Dark Lord Rising

It was a night of dark portents and sinister omens. The good citizens of the five nations were shaken from their sleep by unearthly wails, inexplicable claps of thunder, deep, groaning tremors, and all manner of scary noises. The bad ones were presumably already awake, or just less nervous. In Thyre, a meteor fell out of the western sky and burst shatteringly over the town, starting several fires and cracking an ancient icon long held to ward the region from harm. Across the Highlands of Danoon, headless lambs were born to no fewer than seven separate flocks. And in Drumotin, in the Citadel of The Light Incarnate, one of the astrologer-inquisitors watching the orriers and astrolabes actually burst into flames, laughing insanely as he died.

At least, that’s what they told me later, so it’s probably all utter rubbish. Personally, I slept through the whole thing.

Devil's Dyke by Dominic's Pics

It was a pair of teenagers who woke me up, freeing themselves of the burden of their shared virginity somewhere overhead. Persistent little sods, frankly. Hell of a place to pick to get frisky, too. I’d been out of it for ages and ages, and it was a long, slow drift back towards consciousness while they kept up the racket above me. It was the magnitude of her lie that really snapped me out of it, though – he must have been getting jumpy about the amount of time they’d spent up on the mound.

She had a penetrating voice, and I heard her clearly. “Light above, don’t worry, no-one’s going to find us. I love you.”

The lad’s future unfolded in front of me. Her brothers would arrive on schedule, and when they had finished with him, he was in for a quick, shamed marriage and years of hen-pecked drudgery. How tragic. I grinned into the darkness, and suddenly realised I was awake.

I was lying on a stone plinth in a low, dome-shaped chamber at the base of the mound. The floor was littered with blessed icons and holy symbols, scattered there liberally by the exorcist who’d put me there – Garrod? Jerrod? I forget, now – but they’d lost their virtue down through the years. Most had decayed into shapeless blobs, anyhow. My vault had been built from stone, but I could see that they’d filled in their entry tunnel with earth. I flexed my arms and legs, then swung myself round and sat up.

Crypt by Sekhmet Neseret

Not even a moment of dizziness. Only the Arm of the Light Incarnate would come up with a spell of living death that protected the victim from muscle wastage.

I edged forward cautiously, and bands of white fire immediately sprang up around the plinth, a ward to keep me from being moved. I snatched my legs back up onto the slab immediately, feeling the sting where the energy had singed them. The sudden light was painful, the intensity and colour as bad as the actual brightness.

I shaded my eyes and squinted, until it was comfortable to see again. The vault didn’t look any better illuminated than it had in the pitch blackness. Those flames had to be dealt with. I forced myself to relax, breathing slowly and deeply, and calming my body piece by piece until I’d gained some tranquillity. Then I seized that empty space and concentrated on it, feeding my thoughts and emotions into the void one by one until there was nothing left. With quiet came perception, and an awareness of energy and form. A solution followed. I reached down through the void, down and down again, into the howling, hungry abyss beneath, and dredged up a word, a foulness cloaked in sound. It fought me, clawing as I dragged it into my mind. I held it there a moment, savouring its decadence, and then spat it into the chamber like a thunderclap.

The walls shook, the barriers of flame guttered and died, and I leaped off the plinth, laughing, to stand up straight for the first time in over a dozen centuries.

Up above, I could hear my inadvertent saviours making a panicked exit, whimpering about the ‘Devil’s Hill’. I’d probably have laughed at that, too, but my good mood had just been spoiled by the realization that I was going to have to dig my way through twenty feet of solid earth with my bare hands. You’d have thought the oh-so-merciful forces of Light Incarnate could at least have seen fit to leave me a shovel for when I finally broke free.

I crossed the chamber and started digging, using a couple of the holy icons as primitive trowels. The exorcist, Yared or whatever, had been damned lucky, catching me after the battle of Scribrand Pass. The five nations had been on the point of collapse, and I’d been so eager to crush them I’d taken my eye off the ball. I had utterly exhausted myself, kept nothing back for emergencies. Stupid of me.

Well, this time it was going to be different.

Screw politics. I was going to the beach.

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(unrelated:)