—”

“Then this was a waste of time,” Karog agreed.

The ancient catacombs deep beneath Garihelm had been built by a civilization which preceded our own, sunken long ago beneath the waters of the Riven but kept intact by deeply intricate architecture. Full of restless spirits and deadly mechanisms, they were not a dungeon I felt keen on diving into unless I had no other choice.

I might not have a choice. The thing we hunted very well may have retreated down into that darkness.

“Let’s circle back around the way you came,” I suggested. “Emma should be holding our exit. Don’t want this thing changing the terrain on us.”

Karog’s craggy brow furrowed. “It can do that?”

I nodded grimly. “Some of them, yes. They can warp the environment in subtle ways, or less subtle ones if they’re strong enough. My squire should be able to keep us a path out with her magic, at least.”

More precisely, with her familiar’s magic.

“I do not trust that witch,” the ogre rumbled.

I snorted. “You don’t trust anyone.”

Karog didn’t disagree.

He turned, hunching even more than usual to avoid brushing his course mane of gray hair over the residue clinging to the ceiling. I jumped over to the far side of the tunnel so the trench lay between us, giving us both room to walk side by side, more or less.

We walked a ways in silence, content with our own thoughts for some time.

“I appreciate you helping with this,” I said after a while.

Karog grunted. “These creatures threaten the Drains as well. This is no favor.”

“I hear you haven’t been in the slums much lately,” I noted. “My squire caught your performance in the preliminary lists up in Cragtown. She said it was quite the show.”

Karog snorted. It almost sounded like a laugh. “Children raised to believe themselves warriors and hid their whole lives behind walls provide little sport. Wesley has me playacting against these blue bloods.”

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I quirked an eyebrow as we turned down a side passage, this one narrower. “You haven’t killed anyone, have you?”

It happened in tourney fights sometimes.

“Not yet,” Karog said. “Though there were a few close calls. It has little in common with the gladiator pits I fought in during my years in the continent, these tourneys.”

“You’ll get your challenge,” I promised him. “I’ve seen some of the lists they’ve prepared for the real thing.”

Karog grunted again, seeming unimpressed. Then again, he rarely showed his true thoughts. Despite his brutish appearance, the ogre had an analytical mind behind that craggy brow.

It still shocked me, that he wanted to be a knight. Then again, Emma wanted the same thing despite her upbringing. Karog had thrown in with the changelings of Garihelm’s slums after arriving in the city, choosing to pursue a path to prominence with the upcoming grand tournament to help raise the slum dwellers’ prospects. He’d found a noble patron who’d been willing to speak for a western mercenary, and an inhuman one at that.

Apparently, that same patron had been the reason Karog and Parn, the aging leader of the city’s changeling community, had managed to gain access to the Emperor’s court during my impromptu trial several weeks before. Without that, I might not have survived that day.

I’d yet to meet the enigmatic Lord Wesley. From what I’d heard, he seemed like quite the eccentric.

We passed into a nexus chamber, which split off into three more drain tunnels. Water dripped here and there, a half seen rain in the gloom. Karog lacked my sharp night vision and had lit an alchemical lantern as we’d walked, giving up on using his other senses in the stagnant air. It lit the scene in ghostly blue hues as he clutched it in his left fist, his right still holding his scarred cleaver.

We paused, both trying to decide which way to go. The right passage would lead us back to Emma and an exit, while the left would take us deeper. I wasn’t quite ready to give up the hunt.

We moved on in silence a ways before the mercenary spoke again. “We are being watched.” His voice was a quiet rumble.

He’d sensed the danger before I did. His senses were preternatural, not supernatural, no aura to give him an edge. Yet they were keen enough. I saw him freeze, watched the stripe of thick, sharp hairs running from his skull all the way down his back lift like a canine’s hackles.

The sensation hit me a moment later. The walls seemed to swim, as though for only an instant they had liquified. A thrumming heart seemed to beat through the world, stuttered and fearful.

I recognized the signs. A Thing of Darkness drew close.

I turned, axe up, and it was there. It stood in the distant gloom of the tunnel we’d just come from, clearly visible even beyond the range of my dark vision. As though it produced its own light, it stood stark in an empty patch of black.

It looked like a hunched, emaciated humanoid with sickly gray skin and too many bones. It had a bloated belly like a victim of starvation, and a dog’s head mostly obscured by filthy hair from which two werelight eyes peered, blank and haunting. Root like genitals hung from a pelvis surrounded by weeping scabs.

From its back, two shapely, androgynous arms emerged, palms upraised as though in prayer.

Karog let out a threatening rumble as he lifted his cleaver, a scarred machete which had endured many battles. I held up an arm, stalling him. He growled in frustration.

“Why?” The ogre snarled.

“It’s a trap,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the twisted form of the demon. “That’s a chorn. They can bend space. There should only be about thirty paces between us and the end of the tunnel there. How far away does it look to you?”

Karog’s yellow eyes narrowed. “Perhaps sixty, at least.”

I nodded. “You go near it, you’ll be chasing it for hours.”

Indeed, the demon seemed to lie very distant from us, almost like a faraway moon on a starless night. Its head tilted.

I know you.

It had a musical voice, emanating as though from very far away. I shivered, the sacred fire in me responding to the touch of that malignant presence with revulsion even as it pleased my ears like the sweetest elven music. The disparate feedback was disorienting.

You killed Raath El Kur.

You wounded the Wingtaker.

You are the one Shyora marked.

The scars over my left eye, four long grooves like clawmarks running from temple to cheek, were burning.

Wingtaker. I recognized one of Yith’s names. I took a single step forward, still indicating that Karog should keep back.

“Don’t speak to it,” I told my companion. “It can steal your memories that way.”

Karog remained silent, though a threatening rumble continued to emerge from deep within his chest. The chorn continued trying to engage us in conversation.

You are hunting Yith.

Would you like to know where he is?

I know much.

Each of the Abgrüdai — the demons of the Abyss — are uniquely dangerous. Few of them have much commonality, but there are exceptions. Chorn are among the weakest and most numerous. Still very dangerous. This one had been leaving raving amnesiacs across the Hammer Ward for the past two weeks, evading all our attempts to track it down until now.

Either way, I’d dealt with this kind of monster before.

Will you not bargain?

Perhaps if I were fairer.

The filthy cloak of hair covering the chorn’s back parted. From behind the canine head, the human arms shifted as a new shape began to emerge. The head and torso of a beautiful woman, dark hair obscuring her eyes, her skin corpse pale.

“My kindred know your tastes,” the woman said, lifting a hand to cup one breast. “If you do not wish secrets, can I not offer you aught else, Alder Knight?”

The surge of hate that roiled up in me made itself known as amber fire burning glowing scars into my axe’s oak branch handle. Chorn are vicious tricksters, but they have a habit of avoiding confrontation.

And I had known far better seductresses. All it did was piss me off, and gave me all the time I needed to shape the proper weapon.

Concentrating on the echoing words of one of the oaths alloyed into my soul, I took a third step and thrust out my left palm, fingers pressed together in a shoving motion.

The aureflame, the sacred golden fire of the Alder, condensed into a brilliant expanding ring of almost solid light. It ripped down the tunnel, evaporating the darkness like smoke in a sudden squall.

The flames singed my fingers, but I’d long since gotten used to the pain. I grit my teeth and kept my focus forward.

The power of the chorn broke, the endless tunnel it had intended to lure us down vanishing as the hammer of my Art burned it away. The creature was revealed in its true position, clinging to the filthy wall of the sewer perhaps thirty feet way. It still had the naked woman growing from its back, who writhed as the aureflame scorched the creature, emitting a piercing shriek. With the canine head’s own baleful howl, her voice formed a terrible double timbered noise that made my teeth clench.

“Karog!” I snapped, then dove out of the way. I hadn’t acted a moment too soon. The ogre had already begun to charge, seeing the trick broken and a clear line of sight to his enemy.

I don’t know if every war ogre, a chimeric breed vat grown by continental alchemists to act as soldiers, move with such terrifying speed. Karog made loping direwolves look sluggish. Despite his immense mass, he was neither slow nor clumsy. He tore across the length between us and our target with long, hunched strides.

The chorn hunched, then bounded off the wall like a big, emaciated toad. It moved fast, blurring with speed. Karog swiped his arm to one side, hurling his machete. It embedded itself in the wall where the demon had lurked, missing it by less than a foot.

Karog snarled with rage and freed his second blade from its sheath. I wasn’t far behind him, my axe ready.

The chorn jumped to the rightmost wall, the blank white eyes of its main body moving to the ogre. It jumped just as Karog slammed into the wall in a shoulder charge. The tunnel rumbled, stone and dust and less sanitary things billowing around the point of impact.

For a moment, I couldn’t see anything through all the dust. I skidded to a stop, taking Faen Orgis in a two handed grip. I squinted into the cloud, the light in my eyes useless for this sort of obscurement.

I heard a tittering, nervous laugh, oddly hollow. My only warning. I swung just as the chorn erupted from the dust cloud, cracked nails like avian talons slashing.

I carved a gash along its chest and stomach as it went over me. Its claws caught me, but only sparked off the black iron rings of my hauberk.

In a surreal moment of almost whimsical horror, I caught sight of the woman’s body emerging from the thing’s back. She flopped like a dead limb, toothless mouth split in a grin. She didn’t have any eyes, just veined flesh where they should have been.

Demons are immortal spirits, but they craft bodies of bone and flesh in order to walk in our material realm. When I cut it, its blood splattered me, reeking bad as the sewage. Some of it got near my eyes and began to burn.

I stumbled, cursing and wiping at my face, only to hear a loud splash. I spun, but the murky water in the middle of the tunnel had already started to settle.

Karog burst from the dust cloud behind me almost that same instant, ready for a fight. I pointed at the sewer water with my axe.

“It’s in there.”

Karog regarded the sludge for a second, then stepped forward to plunge in. I barred his way with my weapon.

“It’s moving away,” I told him. The world still quietly thrummed with a sense of wrongness, but it faded fast.

“Which way?” Karog snapped.

I narrowed my eyelids, concentrating. The city, the labyrinth of filth, my own racing heart, all of it obscured the sensations my powers game me. My aura worked best in quiet meadows and autumnal forests, where the magic had been cultivated. Here in this city…

I had to guess. It wasn’t difficult — the thing had taunted me, when it could have kept up this cat and mouse as long as it wanted. I spat out a savage curse and began to move even as I spoke.

“Emma. It’s going for Emma.”

Karog lumbered into step with me, though he asked his question even as we moved. “Why?”

Amber fire ate through the cracks in my axe’s handle as I answered. “Because Yith sent it. He wants revenge, and she was there when I hurt him.”