Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial

Arc 1: Chapter 33: Unhallowed

“Something’s wrong,” Catrin said, as we approached the village.

I had noticed the same. There were no guards at the gate, and no sentry torches as there’d been the night I’d arrived. The streets of the lakeside community seemed quiet. Empty.

Out over the lake, the black towers of the Falconer castle jutted from a shifting haze of fog, cast in its own eerie glow against the black horizon. A ghost castle, brooding and watchful.

I wondered if the Baron watched us even then.

“Maybe something’s happening at the keep,” I said.

“Or maybe your hunter friends killed everyone,” Catrin suggested, half joking.

I grunted. I didn’t think the doctor was that dangerous, but it paid to be ready for anything.

We approached the village cautiously, but openly. Tiny blue lights flitted around us, illuminating the overcast gloom. They giggled like little bells and chased one another, toying with the frayed hem of my cloak or flitting in and out of my raised hood. They played with Catrin’s hair too, though she swatted at them, half annoyed and half charmed. They’d followed us from Irn Bale’s manor.

“You remind them of the Gilded City,” Irn Bale had said. “They are fickle creatures, but perhaps they will give you some comfort. Remember, Ser Knight, there is beauty in this world still worth fighting for.”

I glanced a the old church atop its lonely hill. It too lay quiet and dark. Had Olliard and Edgar returned there, tried to take sanctuary on hallowed ground? With two clerics, it could act as a veritable fortress against the Mistwalkers.

But not that ogre. And not Orson. He was human, and noble born.

I considered what to do next, my mind lingering on the chapel. Was William Garou’s body still lying in the nave, cold, his blood dried on the stone?

“Let’s see what’s going on in the village first,” I said. “I’ve got a bad feeling.”

Catrin nodded. “Alright.”

We passed through the gates, and no one challenged us. I didn’t even need to use glamour this time. It wasn’t until we were in the village square that we found anyone.

“Bleeding Heaven,” Catrin cursed.

A corpse had been strung up on a post above the square’s fountain. The fountain was old, some remnant of more bountiful days, a piece of clever masonry bearing the image of an Onsolain herald, which had likely once filled itself from some underground spring. Nothing emerged from the stale waters below anymore.

Now the stone basin was filled with blood. The body had been beheaded and disemboweled, though his old, threadbare robes with their fur lining remained to make it clear who it had been. The head adorned the fountain itself, eyeless and tongueless. Night insects swarmed it.

“The village headman,” I said. “He was at the castle yesterday morning, to see the baron.”

“Meeting must have not gone well,” Catrin noted, grimacing at the sight.

“I’m guessing this was the Mistwalkers,” I said. It reminded me of the dead bridge troll.

“Fucking butchers,” Catrin hissed. Her voice held a strained note, almost desparate. She inhaled sharply through her nose, taking in the fountain’s gory scent, then shuddered. A blush formed on her cheeks.

“We…” she licked her lips. “We should get moving. Get away from this.” She cast her gaze around, trying to look anywhere but at the fountain. “Where do you think everyone else is?”

I swallowed my disgust at her reaction and thought it over. My senses didn’t warn me of anything inhuman nearby, save for the subtle pressure of threat from the dhampir at my side.

“Let’s check all the buildings,” I suggested. “Inn too. If anyone’s here, they can tell us what’s going on.”

We split up, Catrin melding into the shadows. How that trick worked, whether it was Art or some kind of inherent power of her nature, I couldn’t guess. If it helped us search the village quicker, I wouldn’t complain.

I went door to door. Every house lay empty. I found meals left half eaten, laundry left out in the damp, doors unlocked or even ajar. But no signs of violence. No bodies. Even the inn had been abandoned.

Just empty rooms and eerie quiet. My sense of unease blossomed into a heart pounding anticipation.

The baron will need a sacrifice.

He wouldn’t. These are his people. He is sworn to protect them even as they are bound to him as his subjects. That is the law of Urn, the sacred duty of the lord.

Orson Falconer consorted with monsters. He was Recusant, and professed to defy the god-saints and their priests. Why would he consider any law sacrosanct?

I had believed he did all of this for his people, his house. For honor and respect.

Catrin found me some time later. Dawn was little more than an hour away, the time limit I’d imposed on myself closing fast.

Perhaps it no longer mattered.

“Nothing,” she said, confirming my own suspicions. “Place is a ghost town.”

I looked to the hill. One more place to check.

The muddy trail leading up to the chapel had seen hard use, and recently. No rain had fallen that night, so I could still make out the tracks marring the path as we ascended. There had been many feet trudging up this hill that night. Scores, at least.

Less than a hundred people had occupied the village. There had been less than half a hundred ghoul soldiers. I did the math, and didn’t like where it settled.

The chapel, like the fountain, was older than much of the rest of the settlement. Its bell tower rose high above the surrounding land, made even higher by the low hill it sat on, almost a castle in its own right, competing with the steepled towers of the Falconer palace rising through the mist in the distance.

Stolen story; please report.

Catrin eyed the church dubiously. “Need a quick pray before we head back to the keep? I’m not judging, but I think I’ll wait out here.”

I moved to the entry and, as I had with William, inspected the auremark worked in solid gold to the double doors. I sensed very little power in it. The metal seemed faded. Tarnished, more like dull brass now. Several wisps flitted toward the door, drawn perhaps by its faded energy or my own attention. Their light dimmed as they touched it and discovered, to their disappointment, its lack of magic.

Every preoster’s ritual, and every supplicant’s prayer, puts a bit of aura into Urn’s temples. Over long generations, they become like fortresses against the fearful things which would prey on the faithful. When I’d been here last, that blessing still held strong.

Not anymore.

I glanced back at the dhampir. “This place is barely hallowed. You should be fine.”

Catrin shook her head, her mop of hair swinging with the motion, and remained planted on the trampled grass. “I’d rather not take any chances with holy ground. Sorry, big man. I’ll be out here when you’re done. Keep watch, yeah? Make sure no ghouls sneak up on you.”

I didn’t trust her. This reluctance felt suspicious.

Well, better to have her out here than at my back if she planned anything. I shrugged, as though it were of no consequence, and tested the door. Unlocked.

I stepped inside, and nearly gagged on the smell. The wisps retreated into the shadows of my cloak, hiding from what I found.

I’d found the villagers.

I’d been too late.

They had been piled around the dais basin. All of them, so far as I could tell. Blood dried within the floor’s many grooves and cracks, like a hundred miniature charnel rivers. I could barely see the holy basin for all the corpses piled around it.

My eyes, with their cursed blessing, saw the entire thing clearly. No detail was hidden, no shadow so deep I couldn’t capture every facet of the nightmare in my memory. My gaze fell on innkeeper from the Cymrian Sword. His eyes stared unblinking from the mound, rimmed with red. His teenage daughter lay against him, as though clutching him for safety.

The soldier’s spear had stuck both of them to the pile together. They’d all been killed with weapons, so far as I could tell, and many of those tools had been left behind, as though the killers had thought it more aesthetic.

I’d known. I’d known there was no way the diabolist nobleman could properly use his minion without something profane. This is what he needed the mercenaries for. As butchers.

Too late. I was too damn late to make any sort of difference. Was I at fault for this? Had Orson Falconer moved quicker than he’d anticipated because I’d killed William, made him feel threatened?

I stumbled toward the altar. The smell of rotting meat, feces, and blood made me want to flee from that place, empty my guts out under the clean sky. I moved toward the slaughter instead, some unseen gravity tugging me onward on unwilling legs. I kicked something and nearly fell. When I looked down to see what I’d struck, the corpse of a child stared up at me. It had rolled off the mound.

I did vomit then.

When done, I wiped my mouth and half turned to leave. Something gave me pause. Movement in the edges of the room? I tightened my grip on Faen Orgis and turned slowly, glaring at my surroundings.

The domed ceiling and pillars of the chapel were carved with complex scenes, all meant to depict the history of the Faith. Ranks of archaic knights battled the slave armies of Recusant kings, the original ones who’d pushed the faithful out of the west. Alongside them congregated images of ancient lords offering their crowns to the God-Queen. Great storms and floods swept across the plains and mountains of the continent as the converted Edaean kings led their armies into Urn, to fashion new bastions against the chaos in the west.

The long march of history and legend, inscribed into ivy wrapped stone.

Blood had been splattered across all of it.

My eyes took in more scenes, more wars, more fables I’d known since childhood stretching across those walls. My gaze lingered on the pillar which showed a group of knights surrounding an elven youth. The elf held an axe, very much like the one I carried, his image superimposed over a towering tree encompassing most of the stone pillar’s length. Lines of gold had been worked into the stone to add definition and color to the scene.

I knew the elf. I knew the tale.

And the greatest lord of the Sidhe, wisest among all who walk the world in flesh, took an axe to the great golden alder which had stood in that place since the silence of the world was broken. And he, the elf king, hewed down that tree, and from its ruin shaped a power then bequeathed upon Men, so they may hold a candle against the hungering dark. And the Autumn King knelt before the Golden Queen, She who is Heir to the throne of God. And the God-Queen gave unto him the services of chosen knights among Her followers, who bound themselves to the Alder, and made of this act a covenant.

Legend. Myth. I had thought that once, before it had become my world.

My heart began to beat faster. I blinked, and the image changed.

The stone-etched image of the elf had fallen. The knights had driven their swords into his back, pinning him to the ground. The tree became a blackened, charred husk less than a third its original length. The scenes of war carved along the other pillars took on a more visceral aspect, until very real blood trickled down like miniature waterfalls, pooling into the open space in the room’s center, even dripping from the ceiling to form a macabre rain. Fiendish things danced within the chaos, crouched on the shoulders of kings, spurring them on to slaughter and worse.

I could hear them laughing.

I blinked again. The images were as they had been. The knights bowed before the elf, who stood tall again, their swords held in supplicant hands. The rest of it remained cold stone, unmoving. Dead.

Profaned.

I moved closer to the basin, using some of my cloak to cover my mouth and nose, though my gorge gibbered threats with every step. I could still make out the crack in the altar from when I’d fought Orson’s chimera.

There was something in the bowl where I’d given blood to speak to Saint Eanor. Something moving.

I leaned over the piled bodies and looked into the receptacle. It was full of crawling insects. Centipedes, spiders, maggots, beetles… they swarmed over one another, devouring, breeding, dying. Many had spilled into the piled corpses of the villagers and the same horror repeated itself there.

Somehow I knew — though I couldn’t say whether it was some insight from my oaths or a more primal instinct — that a hollow lurked within the basin, an emptiness just under that crawling, writhing mass. A hole in the world.

Something had been born here. Something terrible, just as I’d feared.

Too late.

“They said this was justice.”

I whirled, a snarl half formed on my lips, only to see a figure slumped against one of the pillars encompassing the room’s center. He was young, overweight, dressed in the plain brown robes of a chapel brother. His black hair had been matted to his head. Blood and worse soiled his robes.

Edgar.

The young priest’s eyes slid up to me. They were bloodshot. “They said this was justice for our sycophancy, that the Onsolain would not save us for all our prayers.”

“They?” I asked. “You mean Orson and his guests? Where is the baron, Edgar?”

He didn’t seem to hear me. He lifted cracked fingernails to his temple and clawed at the raw flesh there. His words took on a hysterical edge. “She made me pray as they killed them. She said they could not hear me.”

“Who?” I asked.

His eyes remained unfocused. “God. Oh, Golden God, Queen of all the world, why did you let this… why did you have to leave?Why haven’t you come back?”

I approached the monk and knelt at his side. He shied away from me.

“Was Orson here?” I asked him softly.

He shook his head. “No. It was… it was that old woman, Lillian. The witch in red.”

Orson hadn’t been here? That struck me as strange. “Who else?” I asked.

“There were two in hooded robes,” he told me in a shaking voice. “And this… monster. A man who dressed like a nobleman, but his face was…”

I recalled the goblin lord from the council. Count Ildeban, Catrin had called him. Another dark legend, just like the Culler Brothers. Lillian had been here, and those shrouded twins. The Mistwalkers were here too, doing all the murdering, which likely meant their captain Issachar had been present.

But not Orson? The instigator of all this?

“They said no one could hear my prayers!” Edgar sobbed. “Not God, not Her saints. They wouldn’t stop!”

I showed him Faen Orgis. The Doomsman’s Arm. Wil-O’ Wisps emerged from the shadows of my cloak to flit about the weapon, illuminating the elven patterns engraved into the axe blade. The monk’s eyes widened as he saw the gleam of aura clinging to it, the same light held in my eyes.

“They heard you,” I told him.